5 Reasons Why EntreCard Sucks

When I gained control of this blog few weeks ago, I thought of giving the popular and debatable system called EntreCard a try. I had heard about it from a lot of people online but never really thought of trying it. One reason could be that the system is slightly difficult for newbies to understand and the information provided on the website is not very detailed and informative. Nonetheless, I decided to giving it a try.

How does Entrecard work?
For those who do not know, Entrecard is a system that lets you place a widget on your blog with a banner that is linked to someone else's blog. Below the banner is a button called "Drop." Clicking that button proves that you have visited that blog (which has the widget). Each drop gets you EntreCard (EC) credits and you can use this currency to buy advertisements on other blogs. This system is supposed to be a way for bloggers to help each other out and discover new blogs.

But does the system really work? Does it have flaws that some are unaware of? Here are my Top 5 reasons to why I believe EntreCard really sucks.

1. Difficult to get drops back
When I first started using EntreCard, I was totally addicted to it. I found earning EC Credits fund and easy. I used to click on numerous blogs everyday just to drop my card and get some EC Credits. However, after few days I noticed that I had dropped around 50-90 cards everyday on average on blogs but I had only gotten around 20% - 30% from the EntreCard community. The stats declined more in the next few days and I hardly got any drops from other bloggers.

2. Visit, Drop, Leave
Most of the members of EntreCard only have one thing in mind and that is to quickly build EntreCard Credits so that they can either sell them to others or use them to advertise on other blogs. Having this goal in mind, most EntreCard members only care about visiting a site for few seconds, quickly searching for the EntreCard widget, dropping the card and then leaving the site without even taking a look at the content. Some of you may not agree completely but try to remember those days when you were desparate for some EC Credits and were crazily going through blogs after blogs. EntreCard does succeed in getting you some traffic but most of that traffic turns out to be useless. Many webmasters have noticed that traffic coming from EntreCard only lasts for few seconds on their blog and the bounce rate is as high as 90%!

3. Irrelevant Traffic
There is no doubt that EntreCard does provide you with at least some traffic if not a lot but even that tiny fraction is not of much use. As mentioned above, most EC members are looking to just gain EC Credits. They hardly have any interest in your blog's content. Placing your ad on a relevant blog might seem like a good idea to get some relevant traffic but the truth is that most of that traffic is trash and not beneficial to your blog in the long run. For example, if your blog is about American politics then you may get a lot of traffic from EntreCard but hardly any of it will be relevant since most of the visitors will not have any interest American politics.
4. Poor stats provided to advertisers
Once you have enough credits, you will want to place your ad on other blogs to gain more exposure and get more traffic. But just placing your ad on another blog guarentee you such results. While I was a member at EntreCard, I placed one ad on a blog with a good PageRank. I was hardly provided with any information about the blog's traffic, popularity etc by EntreCard. Eventhough I had insufficient knowledge about the blog, I still decided to place my ad for a day. A day later, when the time limit for my ad was over, I checked my stats only to see that I had recieved 0 clicks from the blog! Was that just coincidence? Could be! But the truth is that EntreCard needs to provide advertisers with some more stats to help them decide where to place their ads.

5. System is FLAWED
I saved the most important point for the last! Believe it or not but EntreCard system is flawed. The system is based on the concept that bloggers need to help each other to succeed. That is fine but it only emphasizes the value of traffic and not content. Most EntreCard members do not care about the content of a blog. They believe that joining EntreCard will bring them a lot of traffic even if they do not write unique and interesting articles on their blog. But the truth is that for a blog to be successful, it needs to provide something useful to the readers.

If you are an EntreCard member then I suggest that you think again about EntreCard and whether it is really helping you. If you have not tried it yet then you should give it a try and experience it yourself. There is nothing better than getting first hand experience.

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Some useful links:
Search quality, continued - Google Blog
More Transparency in Customized Search Results - Google Blog
Back to school with more than 1 million users worldwide - Google Blog
Hello from A2 - Google Blog
We Knew The Web Was Big - Google Blog
Knol Is Open to Everyone - Google Blog
Updates and Fixes for July 18th - Blogger Buzz
Easy as 1-2-3 - Adsense Blog

Google's PageRank Update Has Ended!

After Matt Cutt announced in his blog the latest PageRank update, the whole webmaster community stirred with thousands of new threads popping up at different forums. People were curious and nervous while others simply did not care. I was one of the first ones! I have several blogs and I have been working hard to build backlinks and post unique content since the last PageRank update.

The update finally began two-three days ago. Webmasters could notice their websites' PageRank changing. Some sites gained PageRank, others lost while some stayed the same. Most of my blogs did not see any change at all. Only one blog saw an increase from N/A to PR 1. I hardly spent any time on that blog and there are less than ten posts on it but still it got PR 1. However, my other blogs which have lots of backlinks from high PR sites did not notice any change.

One of my blogs got a PR 3 in the last update. That was when I was not interested in PageRank at all and hardly cared about backlinks. Since the last update, I decided to raise the PR to at least 4 or 5 from 3. I managed to exchange DoFollow links with a lot of high PageRank websites. Some of those sites even had PR4 and PR5! Furthermore, I submitted my blog to several famous directories but it seems like none of it worked.

Now when the update has ended, I am highly disappointed with Google. Their system seems to get less accurate in every update. Am I saying this only because I did not see a raise? Well, it is partially true but I have also seen other webmasters talk about it. Not many are happy with this update. Google needs to be more careful in future and reward websites that truly deserve it. I understand that being 100% accurate is very difficult but it is still important to manage some quality when ranking other websites. But this is only my opinion and you have all the right to disagree with it.

Fortunately, if I didn't gain any PageRank then I did not lose any either. I was a little nervous about SEO and Blogging Tips since I just started working on it. It managed to stick to its PageRank (4).

How did Google's PageRank update turn out for you? Did your websites' PageRank raise, drop or stay neutral? Are you happy with it or disappointed?

Image Source
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Some useful links:
More Transparency in Customized Search Results - Google Blog
Back to school with more than 1 million users worldwide - Google Blog
Hello from A2 - Google Blog
We Knew The Web Was Big - Google Blog
Knol Is Open to Everyone - Google Blog
Updates and Fixes for July 18th - Blogger Buzz
Easy as 1-2-3 - Adsense Blog

The Difference Between DoFollow and NoFollow links

While adding a link to an anchor text, you have the option of either using a DoFollow link or a NoFollow link. Most webmasters know the different between the DoFollow and NoFollow links but there are still many that don't. To many, the difference is very insignificant while to others it is very important. So how are these two different types of links different? What's their importance to Search Engine Optimisation? Lets start with some background info about Google PageRank.

Google PageRank
As you all know, Google has its own very famous ranking system called PageRank. This ranking system is used by several webmasters to determine the price of websites when buying or selling. But how is Google PageRank determined? Mainly, if your website has a good number of backlinks then you will have a high PR. Backlinks are links to your website from another site. Google consider each backlink as a vote from other webmasters to you. The more votes you have, the higher the PageRank you will receive.

The Difference
In 2005, Google's head of webspam team Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen came up with the concept of NoFollow.

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.

By Wikipedia

When other webmasters place a link on your site they can do it in two different ways. They can place either a DoFollow link or a NoFollow link. If they choose to place a DoFollow link to your site then you will receive their vote and that will improve your ranking. But if they use the NoFollow link then you will not receive any vote and your ranking will stay the same. Remember, it will not decrease your ranking but the backlink will simply not count.

Sometimes it is easy to manipulate Google PageRank. If you have a big budget then you can easily buy links on high PageRank websites and thus increase the chances of getting a good PageRank for your own website. Google does not like this and has been working hard to punish all those webmasters that sell and buy links by decreasing their websites' PageRank. Google does not have any problem with webmasters selling and buying links but Google asks them to use the NoFollow links when doing so in order to prevent PageRank manipulation.

Does that mean that you are not allowed to post DoFollow links on your websites? You are allowed but one thing that I find confusing is the process through which Google knows if a link is bought or not. How can Google tell if Webmsters are buying links or not?

How to put NoFollow and DoFollow links
By default all natural links are DoFollow so you don't have to do anything different to place a DoFollow link. Just place a link like you usually do and it will be a DoFollow link.

Here is how the code should look for each link:

DoFollow

NoFollow

Hopefully, this post has helped you understand the difference between two types of HTML attribute values: DoFollow and NoFollow. If you are buying links then you might want to check if a link is DoFollow or NoFollow before getting into any deal.

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Useful Links:

Ragogmakan (Google) goes to the Amazon - Google Blog
Knol is open to everyone - Google Blog
We knew the web was big... - Google Blog
Easy as 1-2-3 - Adsense Blog
Web Analytics by the Bay - Analytics Blog

Quick Way To Find Best Web Hosting Service

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