Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

The Google monopoly!

Just looking at my Google Analytic figures for the past 30 days:-

Search Engine referrals Sep15 - Oct15 2008

Looks like Google has a bit of a monopoly to me!

The real reason for looking at my analytics was to see if the link Steve Pavlina gave me has made any difference to my readership.

Referrals from stevepavlina.com

Looks like about 160+ folks wandered over to see my Wordle review of Steve’s new book. So not as many as I thought would.

Will be interesting to see if the link from such a high PR (Page Rank not PR like Ellee does) page will make any difference to my Google rankings for Geoff which has been suffering lately 🙁

Here is the  corresponding data from Sally’s site. She gave me 7 links last month resulting in 47 visits.

Referrals from SallyInNorfolk.com
Referrals from SallyInNorfolk.com

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Steve Pavlina on Truth, Love & Power

I originally discovered Steve Pavlina‘s blog when searching for public speaking, several years ago using Google. His blog led me to Toastmasters which I then discovered met in a hotel literally 100 yards from where I live in the UK!.

Since then I have followed his experiments with great interest using his blog as a model for everyone I meet who is interested in blogging (I have now introduced over 20 folks). A lot of what he says resonates with me particularly his attitudes to food (I became a vegetarian about 10 years ago) thinking and life in general (My favourite experiment was his experiments with polyphasic sleep, I’m convinced it drove his wife, Erin, nuts). Some things I disagree with like his attitude to mushrooms which he doesn’t view as a fruit and somehow considers them undesirable, this to me is weird for someone who is a convinced raw foodist.

I jumped at the chance of getting a free, prepublication, copy of his new book, Personal Development for
Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth
(Hay House;
October 15, 2008),
in exchange for writing this review. I was dismayed when the book arrived in pdf form rather than as a hard copy. So in true Pavlina fashion, how could I turn this setback into a positive outcome. The answer; do an electronic review, here it is:-

This is the full text of the book, 101,365 words according to wc (excluding external quotations), as processed by Wordle. I then ran the full text through a text analyser to discover the most frequent phases etc which is where the post title of truth love and power comes from, it is used in the book 111 times! The top two individual words are to, you.

The wordle sums up the book beautifully and is for me an excellent review. The book itself looks a good read (although without its physicality its impossible to review since a lot about buying a book is the form as much as the content)  and I’m sure it will be succesful, although for my part its more interesting following Steve on his journey through life.

Note to publisher: None of the text files used by wordle etc have been stored

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Geoff potential guests being led astray.

I get an enormous number of 404 errors on this site (269 in last 10 hours), they stem mainly from when I migrated the old blogger posts to wordpress. On blogger the post url’s ended with .html when I transferred them to WordPress the .html was stripped off 🙁

So now if you click on an old google search term it comes up with File not Found (404) error. Not good for ones rankings.

I am using John Godleys redirection plugin but to make full use of it I need to learn how to create regular expressions, so far with no luck! (anyone out there willing to help, please). I have created a help topic on the regex advice forum and also asked John Godley for advice too.

Today Google came to the rescue with a neat 404 webpage that is customised to your site if you use Google Webmaster Tools. So now you get this useful little page:-

But I really need to get the hang of \b(https://geoffjones.com/2.*?)\.\w+/(?!\w) and its ilk plus how to add them to a .htaccess file….