Technology Reports

When you start out building a website you want it to be found. Yes, whenever I build a site I dedicate some time to promotion and marketing, building links and getting the word out.

Now, I have some well established sites (over 2 years old) and have hardly touched them once thye build and initial marketing has been done. A look at the stats and at the major search engines show that the initial promotion and linking I did really paid off. Just by doing nothing more than getting a few hundred good incoming links to my sites and waiting for a couple of years they now feature quite high in the SERPS.

SEO is not a short term thing you can do - it is a medium to long term approach. You should concentrate on building your site, building quality incoming links to several pages on your site and then forget about it (so to speak). Just continue to build your site content, add backlinks to new pages and wait.

If you have done the basics then in time your work will pay off and your site will feature well in the SERPS.

That being said, it is always a good idea to continue to add a few links or blog posts about your sites on a semi-regular basis to ensure that it remains high in the SERPS. There is always someone trying to push their site higher than yours. You need not give up on a new project after a couple of months because your site is not on the front page in the big “G”, keep at it and give it time - you will do better than your competitors who give up after a short time.

Well, My experiment in Proxy servers came to an end a couple of months ago.

For a while I was running a small number (about 20) proxy’s and my host told me to get rid of them -due to abuse.. As I had a lot of other sites on the server I had no choice but to remove them. I held onto a couple of them and continued to earn a small amount from them, but finally they too were the subject of abuse.

The abuse was in the form of someone logging into an email account from the proxy and sending spam. Guess what IP address appeared in the email headers as the originator - yes, the IP of my server.

So, the only choice I had was to shut down the last proxy I had, which was a shame as the actions of a single person denied the use for the hundreds of legitimate users.

What did I learn about this experience? Well, a lot. I learnt that no matter what, there is always someone who will try and take advantage of any given situation. Providing an online service might earn you a bit of $, but the eventual abuse will make it hardly worthwhile. Running a proxy made me a reasonable amount of money, but only for a short time. I would have been better off devoting my time to a project that would have earnt me a lesser amount, but been capable of earning forever!