It's not less accurate, it's completely correct. Fuel-based taxation is the perfect solution, and every country I'm aware of already taxes fuel heavily. To add another tax on top of it is either really ignorant (unlikely) or an attempt by the powers that be to further and unfairly lighten the wallets of their citizenry, wrapped up in an "environmentally-conscious" sugar coating. Fighting this unfair tax would now mean that you're an anti-environment reactionary doing the bidding of the dirty oil companies.
I suspect they will use it to try and wriggle into the social network space. People's contacts could be used with permission to build maps of connections, which is what a social network is.
if said website is under you homepage in your/. profile, then i am surprised you are able to sustain yourself with it.
The last frontpage update (on what appears to be a car blog) is from fricking february, and the menu structure seems very unlikely to provide me with any kind of worthwhile content, there are multiple car-news sites that are many orders of magnitude more interesting.
The specification part also seems rather non-user friendly to me.
Honestly, spend more time on making your website worthwhile rather then trying to sell what it is now
It is not a car blog, nor a car news site. It is a database of car specifications. The recent activity is almost always in the "Latest Additions" section. That shows the last 250 entries, and I'd be surprised if there is currently anything from before March 2011 in there. The aim of the site is present a searchable, slice-and-dice view onto reams of data that I have researched over years. I'm sorry that you find it hard to navigate around, if you would be so kind as to drop me a line via the feedback form with more details, I'll try and make it work better for you.
I think he was just hoping you didn't mean the site in your Slashdot profile, because that thing is a piece of junk. You aren't updating the main page even monthly and your content seems to consist of freely available information that you've just re-worded into blog posts and put into a database.
Basically, I'm sorry to say it but your site doesn't really deserve a good ranking.
Thanks for your kind words:)
A lot of the content that is now freely available is in fact freely available because I put it up there in the first place. The main page isn't where the updates happen as a rule - if you look at the "Latest Additions" page you'll see the last 250 entries to the database. I doubt that even one was added earlier than March 2011.
A quick search seems to indicate you're being put at the top for searches for your content? I found carfolio on the first five spots on a search for a snippet from your website (which I assume is the one linked as your homepage).
Yup, that';s the one.
For a great many terms i do rank 1st, still. But there are many where I don't. I suspect if you're obviously trying to find Carfolio.com, you'll find the site right at the top. But if you're searching for data on various cars out of the database without consciously trying to get Carfolio.com on top, you'll find copied content ahead of mine. That's certainly been my experience.
Just to quickly address your two specifics - Dodge 2500 is a truck. I sometimes have them listed, but I generally concentrate on passenger cars, as there's more than enough work there to keep me busy for forever, probably.
Then, if you drop the model year from your search, you're likely to find your Maxima. Most year-on-year changes are merely options being added or deleted rather than the actual technical data changing. I do not currently attempt to cover those. With 2 caveats: I'm particularly poor in the mid- to late-nineties era, before car data from the manufacturers was comprehensively published by them and there just happens to be a massive gap in my personal offline collection of hardcopy from the manufacturers around that time. When gaps like this are found and brought to my attention I make extra effort to research and publish that data.
Honestly, it looks as though his site is largely an aggregator of printed content. The front page appears to have original news-release summaries, but all photos are stock photos (which can't help), and it looks like the vast majority of the content is the "Car Database", numeric specifications like wheelbase, curb weight, etc. likely collated from a variety of magazines (and may be duplicated on the magazines' websites for all I know).
Most of the specifications come from the manufacturers themselves. This is to be expected. I also only use images that I have permission to, and to that end the manufacturers do a reasonable job of providing free-for-editorial photos of their products. I use them, but you'll notice that in all cases, they are at least cropped to show the car in as great detail as possible within my self-imposed 300 pixel-wide image size restriction. It's never simply sticking up the manufacturers' images.
Also, there seems to be piss-poor SEO being used (at least the good kind encouraged by the search providers). It appears to be using a simple scripting mechanism to look up cars by numeric IDs in the query string. Putting the car name in the URL and using URL-Rewriting instead would probably be nice, perhaps a sitemap file would be helpful. The main content is listed after all the ads, headers, footers, left and right sidebars, hell, I'm surprised it's not after the </html> tag...
To me it doesn't look like there's that much original content, and content farms are likely to use better techniques to make them look like the authentic source....
There is a lot of original content, well in as far as publishing factual information can be original - the combinations of models, data and the timeframe of the specs - from before the 190s to 2011 - makes the collection as a whole pretty unique. I try hard to make it more useful than a simple collection of html pages with specs on them. You can search for cars having certain characteristics, designed by certain people, etc. Also, during my collating/collecting/researching of data, I often find errors from the manufacturers themselves, which I always bring to their attention. Some acknowledge and fix, and I'm pleased when they do.
The ads - well, I'd love to have no ads, but at the moment that's what I am relying on for my income and to allow me to continue running the site. I am investigating alternative ways of generating revenue, but the ads for now enable me to continue doing what I do.
As for site layout, hey I did the best I can. I'm no designer, nor do I have resources to hire one. I'm not happy to ask for favours either, so I wasn't about to lean on mates who were more "designery" than me;-)
A sitemap would be useful, indeed. It's on the to-do list.
Your business model is: get people to visit my site so I can collect ad revenue.
However you turn away people who were curios about your sight because you've decided that anyone who doesn't take the initiative to look at your profile and follow the link without any promoting from you isn't worthy of giving your their business. (you didn't say "it's in my profile" you said "if you can't find it I don't need your business").
If you want to make money from ad revenue you have to make an effort to get people to see your ads. and no having good content isn't enough without promotion.
Actually, the link is not only in my profile, it's shown in the very place the comment was! My point was actually that if he couldn't find that then I was not likely to consider his feedback about my site (or anyone's for that matter) terribly highly. However, I was probably a bit snippy and I apologise for that. I could have easily said "Here you go, here's the link." Humble apologies.
>latest article is feb 13 >article before that is in October 2010
You're not trying very hard. Honest opinion.
Maybe you're dropping because you don't have current information.
Posting with no karma bonus cuz offtopic. Just had to add that here, though, because someone needs to tell you.
-- BMO
My main updates do not happen on the front page. That is for something interesting or noteworthy and I do it when I have time or feel there is a need. If you click the "Latest additions" link you'll see the last 250 models added to the database. That is the engine room, so to speak, and you'll not find anything last added (never mind updated) later than March 2011 in there.
Well yes, but Google should not be judging a site's quality as such, they should be indexing the web. There is significant overlap in those concepts, sure, but currently their algorithm for indexing is broken - demonstrably so - and they are trying to do too much too soon.
I'm confused; are you in the index or not? If you're in the index, then your complaint is really about the ranking you're being assigned. But you just said you don't want them to judge quality (though earlier you argued that your quality is what differentiates you from your competition). How else should they be judging your content?
I am in the index, and Google is going a really shitty job of figuring out quality on whatever these new algorithms consider to be signs of quality. My site is older (they can verify that easily enough) than the scraper sites, has more links to it (the basis of the original page ranking system) and is also quite clearly being duplicated by these sites. Had Google stuck to just indexing the web as they did, the natural order of things would have been more favourable to me. Which IMHO is what it should be in this particular case.
It's an odd freaking post. On one hand he says content farms were ranking higher than him. This fix will allow people to remove those content farms, and now he complains that his hits will go down?
So he was relying on the content farms to link to him and he mad that they get higher pagerank, but happy that they do?:boggle:
Perhaps I wasn't clear. After the update, my site is lost in a sea of results to content-scrapers who had taken from my site without linking back or citing me as the source, many of which ranked higher than I did.
So what's your site?... What have you got to lose?
Zakkie links to http://www.carfolio.com/ on his/. profile page. I'm personally completely uninterested in the topic, but it looks like a real site as opposed to a content farm.
He's probably worried about losing his anonymity, knowing that/. is the most likely place on the net to have us all check his whois and reverse DNS records just for fun, etc.
I was commenting on the story, because it impacted me quite directly. Those who wanted to see my site could easily have done what you did:)
By relying on AdSense for income, you are selling your own work. Thinking otherwise is allowing yourself a convenient illusion.
Yes, but I don't have to stop researching my data, making my site work better, adding features, etc. Eventually I could look to hire people to sell for me, but I'm certainly not in the position to be able to do that yet.
Well yes, but Google should not be judging a site's quality as such, they should be indexing the web. There is significant overlap in those concepts, sure, but currently their algorithm for indexing is broken - demonstrably so - and they are trying to do too much too soon. Wiping out the small independent publishers who provide mountains of good information is surely not what they intended to do.
I run a website that is entirely my own work, is the result of years of research and involves many hours a day of new research. I am able to provide the data I collate for free to everyone because AdSense income covered hosting costs and allowed me to pay rent and buy food. I was not making vast sums of money, but I could do what I love and provide a useful resource to thousands of others. Now, scraper sites get ranked above me and even sites that cite me as the source rank higher than I do for many keywords. It's unfortunate, but for me this means less time doing actual original research and more time having to go out and market myself.
As a one man organisation, it's going to be really tough to keep going. I think Google have made a massive error here - by saying they can gauge the quality of a website (and its usefulness) algorithmically is arrogant and short-sighted. I hope they figure this out quickly. I really do hate having to sell stuff, even my own work!
MS isn't a puppy until I can buy any spec laptop I want without MS Windows bundled along with it, dammit. Until then, they're doing nothing and getting paid for it, which doesn't sit well with me (unless I'm the one getting paid).
Slashdot Mirror
He should stick to acting.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up, etc etc etc
Here's a link: http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Late+Canadian+scientist+Ralph+Steinman+shares+Nobel+prize+medicine/5493302/story.html
Although it looks like the prize will remain awarded.
AP says Steinman died September 30th (will get link after posting). Nobel prize not awarded posthumously, apparently.
Some devices just cannot be bought without MS Windows installed on them. I could not source a new laptop without it, for instance.
Why sign your comment if you're posting anonymously? Hint: defeats the object of anonymous posting ;-)
It had better not change everything to the incorrect, US way of spelling.
It's not less accurate, it's completely correct. Fuel-based taxation is the perfect solution, and every country I'm aware of already taxes fuel heavily. To add another tax on top of it is either really ignorant (unlikely) or an attempt by the powers that be to further and unfairly lighten the wallets of their citizenry, wrapped up in an "environmentally-conscious" sugar coating. Fighting this unfair tax would now mean that you're an anti-environment reactionary doing the bidding of the dirty oil companies.
Umm they were busy being productive...
...mining Bitcoins (TM)!
I suspect they will use it to try and wriggle into the social network space. People's contacts could be used with permission to build maps of connections, which is what a social network is.
if said website is under you homepage in your /. profile, then i am surprised you are able to sustain yourself with it.
The last frontpage update (on what appears to be a car blog) is from fricking february, and the menu structure seems very unlikely to provide me with any kind of worthwhile content, there are multiple car-news sites that are many orders of magnitude more interesting.
The specification part also seems rather non-user friendly to me.
Honestly, spend more time on making your website worthwhile rather then trying to sell what it is now
It is not a car blog, nor a car news site. It is a database of car specifications. The recent activity is almost always in the "Latest Additions" section. That shows the last 250 entries, and I'd be surprised if there is currently anything from before March 2011 in there. The aim of the site is present a searchable, slice-and-dice view onto reams of data that I have researched over years. I'm sorry that you find it hard to navigate around, if you would be so kind as to drop me a line via the feedback form with more details, I'll try and make it work better for you.
I think he was just hoping you didn't mean the site in your Slashdot profile, because that thing is a piece of junk. You aren't updating the main page even monthly and your content seems to consist of freely available information that you've just re-worded into blog posts and put into a database.
Basically, I'm sorry to say it but your site doesn't really deserve a good ranking.
Thanks for your kind words :)
A lot of the content that is now freely available is in fact freely available because I put it up there in the first place. The main page isn't where the updates happen as a rule - if you look at the "Latest Additions" page you'll see the last 250 entries to the database. I doubt that even one was added earlier than March 2011.
A quick search seems to indicate you're being put at the top for searches for your content? I found carfolio on the first five spots on a search for a snippet from your website (which I assume is the one linked as your homepage).
Yup, that';s the one.
For a great many terms i do rank 1st, still. But there are many where I don't. I suspect if you're obviously trying to find Carfolio.com, you'll find the site right at the top. But if you're searching for data on various cars out of the database without consciously trying to get Carfolio.com on top, you'll find copied content ahead of mine. That's certainly been my experience.
Just to quickly address your two specifics - Dodge 2500 is a truck. I sometimes have them listed, but I generally concentrate on passenger cars, as there's more than enough work there to keep me busy for forever, probably.
Then, if you drop the model year from your search, you're likely to find your Maxima. Most year-on-year changes are merely options being added or deleted rather than the actual technical data changing. I do not currently attempt to cover those. With 2 caveats: I'm particularly poor in the mid- to late-nineties era, before car data from the manufacturers was comprehensively published by them and there just happens to be a massive gap in my personal offline collection of hardcopy from the manufacturers around that time. When gaps like this are found and brought to my attention I make extra effort to research and publish that data.
Thanks for your feedback.
Honestly, it looks as though his site is largely an aggregator of printed content. The front page appears to have original news-release summaries, but all photos are stock photos (which can't help), and it looks like the vast majority of the content is the "Car Database", numeric specifications like wheelbase, curb weight, etc. likely collated from a variety of magazines (and may be duplicated on the magazines' websites for all I know).
Most of the specifications come from the manufacturers themselves. This is to be expected. I also only use images that I have permission to, and to that end the manufacturers do a reasonable job of providing free-for-editorial photos of their products. I use them, but you'll notice that in all cases, they are at least cropped to show the car in as great detail as possible within my self-imposed 300 pixel-wide image size restriction. It's never simply sticking up the manufacturers' images.
Also, there seems to be piss-poor SEO being used (at least the good kind encouraged by the search providers). It appears to be using a simple scripting mechanism to look up cars by numeric IDs in the query string. Putting the car name in the URL and using URL-Rewriting instead would probably be nice, perhaps a sitemap file would be helpful. The main content is listed after all the ads, headers, footers, left and right sidebars, hell, I'm surprised it's not after the </html> tag...
To me it doesn't look like there's that much original content, and content farms are likely to use better techniques to make them look like the authentic source....
There is a lot of original content, well in as far as publishing factual information can be original - the combinations of models, data and the timeframe of the specs - from before the 190s to 2011 - makes the collection as a whole pretty unique. I try hard to make it more useful than a simple collection of html pages with specs on them. You can search for cars having certain characteristics, designed by certain people, etc. Also, during my collating/collecting/researching of data, I often find errors from the manufacturers themselves, which I always bring to their attention. Some acknowledge and fix, and I'm pleased when they do.
The ads - well, I'd love to have no ads, but at the moment that's what I am relying on for my income and to allow me to continue running the site. I am investigating alternative ways of generating revenue, but the ads for now enable me to continue doing what I do.
As for site layout, hey I did the best I can. I'm no designer, nor do I have resources to hire one. I'm not happy to ask for favours either, so I wasn't about to lean on mates who were more "designery" than me ;-)
A sitemap would be useful, indeed. It's on the to-do list.
Thanks for your feedback.
See, that's your problem right there.
Your business model is: get people to visit my site so I can collect ad revenue.
However you turn away people who were curios about your sight because you've decided that anyone who doesn't take the initiative to look at your profile and follow the link without any promoting from you isn't worthy of giving your their business. (you didn't say "it's in my profile" you said "if you can't find it I don't need your business").
If you want to make money from ad revenue you have to make an effort to get people to see your ads. and no having good content isn't enough without promotion.
Actually, the link is not only in my profile, it's shown in the very place the comment was! My point was actually that if he couldn't find that then I was not likely to consider his feedback about my site (or anyone's for that matter) terribly highly. However, I was probably a bit snippy and I apologise for that. I could have easily said "Here you go, here's the link." Humble apologies.
>latest article is feb 13
>article before that is in October 2010
You're not trying very hard. Honest opinion.
Maybe you're dropping because you don't have current information.
Posting with no karma bonus cuz offtopic. Just had to add that here, though, because someone needs to tell you.
--
BMO
My main updates do not happen on the front page. That is for something interesting or noteworthy and I do it when I have time or feel there is a need. If you click the "Latest additions" link you'll see the last 250 models added to the database. That is the engine room, so to speak, and you'll not find anything last added (never mind updated) later than March 2011 in there.
Well yes, but Google should not be judging a site's quality as such, they should be indexing the web. There is significant overlap in those concepts, sure, but currently their algorithm for indexing is broken - demonstrably so - and they are trying to do too much too soon.
I'm confused; are you in the index or not? If you're in the index, then your complaint is really about the ranking you're being assigned. But you just said you don't want them to judge quality (though earlier you argued that your quality is what differentiates you from your competition). How else should they be judging your content?
I am in the index, and Google is going a really shitty job of figuring out quality on whatever these new algorithms consider to be signs of quality. My site is older (they can verify that easily enough) than the scraper sites, has more links to it (the basis of the original page ranking system) and is also quite clearly being duplicated by these sites. Had Google stuck to just indexing the web as they did, the natural order of things would have been more favourable to me. Which IMHO is what it should be in this particular case.
It's an odd freaking post. On one hand he says content farms were ranking higher than him. This fix will allow people to remove those content farms, and now he complains that his hits will go down?
So he was relying on the content farms to link to him and he mad that they get higher pagerank, but happy that they do? :boggle:
Perhaps I wasn't clear. After the update, my site is lost in a sea of results to content-scrapers who had taken from my site without linking back or citing me as the source, many of which ranked higher than I did.
So what's your site? ... What have you got to lose?
Zakkie links to http://www.carfolio.com/ on his /. profile page. I'm personally completely uninterested in the topic, but it looks like a real site as opposed to a content farm.
He's probably worried about losing his anonymity, knowing that /. is the most likely place on the net to have us all check his whois and reverse DNS records just for fun, etc.
I was commenting on the story, because it impacted me quite directly. Those who wanted to see my site could easily have done what you did :)
By relying on AdSense for income, you are selling your own work. Thinking otherwise is allowing yourself a convenient illusion.
Yes, but I don't have to stop researching my data, making my site work better, adding features, etc. Eventually I could look to hire people to sell for me, but I'm certainly not in the position to be able to do that yet.
If you can't figure out how to find the link, I'm not sure your opinion on my site will be worth much, mate. But thanks for the kind offer.
Well yes, but Google should not be judging a site's quality as such, they should be indexing the web. There is significant overlap in those concepts, sure, but currently their algorithm for indexing is broken - demonstrably so - and they are trying to do too much too soon. Wiping out the small independent publishers who provide mountains of good information is surely not what they intended to do.
I run a website that is entirely my own work, is the result of years of research and involves many hours a day of new research. I am able to provide the data I collate for free to everyone because AdSense income covered hosting costs and allowed me to pay rent and buy food. I was not making vast sums of money, but I could do what I love and provide a useful resource to thousands of others. Now, scraper sites get ranked above me and even sites that cite me as the source rank higher than I do for many keywords. It's unfortunate, but for me this means less time doing actual original research and more time having to go out and market myself.
As a one man organisation, it's going to be really tough to keep going. I think Google have made a massive error here - by saying they can gauge the quality of a website (and its usefulness) algorithmically is arrogant and short-sighted. I hope they figure this out quickly. I really do hate having to sell stuff, even my own work!
MS isn't a puppy until I can buy any spec laptop I want without MS Windows bundled along with it, dammit. Until then, they're doing nothing and getting paid for it, which doesn't sit well with me (unless I'm the one getting paid).