Tag: search engines

Bummed But Hopeful

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

I’m a little bummed out right now. My KewlRank number keeps going down more and more every day since I lost my database. I don’t mean to sound like a bummer talking about this and I’m sure rank doesn’t mean a lot to most people but it means something to me.

That is a bummer lol.

But since I’ve been copying my old posts back over, it looks to me like that little line is coming back up. So even though I dropped like a brick, I see it coming back up little by little. It took a long time to get over 5000 and seeing that number drop bums me out but on the other hand look how fast it’s rising again. I’m sure before you know it I will have 1200 posts back on my site (despite my 1700 that I had before) and my number will be over 5000 again and I will be as happy as can be again.

I know that I have a few regular visitors and I love them for it but that’s not really where my traffic is from, it’s the Google visitors that really make my numbers go up and as long as my old links start disappearing from the search engines and be replaced with new links then I know I will be ok again. I will bounce back.

I got 27 posts copied over today and I’m up to 167 posts from 1700+.  Even though it’s not going very fast, it’s the only pace I can take since I’m only one person. I had hoped that I could do a couple hundred per day but that’s just too many considering I have to edit them all over again and add tags and give them all categories. It’s a lot of work. More than most people would probably want to do and I’m sure if that happened to someone else they would’ve thrown in the towel by now. See how dedicated I am?

Tomorrow is yet another day and I will work hard to get hopefully 30 more posts copied. Who knows, I might work overtime and get 40.

My Blog Progress

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

Things aren’t going as fast as I had hoped they would. My projection last night and this morning was that I would get at least 200 posts copied from YouSayToo but that just wasn’t the case.

Last night, in just maybe 4 hours, I had copied 18 posts so that is where I got my estimation. I figured it would be so much easier today and I would have gotten way more than last night. I have only gotten 27 copied over.

The thing is, it’s so boring lol. I mean, I have the YouSayToo website loaded in a tab and my blog in a tab so it’s not difficult switching tabs to copy from one site then paste to the other. It’s all the editing I have to do and adding tags and putting each post in a category and this and that and the other. Plus there are images that I have to use that I have to upload all over again because even though the images are all in my blog uploads folders, they don’t show up because it’s a new database. I could go on and on but no matter how long it takes I will keep at it until it is all done.

The problem is, people are still coming to my blog from the search engines with old posts that no longer exist. How do I tell the search engines that my old links don’t work anymore? I can’t. So all I can do is hope that people do a search for themselves on my blog to see if they can find what they are looking for and go from there.

My toolbar has a notification explaining what happened so if they see it great, if they don’t then there is nothing else I can do. Tomorrow is another day so we will see how many I can copy then. I already have all of January 2011 and December 2010 copied so maybe I can do 1 month per day. Yeah, that will make it easier. Let’s hope November 2010 was uneventful in the blogging department :p lol.

Microsoft and Yahoo Vs. Google

On By Michel McDonaldIn NewsLeave a comment

I saw on Fox News this morning that Microsoft and Yahoo are going to merge and Yahoo will start using Microsoft’s Bing search engine.  I don’t know why.  Anyway, they said that Google has been kicking Yahoo’s ass in the search engine department so MS and Yahoo are going to combine to kick Google’s ass.

Shep on Fox said that Bing seems to be a way better search engine but I don’t know about that.  I just did a Bing search for my name “Xanapus” and it didn’t seem that special to me.  It has a pop up on the right side of each item that shows you whats in there but who really cares about that?  It’s not a little mini image of the page, its text.  I don’t see how it’s better than Google personally.

Also, a few nights ago we went to visit friends of ours and when I went to look up the directions I opened Windows Live Mail (which I find easier than Outlook Express) and opened up the address book to copy the address to paste in Google maps but the address was a link so I clicked it and up came Bing Map.  After awhile trying to figure out just how I was supposed to get directions to that address I finally printed the directions with a map.  Well, those directions got us lost because they put us somewhere else.  They told us to turn left when we were supposed to go to another street 2 streets up on the right.  We ended up having to call to find out which street to go to and found out right and not left.

Google in my opinion is way better for search engines and for maps.  I’m probably not going to change.  There are some aspects of Google I don’t care for like Google Chrome browser because it doesn’t give me my Yahoo toolbar.  I’m kinda sorta looking forward to Google Chrome OS only because of the claim that it starts up faster than Windows but we will see if I can still use my Windows software since it will be Linux-based.  One service of Google’s that I do love is their free 1-800-GOOG-411.

Good luck Microsoft and Yahoo.

My Birth Father

On By Michel McDonaldIn Friends and FamilyLeave a comment

On my 15th birthday my mother decided that it was time for me to know that my step dad wasn’t really my real father.  I basically knew but I let her tell me whatever she was going to tell me.

She gave me this elaborate story about how he left her when I was a month old to go to Germany in the Air Force and he never returned and she made him out to be this bad guy.

What she didn’t tell me was that he was married to another woman and had an affair with my mother and she got pregnant but he broke off the relationship with her because he loved his wife and she never told him that she was pregnant so he didn’t even know.  However she stayed in contact with his mother, my grand mother, for years afterwards.

My mom has shown me pictures of her when I was a little kid and just told me that she was a friend of hers.  When she told me the truth she told me that this woman was my grand mother.  When I had my tonsils out around I think age 3 or 4, I forgot when, she bought me a Mrs. Beasley doll from the show Family Affair and my sister was so jealous because she wanted it.  I didn’t know who gave it to me, I just knew it was given to me.

I would definitely love to find my birth father and have some kind of relationship with him because I have this huge hole in my heart that I would love to fill.  His name is Ron or Ronald Shirtliff.  I am not quite sure about the spelling of the last name but that is what my Aunt Betty has told me.  I have found that name a few times and contacted all of them and of course none of them agreed that they knew my mother so without a social security number I can’t get any information to find him.

I’m hoping that his name will be on search engines and if he or his family members decide to do a search for him they will find my blogs and posts on message boards and contact me.  Please, if you can help me reply with a comment in this blog or go to www.xanapus.com and click the email form and email me.  I don’t have any motives, I don’t care about the affair, none of that matters.  All that matters is that I find my birth father.