As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m shortly coming up on 5 years of blogging, which still astounds me when I think of it. There are now many people who have been blogging for five or more years, so it’s not that unusual anymore, but it’s longer than I expected to be running this blog. The official anniversary date will be May 30, 2010, which is exactly five years after my first post. In preparation for this anniversary, I’m going to run a retrospective series about this blog, blogging in general, AdSense, search engine optimization, Internet marketing, and other related topics — whatever comes to mind, I guess, as I peruse five years worth of posts.

Let’s start with a few stats. Not counting this post, I have 1048 posts, which comes out to be about 210 posts per year, or just under 18 posts per month. Oddly enough, that’s pretty close to the 20 or so working days there is in a month. My output’s decreased quite noticeably in the last year or so, mind you, but for a while I was pretty much posting something once or twice a day.

Comments… There are over 3000 approved comments. I currently have 2400 pending comments, but most of those are spam (both out-and-out spam but also lots of “I like your site!” and “Keep up the good work!” and “Nice article!” type comments) and I’ve gotten into the habit of blowing away the entire pending comment pool when it gets too big to navigate… Lots of commenters are showing up lately because the blog is near the top of list of “dofollow” blogs and everyone’s trying to get a nice juicy link from a PR4 page back to their site. Too bad I moderate all comments… if you don’t have anything worthy to say, don’t bother commenting!

I can’t say this blog ranks highly for many keywords in Google. For “adsense” it’s around #70. Even though I have a fair number of inbound links (about 50,000 according to Yahoo!), only about half of the pages on this site are actually in Google’s index and only 400 or so of them show up when you do a “site:memwg.com” query. There are different reasons for this. One is that the site’s been hacked numerous times — I took out some injection code just yesterday that was putting lots of links for popular pharmaceuticals into my pages. It’s also been losing link velocity — the speed at which incoming links are made — because I haven’t been updating it very much lately. And I don’t have a lot of deep links into the site, which is another problem — most of the links are directed at the root of the domain.

Anyhow, in part 2 we’ll actually start the retrospective by looking at 5 things I’d wish I’d done different from the beginning.

• Previous Entry: Coming Up To 5 Years Of Fun!
• Next Entry: How To Quickly Tell If Your Site Has Been Hacked