Putting An End to the Entrecard Drama

You can help me get rid of my credits!

Well, Entrecard users: it is time for me to put this card dropping system to rest. By the end of this month, if not much sooner, I plan on exiting Entrecard once and for all.

I don’t remember when I first started using EC, but I believe I am one of its earlier adopters. At one time I was dropping cards for four of my sites, but cut back to three, then two in recent months. Right now this blog and Word Journey (WJ) are in the system, but I stopped accepting ads for WJ two weeks ago and for this blog last week.

Exiting Entrecard

I plan on running an “Exiting Entrecard” contest effective immediately to help me give rid of my credits, but I will save those details for the end of this article. In the meantime, I thought I’d share my reasons for leaving as I have several, but not everyone is an indictment on the way that EC goes about its business:

• No more time. I used to drop as many as 300 cards per blog daily, but those days are long gone. These days I generally drop on whoever dropped on me earlier in the day which means I rarely hit 100 drops on any given day.

• Lots of people have moved on. We’ve all been seeing EC users come and go, but it seems the ‘go’ part has dominated of late. Some of the most avid users are no longer on the site, while a bunch of newbies have taken their place. Unfortunately, the commitment level and enthusiasm from new users are both sorely lacking.

• EC doesn’t seem to care. Perhaps the most telling reason for some users is that the Entrecard team just doesn’t seem to care about its own site all that much. Sure, if you buy credits and take “advantage” of their offers, then they care. But, when you kill off a forum and you don’t update your blog all that often, I think that these things send out a signal that you aren’t passionate about your business.

• Too much junk. The biggest problem with EC right now are all of the sites which look or act like crap. Certainly not all of them, maybe not anywhere near a majority, but enough of them to cause mischief. My anti-virus alerts goes nuts with some of these sites while other sites, though not sending out viruses, malware, or trojans, take forever to load. Way too many widgets and nearly impossible to find their EC drop cards. Ugh.

Contest Details

Now on to my Exiting Entrecard or EE contest: this is an easy one. Simply leave a thoughtful comment here and I will send you some credits. I haven’t determined an exact amount, but the “smarter” your comment, the more generous I will be. Feel free to link to your site (that way I can deposit credits accordingly) and, if you mention on your site this article and offer an active link to it, my generosity will suddenly increase.

Once my last ads have run and my credits have been exhausted, then I’ll cancel my account. Someone may win as many as 1000 EC credits so have at it.

Anyway, it has been an interesting experience using Entrecard. I hope to keep up with many of you elsewhere, but as far as EC goes the drama is about over!

Looking Beyond Your PageRank

Last Wednesday — April 1, 2009 to be precise — Google was up to their usual tricks for April Fool’s Day. I didn’t pay much attention to their annual spoof, rather I soon found myself occupied with reviewing their PageRank export to the Google toolbar.

Yes, it appears that Google is hitting its stride with the all-important, but not that important Google PageRank update, by making changes on a quarterly basis. I say important because for some people it is the chief way that they measure their site’s worth, but I also say not important because there are many different factors and tools which tell how well a site is performing.

My PageRank Report Card

For the record, Matt’s Musings went from PR2 to PR3, WordJourney from PR3 to PR2, AutoTrends held steady at PR3 while The Article Writer is back up to PR4. FYI, The Article Writer made its debut at PR6 in June 2005 before gradually falling to PR5 before dropping to PR3.

Several tiny, niche sites (and even placeholder pages) I manage acquired their first ranking, PR1 to be exact, while my client’s two blogs at SayEducate.com and SayCampusLife.com managed to hold onto their previous PR4 position.

Other Ways To Measure Success

Granted, any drop in PageRank can be frustrating especially if you’ve been link building and using other methods to promote your site. However, there are other ways to measure the value of your website including:

Alexa Rank — Once widely panned by the SEO community, Alexa has gained some respect if only for their frequent updates which occur several times each month. The lower your Alexa number the higher your score.  However, it can easily be gamed through sites like Entrecard which encourage others to visit your site to inflate traffic numbers.

Google Analytics — If you run Google Analytics, you can gain an excellent understanding of your site’s traffic trends. While you won’t get a “rank” for how well your site performs, you will be able to gauge traffic numbers including page views, sources, and how well your AdWords campaigns perform.

Compete — Like Google Analytics, you can receive site traffic history and measure how your site compares against your chief competitors with Compete. Even in the basic (free) format, you can obtain some decent information about your site as well as your competition.

Semrush — Forget PageRank as I want to see how my sites perform with specific keywords. Recently, I discovered that the sharply increasing traffic to my The Auto Writer blog was bringing a lot of good attention my way. Turns out that I secured the #1 keyword phrase for a new vehicle about to be introduced, sending 200+ extra visitors to my site each day. Semrush has a freebie tool which can help you identify some of the results for free. Pay a monthly fee and you can get a hold of all of that information.

SERPs — You can check any search engine’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) manually to see how your site is doing. Honestly, I only check Google these days because of their dominance in the world of search. However, I also use Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools to analyze all of my data.

Miscellany — Of course, I use Twitter to help build contacts online and have been particularly taken by Twitter Search which is an excellent way to find out who has been talking about your favorite topic recently.  I also like to use a good backlink checker to find out who is linking to me, I let Google notify me when certain keywords or phrases I’m following get mentioned. Additionally, I like to peak at domain tools when I want to obtain information about a client, a competitor or when I’m considering purchasing a domain or website.

So, as you can see PageRank doesn’t carry quite the weight that it some think that it should, given the many different measurements to quantify your site’s success. True, I would love to have a higher ranking from Google across my network of sites, but it is the other factors that weigh heavily and seem to bring fresh business my way.