What is Qassia?

March 5, 2008 by

I got an email today asking me to check out this new beta program called Qassia. I went over, signed up and started poking around. This is what I was shown right away just before signing up.

Hi! Welcome to my profile page at Qassia, the most amazing resource ever. Wanna join Qassia? All you need to do is click on “Sign Up“. Qassia is fantastic because you get credit for sharing your intelligence. The more credit you earn, the better your websites will rank. And you get a backlink to your website for every intel you add – only Qassia gives you unlimited quality backlinks.

Last but not least, Qassia also has the best ad revenue sharing system on the Internet, so in effect you get paid for promoting your websites. Qassia rocks!

The more people join Qassia, the more everyone will benefit, so give Qassia a spin. Signing up takes less than a minute, so you’ve got nothing to lose. See ya around!

I have to say, I was slightly intrigued. They say that it’s in beta, but from what I can tell, you can sign up through anyones profile page. All you have to know is a username. Then you can poke around and sign up.

They’ve got a rather funky system going. It reminds me a little of Squidoo. The idea is that you enter in your website addresses and they get put into a SEO friendly (they ask for the anchor text) directory. Your placement in the directory depends on how much Qassia money you have. You earn money by adding “intel” to the site. “Intel” is classified as any kind of intelligence. Information basically. You also earn money by screening intel. In the end, the intel gets graded. The higher the grade the better it gets placed. The better it gets placed, the more Qassia bucks you make from it. They also share ad revenue through Adsense. That works very similarly to the forums at Digital Point in that you enter in your adsense id and they just put up your adsense ads. Supposedly, you get 100% of the ad revenue from the showing of your intel. Pretty generous.

At the moment, the colors of the site are not great. And the beta doesn’t really seem like a beta if you just have to know a user name to go to the sign up page. But, it is also a new site. Which means it doesn’t have much for content just yet, but new stuff is getting added all the time. Which also means that you and I have the opportunity to add a lot of content and have it be fresh to the site and also some of the only content. The proverbial foot in the door sort of situation. Early bird gets the worm. etc…

I’m gonna be toying around with it. You can sign up at my profile or through this sign up page.

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Trash Management

January 9, 2008 by

There is always talk on sites like mine about how you have to actively manage your profile online.  You have to be in control of your brand.  But what happens when it isn’t your profile that has the problem.  What happens when the honest content that you create (albeit for monetary gain, but actual content) isn’t as high on the search engine rankings that you expected.

Garbage Recycle TruckIt’s time for a little trash management.  I don’t mean cleaning up of your content.  If it’s actual honest content, it’s probably pretty clean anyways.  But, what I do mean is to clean up the search engine results.

Take a close look at the results that are above you on the results page.  Many will be sites with actual honest content that the owner did better SEO on, or the page has simply been around longer.  But, some of the results will be downright spammy.  Sites like Squidoo, Google Groups, and Blogspot blogs are frequently used for the proliferation of spam links.  It’s fairly simple really, make a quick account, create a page or lens or blog, fill said page with keywords and affiliate links and viola!  You have your very own spam page.

Cleaning up these pages can be fairly simple as well.  You probably won’t get the job done on your own, but if you are consistent with it, the efforts of others will help you as well.  In all of the cases, the hosting organization will have a way to report the page as being of “less than admirable” quality.  i.e. Spammy.   Report it.

That’s it.  As you report the items, others will do so as well.  When enough reports come in, that site will get pulled.  Next time the search engine goes to crawl the site, it won’t be there.  It then gets pulled from the index and no longer shows up in the results.  Instantly, you’ve moved your listing up one spot on the results page.  If you’re already on the first page, one spot can mean a lot.

One suggestion here though.  Be honest about your reporting.  Don’t report a non-spammy site simply because they rank higher than you.  You wouldn’t want them to do that to you, so don’t do it to them.  Report the truly spammy sites.  The ones with the blocks of keywords that are gibberish to a human, but are golden keys to the search engines.

At the same time that you’re helping yourself out, you’re also helping the rest of the internet population by helping to weed out a few of the spammy sites and let the real content come through.

What non-standard ways do you have to increase your search engine rankings?

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