A lot of people take the number that is displayed in your FeedBurner dashboard as the actual number of RSS subscribers you have. It tends to fluctuate a lot from a day to day basis, which is confusing – are people really adding and dropping your feed at that rate? After a little look around the help section, I have found some clarification.  It turns out that the number is only an approximation of your total subscribers calculated based on how many times your feed was requested in the last 24 hours.

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.

Now you know :)

1. All Link Exchanges Are Good – sorry, but no. Reciprocal link exchanges have pretty much no benefit for SEO and in most cases should not be done. However, if the two sites are on the same topic you may wish to perform a reciprocal link exchange for the benefit of drawing targeted visitors, but you still won’t improve your search rankings. Link farms should especially be steered clear from.

One-way links are the holy grail of website promotion – they carry a lot more weight with them in terms of SEO, and are almost always targeted. How do you attract these one-way links? Write solid content with great headlines.

2. A Big Promotion Budget Means Big Results – having money to throw around is not going to make your website successful. You can’t just stop at getting the visitor to your website – you have to sell to them, also. Make them want to buy your product or subscribe to your feed and become repeat visitors or whatever your objective is.

Before you spend even a dime on website promotion you need to carefully design your site with your visitors in mind. Just because you would buy from your site does not mean that other visitors will want to. Know your audience and how to sell to them before wasting your money. Work on getting your conversion rates high first before you aim for larger amounts of traffic. Remember, you don’t need to have a big budget (or any budget at all) to become successful.

3. Design Is Everything – one cannot underestimate the importance of a good design, but without great content, the design will mean nothing. Your website design should work to compliment your content, which is the main focus of your website. Use your design to draw the reader in and spotlight your articles, focusing their attention.

There is no excuse nowadays to have a crappy template with the proliferation of good, free templates all around the internet, but you also don’t need to be spending all of your resources and time trying to create the perfect design – text is what sells. You don’t buy a book based on the cover, you buy it based on the content. The cover may be what draws you in, but the text is what sells you. Your priorities should be: good design, great content.

4. Anybody Can Create A Successful Website – false. It’s a lot harder than it looks. It takes a huge amount of time and dedication. That is why 90% of new blogs don’t make it past two months. Only if you are willing to put hours into research, learning, building, and promoting, and realize that you will fail multiple times before you succeed, will you be able to become successful. There is a huge change in what it takes to build and run websites as a hobby and as a business.

5. If You Build It, They Will Come – just creating a website does not guarantee that visitors will come to it. Google has over one billion websites in its database, and you can bet that a thousand of them are very similar to yours. If you just do what everyone else is doing you will get the same mediocre results. To truly get attention and attract visitors, however, you need to be unique. Do something that no one else is doing, put a new spin on an old idea, or just do it better. You need to have a good answer as to why a user would rather go to your site instead of one of the other thousand that offer the same thing.

6. Yours – what do you think is the biggest website promotion myth?

As you can see, building a successful website is not easy. It is, however, an exciting and rewarding journey if you are dedicated to it.

Just kidding. The fix is fairly simple, though I do warn you – you may lose a little ranking for a while, but it shouldn’t be anything major. What you want to do is set up a permanent (301) domain redirect, such that if someone visited your old domain at oldDomain.com/folder/page.html, they would automatically be forwarded to newDomain.com/folder/page.html. Same idea with the search engines – when the bots crawl your site, they will be redirected by this 301 which tells them that the redirect is permanent and that they should update their databases accordingly.

So how do you do this? Easy as eating pie! But maybe not quite as fun…anyways, I digress. It’s just three simple lines of code to put into your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old-domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Obviously changing the domain names to their appropriate values.

Viola! Done. However, it may take a while for you to see the domain change in search results.

So where does all this traffic come from if it is not from the 7Search site? A member at WickedFire recently did some research into this, and here are the referrers that he found: (read more)

searchportal.information.com
realstarsearch.com/search.php
lookuplive.com/search.php
topsearch10.com/search.php
my-search.tv/search
216.133.243.28/2.php
digitalon.info/search.php
spotdescribe.com/search.php
ussfind.com/search.php
searchkv.com/search.php
vip.topically.org/search.php
page-not-found.net/SmartOffers/SmartOffers.aspx
search-for-avail.com/search.php
searchfeed.com/rd/Clk.jsp
realstarsearch.com/search.php
find.uz/search.php
allfindout.com/lookup
allsitesfind.com/search.php
sp2.information.com
yasuhisa.com/runescape-2-money-maker.phtml
cjbjobzk.org
pharmacy.realstarsearch.com/search.php
search.ug/search.php
game.realstarsearch.com/search.php
page-not-found.net/SmartOffers/SmartOffers.aspx
landing.domainsponsor.com
216.133.243.28/2.php
my-search.tv/search
lookuplive.com/search.php
meta.7search.com/click/free_click.aspx
all-best-travel.com/search.php
foxnews.com/story/0,2933,241597,00.html
new-era-search.com/search
topsearch10.com/search.php
allfindsite.com/search.php
right-search.org/all.php
aruba-fishing.ashdome.com
7search.com/scripts/security/visit.asp
jux2.com/best.php
allfindout.com/lookup
upliftsearch.com
searchlab.info/mfeed/package/search.php
allaboutvacation.com/destinations/Acapulco-vacation.h…
sidefind.com/results.php
resultsmaster.com/SmartOffers/SmartOffers.aspx
araomai.com/barcelona-in-restaurant-spain.shtml
flghts.com/athens-flights.htm
clickztravel.com/search/vacation-resorts/1-1.html
ampmsearch.com/search.php

Not many recognizable domain names in there, eh? If you check some of those sites out you won’t be very impressed, either. So that’s where 7Search traffic comes from.

So, question: are reciprocal link exchanges good for SEO?

Answer: No. Reciprocal link exchanges (RLE) have no positive affect on SEO anymore. A while ago in the past you might have had some success in doing RLE, and you will often still see new webmasters posting in forums for link exchanges. However, it is a good idea to stay away from these. First of all, you want your incoming and outgoing links to be relevant to your website’s topic. Nine times out of ten, reciprocal links are not. Now, however, if you are interested in performing a RLE with a topic-related website, that can’t hurt. Google won’t reward you with PR or better search rankings from off-topic links, and, without diving into the design theory behind page rank, having too many outbound unrelated links will just hurt the PR that you have.

But most importantly, remember this: Linking to unrelated sites is of no use to your user and just serves as another potential exit point from your site.