世論 What Japan Thinks

Things are ticking along quite nicely now. I’ve launched a sister blog to this one, 私論 – Shiron – What I Think that covers more chatty personal blog stuff on the whole, and perhaps the occasional rant about life in Japan. Excuse the rather egotistical title, but I might as well be up front about it!

Search engines are looking good – Google rating for the site itself using the blog’s title is still rather poor, but other keywords seem to work quite well! Search logs show a few good hits from Google, MSN and Yahoo! (about 10% of my traffic is now from search or directories), but not Google Blogs, however. Blog Explosion still ticks along, but I’m using it in a much more efficient manner now, I hope. I’ve done a few trackbacks and blog comment postings to get the word around, but I’m still to get even one decent incoming link outside of directories. Also, as there seems to be a Google Page Rank update going on at the moment, I find according to a site I can’t find again that my Page Rank has jumped from 0 to 4, mostly, I think, thanks to Jim Breen and his fine list of Japan-related links. I’d be lost without his WWWJDICT to hand for my translation needs.

It’s a bit disappointing, however, that my other blog has got more comments for the mindless nonsense that I’ve written there than this place, where I’ve put in well over 100 hours of effort in the last two months! Oh well, but at least I’m writing this as a reference source, not as a popularity contest.

I’m still to earn beer (singular) money from my AdSense – I think I could just afford to buy a cheap and nasty chuhai right now from Google.

The bad news: I had a complaint from one of the people whose material I translated due to my rather blatant spicing up of the story for hits. That experiment worked far too well, resulting in a 50% increase in traffic due to a wonky algorithm in MSN Search, which had decided to promote me to second place for various pr0n-related keywords. I’ve deleted the original and reposted a cleaned-up translation.