October 16th, 2008

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Highly Targeted Niche Website for Sale (Saint Louis Area)

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

For nearly 5 years I’ve run a website called Arnold Talk here in my home town of Arnold, Missouri.  The website has gone from a forum to a complete community website that promotes local events and has a very active forum.  The site gets well over a half million hits every month, all from very targeted traffic (Arnold residents).

I’ve had a horribly difficult time getting advertisers, therefore I’ve financed the entire thing (minus a scattered donation here and there) and now I must stop.  As my business continues to grow, I’ve got to start cutting out some of the things that are not part of my core focus.

Therefore I’m going to shut down this hugely popular website.  That is, if no one offers me some buck$ to buy it.

Hyperlocal websites are getting really popular nowadays.  This is probably the entirely wrong time to close down this site, especially with the amount of traffic that it gets month after month.  But I’m no ad salesman and can’t even generate a decent income to make the site worth keeping.  Traffic or not.

Interested in buying it? Here’s the link.  Make me an offer (by Oct 31).

The Epic Dash vs Underscore Battle

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

For a long time I’ve read that there is a difference in how search engines see and index filenames and URLs that contain dashes or underscores. For a long time the general concensus has been that the search engines consider a dash to be simliar to a space, whereas they consider an underscore as no space. If that’s true, then your new page called will_hanke_wins_lottery.htm is going to rank as willhankewinslottery. Had you named it will-hanke-wins-lottery.htm then you’d theoretically have a better chance at ranking for a mixture of those individual words.

But c’mon, do you really believe that with all those algorithm nerds in California can’t figure out how to differentiate between a dash and an underscore?