Well, with all the commotion about Google’s latest pagerank update, I have some great news. The Million Dollar Wiki is now a Pagerank 4 website. That means all you page owners have been rewarded with some nice link juice! Congrats! I’d like to thank everyone that helped make this happen.
What’s next for Million Dollar Wiki?
I am currently exploring strategic moves for Million Dollar Wiki. As many of you may suspect, I have a few ideas up my sleeve. I want you all to know that I’m committed to selling all 10,000 pages, even if I have to cut the price. The law of supply and demand suggests that by cutting the price, the demand will be higher. The question is, by how much? The other question becomes, how do I renew the buzz that made it work in the first place?
These are all good questions. Certainly the pagerank update adds a nice selling point. But now its time to think.
I urge everyone to be patient as I formulate a new plan to take this to the next level. Like I said from the beggining, I don’t care if it takes me until the day I die, I will sell 10,000 pages. Sure, they might not all be for $100 but damnit I will sell them all.
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27 users responded in this post
This is so awesome, enough with the nay saying MDW continues on. This is due to one big group effort thank you for all the people who have poured hours and hours into their wiki pages.
Let’s put this in perspective though. The time has clearly come to put some development dollars into the MDW.
While a PR4 is nice it can’t pass on link juice if it can’t be seen by search engines. Have you ever site scraped the Main Page? It gets no content - no links can be seen.
While I appreciate the efforts of the categories, they left me underwhelmed at the bottom of the page. No revamping of the main page for a fair distribution of traffic. Nothing had changed for the rest of the page owners but we were added as a footnote in the categories.
Well said.
<p>Well, like I said, things are on the way. You’ll just have to be patient. Keep in mind this is a 15 year investment. It was impossible to forsee hundreds of people purchasing pages and doing absolutely nothing with them. It doesn’t make any sense to develop the site further when it doesn’t even rank for its name on google, and it won’t rank for its name until there is content on every page, or at least most pages, and no duplicate content copy pasted from elsewhere on the net. Thats why all the money I’ve spend since it got big has been to add content to pages, and while we’ve added good content to at least 200 pages, it really is up to the page owners just as much as it is up to me to take this to the next level.</p>
I apologize, Graham, but I have to refute this.
MEW PR2, FDW PR0, OBW PR0, Word Hugger PR4 all rank #1 for their name. MDW ranks #75. Now why is that? Are you admitting they have better content? Are you admitting they have better SEO? Even with the huge advantage of MDW being first out of the gate, the hype, the backlinks, the development dollars? So what are they doing that you are not? (Look at the front page, it can’t be indexed).
If it doesn’t make sense to develop the site further I guess it also doesn’t make sense for future investors to buy in either.
I’m not sure if you remember this, but we ranked first for our name for months. It happened on September 23 that we officially got kicked from google. It’s probably because we have hundreds, literally hundreds of pages with nothing on them. Or maybe its because we’re selling the pages, and essentially selling links. Either way, someone at Google intentionally noticed our site, didin’t like it, and put us in “Google Hell”.
If everyone who reads this fills out the form here:
http://www.google.com/quality_form?q=million+dollar+wiki&hl=en&pwst=1
And tell them you want to see the Million Dollar Wiki! that would help!
PS. Do a google search for john chow. He ranks aroudn 75 for his name too. This is the problem with Google, if they don’t like you, they kick you to the gutter. I never got an explanation and I’m not happy about it, but there is nothing I can do. All the SEO in the world won’t improve my rank.
Glad MDW is finally ranked, that will help us resell our pages. Sucks that google took so long and let the other knockoffs time to catch up - if they did the PR update a month or two ago, i am pretty sure we still would have got a 3 or 4 and the other sites would have been lucky to get anything.
Wow. Just wow. I suspected we might have been put into the Google penalty box but after the roll out of a very decent PR, I thought we had scraped through. Time to educate the owners to stop trying to sell links and ads to get back the SERP…
Graham — Regarding SEO — one change might help you a lot — can you change the home page title tag to read:
The Million Dollar Wiki
instead of:
Main Page - MillionDollarWiki
also, if possible, on the main page’s H1 tag, something like:
Million Dollar Wiki - Main Page
instead of:
Main Page
I think that might help a bit. Of course, it is possible you are just in the Google doghouse.
Regarding page pricing — I’m not so sure you should drop your pricing. I think its better for you to keep the list price the same and maybe offer discounts for multiple pages. Also, continuing to set aside some inventory and offering them up to various blogs out there as contest prizes would help to increase awareness.
Another idea might be to partner with some influential bloggers and provide them with a premium affiliate program that pays a higher share than normal.
If you reduce the pricing I think you run the risk of “devaluing” the Wiki. The pricing is built into the original concept — 10,000 pages at $100 each. Once you move off of that I think you kind of move away from your core mission which is risky.
$100 for 15 years is not bad — I think that is a story you can sell.
If I were you, I’d also keep a firm cap at 10k pages. At one point you mentioned you were willing to oversell that as I recall. I think maintaining a sense of relative scarcity is important in order to preserve value.
Sorry for the long post
If I have any other thoughts I’ll pass them along in more bite-sized nuggets. 
BTW, I’m not terribly familiar with the Wikimedia software and so have no idea if those changes I mentioned are even feasible
I agree with BlogAdvertising about changing the tags. Little things like that can only help. I also agree with the rest of his comments on pricing. As far as limiting the words to 10,000…I think we should wait until we’re even close to talk about that. Who knows how things will look down the road.
Advertising campaigns need to continue though…it’s kinda unnerving to see the knockoffs mounting attacks.
Peace all.
PS. One other thing…and I think Mariam touched on this a little…
The homepage shows the phrase “million dollar wiki” only once (I think) and I know that to rank higher it should have your #1 keyword show in the first 90 characters (if possible) and then a few more times throughout the text (without over saturating). A lot of the times “MDW” appears it appears in jpg or gif so obviously it can’t be indexed.
It’s a tricky thingn to try and figure out how to include the words without sounding repetitive but to some extent it has to be done to get the rank.
Exactly. There are always little things to tweak.
BTW, when did the main page get overhauled to the 3 column thing? Before we conclude that MDW was punished by Google, let’s eliminate the possibilities.
eh, on September 22, we were #1 for our name. On September 23, we were #75. I doubt it’s because our homepage has 3 columns or ineffective keywords in the meta…
Seriously, everyone go to this link:
http://www.google.com/quality_form?q=million+dollar+wiki&hl=en&pwst=1
And tell them you want to see the Million Dollar Wiki when you search for “Million Dollar Wiki”!
I just did went to the link…there should be a way for you Graham to send one mass email to all owners with that link.
and also…maybe during august/september mdw.com was one of only a handful of pages with the phrase “million dollar wiki” in its html…but I know that now over 100 have it in there somewhere…just being the devil’s advocate.
I know with school and all it’s hard to update things (I got a few sites I’m doing and still going to UConn) but don’t give up on your bloggers and other advertising methods. I’m sure some innovative marketing and publicity can really revive the purchases. You have to let people know that MDW WILL be more significant than all the other immitators.
Peace
At last some I see some activity here. Reducing the price is will suggest people to wait for longer to get some more price reduction. I think efforts should be taken to increase the activity. Who will read same news paper ever day? I haven’t seen Front page change. All I see is same few links on front page.
Ok, you’re right. This is going to sound crazy, but I think I’m going to let any page owner change the home page at any time to promote your page. That way, the home page gets updated all the time, and there is an extra benefit to owning a page.
What do ya’ll think?
I don’t think all 1000 people editing is good idea. Similar to recently sold, “Recently updated” kind of section wouldl be nice. If you can automate that process, that would be awesome. If possible, keep featured page as a ration : 10 appearing out of 20 or 30.
There was a fairly decent activity when you had Free page contest on this blog. It is proven contests will bring people. Even page owners may comeup and announce a contest.
Just my 2 cents.
I’m not sure if you’re joking or not but in case you’re not…
That’s a definite no. Just like we saw with the “most popular pages” it’s bound to be abused. And I don’t want 1000 people editing with no wiki/html skills defacing the main page.
I’ve done my part with Google and requested that MDW be reinstated as number #1 for it’s name.
I request that you do the same and look into scraping the home page with the link I provided AND compare the results of your competitors and how the pass link juice.
I too get ranked #1 for “stock picks wiki” around Sept 19, (posted it in the forums) and I lost it. So, to provide content (while I don’t disagree with this) doesn’t make sense when the main page has issues.
I don’t think letting everyone update the homepage is a good idea because of all the reasons mentioned above and honestly some pages don’t deserve to be on the homepage yet and it might give the wrong idea to new visitors.
Also I say one thing that can be done is what worked in the past. Keep up the blogs with the latest good news as you’ve been doing and get a press release out if you haven’t, work out more contacts with bloggers and hit up like 2 bloggers at once, get people to post (not flame) message boards and/or add “MillionDollarWiki” to their signatures in other boards.
Maybe make a youtube video? Have the intro playable on the homepage? It would give it a more interactive vibe. The homepage could also be a little longer (without going overboard) to get more info in at once before a 1st time visitor clicks away.
anyone else?
Just another thought. Maybe the “Most Popular Pages” should start from scratch every month. I’m sure you can see the benefit of that…and it would probably be more accurate…if a page is that popular then it will continue to get more views even without its thousand-visit-cushion…if it doesn’t…then maybe it’s not that popular after all.
Graham, another possibility to consider is that some of the inbound links that MDW used to have are no longer passing link juice leading to the rankings fall.
BTW, I really wasn’t referring to the meta tags — it doesn’t really matter a whole lot what you put in there as Google doesn’t give them significance.
I think that you’ve ranked fro Million Dollar Wiki primarily due to the fact that many of the inbound links use the link text “million dollar wiki”. If some links were discounted, the lack of the phrase Million Dollar Wiki in the Title tag or the H1 will probably hamper things.
If it isn’t much trouble, it might be worth a test. 9 out of the 10 in Google’s top 10 currently use the exact phrase “million dollar wiki” in the page title. The 10th uses 2/3rds of it and has good keyword density for the phrase throughout the rest of the page.
Of course, it may not help at all — the phrase is used prominently on the title of this blog and it ranks just below the main site 70+ pages back. This is suspicious and does make me lean towards a Google penalty being at work.
Josh (+mariam and siva i think) had a great idea to keep the main page fresh.
Rotate the features - use iframe to do that. With every visit or refresh, the site will seem updated.
Graham,
Consider setting up a robot.txt file to ‘hide’ the unfinished/new pages.
Google also offers some webmaster tools that make site management a bit easier.
Great news that we have hit pagerank 4.