I've decided to go back to my humble beginnings, dredge through the historical Swollen Pickles archives, and take a look at how it all began. I thought I'd take a look at the first five posts published on SwollenPickles.com. A trip down memory lane if you like. Looking back at the first five, I have to say, quality wise, the content was crap. Quantity wise, it was also crap. Then again, perhaps not a lot has changed...

Initially I set up this site just to see if I could actually do it. I wanted to experiment with a website, play around with little bits of code, modify things here and there. I suppose that will go some way to explaining the forgettable first post:

Please be advised that I have cut the red wire. I’m sure I’ll get this working eventually.

I followed up the first post with an artists impression of the Bean Bag Boy:

in his natural habitat he is most comfortable in track suit pants, with his laptop resting on his legs to keep them warm in winter.

Then there was the "serious" album review of the Killswitch Engage album End of Heartache. I don't really post album reviews here any more, I generally stick them over on Digital Burn.

Post number 4 was on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie:

...who wasn’t inspired to strap a washing basket to their back and kick ass with their home made nunchuckas after seeing this movie?

Post number 5 focused on my then obsession with the Channel Nine 'gap filler' program, Shock Docs. It introduced me to terms such as "amputee admirers", "chubby chasers" and "primordial dwarves".

In summary, my first five posts were rubbish, and on that basis I'm a little surprised that Swollen Pickles has lasted so long. Perhaps this is true of most first time "bloggers".

So now I put the challenge to you, what were your first five posts like? What were they about? How have things changed?

Harry Potter doesn't interest me. I don't know why, it just doesn't.

Harry Potter in the Hood interests me.

Check it...

Here's Harry Potter vs South Park, with some educational dialogue regarding the threat of ginger headed people.

I think this Harry Potter "spoof" came from Saturday Night Live, but I'm not sure... it's kinda long, and light on laughs but I'm trying to maintain a Harry Potter theme here, so stick with me it's Sunday... » Read the rest of the entry..

Firstly, I need to thank Meg from Dipping into the Blogpond for sticking with her top 100 Australian blogs index. Any time I need an ego boost, I head over to her list to see where Swollen Pickles sits in the list. Currently this blog is sitting at number 20, which I'm more than happy about!

Another blog I work on has also cracked the top 100. Motordude the car news blog is sitting pretty at number 59, which is pretty cool considering it's only a couple of months old. Incidentally, if you're an Aussie male, you may want to check out this story summarising recent research that has found Australian women find ute owners "hot".

Meg has also been quite supportive of Swollen Pickles, and has linked to me on more than one occasion. The last time she gave me a nice write up on the whole Meg White sex tape saga.

So, in summary, thanks Meg!

There have been a couple of other things that have caught my attention in the last week or two, so here's a quick summary.

Andrew Boyd received his first 'troll' comment, so congratulations go out to Andrew!

Andy Beard airs his beef with the Google Monster and presents it far more eloquently than I did!

This one dates back to August, but I only stumbled across it this week... The Wrong Advices highlighted The 20 Most Bizarre Science Experiments Of All Time. A lot of old school Ripley's Believe it or not? style stuff there!

Thomas Sinfield, who has popped into Swollen Pickles before, put a question to his readers, should he spend $100 on buying an ebay affiliate store script? Me, I'm not so sure, if it were my money I'd put it toward an Xbox360 and spend a little time searching SitePoint or something to find out how to create a similar script myself. The concept does sound worthy of investigation though.

In other news, WidgetBucks seems to be performing well for those people that have decided to give it a try. The CPC people are reporting seems to vary a little bit, but I'd suggest that most people seem to average between $0.30-$0.40 per click. I've decided to give a pink ad spot a try on my music site to see how that goes!

That's all for today.

Search Engine Optimization is a big business that basically revolves around the Google Monster. But when it comes to Search Engine Optimization, not even Google is perfect.

So check out the meangene site to take a tongue in cheek look at how Google could go about improving their own site in terms of Search Engine Optimization!

In other slightly related news, still no word back from the Google Monster regarding what looks to be a swollen pickles penalization.

36 hours have passed since I emailed the Big 'G'. As yet I have not received a reply. It's a little bizarre though. Right now, traffic to this blog is the highest it has ever been, yet, my organic Google traffic is now almost non existent. I guess if anything this experience has highlighted to me the importance of not putting "all my eggs in the one basket" in terms of traffic sources.

I just checked in on my analytics and it appears as the the Google drop off occurred late August/early September, as you can see from the graph below.

I guess it's kind of sad it took me so long to realize that the drop off had happened. Just goes to show it pays to review your statistics relatively frequently!

Hopefully this whole thing resolves itself fairly quickly, or at the very least the big "G" can let me know what I did wrong and how I can fix it.

If you live in Australia you may have noticed quite a lot of advertising talking up the new "Australian Citizenship Test". From the 1 October 2007, applicants for Australian citizenship need to pass an Australian Citizenship Test, with a mark of 60% or more, before they can submit their citizenship application.

Here's a summary from the oracle of truth and fountain of factual information, Wikipedia:

The computer based test will consist of 20 multiple choice questions drawn randomly from a pool of 200 confidential questions. The test will only be available in English. Applicants will have 45 minutes to complete the test. The material is drawn from the official guide "Becoming an Australian Citizen" published by the Australian Government department of Immigration and Citizenship.

I was curious. What are the questions like? How hard are they? Luckily, Queen of the Nerds forwarded me 20 sample questions so that I could find out for myself. Now I'm sharing them with the world. » Read the rest of the entry..

It looks like I've just come in on the receiving end of a giant Google bitch slap. Recently I'd noticed a massive drop off in Google search engine traffic. At first I put it down to a weird traffic fluctuation. Today I decided it was time to do some research, and I've uncovered some disturbing stuff. First I read this post about the impending PR update by Bush Mackel, that's what go me started.

Secondly, I did the standard back link check: http://www.google.com/search?q=link:www.swollenpickles.com

When I used to do that, links from www.swollenpickles.com used to dominate the top of the list. Unfortunately, they don't anymore.

Thirdly, I did a standard search for "Swollen Pickles", a term I had proudly ranked as number 1 for, for quite some time. Now, this site is no where to be seen.

And then fourth... I cried into my cocoa pops for 30mins or so.

Why have I been bitch slapped? I'm not so sure, and I'm not sure Google will give me any answers either. I'm guessing it's to do with selling links (via Text-Link-Ads), but I can't be sure. There is something about "Why I should report paid links" here. Seems pretty harsh that I should cop a Google ban for selling one link don't you think?

Does this mean paid reviews are a no no now too?

If I remove Text-Link-Ads, will that redeem me in the eyes of the Google monster? If Google buy out Text-Link-Ads will it then be ok to sell links again? Grrr... I'm angry.

If you've been bitch slapped by Google, when did it happen? How long before you appeared in Google search results again? Did it kill your site?

Edit: I've decided that I'll pull the Text-Link-Ads plugin from swollenpickles.com and file for a "reinclusion request".

Edit no.2 (16 Oct): I've emailed Google, to try and get some more information on what has happened. I've also removed the Text-Link-Ad as this is the only thing I can think of that would have angered the Google monster.

Some people have also asked me what my organic traffic coming from Google was like leading up to the slapping. So I thought I'd post the stats here. Each grouping spans a month, beginning on the 15th of each month (if that makes sense?).

Number of visitors sent from Google (Organic):
Sept - Oct = 318
Aug - Sept = 3,034
Jul - Aug = 4,616
Jun - Jul = 2,366
May - Jun = 1,558
Apr - May = 2,866
Mar - Apr = 2,945
Feb - Mar = 1,547

As you can see from that, the past month has been significantly lower than any of those previously. Very sad.