Does anyone know if this means it will be in the print edition too? (I am in Japan, so I can't check these things.)
I am not in the co-op. And let me add something here: Your appearance in the USA Today is the reason that search engines validate backlinks. I was not referring to coop or any program when I talked about weight. Weight is something you have if your domain name is powerful due to a strong presence online. A powerful web site is giving you a good reference and search engines say, hey, USA Today thinks this site is good, so we will give him some rankings. What you see people do is try to make search engines believe that their web sites are great when in reality they are doing a trade off. Just to do a little reality check for those so involved in the seo game and unable to see the bigger picture. Can you now blame search engines for being upset with seo's? Of course not, seo's are more hurting the quality of search results than helping. That is why Google invited the top optimizers to their Dance and says on many occasions: Build a quality site, submit to good directories and the chill out. So what you should do now is chill out, be happy with what you have and WAIT! Mike
Stephemunday, Congrats on being picked by the USA Today Hot Sites team - they seem like nice folks. I have this bookmarked and saw yours the other day and thought it was cool. The've done me a few times - The HULK at Christmas was probably the funniest and you can see the amount of inbound traffic I got on my 2004 Christmas Slashdot Effect page which amounted to a couple of thousand. Again, nice work ... and nice site! ;-) alek
My 2 cents: I don't think the # of links affects Google's decision to put you in the sandbox. I have created a new site, bought the domain name in mid January and then threw my site on the web around Jan.21. That SAME day, I got tons of links and people loved my site. Just a few days later, Google started ranking me in the top 5 for my keywords. It is also a highly competitive keyword sector and I am competing against Britannica, Wikipedia, etc. My site is: www.ww2incolor.com
My understanding is that G gives you real rankings for a time and then you disappear. That is what happened with my site: G picked it up when it was in beta in Sept last year and we started getting visitors. Then after a while it flatlined. The wierd thing is that my subdomain is indexed properly even though the main one isn't. What is that all about????
Here is another bonus from being listed in USA Today - free instant listing in Yahoo Directory. Just checked my stats and they must have included my site in the last few hours. Usually costs $299 - not that I was planning on paying that, but freebies are nice.
Your Translation site does something I have been dreaming of doing with my old dictionary word list for my rare language. I've been looking for the best way to automate the translation of French words and English words to this "Creole" Language. Your site seems to do a great job from english to japanese katakana so I guess what I am looking for is a little more simple. You even have this cool "Put this translator on your site" feature Would you be willing to help me if I shared some Co-op weight?
I went to USA TODAY and I was trying to find the link to list my site. I could not find the link. Did you click on Media Kit? Thanks Vicky
They hide it at the bottom of the Archives page. The email address is: I'm sure they get hundreds of emails a day, but the fact that they picked my site shows that they do bother to read them, so it is worth a try.
Thanks for the info. Did you ask them "hey" can you list my site? Or did you have to fill out anything? Thanks
I did not sign up to have my site reviewed for the Yahoo Directory. However, a few hours after hitting USA Today, I started getting visitors from 2 Yahoo directory locations and found that they had listed me. I paid them nothing.... Regarding sending your site to USA Today, I just sent them an email saying my site is about such-and such, check it out - and then just left it. I never thought they would list it coz they probably get hundreds of emails like that every day - or at least that is what I wrote in my press release : ) = http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/2/prweb212617.htm