Thanks Mike! That means a lot coming from you -- big fan of your blog by the way in case you haven't noticed :)

Hi alamperti,

Thank you very much :)

Hi Ray,

For now, I'm just enjoying it as a personal blog. I've placed a few ads on it in the past, however all but one of them were for free to friends of mine to help promote sites of theirs. Money isn't much of a problem and even with the enormous traffic growth over the past month, I still doubt I could make much more than maybe 1k a month off of it, so I'd rather keep it clutter free.

At the moment, I'm trying to upgrade my own skills more than anything else -- reading everything I can get my hands on related to domain development, SEO, SEM, and keyword research. Blogging forces me to verbalize acquired knowledge and the pressure of pleasing blog readers encourages me to make sure I do my reading each day so I can provide them with something worthy of their time tomorrow. I have a few non-monetary goals which I would like to achieve, mainly centered around increasing traffic from search engines and growing the blog from PR4 to PR5 hopefully within the next 6 months.

Completely agree Ray -- well said.

Josh, thanks for summarizing that and adding your thoughts on it :)

I see it the same as you -- I can't understand how Google would do something that would penalize millions of blogs out there unless Google has something against blogs.

The paranoid "Google is out to get blogs" opinion seems to be that Google wants big brands to rank higher in the SERPs as they have money to spend on paid search and if they see organic search converting well for them, they may be more inclined to spend (or spend more) on paid search.

Ray - thanks for your kind words. I'm glad you enjoyed the article. I've been doing a lot of reading on SEO lately and I was quite surprised myself to see how valuable high PR links are -- no wonder why people are willing to pay hundreds and even thousands per month for a good link despite the risks involved.

Ross -- thank you for the correction. I'm a big fan of Problogger.net and read it almost religiously :)

You make a very good point that loyal readers will be more inclined to read a longer post than first time visitors -- that's something I didn't write about in the post and truthfully, something I didn't think about but certainly makes a whole lot of sense. Thanks for your contribution Ross and I'm glad you liked it.

Josh -- One think that has me particularly worried is about all the nofollow links I've given to other sites. Thinking it didn't hurt my pagerank, I've probably nofollow linked out to a hundred different sites and now to think that's the equivalent of having 100 dofollow links in terms of pagerank damage and no link juice going to the sites I liked enough to link out to... What a mess.

Something a few of the posters were talking about on SEOMoz was about blog comments and nofollow -- if every nofollow link is going to hurt you, then a good blog post is essentially going to be punished in the rankings for being good through receiving more dofollow links from all the people who enjoyed the article enough to leave a comment.

Thanks Samir! I'm glad you liked it :)

Hi Adam,

I'm not quite sure what happened however I can't get your post to show up -- sorry about that. Thank you for providing the Afternic sales link -- I forgot about Afternic having that.

Ray, thanks for your kind words.

I've been spending a lot more time developing and focusing on improving my ability to develop -- domainers can say what they want, but I don't see many people making a decent living off PPC earnings anymore unless they' got in a long time ago... I'm in the same boat as a lot of domainers -- my web development skills are on the weak end, I'm still learning how to use Photoshop, etc. Too many domainers make excuses for why they don't develop before they even give it a serious try. I have yet to meet someone who was born knowing how to code a website :)