The following text is from Smarty online manual:

{literal} tags allow a block of data to be taken literally. This is typically used around Javascript or stylesheet blocks where {curly braces} would interfere with the template delimiter syntax. Anything within {literal}{/literal} tags is not interpreted, but displayed as-is.

I finally did some search today and found a solution:

Removed “try {” and “} catch(err) {}” from Analytics code, it worked, although I still don’t know why.

<script type=”text/javascript”>// <![CDATA[

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));

// ]]></script>

<script type=”text/javascript”>// <![CDATA[

try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-xx"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}

// ]]></script>

Everything went well with the merge until a formal mod showed up, she complained publicly at the beginning, and got more and more aggressive, even started a free forum and asked other members to follow, anyway, it got very ugly several days later.

The protest got very severe but still didn’t change my mind, but somehow, I suddenly feel those diet posts don’t fit in my health forum at all, they are hurting my forum. Then I reversed the merge two weeks after it happened. The formal members seemed very happy, which is a bit shocking to me, I always thought only one member hated it. It’s practically dead after all, why should they care? It seems to be a happy ending, though!

My lesson: don’t merge forums if not 100% sure, people may get very upset and will defend their community (even a small one) very aggressively.

Several years ago, I always encouraged my friends to start a website if they were interested. It wasn’t hard to earn some money at that time, many webmasters have several dozen websites. But it’s very different now, I will tell him it’s very difficult to earn money online if someone asks me. Recession is only one of the reasons, changes on Google side make small websites hard to survive (or grow, more accurately).

When you search something on Google, wikipedia.org is often on the first page for almost anything. This means Google gives authoritative websites very heavy weight on rankings. This change has been spread into all fields. In a niche topic, there are a couple of authority websites which takes over most SE traffic, it becomes very hard for other small websites. So, either your website is quite successful or it can only buy you several hamburgers. There is no doubt that it’s extremely hard to gain the authority status from Google.

Should you start a website? If you want to earn money, think it again, you need to have a very solid long-term plan. If you do it for personal interest, do it, you can get free hosting everywhere, it’s also very cheap to use you own domain name and commercial hosting. $10/month would be the maximum cost.

I have put ads on every possible websites, also plan to shutdown some garbage websites. I can see many many websites will disappear in this cold winter.

Besides directories, digitalpoint forum has probably the most outbounds links, almost every member put four random links in their signatures, but this forum has very strong rankings. A few other webmaster forums are very strict on signature usage, and they didn’t out-rank DP although they were older. My member ID on DP is under 1000, have been watching this forum grow, I’m always amazed at its rankings.

I know this is not a good example, I wouldn’t draw such a conclusion with it either. I setup a blog for an active member on my forum two years ago. She doesn’t care about outbound links at all, she linked to many pages nearly in every blog post. I don’t like her writing from a webmaster’s point of view. But only one year later, the blog started to rank very well, also has site-links on Google.

This makes sense, as long as these links are not paid, these web pages give visitors more options for further read, isn’t it the way Internet worked before? Over the years, we have heard of too many bad stories of bad links and became over cautious.br /br /Time to change for me.

• Stage 1: Rent links from a couple of authority websites. This was good enough to get a high PR in the earlier days.
• Stage 2: Rent massive links from a huge amount of websites.
• Stage 3: Rent massive links, also build content to make the directory ‘useful’.

So, why botw.org wasn’t hammered by Google, I think there are three reasons:

• It’s older.
• It rents links for internal categories, not putting PR in the first propriety, or at least looked this way.
• They charge pretty expensive submission fee, as a result, the listed websites are better in quality. And more importantly, not so many additions over a short period of time.

I have been running my own directories for over three years, I don’t do extensive link building, also quite few links submission. Gradually, they get good rankings on Google, for example, my personal finance directory is on the first page, as well as other two general directories nice web directory and appropriate web directory.

So, how do we evaluate a directory? Is it worth the submission fee? I would check its history and ranking. Is it over two years old? Is it on the first spot if we search its name? If it can’t rank well for its own name, we can be sure it won’t bring us any results. PageRank is the third factor, IMHO.

There are two possible reasons, if it’s not because of search engines’ random changes:

• I’m using much more unique IPs, which is favored by Google. 14 IPs cost only $7.5/month, I should have ordered more, it’s even cheaper.
• A slightly faster server, which makes more visitors patient enough to wait for the page load.

Anyway, it doesn’t hurt to give your websites a decent hosting.