Christmas Australia is now completely live, with Christmas gallery, forum, shops, events, charities, carols and music pages.

I’ve used Drupal for construction, and also use the blog component as a Christmas news page and moved across all the

But it really does bug me that my old site was ranking #2 at Google today for my Christmas keywords. It just shows the power of incoming links at Google - so many people were linking to my old site, that even now that someone has replaced it with a junk advertising site, it still holds the ranking. As I can’t do a 301 redirect from old domain to new domain, I basically have to send an email to each person, asking them to transfer their links to my new site.

At least I still have access to the old site logs, so I can see what words people were using to find my site. A surprising number would go directly to my site, whether through a bookmark, or because they had typed in my address. I’m considering using pay-per-click advertising to tell those people what my new site is.
I was also reading the blog of another person who had a high profile domain taken away from them, because of registration problems. Like me, they are starting all over again. And this time we’ll both make sure we check registration emails two months before they expire. And go for long-term domain registration as well.
Good luck everyone.

I’ve just started promoting my new Halloween Australia website, Halloween Australia.
It’s written from the ground-up in php, with a mysql database to store halloween events.
The goal is to let local families spread the word on how they plan to organise trick-or-treating.
In previous years, a family in my suburb has dropped leaflets telling people to tie a balloon to their front fence. Although I don’t always get one.
And sometimes they’ve decided to celebrate Halloween on the weekend, instead of the actual day.
The events section also lets you list community halloween events that are open to all, such as school or community parades.
I’ve put some of my favourite halloween recipes up.
In the next few days I’ll add a few more forms to allow people to submit photos, recipes and stories to the site.
It’ll be fun to see how well i can get it ranking in the weeks leading to Halloween.
I haven’t done much link building yet, but I will probably start this afternoon.

I finally finished (well, mostly) my two new complementary [tag-tec]dog[/tag-tec] sites, My Dog Space and My Dog Site.

They are written in different languages. MyDogSpace is a php package with slight modifications. MyDogSite was written from scratch in ColdFusion, as a learning tool for the language. It is still fairly basic language-wise, but functionally I think it’s a great dog search system.

In MyDogSite you can search for a dog holiday by state, region, suburb and feature, then display a detailed information page, which includes a photo and Google Map of the location.

I’m still planning more improvements to MyDogSite - more automation, a club search, and more content, but it’s a good start.