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I'm not sure what has caused this sudden onset of not wanting to do any work today but it sure has hit me hard. Yesterday I worked my ass off and churned out a heap of work for adult clients and followed up on a few proposals we put together for mainstream clients, I went to the gym, came home and cooked dinner and then went on to work on some of my own projects but today I'm hard pressed to even want to think about making my first cup of coffee for the day.

I notice that I'm not the only one who doesn't really want to think about work today. Even Aaron Wall from SEOBook is having problems getting down to some serious work. I wonder how many other webmasters are feeling the same way today; could it be that we're seeing the start of something that's spread online?

And I'll now remove my tinfoil had and get down to something more serious.

Paid links
I see that the subject of paid links has hit the headlines in some parts of the Net yet again. This time it seems that Andy Beard, one of those lined up against Google in the paid link skirmish, has decided that the best way to avoid being penalized for displaying paid links is to not let Google crawl the pages where the paid links occur by relevant entries in his robots.txt file.

Don't get too excited about that though because even my befuddled brain could see the fundamental problem there for most people who might try this little ploy. You only need to think about it for a nanosecond or two before you realize that if Google can't crawl those pages then Google can't index those pages and if they're not indexed then they're never going to appear in the search engines. And if they don't appear in the search engines then there's a good chance that you won't get much traffic.

Of course the guy who thought up this cunning plan did realize that there would be some difficulties getting people to see those pages where the paid links occurred if he banned Googlebot from them and he does have a work-around. For him that work-around includes getting links on social bookmarking sites and that's something that he can do quite easily whereas you and I probably can't.

It's not the only thing that needs to be done to out-fox Google and if you want to read more then check out Andy Beal's blog where he explains it in much greater depth ... but don't expect to find that it's an easy solution and don't expect the solution to last for long. Google doesn't like people who want to play the game by rules other than those approved by Google.

Interesting Hitwise data
If you haven't stepped outside of adult online marketing yet then you may be surprised at just how many adult webmasters are also out there playing in the travel and shopping markets in mainstream and more are diversifying into mainstream every month. Those who are heading that way will be interested in some Hitwise data that has just been released.

Hitwise has been analyzing search data and it has thrown up the fact that the online travel industry relies heavily on paid search rather than organic search listings while shopping sites are more reliant on organic listings. While online shopping sites get way more traffic from both types of search listings than travel sites, on a proportional basis, travel sites get 50% more traffic from paid search.

Hitwise also found that the flow of travel traffic from paid search is not consistent. The peak period for paid search traffic appears to occur during Autumn even though that's not the peak time for travel search when both paid search figures and organic search figures are combined. When those figures are combined the summer months are clearly the busiest time for travel related searches.

Understanding those peaks and troughs can help you work out your online marketing strategy for the months ahead and ensure that you're sites are ready well in advance of the peak times so that you can take advantage of that seasonal ebb and flow.

You'll also find that there are ebbs and flows in just about every other vertical too and that includes adult online. Knowing when those peaks and troughs occur will help you plan to take advantage of eager buyers who are hungry for whatever it is that you might be selling.

And now I'm off to try and find the drive to get up and make myself that first coffee. That might be all it takes to send this lethargy packing and get me motivated to put in another big day. There's certainly plenty of work lined up to keep me more than busy today, tomorrow and well into next month. All I need is the energy to get it done.