My visit to WSC ISRAEL 2008

My interest in visiting the world stamp championship exhibition might have been a bit different than that of most visitors. As stamps are the next collectible to be added to colnect, I wanted to get better feeling of the hobby and meet some people with whom some future business cooperation would be achieved.

My experience was enriching as stamps, unlike phone cards, have existed for ~170 years and so have more stories and are more established as collectibles. It's a complete world to discover.

Meeting representatives of a few postal authorities went very well. I tried to interest them about the benefits colnect could bring them. Most of the people I spoke with were excited about the ideas presented and so I hope that the enthusiasm would continue to real actions.

The attached pictures show boards containing some of the world's rarest stamps presented in the exhibition.

The other PR (Public Relations)

Just appropriate that following a post about PageRank, there'll be something with a more positive note.

TheMarker, a popular Israeli newspaper concerning economics, have published an article (in Hebrew) about phone cards collectors and colnect.

The Islands Phonecards Database story now has a Russian version (originally posted in English).

colnect.com has also been mentioned in Telecartofilistas and Dia de Folga, Brazilian blogs in Portuguese.

PR0

Forgive me Google for I have sinned. I don't know the nature of my sin yet but I'll probably eventually figure out what has happened and how come my website, full of original content (it's the world's most extensive resource for collectible phone cards information), has a PageRank of 0, aka PR0.

Seems like the lovely WWW is made of a myriad of rules that dynamically change and are quite hard to obey, even if you're one of the good guys. Unlike the real world where you usually know what's good and what's bad, here you have to figure it out slowly, understanding that causality isn't as evident.

PR0 is considered a punishment but since Google work in mysterious ways (and keep their algorithms confidential), not even a prayer could work here. One has to search deep in his heart (and on the Internet) what it is that was wrongfully done.

So here's my guess
At the end of March, I've moved to a new hosting service and decided to also move to the new domain and so http://telecards.islands.co.il became http://telecards.colnect.com

Since colnect.com (the project which will soon accommodate many different types of collectibles) is still under development I've made redirects from http://colnect.com, http://colnect.org, http://colnect.info and http://colnect.net, as well as from the old http://telecards.islands.co.il

And so, it's possible that this is considered a domain Spam (when one has a few domain that link to each other to get better search engines ranking) although no bad intentions were involved nor any trickery.

But the site's still on top of the results
Strangely enough, although my website was seemingly punished, it's still on top on the results page when Googling for telecards.

There will be more posts on SEO, SERP, Google. Meanwhile you can check out these tools for measuring your website.