July 2005 Archives

There has been quite a bit of discussion in SEO circles following on the release of Google sitemaps a couple of months ago. For CMS and blogging platforms there are plugins that aid in the automatic creation of the sitemap and I use it on this site, however it does not cover the areas of the site outside my blog, so the rest of the site is not even mentioned. Roy Schestowitz has posted an interesting critique of the concept over on his blog and I must admit he does have some very good points (I would have place a comment there, but his captcha code is broken) Likening Google to Microsoft he does not see any malevolence, but he has highlighted an important trend:

The phenomenon above is the introduction and absorbance of new technologies by force. Google are forcing, not malevolently though, trends of crawling and push for methods to change

If Google do it, then the others may be forced to follow or die.

I found a couple of interesting references to the Irish Blogs topsite/list I launched the other day via technorati Some people are very positive about my latest little project, whereas others seem to think it a waste of time :) Youngirelander seems to be missing the point entirely. Nobody ever said it was intended to be a list of every single Irish blog and nobody is going to lay any doubt on how popular some blogs maybe. If you don't have the tracking code how is anybody meant to know how popular your blog is? There is no universal way to rank any website's popularity using a uniform third party system. Alexa, for example, can give some information, but it is restricted to reporting information reported by users of their plugin. Maybe some of us seem to have a fixation with Google PR, technorati and other things, but that might be because we work in an industry where those things count. If you aren't interested in them and don't want your site listed then nobody is going to force you. As I've already pointed out the toplist cannot track certain things at present, such as RSS feeds. Does that render it worthless? I don't think so, but you are entitled to your own opinion. I think my original post announcing the site explains why I set it up.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Sed tincidunt. Look familiar?

If you are fond of the Darwin Awards, then you'll probably enjoy this site as well

Software patents can be problematic and Google seems to be adding to the problem with their patent application for "syndicated content":

This FAQ is a work in progress and will be updated as I receive queries via comments or email. If you have a question about anything please ask.

As a couple of people contacted me about this already this morning I thought I'd better clarify a couple of things. Sites are ranked according to popularity ie. number of visitors etc., NOT votes, so getting all your friends to vote for you won't have much influence You need to place a snippet of HTML on your blog so that the system can track the number of visits to your site. If you look at the bottom top right of my blog's main page you should see a small image which links through to Irishblogs.info. It updates in realtime ie. the more popular your blog is then you should see the number changing. People reading your blog via RSS will not be counted as the image counter is not in the RSS feed. If you have any other questions please let me know

There seem to be an ever growing number of Irish blogs judging by the two main aggregators; POTB and IrishBlogs. But does anyone know how popular the blogs are?

If you are using Google adwords for your business and you are not based in the Irish republic you can now claim back your VAT from Google.

Even though I only made a modified version of the adsense plugin available a couple of days ago it has already been superceded!!

The URIBL website has been given a complete overhaul. A number of buttons and logos are now available for supporters as well :) If you don't know what URIBL is I would recommend you have a look at my previous post on the subject.

Eircom are RFC compliant in that they accept regarding abuse complaints sent to abuse@eircom.net HOWEVER they do not seem to process input to that address

A news item on Netcraft points to a Eurid public statement regarding the new .eu TLD.

Technorati tagging your posts in Wordpress can be achieved in a number of ways. The key is doing it in such a way as to minimise effort on the bloggers part.

Threads on CI can bring up some real gems like the one "dottie" posted today.

It's kind of amusing to read over other people's reactions to the launch of 3 in Ireland. Compared to their initial launch on the European market the Irish one has been very low key.

Not sure how to make the most out of adsense?

Are you tired of the Google logo?

BOTD can bring up some very quirky snippets. I especially liked this one A very funky use of CSS which only a standards compliant browser can view. I wonder has anybody tried doing a tricolour.........

Over the last few months blogs and blogging have received a lot of media attention. In some cases the media provides useful incites via the "new" medium, such as the Guardian's news blogs.

Arnaud Froment has released a very interesting plugin for wordpress.

Came across this new site by accident Basically it allows you to ping multiple sites at once.

Most bloggers are probably familiar with the concept of "tagging" their content so that systems such as Technorati can pick up on their posts.

As I have a tendency to post on SEO and related matters I've decided to create a separate blog.

I had been promising to write up a short review of the latest Harry Potter, but I didn't want to do it straight after reading the book. Why?

One of the things that has always frustrated me was that there were no hosting resource sites for the Irish market only

Making your blog more search engine "friendly" should not be too hard. By default Wordpress includes an option to turn on permalinks with more "friendly" URLs. Although this won't work on IIS it will work on any server using Apache with mod_rewrite enabled. Another handy little trick is to get your page titles to display as something a bit more meaningful.

I've decided to include a Creative Commons license on this blog

Like a lot of bloggers I use adsense. Up until recently I was using a standard banner at the top of all pages, which was done by using an include in the template files. Other people seemed to have gone to some trouble to incorporate adsense in their posts, so I thought I'd investigate further.

Eric Davis has released a wordpress plugin for feedburner.

I've noticed that quite a few bloggers have started putting Creative Commons licenses on their blogs. Considering the nature of blogs, with their links both in and out and cross-fertilisation I can understand why the CC license is attractive, but why do people make a conscious decision to include it? Do you think it makes any difference?

Site has been moved over to new server and seems to be working correctly. If anybody spots anything odd please let me know ASAP For the curious this new server is running Ubuntu stable instead of Debian. MySQL 4.1 and all the other "bits and bobs"

I'm about to move this blog to another server, so it may vanish for a couple of hours :)

Nominations for the 2005 IIA Netvisionary Awards are now open.

I posted recently about the dangers of blogs in relation to job prospects. One young blogger is now out of job due to his blogging about working in Google. Whether his blogging breached his contract terms with Google or not is probably of little interest to bloggers, who are probably more than a little shocked at how an "innocent" blog could cause so much trouble.

Over a year ago I first put some form of linux on my laptop. My distro choice at the time was Mandrake 9.1, but I moved on to try other distributions. To date my old Dell has seen:

• Mandrake 9.1
• Mandrake 10.0
• Suse 9
• Ximian (on Suse - I know it's not a distro, but it is a big change)
• Debian testing
• Ubuntu
• Mandrake 10.1 (official)

The last one went on this evening :)

Judging by what I'm seeing the Google PR update still hasn't settled down. A couple of days ago I was seeing a clear PR of 5 on this blog, but now I see 4, while other people see 5. The only way to see what it is across all Google data centres is to use a tool like this one You can change the URL to your own :)

John had posted some interesting statistics based on his crawling of the IE namespace:

Websites With Title, Keywords and Description: 10460

That's out of a corpus of 36198 domains!! So, if John's stats are true, and I have no reason to doubt him, approximately 66% of Irish websites have no meta content. Some SEO experts may say that meta content is not as important as it used to be, however they would surely agree that TITLE tags are a necessity. Others would also opt in favour of using all available meta content, as it can help with your listing in some cases. From reviewing sites submitted to browse.ie, search.ie and translationresearch.com I would have to agree. In the case of the two Irish directories the quality of submissions is quite poor. If they were being submitted to Skaffe , where I am also an editor, they would either be rejected or pushed between editors until the titles and descriptions had been beaten into an acceptable shape. A lot of the Irish sites submitted are completely lacking in title tags, or all pages share the same ones, which is almost as bad. As John points out, there is a definite need for SEO professionals in the Irish market. I wonder are people willing to pay them though....

Not so many moons ago I mentioned Google Sitemaps which may help with indexing your site. Google are now providing a handly list of plugins, produced by 3rd parties, that hook into their API. For bloggers there is a plugin for Wordpress, while there are others for popular applications such as oscommerce, vbulletin, phpbb and plone (to mention but a few) I've noticed some fellow bloggers are relying on third-party services to generate their sitemaps and google has listed a number of those also The only one I have any experience of is the Wordpress plugin, so I am only providing links to the others

I've been trying to get the runphp plugin with plugins used working. I was hoping to get a simple static page in Wordpress to do this, but for some silly reason it's refusing to work :( I have, however, managed to get it to work for an external page, so you can now see which plugins I'm using.

The launch of the 2005 Netvisionary Awards is this Wednesday evening in Clontarf Castle, Dublin. Free for IIA members. EUR25 for non-members. I'd love to meet up with people who are going :)

While doing some browsing I came across another useful SEO site: seomoz In order to use the site you need:

• Google API key
• Yahoo API key
• Amazon API key

As its tools query a number of online resources using your tag, not theirs, which makes a lot of sense, especially as it's a suite of free tools. The tools available include ones for valuing links, checking keyword popularity and a range of other things that any budding DIY SEO expert should find useful.

According to a post on a Hispanic blog, the latest Harry Potter is already available online, both the book and an audio version of it (read by a human no less) As the original post is in Spanish I'm providing my own translation below:

It took 12 hours for the fans of Harry Potter to publish an illegal electronic version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the latest and much awaited book about the young wizard written by JK Rowling. The process consists of scanning in the book's pages and digitising them using OCR software (Optical Character Recognition). After they proceed to the page by page revision (which is shared out) to ensure there are no errors before publishing it online. If this wasn't enough there is also an audio version of the book available on filesharing networks, read by a human not software. Why does this happen? the problem, for both the publisher and the author, is that being part of the information society is that if you don't make your work available and provide the required facilities, then someone else will. Not only will it happen,. but groups organise themselves in order to get them out as quickly as possible, as happened with the latest Harry Potter

David pointed out a very disturbing piece of tech news. It looks like DRM (digital rights management) is moving towards adding restrictions based on your monitor. Worrying? I would think so.

I finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince late last night. I had intended to savour it over a couple of days, but I couldn't. Once I had started I found it impossible to put it down. Waking up this morning in the "real" world is quite depressing :) I'll try to post a proper review of the book later today. In the meantime I would urge you to get a copy if you haven't already! You can choose from the colourful children's edition: or the more sombre adult version:

There may have been a certain amount of talk of late with regard to business blogging faux pas, but what of personal blogs? Mel drew my attention to a very interesting article which shows how job candidates' blogs ensured their failure in the job hunting process. As an employer I found it quite revealing to read some of the anecdotes and, to be frank, I probably would react in a very similar way. What never ceases to amaze me is the things that some people post in their blogs. Most of the blogs I read on a regular basis would contain a mixed back of technical, business or political commentary. Some may contain personal references, but even those would not reveal anything too embarassing about the author or their employers. However, if you dip into some of the blogs being aggregated by POTB or any of the other blog collections, you will find some very revealing thoughts. One example that springs to mind is of someone villifying a close relative on their blog. Surely something that personal should be kept private?

Unless you prebooked your copy of the latest Harry Potter well in advance via Amazon there is no price advantage. Amazon UK is selling the book at the equivalent of EUR13.07 (before P & P), while all the local shops here are selling it at EUR12.99. It would probably make sense to buy it online if you were sending it as a gift to someone, but not if you were buying it for yourself. I picked up my copy in Carlow Bookshop yesterday. It was amusing to see the constant flow of people in and out of all the shops yesterday, all clutching their copies of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince Although I started reading it yesterday afternoon I am in no hurry to read it, so I won't be trying to beat any records on this occasion.

The recent changes to adsense naturally broke a number of applications that were interfacing with it, including the Allen G Hollman's Adsense notifier for firefox. Fortunately a new version has already been released that resolves any issues. Thank you!

The Organic SEO wiki seems like a good starting place for DIY SEO. It also has a useful glossary of terminology that you will encounter.

It's almost amusing to see so many bloggers talking about the latest Google updates. We all remember the famous "Florida" update. I posted about it at the time, as I'm sure did many others. Prior to November 2003 there was almost a predictable factor in SEO. If you played by the rules and did certain things you knew more or less where you stood. Page rank (PR) was important, but more importantly you could rely on your position in the search results. With the Florida update all that changed. In the case of our company site it was pretty catastrophic, but we were not alone. Not by a long shot. Clients who had had good rankings saw their sites vanish almost overnight. A lot of theories were put forward as to what was happening, why and how to overcome it (this site contains a summary of some of the more popular theories). It didn't matter. The theories were simply that, theories. What was extremely frustrating was that the quality of the search results after the update seemed to have regressed. If Google had been trying to combat the SEO experts who used dubious methods to boost their clients' rankings, then a lot of innocent bystanders were caught in the crossfire. Almost 2 years later the updates still excite the online community and we all wait to see what will happen. Will our PR increase? Will our search terms drop? Will we still be on the first page for that search query that we cherish so much? In some ways none of this matters as much as before. A lot of us have resorted to using Google's contextual advertising to boost our presence. We still want to appear in the search results, but even if we don't we know that we can hope to catch people's eyes in other ways. Unfortunately the reality is this. Google is still king. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it's not. You cannot avoid the facts though. If I look at the referrer logs for any site that I manage I can expect to see the bulk of referrals coming from Google. What does that mean? Does it mean that Google is the most popular search engine? Or does it mean that the people who are most likely to want the kind of information on those websites are more likely to use Google to find the information? It's a hard one to call. Back in the early days of the web there was no Google. There was no MSN. Do you remember the virtual tourist? Can you recall the early days of Yahoo? Anybody remember Altavista (mk. 1)? Or webcrawler? Most of these sites are still around in some form or another, but the way we use them has changed dramatically, as has the face of those who choose to use them. Even the most technically inept 'net user ends up using Google these days, either directly or through one of the many sites that relies on their search technology. Of course I still use Yahoo, but not for searching. I might go to Yahoo for news or other information, but not to actually search.

It looks like there is a serious update of the Google PR at present. Since earlier today reports of new page ranks (PR) have been subject of discussion. Of course the update does not happen instantly across all data centres, so it is not that strange to find some people reporting a higher PR than others for the same site. The burning question for many though is whether PR is as important as it once was. According to Google PR is:

ageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

The idea behind PR being that a page's importance is related to the company it keeps. However this transparency has led to a lot of abuse, with people overtly selling text links on sites based on the site's PR. A number of my sites have finally been assigned a page rank, while others have seen their page rank shift, both up and down.

A lot has been written about how Google Adwords have changed the way advertisers interact with their market online. A lot has been written about how to use and abuse the system to make money for your business, either as an advertiser or as a publisher of the ads. Harold Davis puts it into simple terms which should help you see if your ads are paying or not. He does raise an interesting point about the tracking of the ads. As he rightly points out, most ad publishers track invisibly, whereas Google is more overt:

An interesting, and somewhat controversial, feature of Google AdWords conversion tracking is that as part of the tracking, Google notifies users that they are being tracked. This notification is produced by the Google-supplied code you add to the results page. A tracked user sees a message titled Google Site Stats with a “send feedback” link when the results page is opened.

Although this is possible, it is not always going to be visible. We use the Google tracking code as an integral part of our billing system, but users do not see any graphics or other content to indicate that we are using the code to track them, as our billing system allows us to embed the code invisibly in the pages. If cookies are involved and the user is prompted about them, then the visibility will be lost. I'm still not convinced by the stats for the CPM campaigns though. Edit: Harold Davis' email this morning prompted me to run a couple of tests, as he rightly pointed out that hiding the tracker completely would have been an infringement of the Google TOS. Yes Harold, you are right. I am wrong! There is a very small image visible on the checkout page. I must have missed it!

An interesting article on XML.com on about encrypting and decrypting RSS feeds using blowfish and greasemonkey. I don't know too much about crypto, but it sounds like an intriguing idea, although I am not so sure how secure it really is.

More and more bloggers seem to be using Adsense, though I doubt if that many of them are making "big bucks". Google has made even more improvements to the interface recently. You can now see at a glance exactly how much money you've earned in a given period. The interface is much simpler to navigate as well, so you should be able to see which sites are performing better than others a lot faster. If you want to see the older format you still can, but that is now considered to be the "advanced" mode, as it gives you a much finer level of control over the presentation of data. Edit: I skimmed the changes to the terms and conditions earlier. Fortunately other, more patient people, didn't. Jesús spotted an interesting change in the way adsense unit impressions are logged. Previously each adsense unit impression was counted as a separate page impression. If you had 3 units on a page then 1 page impression gave 3 adsense impressions, which was incorrectly reported as 3 pages impressions. Now you should see page impressions being logged as page impressions and ads being logged as ads. This may not have a huge impact on some people, but it will give you a much clearer idea of what is actually happening in terms of click rates.

Market research is an important exercise. You should know:

• What people have
• What people would like to have
• What people need (not the same as above)
• What is on offer (in the market)
• How it is offered

There's probably a more scientific way of presenting those ideas, but you should get the general idea. In the hosting market it is not uncommon to contact competitors to seek quotes for various services simply to see how other people are presenting their services and products. After all, when it boils down to it, a domain is still a domain. You can call it what you like, but it's not going to change what it is. I was rather amused, but slightly bemused, when we received two almost identical RFPs in the space of 12 hours. One arrived. I read it and was dealing with it. When the second one arrived I was hit with a sense of deja vu. Hadn't I read the same request only a couple of hours earlier? Maybe I was imagining things. No. I wasn't. Putting them side by side the only differences were minor punctuation and stylistic differences (3 or 4 elements to be precise). Smelling a rat I checked the headers, as did a couple of our technical staff. You would think that they'd have at least tried to hide their origin. Nope. The IP in the header was the competitor's office mail server, with customised SMTP flag and all!! Moral of the story. Don't send emails to competitors from your office IP.