i.ndustrio.us » Tech/Web

“Jason Roberts” SEO Experiment

June 4, 2007 – 10:22 pm

I’m curious to see how the addition of this posts affects the Google natural search rank for “Jason Roberts”. It was only a month or two back that this website ranked #52 for “Jason Roberts”. At the time of this post the rank is up to #17. Try it yourself: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Jason+Roberts%22&btnG=Google+Search

I’ve seen other bloggers brag about how their first name is ranked in the top 5 so I must admit I feel a bit sheepish mentioning the ranking of my full name (in quotes at that!). Tackling the rank for “Jason” seems a bit too ambitious right now but we’ve got to start somewhere right?

I’ll attempt to increase the rank of my full name using a variety of methods.

Shamelessly request the help of readers to add a link to Jason Roberts somewhere on their blog.
Publish this post with Jason Roberts as the first two words in the title.
Hack my well-hacked (quantitatively speaking) theme to display my full name in the blog’s subtitle as a hyperlink.
Add a Meta Data plugin and include “Jason Roberts” as a keyword.

You can help a brother out and include this link somewhere on your site <a href=”http://i.ndustrio.us”>Jason Roberts</a>. I’ll be sure to link back to anyone that mentions the favor.

Also, please share any tips you may have so I can try them out and report my findings… Check back in a week or so for the results of this brief experiment.

Update: Up one position to #16 after posting this.
Update: …and still moving up! See comments below.

Posted in Random Stuff, SEO, Tech/Web | Comments (3)

Multi-Lingual Blogging

May 31, 2007 – 4:46 pm

A friend of mine writes a blog in Spanish that I often wish I could make better sense of (mi Espanol est no bien - need more proof??).

His blog, which is running on Mephisto (he’s a big ruby fan), receives a good amount of english speaking traffic.

Results aside, going the Google translate route didn’t sound like an option because readers would initially be presented with the blog in the primary language which would probably turn off readers (non-Spanish speakers in this case) before they could find the translate button.

He found a Mephisto based solution that would allow him to maintain one blog and one database (very nice!) but unfortunately would require him to write two posts (less than nice); one in English and one in Spanish.

If you’re interested, his English blog, OnlineVortex is now up and running. More details on the multi-language experiment are forthcoming I’m sure. Read more about it and follow his progress here: Multilanguage Blog.

Posted in Random Stuff, Tech/Web | Comments (1)

Alternatives to Google Adsense

May 24, 2007 – 7:24 pm

Ryan Caldwell over at Performancing writes about finding success with alternatives to Google’s services - particularly alternatives to Adsense.

There’s something big happening on the neterwebs. Don’t know if you’ve noticed.

For whatever reason, Google has been taking a serious gut check. Lately, they’ve been cracking down hard on AdSense publishers from a number of angles (spammyness, mature content, etc).

Well, not “for whatever reason” - I’m sure its because they’re feeling pressure from some corner of the woods. I’m sure they feel dollars and cents and shareholders breathing down their necks.

Ryan touches on some of the alternatives like “AdBrite, AuctionAds, ContextLinks, Azoogle and more” but he doesn’t tackle ranking them in this post. He only mentions that his revenues have increased since the switch from Adsense clearly indicating to him that Adsense was underperforming.

If you’re interested in reading about real world results with other alternatives keep an eye on the reports from tjantunen.com. I’m sure there are other more in depth analysis’ out there but his real world numbers are intriguing to me.

Ryan continues writing about the growing anti-Google sentiment.

I’m sure they notice things like the recent Real Simple article my wife showed me entitled “the digital doc” which outlines 5 rules to find good medical information online. What was Rule No. 1? Skip Google.

Ouch. I bet that hurt. The “don’t do evil” company let status quo evil reign for too long, while money poured into their bank accounts, and their search results got all facked up with spam. Now even the common person doubts Google. That’s sad.

There’s More! Read the full post here: Liberating Yourself From The Google Monopoly - The Times, They Are A Changin’

Posted in SEO, Tech/Web | Comments (5)

How-To: Connecting to MySQL Remotely from Windows with SSH

May 21, 2007 – 12:02 pm

Connecting to MySQL Remotely from Windows with SSH
Read the following for an introduction: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/windows-and-ssh.html

Specific Instructions for Connecting with SSH Secure Shell:
(can anyone recommend a better client?)

Create an initial connection in SSH and verify you can connect.
‘Edit Profiles’ and select the ‘Tunneling’ tab for that connection.
Add an ‘Outgoing’ tunnel as such:
Display Name: MySQL
Type: TCP
Listen Port: 3307 (I used this instead of 3306 because I have a local instance running on 3306 already)
Destination Host: localhost
Destination Port: 3306

Then, if you’re using MySQL Query Browser or Administrator
Create a new connection with the following parameters

Connection: (enter whatever you prefer)
Username & Password: (should be your local access, not root)
Hostname: localhost
Port: 3307 (see above note for why I chose this port)

That’s It! Enjoy your secure connection!

Posted in Random Stuff, Tech/Web | Comments (0)

Gmail Annoyance: Highlighted Status Message

May 18, 2007 – 9:28 am

I’m probably being waaay too picky here but does the Gmail status message (you know, the one highlighted with yellow) annoy anyone else? Don’t get me wrong now, I don’t mind the message at all or even the fact that it’s highlighted. I just hate the fact that it doesn’t go away unless I do something.

In the interest of full disclosure, you should keep in mind that I’m the kind of guy who has always needed to have every one of his mails marked as ‘read’ before I feel like everything is right with the world again.

Go Away Yellow!!

“But it’s functional” you say, “It isn’t supposed to disappear by design” (giving you the longest possible opportunity to take action). While I understand that concept there is just something about the fact that it is big bold and yellow that compels me to make it disappear. Sometimes, when it’s very late at night, I almost even convince myself that if I wait long enough, it might go away on it’s own… but alas, it never does.

Ideally, I wish that Gmail animated a degradation from yellow to maybe the Gmail blue so the message would be less noticeable. For those of you familiar with the Wordpress Admin interface or the animation of ~~script.aculo.us~~ ~~prototype~~ jquery then you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Have the snazzy ~~script.aculo.us~~ js-library animations spoiled me or am I just being way too anal? Please tell me someone else out there is bothered (at some level) by the Gmail status message!

Posted in Random Stuff, Tech/Web | Comments (2)

Delicious Bookmark Tip

May 16, 2007 – 12:05 pm

I like the idea behind del.icio.us (referred to as delicious going forward) but managing all the content or “bookmarks” can quickly become an annoyance as they increase in number. If you use delicious already and haven’t already integrated the newest Firefox plugin, I highly recommend doing so. The initial kinks the plugin suffered from seem to have since been ironed out.

Often times, I’ll find myself wanting to quickly save a site into delicious without taking the time to tag it appropriately. I was previously tagging those sites as “tagme” but have since discovered a better method.

Instead of having a tag like “tagme”, “unread” or even no tag at all, make use of the networking tags that delicious offers and tag it as “for:yourname” (where yourname is your delicious user name.

When using the firefox plugin this becomes a two-click action because the “for:yourname” option becomes listed under the network tags.

As an added benefit, the sites you bookmark in this manner can be found in your delicious inbox which remain marked as unread until you open that folder. Nice huh?

Posted in Tech/Web | Comments (2)

Technorati Favorites Exchange: Join the Experiment

May 15, 2007 – 12:54 am

A Little Background…
Fave me and I’ll Fave you. That’s the basic idea. As far as I can tell this was first initiated by Dosh Dosh about one month ago. His article (see link above) called for people to favorite his Technorati Profile, post a comment and then he’ll favorite you back.

His stated goal at the time was to get into the Technorati Top 100 Favorited Blogs and to take others with him. Well it appears to have worked like a charm as Dosh Dosh is now #8 on the Favorited list. At the time of his article (one month ago), Dosh wrote that it was going to take 148 faves to break into the list. Fortunately for the rest of us, this threshold hasn’t increased too much: at the time of this writing it takes 211 faves to crack #100.

Why Participate In This?
This is an experiment, a two way method allowing us to share readers and traffic together. Take advantage of this exchange and participate in the exchanges of others as a means of leveraging outside traffic for the Read More »

Posted in SEO, Tech/Web | Comments (31)

SEO News: Google Penalizes SEO Company for Using Black Hat Tactics

May 11, 2007 – 4:58 pm

“The Found Agency”, an Australian firm specializing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) seems to have been penalized by Google for using black hat or at lest slightly-dark ‘grey hat‘ optimization techniques.

Wikipedia doesn’t seem to mention how those terms apply to the SEO world (which is odd, considering the relevance of that topic today). If your not familiar with “white hat” or “black hat” SEO you basically just need to understand that it’s tantamount to cheating in order to increase your natural search position. Each search engine defines it’s own terms of acceptable use but by and large they are the same - and by same I mean there is much room for interpretation.

According to an Australian news site…

Google Australia would not comment on the case — talk of which had spread like wildfire through the search marketing industry — but a spokesman pointed to its webmaster quality guidelines, which covered the most common forms of deceptive behaviour. Found Agency co-founder Tim Macdonald said Google had downgraded the site’s search ranking but refused to comment on whether the company used black hat techniques. He said some strategies the company used were “in the grey area”.

The company of course is going to great lengths to emphasize the fact that they were penalized by Google and not blacklisted. I find if very interesting that Yahoo doesn’t appear to have done anything to The Found Agency’s rankings…

So what’s the bottom line? Well it appears that The Found Agency has dropped in natural search position for “search engine optimisation” from a #1 or #2 ranking to somewhere near #40. What impact will this have on their business? Well the long term affect can be mitigated of course and in the short term heavy Australian media coverage is only going to increase sales.

Interesting Note:

Similar action does not appear to have been taken on Yahoo, which had about 14,000 links pointing to foundagency.com.au on Wednesday.

Read the original article here: Google penalises ‘black hat’ tactics

Posted in SEO, Tech/Web | Comments (2)

Wordpress 2.1 Pages Return 404 Because of Sidebar Plugin

May 9, 2007 – 11:30 am

I upgraded my Wordpress installation to 2.1 the other day from 2.0. Normally I don’t bother with keeping my software so up-to-date but I had heard some good things about the newest version. After upgrading everything appeared to be working correctly except for some of my pages.

The link exchange page worked fine but the other pages returned a WP 404 message. I created a new page as a test to see if maybe I could just get away with redoing the 4 or so other pages from scratch but that didn’t work either.

What’s going on?
After some digging on the web I came across a wordpress support thread suggesting that the issue might be Kates Gasis’ Sideblog Plugin (which I’m using to populate the ‘distractions‘ list). I haven’t had a problem with this plugin in the past while this bug appears to be documented, I was using Kates’ 3.7 release which is supposed to address this issue (didn’t work for me.. and sorry no time to debug).

According to the above WP support thread, someone identified the cause of this issue to be centered around the default post category. Hmm that’s odd, I didn’t think pages had any association to categories…

Well I stand corrected. After looking at the wp_post2cat table, Read More »

Posted in Tech/Web | Comments (7)

Linkbait Swallowed

May 7, 2007 – 3:39 pm

SEO guru Jason Calacanis wants to see who will take his link bait… well I’ve let it sit on a hook long enough, okay, I’ll bite.

And because it’s humorous enough, I’ll post the link bait photo as well.

Anyway, for those of you unfamiliar with Jason Calacanis, he’s been well known name in Silicon Valley for many years. He was editor and CEO of Silicon Alley Reporter Magazine as well as co-founder of Weblogs Inc. In late 2005 (about 2 years after inception) he sold the company for to AOL for something like a cool $25 million but has remained in charge of the editorial supervision as SVP in AOL ever since. Since that deal, Jason has gone on to relaunch Netscape, run a successful weblog (calacanis.com), and serves on the board of the social shopping network, ThisNext.

Jason’s Idea of link bait has been done many times and many ways before but his list of rules seems truly original. If you’re not familiar with link baiting, basically Jason is promising Read More »

Posted in SEO, Tech/Web | Comments (3)