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Google PageRank toolbar updates coming today

Saturday, April 3, 2010, 10:58 AM
Website Design by John (Article #267)

I was scanning the PageRanks of sites I own or admin, and I noticed a lot of new PR improvements and a couple dips. Most of the surprises were upside one or two points. Real big pops across a lot of sites.

Not sure what all went into it, but it's a pleasant surprise for an already gorgeous day.

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Tracking expiring and dropping domain names

Monday, February 15, 2010, 1:29 PM
Website Design by John (Article #265)

This is my most recent big project: DropCatchSell.com, a site for tracking expired and dropped domain names with value.

This is the culmination of much of my recent research into PR, SERP and other ranking systems. The idea is pretty straight forward if you understand the domain name acquisition process.

The big problem with what is known in domaining as "drop catching" is the majority of expiring and dropping websites aren't worth the cost of registering them. The thing is, on any given day, between 250,000 and 400,000 domain names drop. And that's only counting the major US TLDs, such as .com, .net, .org, .info, etc.

The goal with DropCatchSell is to build a website that does a respectable of filtering out the garbage domains and leaving behind those with real value. Short domains (4 letters or less), two syllable medium domains, dictionary names, ones with established traffic, etc.

It's still very, very beta. I hope to keep it free, but a big part of the beta is deciding whether free is a workable business model.

Check it out. Use the contact form to let me know what you think.

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Back to basics: clean up your link names

Friday, January 22, 2010, 11:44 AM
Website Design by John (Article #263)

One of the biggest things search engine providers -- and thereby search engine users (your potential visitors and customers) -- rely up is the quality of the text in your links.

While you don't want to engage in skeevy techniques that amount to Googlebombing, you do want to do your level best to write your links cleanly for the actual thing that page you're linking to is about.

The classic bad link name is "click here". While it makes a great deal of sense within a sentence, for example, saying "for more information on ridding your property of unwanted widgets, click here", it doesn't make life easy for Google, Yahoo and Bing's bots that are indexing your page.

As a content creator, it is your social responsibility to ensure that the pages those bots index have good, meaningful links on them. The entire notion of a usable semantic internet hinges on good links.

So, if the page you're linking to is about "removing unwanted widgets from your notwidget pond", that entire string of text needs to be the main text inside the A tag of your link.

It represents one of the big shifts in editorial decision making in the age of the internet. And it is shocking how much of it goes to waste. Don't let your perfectly good links go to waste in the search engine simply by poor linking. Improve your links. Thing when you're righting about what part of the sentence is the semantically linkable part. Keep that in your head at all times when you are writing for the web. Not only will you improve your own website, you'll improve the general internet.

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What the internet will look like in hell

Thursday, January 21, 2010, 10:06 AM
Website Design by John (Article #262)

Check this out: this is what the internet will look like in hell.

So many things done wrong. The Flash intro (frustrates customers who might just want the phone number). The Flash navigation (makes it hard for Google to index). The skip intro link (loses juice for the front page).

As a design it's almost bad to the point of being cute.

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The PageRank experiment first results

Wednesday, January 6, 2010, 11:16 AM
Website Design by John (Article #260)

The PageRank experiment I had mentioned in December has already yielded some interesting results.

Let me just say I don't understand the first result at all.

There were three sites used. The first site was a revived site that had previously been deleted. It has a few inboud links from a PR3 website. The second site is a continuously registered domain with links from many PR2 and PR3 sites. The third has a single link from a PR5 website.

Google began updating PageRanks right after the New Year. Apparently the first wave of updates pertains to new websites, because those are the ones that seem to be popping up with new PRs all over the place.

The third site, with the single inbound PR5, has a PR0. It turns out, I forgot to move this site over to a new server when I canceled the one it was on. Oops. But easy to understand.

The second site went from PR0 to PR2. Roughly what I expected. I thought it was on the border of PR2 and PR3 and it fell a bit short. Again, very understandable.

The first site is the one that perplexes me. It has several inbound links, but only from a single PR3 website. It went from no PR to PR3. The inbound link site links to five other websites. My understanding of PR indicates this should have resulted in a PR2 website. And this makes me wonder if the inbound link site has some special juice as a trusted website. Hmm.

PageRank followers believe that Google will begin updating more often in 2010. In previous years, Google updated PRs four times a year, on a very rough schedule of every three months. The current prevailing view is that Google is now updating every two months.

So, the experiment continues.

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Fixing the FH_DATE_PAST_20XX bug

Monday, January 4, 2010, 2:05 PM
Website Design by John (Article #259)

Like many folks using a standard LAMP stack system, I've gotten the joy of waking up this Monday to support calls caused by the FH_DATE_PAST_20XX bug.

FH_DATE_PAST_20XX is a bug in SpamAssassin, that scores any sent email from January 1, 2010 or later as spam (approx a 3.0 - 3.8 score, usually on a 5.0 scale to be declared spam).

Here's how you fix it (note that almost all of this requires root access).

1. Find the prefs file where the scoring is done.

On my GoDaddy virtual server, this file was /usr/share/spamassassin. The file is 50_scores.cf.

On most other systems it is going to be user_pref.cf. Or, if you're lucky, you can use the local.cf file in /etc/mail/. However, a lot of systems use different paths. Be warned.

2. Make a copy of the CF file.

I made a file named 50_scores-bak.cf.

3. Using the contents of the CF file, create a new one.

Of course, my new one was titled 50_scores.cf.

4. Do a search for 20xx and change the score.

This section will vary a lot depending on your system. On my system, it appeared as:

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.075 0.084 0.054 0.088 # n=2

On some systems, it may be formatted simply as:

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

As a rule of thumb, try to conform to what is going on already. If it's a more complicated series of scores, conform to that. Generally, for those using the local.cf file, "score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0" will work fine. If you have to guess, that would be the first format I'd try.

5. Restart the SpamAssassin server.

If the SpamAssassin service comes back live, you're done. This also varies greatly depending on the machine you're using.

It's also not a bad idea to restart all your other mail services. Once that's done, you should be able to send with scoring 60% of the way to spam on every send.

- - -

If there are any folks out there who need help with this, I do offer my services for profit at $40/hr. I know this can be a particularly nasty thing to fix on GoDaddy systems.

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An experiment in PageRank

Tuesday, December 29, 2009, 4:25 PM
Website Design by John (Article #257)

I'm tired of the great PageRank mystery. Too much voodoo, not enough what to do.

So, I've spread out several domain name purchases with the intent of figuring out what we actually gain by certain inbound links from clearly ranked, legitimate websites.

The first sample is an expired domain, registered, with inbound links from a single legitimate PageRank 3, providing links on all pages. Based on general knowledge from the internet, I'm anticipating this will result in a PR of 2 for the revived website.

The second sample is a continuously registered domain with a previous PR of 0. It is being propped up by a ton of links from PR 2 and PR 3 websites. I also anticipate this resulting in a PR 3.

The third sample is purely propped by a single paid link from a legit PR 5 website that pushes out many links. I anticipate a PR 2 or PR 3 for this site.

I wish to keep the URLs anonymous in the hope of preventing any contamination of the experiment through further links. It's a pretty straight-forward idea: plug some stuff in and see what you get. Try to limit what you plug in so you can isolate what caused the uptick in PageRank.

I am hoping to have results around the beginning of March.

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WordPress auto-Twitters. Yay. Wonderful.

Monday, June 8, 2009, 8:47 AM
Website Design by John (Article #241)

I got a notification that a chamber member was following me on Twitter. This came as a surprised, because I don't recall ever signing up for Twitter. In fact, I hate Twitter. With a passion.

Turns out, another blog I configured using WordPress was configured out of the box to post to Twitter. Yup. The Microsoft effect -- too many features not enough solutions -- has come to WordPress.

I don't like systems that automatically do a lot of things on their own. When I install Windows on a system, the first thing I do is disable 2/3 of all the services running. It just isn't in my nature.

But, for a system to create an entire account on a whole other website is a tiny bit disturbing. I gotta admit, I'm beginning to wonder about WordPress in general.

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My computer doesn't have a problem! I HAVE ANTI-VIRUS!!

Thursday, January 15, 2009, 12:42 AM
Website design by John (Article #237)

If you're a hardcore geek you either just groaned or laughed a bit at that headline. Let me share a little exchange I had with a customer on one of our website:

ME (much abbreviated and paraphrased): Sir, your browser is jumping up and down like a Jack Russel Terrier on meth screaming, "I have malware, I have malware! I'm gonna run man in the middle attacks!" And our server's secure session system replied, "No frakkin way... I ain't lettin' you authenticate."

CUSTOMER (actual gorram quote, all emphasis is mine): Thanks for the tip but my anti-virus software says different. It runs everyday and there is also a firewall on this computer. It's funny that your site is the only one I have problems with a log-on. I guess I'll just shop elsewhere. Thanks anyway.

At the risk you ever wondered how malware spreads so far and wide, meet this guy. The ideal malware target, because he doesn't care as long as his computers says all is well.

"Thanks for the tip but my anti-virus software says different." Think about the raw stoopid involved in making such a statement. Think about the strong wish fulfillment component that requires. I'd rather think I am secure than actually be secure.

Antivirus has long since ceased to be meaningful. It's just there to babysit dim individuals who are still working from the security checklist their company's IT guy gave them in 1997.

The fact that users still think that antivirus is magical is downright disturbing. This, kids, is why you can't dismiss any type of attack as just theoretical. Because the average user is so frickin oblivious that the sheer concept of contemplating his own insecurity on the web almost requires that he insult a helpful person. And if the user is oblivious, why shouldn't the bad guys party with that?

It is by far the human flaw that most endangers the internet.

Human beings prefer to feel secure as opposed to becoming aware of insecurities and fixing them. The average web user would rather scratch his groin than be told by the doctor he ought to sleep with a better class of woman.

I have to admit, at some point all programming boils down to a basic truth: there is cure for stoopid; you can only hope to contain it.

And I say that while trying to remain starkly aware that blaming the customer is the resort of flawed businesses. I am aware that dismissing the customer out of hand is a bad idea. But, wow. Where is the limit? When does the customer become responsible for his own role in screwing things up?

Of course, based on the notion that a mature response is the basis of responsibility, the answer is a resounding "NEVER".

So, to all you oblivious customers I wish you good luck in all your unsecure web browsing.

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When did GoogleBot get this slow and lame

Tuesday, December 16, 2008, 12:23 PM
Website Design by John (Article #235)

As of noon, December 16, GoogleBot still hasn't picked up the individual item page for the 2009 Punxsutawney Phil Beanie Baby on the souvenir shop's website.

What's up with that? Maybe linking in to it will help.

And if you're a first time reader, no I am not some beanie crazy. I just admin the website where the not-normals go for this particular beanie.

From a web admin standpoint, I'm surprised by how slow GoogleBot is picking this guy up. Google Shopping already has it. Admittedly, that's because Google Shopping pulled the XML feed.

But, in the past it has never taken more than 15 hours for GoogleBot to sniff out a new page on one of my established websites. I gotta admit, more than 24 hours is a bit surprising.

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