31 August 05 - 13:09Reduced value of some Links in Google
Since this is now appearing in some other blogs I guess I should get my act into gear...
It seems that Google, at least, is getting smarter about link values (ie how much PR to pass down a link)
NoFollow tags obviously pass none (actually there are intestesting
things that can be done inside your own site with this one for PR
concentration - might get back to that one later)
Links that are in a list, or the sidebar, and other "link places"
including link pages and at the bottom of the page are devalued.
For a much better coverage of this issue I suggest looking where I read this first:
http://seoblackhat.com/2005/08/29/devalue-link-google-algorithm/
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29 August 05 - 09:51SEO Blackhat
Just a quick note about a quick note....
I was wondering if certain people would objec to that blog. Seems
both pro and anti SEO blackhat people have been trying to keep the blog
offline... (presumably the former for giving away trade secrets)
Check here for the details:
http://seoblackhat.com/2005/08/28/quick-note/
Well hey - I enjoy reading it -
keep it coming. (do I have any blackhat stuff going on myself SEO-wise? No)
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28 August 05 - 11:20Expired(/ing) Domains
For the people who do not know, lots of domains expire/come up to
expire every day. Quite a few of those have decent linkage - and
sometimes a decent PR too.
The competition for the higher value expiring domains results in hammer
registration by firm, and auctions that may go into the thousands of
dollars...
Now there is value in setting up the add sites that we all know and
love so much, however there is also the potential for using an expired
domain because it fits into the niche your site (possibly new) fits
into.
These sites will get you started:
Aside from these there are a number of pay sites (subscription model)
that will provide you with good value information. Such as?
PR, Alexa rank and so on.
Be wary of just looking at PR alone, however, as it can be
spoofed. Check for the backlinks that should exist and where they
come from. Also be wary of a nice looking site that may have an
unexpected background (as a hardcore porn site for example)
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27 August 05 - 13:43How to avoid the Google Sandbox
I read about this the other day, and lost it. Since I just spent
so much time trying to find the info again, I'm blogging it here for my
own reference. Feel free to read this yourself too!
A certain google engineer was heard to confirm the existance of such a
thing (though of course Google calls it something else) It really
only effects sites that flick a "filter that must be tripped"
Beat the Sandbox:
- Get links that are quality indicators. e.g., get a link from a
well-established high-PR site, get a link from an .edu, get a listing
in DMOZ
- Get a few deep links
- Mix up your anchor text
Source:
http://www.linkbuildingblog.com/2005/08/google_admits_t.html
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27 August 05 - 12:25My Kingdom for an Athlon XP?
Not always - but sometimes (about Canberra).
Got an socket A board about a year ago to help diagnose a problem (with
another socket A system). Quite nice, with dual DDR ram, and
other goodies. Specifically got a socket A because of the CPU I
had off the other board.
Come today I finally have a need for it (after anothe board died) and I
throw a Duron 1.3 (off said dead board) into it and it tell me no way
(the board only runs CPUs with a 1.4 clock speed or higher) so I throw
my Athlon original 1GHz into it and it melts it for me (after BIOS
telling me for a few seconds it was running at 750MHz - obviously
not!) It is after this that I spy the "1.4GHz or higher" note in
the manual...
I then spent the rest of the Saturday afternoon trying to source ANY
socket A CPU in Canberra to no avail. Seems they are in
Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane but not here.
So looking for another solution I dug up the old RT video editing
system I have not used for a year and setup that as a replacement (not
too shabby - PIII-667 on a BX with a dual head Matrox G400 AGP
card)
The good part of the story is I am now flush with hard drives (RT video
editing from a few years back remember - fast drives via striped RAID)
so I now have 4 extra drives to play with.
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26 August 05 - 11:25Personal Area Network
Kind of weird these days to find techo news in print first - I wonder how I missed this one...
RedTacton is the name of the system - being created by NTT from
Japan. How about using the body's electrical field to pass
information around the body? (well hey the brain already uses it!)
Claimed data rate is 2Mbps. Maybe in future shaking hands
could pass your business card info accross? I do wonder if there
are health issues, however it does sound very cool - and certainly
working in the cyborg direction methinks.
Source: Roam magazine.
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25 August 05 - 12:37The value of 404 incoming links
A few thoughts that together will make sense in a second:
- Google does not like "Moved Permanently" 302 (301? I get
those mixed up!) redirects because they have been overused by blackhat
SEOs
- links to http://example.com/index.php, http://www.example.com/
and http://example.com/ are all different, and all accumulate PR (and
other ranking from other SEs) seperately. Ideally you want all
the links to go to the same place here.
- You do want people to update links to your site if they are wrong
- ie 404s, and if they have linked to http://example.com/index.php when
you want to link - and pass PR to - http://example.com
- 404s to a spider will through away any accumulated PR for that page
- A page with a single link on it to another page will pass all it's PR vote to the page it is linked to
- This PR should be used - passed to the site index for example and not wasted.
- You want people to stop linking to the various flavours of your
main site index - but get value out of them even if they never get
changed
- I HATE that I this blog for example has a PR3 for
http://www.frakkle.com and a PR3 for http://frakkle.com. If all
the links went tohttp://frakkle.com then maybe this site would be a PR4...
Okay, I'm not going to give the details - though it would not be hard -
I probably will when I get around to implementing it however. How
about the following:
Using this site as an example, assuming I want all links to go to http://frakkle.com/
Use spider detection, and apache's mod_rewrite so that:
For http://www.frakkle.com/ANYTHING
- Spiders get 1-link page to http://frakkle.com/ANYTHING
- Users get 302 redirect to http://frakkle.com/ANYTHING
For http://www.frakkle.com/index.php
- Spiders get 1-link page to http://frakkle.com/
- Users get 302 redirect to http://frakkle.com/
For bad links to pages that do not exist (404s)
- Spiders get link to http://frakkle.com/
- Users get 404 error and the same link to http://frakkle.com/
Maybe that last bit isn't such a good idea - might leave all those
"dead" pages in the index for ages. The first parts are clean
however.
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24 August 05 - 10:19Article Bot is fine
Okay, so I covered the spyware scandle (as did blogherald.com and
seoblackhat.com) and it actually struck me as funny at the time.
I don't have a copy of the software I was really just reposting what I
had dug up elsewhere... (dangerous I know)
You can see the official reply to this here:
http://www.articlebot.com/reply.htm
However in essense the sofware does not really do all that it was
proported to do by others, however what it does do is spealt out in
black and white in several places. (I don't have much time for
people who do not read contracts - you are waiting to be "done over")
The data that is collected is used for debugging and support, and will
not go anywere. All this would be happily legal and legit under
Australian privacy laws at least.
Not much more to say except: read the response before making up your mind.
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23 August 05 - 12:28New SEO book from Brad Callen
Just a quicky:
No I have not got round to doing an affiliate link. (probably will do
soon) This guy is with it though for SEO stuff. I use his SEO
Elite software - very nice for rapid links etc.
search engine optimization made easy
He runs a good forum too btw.
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22 August 05 - 11:26Article Bot Spying on its users?
Ok - as a software developer and marketer I have often been tempted by
the really handy information that is available from users usage
patterns. Some developers cross that line - and I would think -
profit by it quite nicely. Its commonly called spyware.
If you are into producing automated content (something that I both love
and hate) you may have heard of, or be using, Article Bot.
There are some intersting things being said about it in
blog-space. It seems a bit pointless to rehash what I read a day
or so ago, so check out
SEO BlackHat blog for the full story.
UPDATE: See this article
article_bot_is_fine
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20 August 05 - 11:07A good Drive Imaging Ghost alternative
I just found this email today - never did blog it. So here it is
from about 8 months ago and is the reason SRD is an essentual part of
my toolkit (I'm sure SystemRecueDisk is a lot better now)
Email with performance test follows:
Since we discussed this the other day - Ghost licencing is ridiculous these
days, and the open source alternative is too S-L-O-W, I did somd
digging/testing:
PowerQuest DriveImager (that I used to use as @ SID) has been bought by
Symantec - and now has almost exactly the same licencing. (how many machines
will you use it on - hopless for a "roving techie")
I burnt a copy of SystemRescueCD and am very impressed. I booted up (in fb
mode), tried Links in graphical form, qtparted (very nice - will resize NTFS
partitions _safely_) Very nice - nothing to congfigure when booting (unless
you want to specify 1024/768 fb mode for example, instead of 800x600 fb).
You can optionally have the entire fs load to RAM so you can load other CDs
into the system. Will boot of USB too if you like that sort of thing
Then I mounted a windows share to another machine here using samba, and
fired up partimage
Very easy to use, (HEAPS easier than ghost) tells you that NTFS support
is
experimental. What does this mean? According to the web site, some
partitions may not image (mostly due to corrupted partitions, actually;
recomended to defrag before imaging - I do this anyway when ghosting.
If
the image gets created it will be fine. This is because they are very
perdantic - along with tools that qtparted uses - in building a fully bug
free NTFS implementation that has no relation to the NTFS driver thats been
in linux kernel for a few years) Essentially I am less worried about
this
screwing up an NTFS partition than my own experience with PQDI for example.
Test Results:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Imaged Partition:
40GB / 4.05GB of data on it
XP NTFS partition
Test Machine:
1.3 AMD Duron with 512 DDR @ 333MHz
GZipped Image file - broken into 650MB files (which actually came in as
between 636MB and 666MB like ghost does:
CREATION:
Speed: 152 MB/min == 2.53MB/s
Time: 27m16s
Total Image Size: 2.35 GB ( 4 CDs )
RESTORE:
Speed: 429.62 MB/min == 7.16MB/s
Time: 9m39s
Raw Image file (why would you - though it is faster)
CREATION:
Speed: 290MB/min == 4.83MB/s
Time: 14m15s
BZIP Image
Don`t bother - estimated 1h15m @ 50 MB/min == 0.8MB/s
Which is what you`ld expect really - only did this to be complete. Also
there is a bug with this that means there is a little extra work if you
need
to restore the MBR.
I personally think an easy to use spanning system, no licence hassles,
and a
9 and a half minute image restore time is a worthy replacement. Images can
have comments, too, btw - also like ghost.
Cheers,
Mathew
(oh yeah - if you are interested, this was an email I sent to Hilton at
Quark IT (http://www.quarkit.com.au) really switched on guy)
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20 August 05 - 06:08Frakkle.com is back
Well life gets busy sometimes...
My site went offline about 6 months ago due to the total incompetence
of one of my (soon to be old) hosting companies. While I did have
the time to post blog entries I did not have the time to move and
rebuild the site.
So now we are hosted on the
gplhosting
site - highly recommend them. The name comes from the fact that
the hosting software itself is LGPL, and the hosting is run by the key
developer of said software.
It's is also very good value - however if you have dealt with many
hosts you will understand that relability and intelligence are SO much
more important that price! Cheap is nice, however
high-level-incompetence can sent you to an early grave...
So give Thomas at GPLHosting a call
(man - this wasn't supposed to be a marketing plug... Its mostly
my euphoria about NOT being at the old place anymore - btw "how did
they screw up the site?" you may ask - by moving the server and not the
DNS pointers or was that the other way around !)
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Linkdump
