Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008 released
September 29, 2008 – 5:12 pmhttp://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/
Anyone Else having Issues with VPS
September 26, 2008 – 1:20 pmWeird issue on my sites recently. I have one VPS account with Plesk and the ports all get locked in a ‘CLOSE_WAIT’ state. Using ‘netstat -p” shows its usually httpd locking them up. Restarting VPS will get the ports unlocked but in investigation I found restarting Apache from the Unix command line does the trick to.
Anyone have any experience with this type of issue and how to fix it?
Monitoring Your Brand and Reputation Online
September 26, 2008 – 1:17 pmNewsfactor have a great article on Monitoring your Brand and Reputation Online - check it out.
More on PHP Error Handling
September 24, 2008 – 12:32 pmOK so I’ve been talking about PHP errors for a while now but one more post. I found some code for customizing error handing in PHP , I installed it and got overwhelmed with emails reporting errors on my sites. I had to spend most of yesterday fixing issues on my sites. Most were minor issues of course - the worse is using uninitialized variables such as $ret = $Data['notset']; where the value in $Data hasn’t been set. In reality the code works and its being pedantic but it still needs fixing with:
$ret = isset( $Data['notset'] ) ? $Data['notset'] : “” ;
But some reports were real errors, such as unitialised variables that needed a value, referencing arrays using -> instead of [], and other nasties. Some I can do nothing about - WordPress plugins seem to be especially bad for using uninitialised variables. For now I’m using the code on custom applications and avoiding Wordpress.
Do Article Sites Provide “Quality” Links?
September 22, 2008 – 11:26 amBy Karon Thackston © 2008, All Rights Reserved
It’s still a buzz industry even after all these years. Usually, with Internet marketing, someone comes up with a good idea that quickly gets abused and run into the ground. After a short burn, it dies off like a supernova. However, article distribution has held its own because of several factors, not the least of which is its ability to generate links.
As a copywriter, I produce many articles each month for clients that help them achieve several online marketing goals, including building link popularity. But, lately, questions about the quality of the links from article sites have come into question. I have my own opinions, which I’ll get to in a moment, but I also wanted to check with some well-known and trusted industry sources, so I sent out a couple of emails to a few friends. Below are their responses to the questions:
Are links from article directories still worth having or have they lost their impact? In essence, is it still worth doing article distribution from an SEO perspective to get links from directories?
You can’t talk about article submissions without bringing up one of the oldest and most respected sites online: http://www.ideamarketers.com IdeaMarketers.com. Owner Marnie Pehrson first launched this site way back in 1998 before the Internet gave much thought to marketing through articles. As times have radically changed, Marnie has kept pace making unique and important changes to her site.
When asked the questions above, Marnie responded, “Whether it’s an article directory or any other high-traffic/well-established site, a link prominently displayed on an authoritative site is a good link. Lumping all article submission sites together is rather unfair because they are all certainly not the same.
“Many have pitiful PageRank and bury your article deep within their pages to boot. That’s why we implemented our bidding system at IdeaMarketers. You have the chance to be featured on pages that search engines give more weight to. We include anchor text links in the listings as well, which makes them all the more valuable. So, while some links from poor-quality article directory sites are most likely not worth much, linksfrom well-established heavy hitters can still help your link popularity.”
You might be thinking, Of course an article directory site owner would say that! But, she happens to be right. There are a slew of cheap, fly-by-night article sites online that are literally here one day and gone the next. There are still more that stay active for a while, then slowly grind to a halt. When you check the last time they added any articles to the mix, you might find it was 2006. Your focus needs to be on quality, active sites. One prominent linking pro agrees.
Does http://www.alliance-link.comlink-building specialist Debra Mastaler from Alliance-Link think article distribution still has merit? “Yes, it’s still worth using the article directories as a way to accumulate inbound links. Links embedded in your content will pass link popularity, provided the directory pages they’re sitting on have been indexed.
“Mix up your anchor text and use links to your internal pages as well as your home page. Doing so helps stream link popularity and visitors to your revenue-producing product pages.”
Tips for Effective Article Distribution
I said I’d give my two cents worth, so here it is: I agree with Marnie and Debra. You can’t stereotype all article submission sites. You have to pick and choose. As I discussed in my previous article about http://www.marketingwords.com/blog/?p=5 duplicate content issues with article distribution, there are things you can do to improve your success. In addition to the three tips given here:
- avoid article-blaster software
- only use sites that allow HTML and
- establish the article on your own site prior to distributing, you can also:
Choose Quality Sites - While most PageRank (PR) indicators are not accurate, they can give you a general idea of where a site stands. Choose sites with a minimum PR of 3.
Check for Updates - When is the last time a particular article site added content? They normally print the published date for each article. Flip through a few categories and make sure the site is timely.
Find Backlinks - Using sites that have lots of traffic pointed in its direction is always a good idea. After all, while SEO is a wonderful benefit of article marketing, establishing yourself as an expert and branding your company are prime perks as well. Nobody wants to place articles on distribution sites and have them sit, unused, for eternity. The entire goal is to use high-traffic sites that allow others to find and reprint your material. Aim for sites with plenty of backlinks.
Article marketing has been an exceptional way to get the word out long before the Internet burst onto the scene. When you add the ability to build link popularity to the enormous exposure that’s possible with this type of promotion, you get a highly effective method that drives traffic, positions you as an expert, reinforces your brand and allows for infinite promotion of your business. Pretty darn good deal, if you ask me!
Karon Thackston is developer of Article Marketing & Distribution, a course available exclusively at Search Engine College. Take Karon’s course today at http://www.searchenginecollege.com/article-marketing-distribution-course.shtml.
Subscribe to Karon’s copywriting blog athttp://www.marketingwords.com/blog.
Google Analytics Cross Domain Setup
September 19, 2008 – 1:40 pmI recently had quite a problem with a site that used a different website name for the checkout process compared to the regular non-secure site. For example non-secure site is www.site.com, secure site is secure.site.com. This is addressed in the Google Analytics FAQ in a number of places, mostly to do with 3rd party shopping carts which doesn’t really apply here. In addition this issue is mentioned by a number of other people but their solutions were missing something as well.
After much digging around and wrong turns from the Google Analytics FAQ I came up with the following code that seems to handle this situation perfectly.
<!-- Start of Google Tracking -->
<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-123456-0");
pageTracker._setDomainName(".site.com");
pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);
pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>
<!-- End of Google Tracking -->
The important part I highlighted in red. Notice the peiod ‘.’ mark before the domain name. This signifies to Analytics that the cookie it sets should be available to any subdomain from this main domain thus allowing www.site.com and secure.site.com to reference the exact same cookie. If you don’t set the text in red then the www. and secure. will set two separate cookied and your tracking will not link your sale to your referring source correctly.
One of our sites was hacked
September 10, 2008 – 5:12 pmPut in a whole bunch of PPC (pills porn casino) links and we only noticed because the site wasn’t ranking when it should have, and by looking at the source code. The sire is pure HTML, no applications installed. How the heck they got in I don’t know, all I can assume is they got into the box through someone else’s site and added these links. Now I have to spend time cleaning it all up. Were do I send the bill for the cleanup?
Site Performance
September 10, 2008 – 11:37 amThe speed your site responds to queries is used as part of the overall ranking algorithm - sites that don’t respond at all are likely to get dropped from search engine indexes. Therefore turning on any performance enhancements you can is a must if you want to maintain rankings.
To that end I’ve been working on performance on our sites. My previous post was about turning on PHP errors and correcting them. One page on an internal site went from taking a few minutes to render to under 20 seconds all because I had $$var instead of $var in one line in a loop. (For those not in the know about PHP, $$var causes $var’s value to be referenced, so if $var = ‘test’ then $$var is treated as $test).
So next up is MySQL performance. If you have a database driven site using MySQL (most Unix blogs are like this) then you’re almost sure to gain performance improvements from turning on MySQL cache. By following the recommendations at http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mysql/article.php/3110171 you will give a performance boost for your site. How much depends on what your site does. On a blog the performance improvement will be minor but over thousands of visitors it will add up to less disk activity overall. If you have a large database driven site doing number crunching (we have one of these) it can make a huge difference to response times.
I don’t know how this works on a shared host as all our hosts are either dedicated or VPS (virtual private servers). You may want to send the URL to your host to see if they will implement the necessary changes.
Typical Lazy PHP Programmer
August 27, 2008 – 4:50 pmThat’s me, write a program and it works, don’t bother initializing variables, etc. That was until I moved to a new host that had display errors turned off. It is pretty much impossible to debug without errors being displayed so I went rummaging around for ways around this and found the following code:
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set(”display_errors”,1);
I turned this on and suddenly the code was spitting out warnings and messages all over the place. Some trivial but some really fixed issues that I didn’t know. Now I’ve got it turned on all the time in development and on internal systems.
As the ‘Practical PHP Programming’ manual says:
Always set your PHP error level to the most verbose level, E_ALL. All too often people don’t realise that PHP is outputting various complaints about variables not being set, etc, which you can just do away with entirely by cleaning up your code.
Site Stability Issues
August 27, 2008 – 11:15 amWe are now back up after being down for nearly a week. The problem was the site had lost its main hard drive. We had a second hard drive and there were backups in place on the second hard drive but the host did not know about them or couldn’t restore them as they should have. They moved us to a new machine and gave us root access, we restored the hosted sites from backups and didn’t lose much of anything.
A friend lost a hard drive on his web site, had no backups and lost a number of sites that were generating good income. Now he’s in litigation with his host over it. Much cheaper to pay the $10 per month your host charges for backups, or if you have a stable site download the files and the database to your local hard drive.
Remember - always have backups and check they work.