LinkSleeve Moved to New Server
Excitingly, LinkSleeve, the distributed anti-link-spam service offered for free by Virante, has been moved to a new dedicated server. We have also updated the codebase to use a new database schema that should up response speeds and lower outages. No tags for this post.
Weather Specific Backgrounds on Ubuntu with Apache, PHP, Cron and Weather.com
It has long been a goal of mine to create a system for my laptop which allows my background to mimic the weather where I live (Durham, NC). When it is raining outside, I want a background of rain. When it is sunny, the sun. So, here is a basic step-by-step guide I used to cobble this together. 1. Install Apache on Ubuntu. * JTirrell below makes a good point for those who don’t already need Apache: “Why install apache at all? php5-cli and just run the php file like a script.” Open up a terminal and type in the following, being sure to use your password after entering in the command. Afterwards, you should now be able to open up http://localhost/ in your browser. sudo apt-get install apache2 2. Install PHP Open up a terminal and type in the...
The Triviality of On-Page HTML Tag Optimization
I have long speculated that on-page optimization was trivial. It meshed with my understanding of how a suspicious Google engineer may treat the content of a page in relationship to its rankings. Why trust anything a webmaster says about his or her content (keywords stuffed into H1, meta, or bold tags)? Why trust anything on a page that a user won’t get to preview before visiting (anything outside the Title and Meta-Description, by-and-large)? However, despite my speculations, I lacked the data to truly start making conclusions about the usage of keywords in specific tags. Until now. First, I am pleased to say that our micro-experimentation has found similar results to SEOMoz’s macro-experimentation. In particular, their finding that the H1 tag was no...
XML Sitemap Assisted Redirects: Advanced White Hat SEO
One of the most critical times for a site’s rankings occur when there is a massive shift in URL structure across the site. Unfortunately, this is a common prescription for sites with unruly URLs with multiple parameters. Creating pretty, canonical URLs is easy enough, as is mapping old URLs to new with 301 redirects, but preventing duplicate content issues can be problematic. Each page on the web represents a destination that can be reached by links. Theoretically, without XML Sitemaps (or similar forms of direct page submission), there would be no way for Googlebot to find pages that are not connected by links. In our first example image, this site has a homepage and 4 subpages, connected by links, all of which have been cached by Google. Let’s...
NoFollow and PageRank Sculpting Roundup: Changes and Implications
Matt Cutts has decided to reveal a little more about Google’s internal changes that brought upon debate regarding the use of the NoFollow tag and PageRank Sculpting. While there has been quite a bit of discussion, I wanted to take a moment to wrap up what has happened and what the implications of these are for white and black-hat techniques. What Has Changed Think of your webpage as a water tower and links as pipes from that water tower to other smaller water towers. Historically, a “nofollow” tag was like capping the one of the pipes so that no water would flow to the terminating water tower. Google has changed this, though. Instead of capping the pipe, they merely divert it into the abyss. The link still impacts your page’s ability to...
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