Duplicate Content Round-up: Diagnosis and Correction with Free Tools

Here is the Duplicate Content Tool if that is all you are looking for… “Duplicate content” has become a standard part of the SEO lexicon over the last year or so (2005-2006), and over that time, a handful of common causes have been identified – the most common of which is poor URL handling. There is one cause, legitimately having duplicate pages or very similar pages throughout your site, which is not caused by poor URL handling, and I would recommend SEOJunkie’s tool for determining that type of issue. To note, there is some skepticism (really, skepticism in the SEO world?) as to the actual effect of duplicate content on a sites ranking. I believe that the largest impact occurs through PR dispersion. This occurs when inbound and...

Alternatives to Regular Expressions

As a php programmer who has to deal daily with regular expressions, sometimes they are just overkill for a simple job. Other times, I just don’t feel like trying to figure out the regex when I am trying to extract content just once (and code optimization is just not important). Below,I have thrown together a handful of PHP functions that I regularly use to help accomplish these tasks. GetSingleMatch This code allows you to easily grab a single bit of text out of a document by describing what text or code occurs right before and right after the text you are targetting. This calls for the $start, $end, and $content. If I were trying to target the word “fox” in “the quick brown fox jumps”, i would use, getSingleMatch(“brown...

Clean IP Tool

One of the worst things that can happen to a site is that it gets caught on a server with a ton of spam and adult content. Many web hosts now allow their clients to set up numerous domains on the same shared hosting account, allowing spammers to create tens if not hundreds of sites on the same account which may very well share an IP with your current site. So, we threw together a simple tool that helps determine if other sites on your server have adult or spam content. It even checks the top 100 urls hosted on the same IP in google to make sure they are not banned, and tells you which ones are! Clean IP Tool

My Costume is a Real Digg Story

DIGG COSTUME WEB CAM So, for Halloween, I decided to be a Digg Story. Literally. My costume syncs up with my Digg Story at http://www.digg.com/mods/My_Costume_Is_This_Digg_Story and displays the correct number of diggs. It refreshes every 15 seconds! You can see by the picture below and instructions on how I did it as well… Note: Because I had to take the picture of the costume before I ran it on digg, this one was actually hooked up to yesterday’s story on Al Gore: http://www.digg.com/politics/UK_signs_Al_Gore_to_sell_climate_case_in_US Supplies: 1. Poster board 2. Duct Tape (of course) 3. Magic Markers (no substitutions) 4. Laptop which bends flat (Acer 4010) & WIFI 5. XAMPP 6. Basic PHP Skills 7. More Duct Tape After creating the digg button...

Privacy and Accessibility: Responses to the #privacy initiative

There has been quite a bit of response to the #privacy (http://www.poundprivacy.org) initiative and I am thankful for all who have supported it and taken time to blog about it, link to it, or mention it among your friends and colleagues. The response has been very supportive. (SEOMoz, Google Inside, WebDevForums (15000+ Members), Syndk8 (6500+ Members) and many more.) If this is to be successful, it will require as much support as possible. There are a handful of responses which I believe should be discussed out in the open. I will try to cover the questions which have been raised about the standard as well as I can. (1) Doesn’t adding #privacy to a search flag it as “This is a really interesting search! Hot Stuff Here!”...