Genuine 404s and Google Verification
April 12th, 2006 by Sarah KingGoogle is steadily building up it’s webmaster tools and winning over the hearts of webmasters. As covered in my Google Sitemaps and Verification post the feedback can be very, very useful.
I have run into problems though on Mambo and Joomla sites because they don’t throw true 404s so as far as GoogleBot knows every page is a good page. Google and Googlebot have given webmasters an incentive to change… access to the stats!
To get Mambo and Joomla to throw a 404 you need three things! Read the rest of this entry »
Indexed in less than an hour! #1 for a month!
March 20th, 2006 by Sarah KingSEO experts despair! I launched a small forum recently and as I mucked about at Open Source CMS trying to decide which software to use I renamed the test category “SH20 Activists”.
Open Source CMS refresh their test systems every hour so I know that the forum lasted no more than 60 minutes, and probably considerably less! Read the rest of this entry »
Has GoogleBase missed the mark?
February 28th, 2006 by Sarah King
I checked in at GoogleBase this morning and found that all of my articles were inactive, bar 3 which had been disapproved (and guess what topic they covered 
)
In the past I’ve been able to search and find them, not so today. I renewed my bulk upload and it was instantly accepted.
Problems remain however and Google doesn’t seem to be tackling the issues Read the rest of this entry »
Using PhpBase to update GoogleBase
February 10th, 2006 by Sarah KingI’m not sure I quite “get” GoogleBase just yet – in as much as Google is already indexing my sites so why do I need to submit my content all over again into this system… and who would actually use it to find stuff – surely the standard Google Search Engine is doing a good enough job?
I received my newsletter from the phpClasses today and noticed that there was a tool to make it easier to upload articles and information to GoogleBase so I thought I’d give it a try.
The code is still quite new and there are only a few options but it’s easy enough to extend and use. Documentation is needed and I’m sure it will follow. Given that the author appears to be Spanish I think it’s already pretty good. Read the rest of this entry »
Heartstopping Analytics Stats
February 5th, 2006 by Sarah KingMy sites are hosted with different companies and on different servers so when my Analytics stats started looking like this I got worried… Read the rest of this entry »
SEO contests are so “Middle Class”
January 17th, 2006 by Sarah KingA new SEO contest started yesterday, day before, all depends on your time zone. I created a v7ndotcom elursrebmem page out of idle curiosity and a v7ndotcom elursrebmem contestants directory for people to get extra, themed, links to their sites.
There’s been stacks of activity with domains being bought and onsold, ebay auctions, charity contestants (go Alek) and, of course, spam.
I just checked my Google Analytics page for the directory just to see who the competitors are. Now it is an international affair, but look at the countries. Pretty much only western, first world countries.
So, is SEO and the little games associated with it, just for the bored middle classes?
Google Sitemaps and Verification
January 16th, 2006 by Sarah KingIt’s been a while since I checked back at the sitemaps pages to see how my sites were doing, they’d all been pinging happily and Google had been checking frequently so I’d been happy to leave them be.
I visited today and found that Google have added a verification process whereby you upload an empty html document onto your site, Google find it, accept that you are authorised to have access to the site and then feed you extra info from their databanks.
I can get this overview of whether Google has problems with the pages and how they are ranked – proving that Google still buy that PR matters.
Another page shows the queries where my site has been returned as an option (top 10?) and where my site has been selected by the user. This gives me good clues about optimisation and page building – and about the topics that people actually want to read about!
Top 100 vBulletin Forums
January 9th, 2006 by Sarah KingOn a whim I decided to purchase the domain Top 100 vBulletin and put a wsnlinks directory on the site to rank vBulletin forums.
The only requirement is that External Data is turned on giving me access to external.php.
I’m then ranking the forums based on
- Number of threads
- Ratings by visitors to the directory
- Google’s PR
