Ajax Examples Anyone?
If you have wanted to go a little further on your site and haven’t yet integrated any “Web 2.0″ functions (I know, cliche’) take a look at this.
http://www.miniajax.com/index.htm
The mini ajax site offers some great code samples and examples. There are some techniquest that can be integrated by anyone who has a little bit of code knowledge. So, if you have wanted to play around with Ajax, or Prototype or Script.aculo.us, take a look.
When integrating these ‘cool’ functions, ask yourself if they are really necessary, or if they make the user experience better. Consider whether you are doing it to just ‘do it’ or if they really serve a purpose for your site visitors. There are always trade offs. BTW: According to someone who Brett Tabke knows within a major ISP, this whole Web 2.0 thing is for the female demographic. I feel that is is more site specific than that, but if your site caters to the female demo, perhaps you should consider working with some of these scripts to see how your users react.
Good luck and have fun!
Hidden Articles and Links at Gildasclubchicago.org
I just noticed an advertorial (hosted article) on the gildasclubchicago.org web site when doing one of my common searches. There are certain searches that I have been doing for a number of years, and I usually notice when something odd shows. This one wasn’t hard to spot. In fact, I have seen very similar hosted articles appear from forbes.com in the past, but I would expect it from a company whose goals are more aligned with those of what they are hosting. For a company like Forbes to go there, is expected. For a non-profit organization, who has a board doing oversight, I would question where this got the OK (if at all).
There is an odd result showing up in my search. It is a page at http://www.gildasclubchicago.org and has nothing to do with the mission of the club. This doesn’t exactly look like it fits at Gilda’s Club. http://www.gildasclubchicago.org/insurance-leads.html. You can cut and paste. I don’t want to give the page any added boost. I wonder why they don’t even link back to the home page of the club? Why don’t they present it in a way to let the visitors know that they recommend this non-related service? Because the Gilda’s Club board probably doesn’t know it exists.
What else are they hosting?
You would think an organization like this would be above playing games (well, I thought that about wordpress.org as well). Do you think that the board knows that they are hosting pages that are generating an SEO boost for the company that is developing their web site? Look at the footer in the lower left of the home page (not the splash page).
This is from the about us page at Gilda’s Club Chicago
Gilda’s Club Chicago opened our signature red door in 1998. We provide a warm and welcoming meeting place where men, women and children diagnosed with cancer, and family and friends, join with others to build social, emotional and informational support as an essential supplement to medical care. Membership and our program are free of charge. We offer support and networking groups, lectures, workshops and social events in our home-like clubhouse.
Yep, sounds to me like they would certainly be hosting pages about ‘insurance leads’! Forget I ever mentioned it. Wait, wouldn’t they put it on their links page if they thought it was of use to their visitors? Nah.
Wait, I am intrigued. Is this a page that isn’t linked to the web core? (I think that Danny Sullivan was the one discussing the web core). Well, it probably has to linked from somewhere to be ranking for something so off topic. Let’s do some simple backlink checks. Well, what do you know. Linked directly from the home page of Gildasclubchicago.org and using <h3>’s to pump 3 different pages on the site. Again, totally unrelated to the club. However, the links are hidden when viewing the page. I know that Google and the other search engines don’t care about that, right? Riiiight. The main page of the club is a splash page using flash. Do a simple ‘CTRL A’ to select all of the text. Hmm, I still don’t see the link. View the source of the page. Ah, there they are.
How are the styling the H3’s so that they aren’t visible? Well, there isn’t a stylesheet being called directly and they don’t style it within the H3 tag. The engines would read that, too risky. Let’s check the Javascript (named sswriter.js). I wonder what the person who named the script meant for it to stand for. My guess… ’sneaky stuff’. Yours?
<H3><A href="resources.html">Resources</A> <A href="http://www.gildasclubchicago.org/insurance-leads.html">insurance leads</A> <A href="http://www.gildasclubchicago.org/american-medical-security.html">American Medical Security Insurance</A> <A href="http://www.gildasclubchicago.org/insurance/health-insurance.html">Health Insurance</A></H3>
Looky here. The javascript file that is being called from the splash page is the method used to call the stylesheet that hides the H3 links. They are styling using this…
h3 {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 10px;
color: #ff0000;
visibility: hidden;
}
Yep, that would do it ‘visibility: hidden;’ The links exist but the css isn’t read because it is being called by a Javascript instead of being called directly. A spider might read the css file, but it probably won’t read the javascript file.
Let’s review the steps
- Found the unusual page in a search.
- Visited the page to find that it was clearly just a hosted article and trying to be hidden (no menu or links back to the main site)
- Checked the backlinks to the page to find that they are being linked from the home page of the site (gildasclubchicago.org)
- Noticed that there were hidden links on the page (viewabled only when looking at the source and, of course, by any spider)
- Found that these were H3’s but there wasn’t a stylesheet being called (because spiders do read those)
- Viewed the Javascript being called on the page (because spiders don’t read those) and found the link to the stylesheet
- Discovered that the stylesheet being called with the javascript hid the H3’s (visibility: hidden;)
Why am I pointing this out? Well, I don’t like the fact that there is so much gaming of the system. I know it exists, but sometimes there are things that are done where companies who you would expect to be outside of it are involved (as in the wordpress/hotnacho thing). In this case, I doubt that Gilda’s Club has any idea and that is why I am writing about this.
If a company is hosting these things, or hiding these things, and they know that it is happening it will probably be discoverred naturally. Matt Cutts is tricky that way. If they don’t know something is being done that could potentially hurt their site, I think that they should be informed. If they are informed and they don’t care.. so be it.
Gilda’s club does a tremendous amount of good for families who are going through a horrible ordeal. What if this site was delisted due to the actions of a developer and it had an impact on fundraising and/or visibility. I know, they could file a reinclusion, but that isn’t my point. They shouldn’t have to (unless they know, of course).
Can Google Hear Me?
Aaron Stanton is getting a bit of press for trying to get in front of Google – “Can Google Hear Me?“. I just had to chime in about the original idea. He clearly saw the documentary called “My Date with Drew“. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with taking something that has already been done and applying it in a new way. “My Date with Drew” was done so well, you couldn’t help but love it. It is about a guy who tries to get a date with Drew Berrymore withing 30 days and with $1,000 to spend. It is really well made and the editing style matches up with what Aaron Stanton is going for.
Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery and the style of the video, along with the overall concept, matches up very closely with a funny and successful project. Good luck Aaron.
If you haven’t seen “My Date with Drew”, it is worth it. It is the perfect date movie.
Webcast Online Publicity and Link-Building 2007
Webcast Online Publicity and Link-Building 2007 (2/15/2007)
Presented by: Eric Ward, President EricWard.com
This is a summary of the webcast. The topics were a bit basic, but informative. The Q&A could have been a little longer and would have had more value if the question submission took place in advance. Eric Ward did a fine job and offered some good advice.
Canonical Issues on Windows
If you are looking to make sure your site is as optimized for search as it can be, you have probably been told to do a redirect from your non-www domain to your www domain. This is not too difficult when you are hosted on Linux, but can be a little more tricky when you are on a Windows based hosting plan. Even more troubling if you are on shared Windows hosting. Here is a quick how to if you are leasing a Windows based server and have IIS access.
The method below will do the redirect without any additional software such as ISAPI Rewrite. I am not saying you shouldn’t purchase and install ISAPI Rewrite. I am just looking to provide an install free method.
I will use example.com as the domain name in the how to. Obviously this is where your site name needs to go. This will allow requests for http://example.com/mydirectory/detail.cfm?myid=555 to be 301 redirected to http://www.example.com/mydirectory/detail.cfm?myid=555.
Read more
Free Website Template Search Engine
There was a site that came up today at Del.ico.us and Digg. It was a collection of 40+ sites offering free web site templates or skins. If you are like me (a bit right brain challenged) you will appreciate this nice list of sites. There is even a nice section including wordpress themes.
I could just reprint here, but I decided to do something a little different. I have wanted to try something out in Google Co-op for a while and this was the perfect candidate. Google Co-op allows you to create a custom search engine and even use it on your site. I am not going to integrate it into the site, but this will allow you to search the complete list of free template web sites using Google.
Search this custom engine for a free web site template:
I plan on using this myself since I often find myself looking for a template in a particular niche (real estate, furniture). Going through all of these sites would be a bit tedious and this custom search engine using Google Co-op is the right answer. Not perfect, but nice. I haven’t looked into it, but an image search using co-op would probably be more suitable.
BTW does anyone else find it funny when a “design company” uses one of these canned templates to pitch their “design” services. In any event, I hope this is usefull for someone. I know that I will use it to find web site templates that will help generate some new ideas.
Read more to get the full list of free template sites. Read more
Google Video with Matt Cutts
It is nice to revisit Google from time to time to look at some of the things in the lab and to view some of the API’s that are available.
Google offers this really simple video search control wizard that provides you some nice cut and paste code that you can include on your site. If you want to get fancy with it, you could dynamically pass keywords from your blog post and provide a little added widget for the visitor. With the wizard, you can pass your own keyword list and output a list of videos that match your list. I wanted to keep the list on a topic that people in the SEO world would like. What better person to view than Matt Cutts.
Read more
Yahoo Pipes Pisses Me Off
Are you like me? Do you get upset every time the veil of technology is lifted and a once difficult (or tedious) process becomes easier for the masses? It must be some sort of character flaw, but it really disappoints me and sometimes it even pisses me off.
I will probably file this one more under disappointed than pissed off.
It used to be a little more difficult to grab feeds from other sites, parse them out, and spit out the data as usefull information that just happened to help your site rank well in the search engines. Yahoo Pipes makes much of this easier. Maybe it makes my job easier and I can focus on a new level of control over the data and content. Pull it all together and spit it out with a better mousetrap. We shall see. My hunch is that it will help the webmaster who doesn’t have a great deal of coding experience but wants to put up another worthless MFA (made for Adsense) site.
Please note, I am not calling MFA sites worthless. I am categorizing the expected result of easy feed integration and expecting many people to attempt to enter the game with worthless sites. A scrape, an rss, post site and make money, right? “That is what the eBook that I bought on Ebay said.”
Who will adopt and use Yahoo Pipes? Will it be the masses or users of myYahoo? Will it be the blog community (this could be the big market)? Will it be coders and SEO’s who now find that their job becomes easier?
Were you one of the many who weren’t able to use Pipes in the first couple of day? It must be very difficult to gauge the demand for a new product like this. As a developer on the inside of a company the size of YHOO, it must be daunting to learn that your product will end up on the Yahoo home page. Is there a way to gauge the level of traffic that will come. How about the amount of traffic that you can anticipate from all of the press. It has been so long since Yahoo was out in front and not introducing an “also ran” product that they might have forgotten what comes of it.
On the business front, and an owner of some YHOO stock, I was surprised to see Yahoo get out in front on a new tool. This is great news and perhaps an attempt by Terry Semel to rule with less of an iron fist and start listening to the developers rather than the marketers. Who knows. Semel is not exactly on firm footing at Yahoo. He needs to shake things up and I hope that this is the first of many announcements and products. Even if they piss me off!
PS: Is Pipes crashing Firefox for anyone else?
Mod Rewrite Wizard
Don’t people in the SEO world always talk about link bait? This mod rewrite tool is just that. I have used it a number of times and found it be useful, although limited in some ways.
This is for those who aren’t experts with Regular Expressions and Mod Rewrite. It is a wizard that allows you to enter your own URL along with some other parameters and the tool will spit out the rule to use in your .htaccess file.
http://www.mod-rewrite-wizard.com/
Dual Monitor Setup
As a webmaster, or web marketer, you probably wear a lot of hats. Any bit of productivity that squeeze out of your day means a lot and really adds up at the end of the day,month, and year. If you haven’t ever used a dual monitor setup (or multiple monitor setup), you don’t know what you are missing. It isn’t just the “cool factor”, or being able to show your friends your geekness, it is a legitimate productivity boost. For those of you working for others, it might be a hard one to prove to your boss, but worth the effort.
Look, even Danny Sullivan has a multiple monitor setup.
With the price of LCD’s crashing to the ground, there is not much of a reason not to head this way. Even if you are a laptop user, your system probably has multiple monitor support. You can purchase a 19″ LCD for under $200 from a number of retailers. I like to shop at TigerDirect.com since they ship quickly and the items reach me within 2 days, even with standard shipping. Some of the best deals on the name brand LCD’s can be found in your Sunday paper. Check the flyers for the office supply stores (Officemax, Staples, Office Depot) and Compusa.