Webstart Blog

You know it is going to happen, that dreaded day when your computer becomes unresponsive, nothing you do can bring it back to life. Forcing a reboot is the next step but now it won’t load the operating system, the premium rate support line don’t seem to understand that you have just lost all your data and are asking you unrelated questions… aghhhhh *?()@£!

Losing all your important data - how would you feel about that? All those letters, all the emails, music downloads and what about the thousands of unique photo’s lost forever. Maybe your computer was also for work - all your client details, invoices, communications, accounts are lost and your business is really going to suffer because of it.

This example of data loss is no laughing matter, it is happening to someone right now causing immense stress and inconvienince - one day that person could be you unless you take steps to prevent it. How do you prevent it? Well, you can’t stop your computer from crashing, but you can keep your data safe by backing it up.

Online backups are fast becoming the best way to protect your data, incredibly easy to use and fully automated. One company who do this very well are Depositit, I use their backup service and recommend Depositit to our clients. The software is unbelievebly easy to setup and then you don’t even think about it again as the backups are fully automated.

Go to Depositit’s website for more details and give the system a try, they give you a 15 day money back guarantee so there is nothing to lose.

You can’t stop the crash but you can survive it!

Well I thought I had seen an end to surface mail spam from the Domain Registry of America (DROA) but oh no, another domain expiry notice letter has hit my door mat.

For readers unaware of DROA tactics please read this.

I’ve received a lot of these domain renewal reminders in the past and so have a lot of my clients, my advice is to stay well clear of them and speak to someone you know who works in, or has a good understanding, of the internet.

The tone of the latest letter from DROA has changed from almost a demand to more of a plea for your business, at least they are trying to follow the court rulings against them, BUT, would you trust your domain with a company known for outrageous scare tactics preying on the novice internet user?

The DROA try to be clever by sending out the domain expiration notices long in advance of the reminders sent by the current domain registrar. Doing it so early can make the domain owner uneasy about the domain expiring, creating the opportunity for panic renewals and unwittingly transferring their domain to the DROA. At the top of the letter in bold it states “Domain Name Expiration Notice” - yep I’m curious now - the next obvious area is a bordered box with text in bold stating the domain name and a Reply Requested By date - aghhh that date is just over a month away, is my domain going to be lost forever in a few weeks time?, now I’m sweating - …must …save …domain …send …money …now!

You see how it works

If you get one of these letters and your domain registrar is not the DROA just bin it.

P.S. If your domain registrar is the DROA you can always switch to another registrar - just like they say in their letter!

This blog has a funny thing happening to it! On the day it went properly live, which was the 5th December 2007, it was picked up by Google in an incredibly short time - no more than 30 minutes! I was astounded and kept checking the SERPS and yes it was true, imblogingit.com was indexed with links to all the posts - even the default wordpress “hello world” post which I hadn’t had time to remove!

Now, today I had a quick check and ‘hmmmm’ the blog is no where to be seen! Doing a site:www.imblogingit.com search in Google just came up with the old test pages - we were using this domain as a test bed for a clients new remote control models website (www.apexmodels.com). Where had the blog posts gone that had been indexed so quickly?

So now I’m doing a little experiment, I have removed the sitemap from Google webmaster tools and then reinstated it, also I’m posting this post which will auto generate a new sitemap and ping Google to let them know. Now just keep an eye on SERPS every now and then to see if the posts show up again… I’ll keep you updated.

Update 1: 10:15 - On checking Google with site:imblogingit.com (leaving off the www.) the blog pages are showing, interestingly with the www. on the urls.

Update 2: 11:30 - The site:www.imblogingit.com search is now showing the blog posts again! The new post is not showing up yet but Google picked up the new sitemap after about 10 minutes! 

Update 3: 01:00 8/12/07 - Well I’ve been out this evening at a Christmas party in London so I’m a little jaded - but - now I have checked and all but one link on the blog has fallen out of the Google again - what on earth is going on!

Update 4: 08:40 10/12/07 - Two pages from the blog are showing in the index, the ‘about’ page and the December archive. No sign of the individual posts yet.

Update 5: 08:29 11/12/07 - OK some things have changed in the SERPS, the index page and the login page are now in the main index. The December archives have slipped into the supplementals and the Keywords are dead - long live content  article has also made it into the supplementals. Yesterday I installed the All In One SEO plugin for Wordpress which should avoid content duplication - lets see how much that changes things.

Update 6: 13:50 12/12/07 - No change!

Update 7: 21:20 13/12/07 - The home page and keywords post are in the index (keywords was in supplimentals), the login and December archives have fallen out.

Update 8: 11:39 15/12/07 - Things are looking up a bit, 4 pages now in the main index: home, about, 301 redirect and keywords posts. Nothing in supplimentals and just need the latest post to arrive in the index and we are done!

There is an interesting post from John Mueller on the Google Webmaster Central Blog about meta tags and how Google interprets them. John lists the important tags that have some functionality when it comes to Google indexing the web page, he also lists some that have no effect. There was one tag that John had not included - the meta keyword tag.

Check Johns post and see the first comment asking him what Google do with the keyword tag - you will notice who the comment came from - I asked him:

“I notice that you do not mention the keywords meta tag - does this mean that Google totally ignores it?”

John’s reply confirmed my suspicions…

“Thanks for asking, Glen! You’re right in that we generally ignore the contents of the “keywords” meta tag. As with other possible meta tags, feel free to place it on your pages if you can use it for other purposes - it won’t count against you.”.

So there we have it straight from the horses mouth (no offence John) - Google IGNORE the keywords meta tag.

This comes as no surprise to a lot of people heavily into search engine optimisation but up until now it had not been confirmed and the meta tag was still being used as an active tag for improving search engine results.

Now all those keywords you thought were working in the meta tags need to be in the page content, not a problem for most websites, unless you were spamming keywords but of course no one did that - did they?

I had an issue recently which gave me a few sleepless nights, the problem of duplicated content when a site has more than one domain name. You may have several domain names for your site such as somename.com and somename.co.uk, so how do you prevent two versions of the same thing appearing in the search engine index - particularly Google’s?

My sleepless nights were based on this statement on the google webmaster guidelines page… “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”… alarm bells start ringing as I realised that my new site was being mirrored on each domain I had mapped it to.

The site is a new online directory which has an ever increasing number of business listings (www.pulsating.com if you are interested). The original idea was to have a single directory for a specific town - Crawley, West Sussex - so the site began as www.crawley.co.uk . This was great but restricted us to just one town so the idea to expand to the whole UK was developed and the name changed to www.pulsating.com. Now here lies the problem, www.crawley.co.uk was mapped on top of www.pulsating.com so both would effectively serve the same content - now we have a big problem in google crawling duplicate content. The recommended way to move content is via 301 redirects so we need to use this method. We didn’t want to stop using the crawley.co.uk domain on the new site because we had already done some promotion on this domain and Crawley was well represented for business listings within the site anyway. The solution came by using the php auto_prepend_file directive - which is about the same as having an include statement at the top of all your php pages. To get php to prepend all the php files you simply put the directive in your .htaccess file, here is the line of code …php_value auto_prepend_file “/path/to/public_html/somefile.php”

Now every php page that gets accessed will call the somefile.php page - in that page is where we put the code to do the 301 redirects - just as Google likes it! Here is the code we use…

1) $looking_for = “crawley.co.uk”;
2) $moved_to = “www.pulsating.com”;
3) if (eregi(”$looking_for”,$_SERVER[”HTTP_HOST”])) {
4) $this = “http://” . $moved_to . $_SERVER[”REQUEST_URI”];
5) header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
6) header(”Location: $this”);
7) exit();}

Some explanations of the code above:
1) The text (domain) we are looking to redirect from
2) The domain we are looking to redirect to.
3) This checks to see if the text is in the host part of the url
4) Here we rebuild the url replacing the domain with the one we are redirecting to
5) 301 redirect header to indicate the permanent move
6) Go to the redirected page
7) Stop anymore script executions as we are off to the new page!

This is not perfect, you will need to check for https if your site has ssl and this only works for sites using php pages. For static html pages the mod_rewrite function may be better suited.