Australian Business Directory and Search Engine

VS Consulting Group - Following Startups & Tech Trends: Clickfind

2008-03-24T12:04:00.000+10:00

VS Consulting Group - Following Startups & Tech Trends: Clickfind: "this"

Free Article Site

2008-03-20T13:54:00.000+10:00

Clickfind will soon be rolling out something new that has not been done before in the local search industry. We’re going to allow anyone to write articles related to listings on clickfind. Sort of like a wiki, but different…

No, we’re NOT looking for articles about your new logo, your sick pet budgie or your world travels.

We’re looking for USEFUL CONTENT – by that we mean articles that Australian consumers or businesses would find useful. All articles submitted must relate to at least one business, product or service listed on clickfind. This can be your own business, or somebody else’s.

These are the sort of articles you could contribute:
- how to do a particular task (design a website, set up a business, change a tap washer, etc)
- best practice in a particular industry (safety guidance, design standards, regulations, etc)
- how to brief or select suppliers (managing contractors, understanding builder’s estimates, etc)
- new developments and industry trends (new products, materials, technologies, fashions, thinking)
- useful hints and tips or learning points (general tips, things to look out for, case studies, etc)
- training in specific products or services (step-by-step guides, where to go for info, etc)
- facts, statistics, research (survey results, useful stats, etc)
- anything else that Australian consumers or businesses would find useful

The more relevant your article is, the more people will read it.

This allows writers and SEO people to create and submit free articles with links back to their website.

Brisbane Biz draws Yellow Blood and Google Gold Rush

2008-03-14T13:57:00.002+10:00

Brisbane based Clickfind.com.au has launched a direct attack on the established Yellow Pages Online & Microsoft’s Mylocal business models offering advertising free directory listings that help secure top Google rankings for Australian business owners.

According to a recent AC Nielsen survey internet shoppers are up 40% over the last two years to 875 million people worldwide of which 85% have searched, shopped, and completed a purchase online. Taco Fleur, founder of Clickfind.com.au says, “these trends are forcing many business owners to review their directory spend, demand more web site traffic and more assistance in improving their search engine rankings on sites like Google & Yahoo which are crucial to getting sales online. Search engines like Google have hundreds of formula and criteria that decide site rankings and business owners are telling us it’s a nightmare to understand so they would rather use a simple online directory listing to ensure they improve their web site search engine rankings and sales”.

Older business directories such as D-Look, Mylocal, True Local, and Yellow Pages all a offer pay per listing directory and then supplement their revenues with banner advertising. Fleur says, “I talk to many of business owners who realise how important the internet is and pay good money to list in these in directories only to find that a banner advertisement from a competitor is appearing right next to their listing without ever being told this may occur and they are rightly furious.” Clickfind.com.au has ignored this model in favour of no banner ads, lower listing rates, more space for client product and service description, and a specialist technical team dedicated to improving the major search engine rankings for clients. Clickfind.com.au believes this type of service is key in securing the long term listing relationships that help increase client’s web traffic and deliver sales.

Since the major site launch 90 days ago Clickfind has indexed 32000+ pages in Google and has been rushed by Australian and Asian companies looking to list immediately. Free listings are scheduled to close on 30^th March 2008 after which low fee options will be standardised at up to 80% less than equivalent Yellow Pages Online listings rates. The rapid growth has generated significant international interest and the directors are currently in talks with several overseas companies who are seeking licensing rights to major foreign markets in Asia. Visit Clickfind at: www.clickfind.com.au

Content Management System Australia

2008-02-04T13:23:00.000+10:00

Most people will know clickfind™ as an Australian Business Directory and Search Engine for products and services. But… it doesn’t stop there, clickfind™ can easily be used as a CMS (Content Management System).

Think about it for a minute, you can upload your business description, which is the “About us” for your website, your contact details and other business info is the “Contact us” for your website, and the products and services you can upload is the content for the website. With an easy to use interface, clickfind™ is your one and only option for managing your own content in Australia.

Not only can you get your very own Content Management System for $19.95 a month, you also get heaps of exposure, as your listings will be searchable from the main search engine of the site.

clickfind™ already has 17,900 pages indexed in Google, see the search results for yourself. http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aclickfind.com.au&btnG=Search&meta=
Pages on clickfind™ are indexed quite quickly, which means you don’t need to do the hard SEO work yourself.

As of 4 Feb. 08 the functionality that allows you to setup a dedicated website with your own domain is still under development. But you can already get your own clickfind™ URL, which is something like http://websitedesign.clickfind.com.au but pointing directly to your listings.

Quality Controlled Business Directory

2008-01-30T14:27:00.000+10:00

Did you know that clickfind™ is a quality controlled search engine / business directory?

clickfind™ is not your average run of the mill search engine, we do things a little different compared to other directories and search engines. For us it is not about getting 1.3 million listings as quickly as possible, no, for us it is more about getting high quality listings on the site, listings that are of value to Australians looking for a business, products or service.

Every listing added or edited on clickfind™ triggers a notification that is send to all editors and administrators involved. The editor or administrator will then review the listing and rate it from 1 to 10.

Example; 0 bad, 2.5 not to bad, 5.0 average, 7.5 good, 10 excellent

Rewarding
We also reward members for well written listings. If a clickfind™ member has an average score of 7.0 or over, they get access to additional functionality and more exposure.

Rating
Listings are rated on the way they are written, grammar and the information presented.
A listing with one paragraph would most likely be rated between 1 and 3.5, a listing with several paragraphs of well written information about the business, product or service will most likely get a rating of 6.5 and up.

Community
Something else a little different, is the fact that anyone can apply to be part of it all and help out. Our developer’s directory explains more about how to help out and be part of a select group with rewarding benefits.

What will you not find on clickfind™?
You won’t find personal listings, recipes (unless someone is selling a cook book, which is a product), blogs, something outside of Australia, or anything else that is not a business, product or service. If you are after recipes you should use a web search engine like Google, which searches the whole Internet for your keywords.

Google Base in Australia

2008-01-26T21:46:00.000+10:00

Looking for Google Base in Australia? Look no further! It doesn’t exist yet. There is Google Base for America, United Kingdom and Germany, but no Google Base in Australia as of yet.

So, what do you do with your products and services in the meantime, where do you upload your products and services to while waiting on Google Base to come to Australia?
There is an all Aussie alternative called clickfind™ (www.clickfind.com.au), it allows you to upload up to 500 products and/or services with your business listing.

The good news is, when Google Base does open up in Australia, we’ll be ready to upload your products and services for you, directly from your clickfind control panel with the push of a button. How good is that!?

Google only lists your products and services for up to 30 days, we’ll make it easy and allow you to re list them automatically from your control panel. By the way, clickfind itself does not put a time limit on the listings, other than those imposed by your subscription, as long as you have a subscription, your listings will be displayed.

clickfind™ has a web interface to upload individual items to the search engine, but when there is enough demand we will make available an API that will allow developers to upload directly to clickfind™. api-request@clickfind.com.au let us know!

clickfind™ only lists products, services and businesses, it does not allow you to create any customized items like Google Base, so if you’re looking for freedom to create items with your own attributes, then Google Base is the way to go.

A secure website in ColdFusion

2008-01-15T09:44:00.000+10:00

Well, it’s official! We’ve got a hacker safe site…

I’ve always been pretty careful in regards to security when it comes to ColdFusion programming, SQL programming, web server setup etc.

We’ve had our site checked by members of CFAUSSIE before we launched it. There were two issues that came up. One was reported by Steve Bentley who really did an awesome job in discovering the hole.

We’re not scared to put our site out there and let people try and break it, I believe it’s the only way to go if you want to run a successful and high traffic Australian Search Engine. It’s better to discover the security holes before launch and fix them, than discover them after launch and get a bad name.

OK, even though we had the site checked by members of the ColdFusion community, I still did not feel a 100% safe about it all. So, we’ve become a member of www.scanalert.com and just had our site and server scanned for thousands of vulnerabilities. It’s not cheap becoming a member of ScanAlert, but I reckon it is well worth the money if you want to be notified about potential security holes (if any) before anyone else discovers them.

So, everything went as planned, even our own methods of securing the site and reporting worked, the scan was requesting a high number of pages within a time frame that can only be automated. This gets detected by our application, we get notified, the IP gets logged and also banned from accessing further content. We’re planning to eventually integrate this with the web server so it puts the IP in the access denied list.

The scan report from ScanAlert is pretty comprehensive, if they find something they’ll also help with explaining and fixing the hole. It so happens we had a couple of low alerts. The alerts range from Low to Urgent and in between is Medium, High and Critical. The low alerts were things like allowing ICMP request, which we have to; because we also have the site monitored externally, if and when it goes down we like to be notified! ;-)
Another alert had something to do with cookies not being set over a secure channel. I will have to read up a bit more about that one. Not sure how that would work since we can’t put SSL over the whole site.

I’ll report more about this when information becomes available.

TrustWatch.com – doesn't look so trustworthy!

2008-01-08T10:47:00.000+10:00

I have to write about our experience with trustwatch.com, I just have to!

A website that should stand for TRUST on the Internet should be contactable via email, right? Especially if it’s powered by http://www.geotrust.com/

We felt there might be some synergy between www.clickfind.com.au and www.trustwatch.com as we only list real Australian businesses, and verify the ABN details with the government registry. Therefore we only have real businesses listed, which should instil some trust with the users of clickfind.

Since all partners on http://www.trustwatch.com/get-verified.html are US based and mostly deal with US based companies only, we felt that it would be a good thing to approach them and see what partnership is possible. If no partnership was possible, we’d still be interested in their API, which they list somewhere on the site.

So we compiled our first email:

Dear Sir/Madam,

We like to enquire how we can become a partner http://www.trustwatch.com/partners.html

Our company lists Australian businesses only, and requires each one to
provide ABN details, we then retrieve their business details from the government
registry. Only registered businesses have an ABN which gives people searching
the site the confidence knowing they are dealing with a real Australian
business.
Please see an example on https://www.clickfind.com.au/business/listing.cfm?businessIdentity=45717 please
scroll down till you see "Registered business" on the left hand
side.

Looking forward hearing from you.

The email got returned because their mail server is either down or doesn’t exist anymore.Please see attachment for the Delivery Status Notification.

OK, that can happen to the best of us, so I started searching their website for a contact form. I found one http://www.trustwatch.com/feedback.html

So I figured provide some feedback, the feedback link went to a survey that was closed. OK, report an error then! The link went to a survey that was closed. Nothing but dead links. Hmm, certainly doesn’t instil a lot of trust so far.
See attachments for a screen shot.
TrustWatch screenshot 2 - TrustWatch screenshot 3

That’s when I figured I’d write about this experience. Before I did so, I figured I’d better make darn sure there is no other email address to contact them on. After searching all the pages I finally found another address: info@trustwatch.com I wrote another email:

Hello,

There are a couple of reasons for contacting you.

1. we are interested in the trustwatch API
2. we've been trying to contact you via other channels in regards to
partnership, please see below;

1. we've emailed you on partners@trustwatch.com and the
email got returned, see screenshot trustwatch_01.jpg2. we've tried the feedback
links on your site which all lead to screenshot trustwatch_02.jpg and
trustwatch_03.jpg

We think your company is great, and what you are doing, we are completely
behind it. But having dead links and hard to find emails is not a great public
image ;-)

So, I thought you might like to know about it and I took the time to go
through all your pages till I came across this email address.

Following is a copy of the first email I sent:…[removed the rest]

Please see attachment for the Delivery Failure Notice.
TrustWatch screenshot 4

That was the end of us trying to bring trustwatch to Australia ;-)

Yes, I could have contacted them by telephone (that’s if it wasn’t disconnected), but that’s not the point here. The emails we're also days apart.

Those spammers again!

2008-01-06T15:56:00.000+10:00

We've had some shady activity on our site again!

Our system detected lots of 404 requests for
/mysql-admin/main.php
/phpMyAdmin-2.2.3/main.php
etc.

Obviously we're not running PHP or MySQL so it's someone trying to find a hole, probably to spam or do other things that are not very nice ;-)

So, we've decided to start collecting those URL and create some functionality that in the future will look up the 404 url and if its one of the shady ones, we'll just ban the IP in IIS right away! Where as at the moment we just display them with a blank page after x number of requests.

This post is related to http://australian-search-engine.blogspot.com/2007/12/hackerscrackers.html

If there is any demand for it, I'm more than happy to publish a list of the URLs we're collecting that MOST of these automated scanners seem to search for...

ColdFusion tutorial to create same hash as CF, but in MS SQL!

2008-01-06T15:49:00.000+10:00

How cool would it be, being able to create the same MD5 hash as ColdFusion, directly in the MS SQL RDMBSH?

I know there’s been quite some demand for this function, most people create the MD5 hash in ColdFusion and then pass it the Database, this mean a couple more round trips to the db, which we prefer to avoid at anytime.

We’ll make some assumptions in this article to make things easier, and they are;
- you are running MS SQL 2005
- you are running ColdFusion

Ready to get started?

The first thing to do is go into your MS SQL database and create the following function that creates the hash and return a string value.....

Because our blog doesn't maintain formatting and colour coding, we'll just make this tutorial available in a Word document ;-)
You can download the document here.

ColdFusion tutorial to export from database to RSS

2008-01-05T14:52:00.000+10:00

Always wanted to export items from your existing database into RSS with ColdFusion and syndicate it, but don’t know how?

Well, this is your lucky day! We’re going to show you how you can easily export your database records to RSS.

We’ll make some assumptions in this article to make things easier, and they are;
- you are running MS SQL that support “FOR XML”
- you are running ColdFusion

Ready to get started? (You can download the Word Document with colour coding here)

The first thing to do is go into your MS SQL database and create the following stored procedure that creates the RSS directly in your RDBMS.

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[sp_rssProductFeed]
AS
BEGIN

SET NOCOUNT ON;

SELECT 1 AS tag
, NULL AS parent
, '2.0' AS [rss!1!version]
, NULL AS [channel!2]
, NULL AS [channel!2!title!element]
, NULL AS [channel!2!description!element]
, NULL AS [channel!2!link!element]
, NULL AS [channel!2!language!element]
, NULL AS [channel!2!webMaster!element]
, NULL AS [channel!2!pubDate!element]
, NULL AS [channel!2!generator!element]
, NULL AS [channel!2!ttl!element]
, NULL AS [item!3!title!element]
, NULL AS [item!3!description!element]
, NULL AS [item!3!link!element]
, NULL AS [item!3!guid!element]
UNION
SELECT 2 AS tag
, 1 AS parent
, NULL
, NULL
, 'The name of your bulk upload.' -- title
, 'A description of your content.' -- description
, 'http://www.clickfind.com.au' -- link
, 'en-au' -- language
, 'rss-feed@clickfind.com.au' -- web master
, CONVERT( VARCHAR( 50 ), GETDATE() ) + ' GMT' -- publication date
, 'clickfind.com.au' -- generator
, 60 -- in minutes
, NULL
, NULL
, NULL
, NULL
UNION
SELECT 3 AS tag
, 2 AS parent
, NULL
, NULL
, NULL
, NULL
, NULL
, NULL
, NULL
, NULL
, NULL
, NULL
, [title]
, [description]
, 'http://www.clickfind.com.au/product/listing.cfm?productIdentity=' + CAST( productIdentity AS VARCHAR( 10 ) )
, productIdentity
FROM [your table name here]
FOR XML EXPLICIT

END

When you execute this stored procedure you should get output like following (excluding the content).

<rss version="2.0">

<channel>

<title>The name of your bulk upload.</title>

<description>A description of your content.</description>

<link>http://www.clickfind.com.au</link>

<language>en-au</language>

<webmaster>rss-feed@clickfind.com.au</webmaster>

<pubdate>Jan 5 2008 2:35PM GMT</pubdate>

<generator>clickfind.com.au</generator>

<ttl>60</ttl>

<item>

<title>0.9m Lightweight Beach Ball</title>

<description>"0.9m Lightweight Beach Ball There is massive beach and poolside fun to be had with this vinyl multicolored beach ball. Note: Image shows 1.2m ball. Actual colours may vary, primary colours used are yellow, blue and red. 0.9m in diameter it can be manually inflated or by using a standard foot pump - see Accessories"</description>

<link>http://www.clickfind.com.au/product/listing.cfm?productIdentity=63245</link>

<guid>63245</guid>

</item>

<item>

<title>1 x decorated weight</title>

<description>Balloons 1 x decorated weight</description>

<link>http://www.clickfind.com.au/product/listing.cfm?productIdentity=62801</link>

<guid>62801</guid>

</item>

<item>

<title>1 x standard weight</title>

<description>Balloons 1 x standard weight</description>

<link>http://www.clickfind.com.au/product/listing.cfm?productIdentity=62802</link>

<guid>62802</guid>

</item>

</channel>

</rss>

All pretty simple so far!
The ColdFusion code to call this stored procedure is as following, just copy and paste it into a .cfm file, and run it.





<cfstoredproc

procedure="sp_rssProductFeed"

datasource="your datasource name here">



<cfprocresult

name="rsRSSFeed"

resultset="1">

</cfstoredproc>

<cfscript>

// get the column names data from the resultset

columnName = rsRSSFeed.getMetaData().getColumnLabels();

// create the path where to store the file

storagePath = "c:\replace with where ever you want to store the file\";

// get the coloumn name

rssFeed = rsRSSFeed[ columnName[ 1 ] ];

</cfscript>



<cffile

action="write"

addnewline="yes"

file="#storagePath#product-rss.xml"

output="#rssFeed#"

fixnewline="no">

And voila! Just a few lines of code and you’re publishing RSS directly from your database. Building this structure through ColdFusion would really slow it down a lot. This actually works with thousands of records.

I hope you enjoyed this article, any questions, feel free to contact coldfusion-tutorial@clickfind.com.au make sure you refer to the original document as we might not know which one you are referring to.

Feel free to copy and distribute this tutorial, but reference to the author and sponsor.

Author: Taco Fleur
This article was sponsored by clickfind

New functionality: PageRank™, Alexa Ranking and more…

2008-01-04T21:30:00.000+10:00

We’ve just completed some cool new functionality for our clickfind users who have a monthly subscription. (Well we think it’s cool anyway)

We’ve added a page that drills down further into the client’s website (if they have one). The page displays PageRank™, Alexa Ranking, whether it’s valid HTML, a thumbnail of the websites front-page, and if you came to the business listing by keywords, it will carry those through and perform an external search on the business’ website and display the matching pages. How’s that for useful information?!

Following is an excerpt from the horses mouth on PageRank™ in layman terms http://www.google.com/technology/

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

All users will also have access to this information; however, the information is only available for their front-page. We are making more information available for the rest of the site to contributors of clickfind, users with an average quality score over 7% (people get a score on how their listings are written), users who refer people to clickfind from “My account” and users who publish the extra marketing material also available from “My account. This functionality can not be purchased; we will still keep our one and only low monthly fee of $19.95 a month.

Anyone who gains access to the additional functionality will be able to validate most of their web pages, see how many pages link to them, access other similar websites, the PageRank™ for other pages in their site and much more exciting stuff…

We are sure all this additional functionality will help every business to plan better SEO campaigns, give outside users more confidence in whom they are dealing with, and allow developers from our developers directory to assist our users better.

The name PageRank is a trademark of Google

Australian Search Engines - Which are The Best?

2008-01-04T11:53:00.001+10:00

There are quite a few Australian Search Engines in operation today, and it's difficult to choose the best. In case you did not know: A search engine (a.k.a. SE) is not a directory. Directories like Yahoo! or Dmoz (the directory that Google uses) are collections of links to websites reviewed and edited by human beings like you and me.

A search engine, on the other hand, uses a special program (called a spider or a crawler) to surf the internet automatically, copying all the data into a huge database (an index or list of information).

So when you are "searching" the internet using one of the best search engines, you are not searching the internet at all, but the information this engine has gathered on its computers.

Not one of the various search engines has information that covers the entire Net. Nor are all the results up to date. That is why you should use more than one of the best search engines.

The databases used by search engines are made by "robots" or "spiders" that automatically map the Net by following the links between sites. The directories, on the other hand, contain sites that are hand picked by human beings.

Still, most search sites present search engine as well as directory results. Metasearch engines gather results from several search engines and directories. They are not that good at advanced Boolean searching, but may provide you with a broad sweep of the Web.

Getting back to the question, "Which are the best?" For the purpose of mining data, there's no question that Google is the best at it's job of returning results swiftly and meaningfully.

It achieves this by rating sites according to how many other sites there are that link to it. Links from popular or important sites counts more than links from smaller, unknown sites. The search engine figures that if many high quality sites link to a particular site, that site must contain some high quality information. They are so confident about this, that they have included a "I feel lucky" button that brings you directly to the first result on the hit list. It actually works most of the time.

Google is unique in that it includes files in a wide variety of formats in its regular index, not only traditional webpages, including Microsoft Office files and Acrobat PDF.

Google has also a special adaptation of the Open Directory, where it sorts the listings according to popularity. Another useful feature is the Google Groups SE, which lets you search in the content of Usenet/Newsgroup messages.

Australian Search Engine Submission

Now, for the purpose of submitting your website to the engines there is a separate set of criteria. You need to evaluate which search engines to allocate your precious time. Some will be well worth the effort, others will be time consuming with little benefit. In order to gain links, increase traffic and get to ranked higher in the results pages, you need to set up some priorities.

N.B. Downloading toolbars comes with the risk of gathering some spyware or tracking cookies, which may or may not have adverse effects on your computer and/or privacy.

Download the Alex toolbar, you can get it here: http://www.alexa.com/site/download/?amzn_id=austsearengi-20 Alexa computes traffic rankings by analysing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. I won't go into the technical information, all you need to know is this a great way to work out which sites are getting the most traffic.

The SMALLER the Alexa ranking, the more traffic the site is getting. For example Yahoo is still No.1 and a newish site will rank at around 7,000,000 or not have enough data to get ranked at all. My experience is to not bother submitting to search engines and directories that rank above, say 500,000.

For example, Big Roo has a ranking of 456,922, Dlook is 55,343, Web Wombat ranks at 23,215 and a little known directory Ezilon Australia New Zealand is 11,737

2. Download the Google Toolbar. Go to Settings/Options/More and tick the option of PageRank & Page Info. Go to the page on the SE or directory and drill down to the page which will display your link. The Google Toolbar's PageRank feature displays a visited page's PageRank as a whole number between 0 and 10. The most popular websites have a PageRank of 10. The least have a PageRank of 0 and very new sites won't get a mention at all. You'll see a greyed out PageRank indicator with the alt tag of "No PageRank Information Available."

Google has not disclosed the precise method for determining a Toolbar PageRank value, but it is largely based on the amount of links (read votes) to your website. See if that page passes on any PageRank to your site.

So if it does pass on PageRank and has a low Alexa ranking, jump on it! Even if you sometimes have to pay a small fee, it's usually worth it. So what are you waiting for? Go and get some great Australian Search Engine listings!

This article was written by Bruce Gow, the owner of http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au/ Bruce is a member of S.E.M.P.O., the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization. Bruce has gained Advanced Search Engine Optimization accreditation and has worked in the SEO industry for the past six years. This article is sponsored by http://www.clickfind.com.au/

Clickfind™ is Australian search engine owned, run and managed by an experienced, enthusiastic team based in Brisbane.

You may use this article free of charge, as long as the article remains unchanged and intact, you reference the author and provide a link back to http://www.clickfind.com.au

Australian Search Engines - one way links

2008-01-03T21:39:00.000+10:00

Everyone knows (or should know) that the best search engines and directories are the ones that deliver fast, relevant results to search queries. But which ones are the best to submit your website to to gain one way links?

Below are my recommended Australian search engines and directories. They are worthwhile because they have high traffic and some pass on links and Google PageRank to your site. Some are free, and others are low cost paid inclusion directories or search engines.

N.B. I haven't mentioned the Yahoo directory as it isn't Australian or low cost at $US299, but it does give you lots of relevant links to your website.

http://www.adelaide-city-directory.com.au Recommended full page listing is $132 inc GST (Annual Fee). Also have standard listing at $33. PR 3

http://www.anzwers.com.au/suggest_site.html Free listing

http://www.aussienow.com.au/add-listing.html Paid inclusion @ $49.95 pa. Great value for a PR 3 link over 12 months

http://www.clickfind.com.au Lists up to 500 products and services completely FREE for a month. Then pay just $19.95.

Recommended newcomer http://www.brisbane-city-directory.com.au Recommended full page listing is $132 inc GST (Annual Fee). Also have standard listing at $33. PR 3

https://www.gtp.com.au/gtp/gtplist/listing/addAListing.jsp Free listing

http://www.directoryaustralia.com/account/register Free listing with featured site option. Featured listing isn't worth it in my opinion.

http://www.kangaroo.com.au/content/suggest.html Free listing

https://www.lookle.com/lookleadsorder.htm Used to be free. Not a lot of traffic. Listings aren't PPC but have a system where you pay for keywords shown at 3 keywords = $75 per year 6 keywords = $125 per year 9 keywords = $195 per year. Gives PR 2 on URL

http://www.mysearch.com.au/cgi-bin/add_free_listing.cgi Free listing, reasonable traffic, no passing of PR

http://www.melbourne-city-directory.com.au Recommended full page listing is $132 inc GST (Annual Fee). Also have standard listing at $33

http://www.ozebiz.com.au/cgi-bin/add.pl Free listing reasonable
traffic, no PR passed on.

http://www.ozengine.com/addurl/index.html Has DB problems. Free
listing gives URL link, Featured listing @ $45 pa gives URL & logo bolded

http://www.perth-city-directory.com.au Recommended full page listing is $132 inc GST (Annual Fee). Also have standard listing at $33. PR 3

http://search66.com/add_url.php Free listing with option to submit to lots of other free directories. Don't use your primary email address unless you enjoy spam!

http://www.search-the-world.com/form/listing $6 for permanent paid inclusion. Good traffic but no PR passed on

http://www.sydney-city-directory.com.au Recommended full page listing is $132 inc GST (Annual Fee). Also have standard listing at $33

http://www.thestreetsnetwork.com/forms/advertising-order-form.phpFree listing gives PR 4 URL link! Haven't tried 10 Pages Featured Website for $236.50 Including GST, but it could be worth it, as Alexa Ranking is under 68,000

http://www.vicnet.net.au/cgi/events/index.cgi?addEventForm=1 Free PR 5 links for events in Victoria

https://trans.webwombat.com.au Australia's original Search Engine. Has huge traffic, over 1 mill unique visits per month. Has waiting list for Premium Links which give you a PR 6 link. Expensive, but worth waiting for.

http://www.websearch.com.au/cgi-bin/submit.cgi Free Listing. Good traffic, human editors, no PR passing

http://au.search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html Priority listing is NOT recommended, not good value for money. Go for the free listing

This article was written by Bruce Gow, the owner of
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au
and sponsored by
http://www.clickfind.com.au clickfind™ is Australian owned, run and managed
by an experienced, enthusiastic team based in Brisbane.

You may use this article free of charge, as long as the article remains
unchanged and intact, you reference the author and provide a link back to
http://www.clickfind.com.au

ColdFusion CFC to interact with Google Base

2008-01-02T19:19:00.001+10:00

We've created a ColdFusion CFC that interacts with Google Base. We've decided to make the code freely available on http://code.google.com/p/google-base-coldfusion-cfc/

We're using the CFC internally to allow our clients to upload their products and services to Google Base to get more exposure to their listings.

Anybody with an account on www.clickfind.com.au can go to "my account > products > upload to google base"... Yet another excellent feature we've added... ;-)

Some of the methods are:
- doAuthenticate
- createItem
- doInsert
- doDelete

The code is still in early stages, but we'll be adding more methods to it. Feel free to download it and make any comments or improvements, do let us know.

Top 50 search engine keywords - Google Gadget

2008-01-02T13:48:00.000+10:00

We've just written our first Google Gadget. Nothing fancy, needs some major styling, but it’s nice to see it work, and it was so easy to do.

http://tacofleur.googlepages.com/top50keywords

The gadget pull the top 50 of keywords used in our Australian Search Engine and displays them in a table. It might be useful data for developers and marketeers, but I can't see any other use for it at the moment.

We'll be thinking about other gadgets we can create that actually have some real use Know of any? Let us know.

ColdFusion HTML markup Validator

2008-01-02T11:27:00.000+10:00

We’ve created a ColdFusion library to perform HTML Validation through http://validator.w3.org/ it allows you to programmatically query http://validator.w3.org/ for invalid markup (HTML, XHTML, …).

We’re publishing the code to the public, anyone interested in downloading the ColdFusion classes can send us an email on coldfusion_html_validator@clickfind.com.au once our sourceForge.net account is approved we’ll host the code there.

Example code:

<cfscript>

HTMLValidator = createObject( "component", application.object.root & "._resource.class.HTMLValidator" ). init( "http://www.clickfind.com.au/" );

</cfscript>

<cfoutput>

<h1>#HTMLValidator.getURI()#</h1>

<p>

Has error: #HTMLValidator.hasError()#<br>

Number of errors: #HTMLValidator.getErrorCount()#<br>

Has warning: #HTMLValidator.hasWarning()#<br>

Number of warnings: #HTMLValidator.getWarningCount()#

</p>

<cfscript>

Iterator = HTMLValidator.getErrorCollection();

writeOutput( "<h2>Errors</h2>" );

while( Iterator.hasNext() ) {

ValidationMessage = Iterator.getNext();

writeOutput( "<p>" );

writeOutput( "Line: " & ValidationMessage.getLine() & "<br>" );

writeOutput( "Col: " & ValidationMessage.getCol() & "<br>" );

writeOutput( "Message: " & ValidationMessage.getMessage() & "<br>" );

writeOutput( "Message id: " & ValidationMessage.getMessageId() & "<br>" );

writeOutput( "Explanation: " & ValidationMessage.getExplanation() & "<br>" );

writeOutput( "Source: " & ValidationMessage.getSource() );

writeOutput( "</p>" );

}

Iterator = HTMLValidator.getWarningCollection();

writeOutput( "<h2>Warnings</h2>" );

while( Iterator.hasNext() ) {

ValidationMessage = Iterator.getNext();

writeOutput( "<p>" );

writeOutput( "Line: " & ValidationMessage.getLine() & "<br>" );

writeOutput( "Col: " & ValidationMessage.getCol() & "<br>" );

writeOutput( "Message: " & ValidationMessage.getMessage() & "<br>" );

writeOutput( "Message id: " & ValidationMessage.getMessageId() & "<br>" );

writeOutput( "Explanation: " & ValidationMessage.getExplanation() & "<br>" );

writeOutput( "Source: " & ValidationMessage.getSource() );

writeOutput( "</p>" );

}

</cfscript>

</cfoutput>

We are currently using this functionality ourselves on www.clickfind.com.au under "My account", it allows customers to check their site for validation errors.

Any comments or feedback are welcome.

End of year search engine statistics

2007-12-31T12:59:00.000+10:00

Internet traffic

It's the 31st of Dec 2007! 11 hours to go.

We thought we'd release our Internet traffic results for this year – (between you and me) that’s only one month of traffic, since we launched in Dec.

We are all pretty impressed with the internet traffic we’ve been able to get in just one month. On the other hand, we have all been working very hard on getting Internet traffic going so our clients get results!

Our main search engine www.clickfind.com.au got the most results with 3,013 unique visitors up till 31 Dec 12:20PM, which resulted in 11,002 page views. (view Search Engine Traffic Report for clickfind for more information)

Our two othergreat sites dedicated to Bartercard and BBX received understandably less traffic, but still nothing to complain about;

http://bartercard.clickfind.com.au got 276 unique visitors and 4,661 pageviews. When comparing the traffic to our main site, it appears that Bartercard clients view more pages. (view Search Engine Traffic Report for Bartercard Businesses for more info from Google Analytics)

http://bbx.clickfind.com.au got 27 unique visitors and 273 pageviews. We’re extremely happy with these online marketing results, we can thank our internal team and the team at www.pacificfox.com.au (Brisbane Website Design agency). (view Search Engine Traffic Report for BBX businesses for more details)

We’re looking forward to a new and exciting 2008! And double our list of 4,060 Australian businesses, 10,827 products and 1,612 services.
Why not add your business to our Australian Search Engine and receive some of that traffic today!

Happy New Year Australia! Let it be a peaceful one!

Forum to discuss Australian Search Engines

2007-12-30T19:31:00.000+10:00

We've just created a community on http://www.orkut.com/ on which we can discuss everything related to Australian Search Engines. It's open to everyone, and any Australian Search Engine can be discussed.

http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=45774806&refresh=1

--- Orkut BTW is yet another website owned by Google, its got a bit of a weird name, but I like the interface and the way things work...

Anchor text optimization

2007-12-30T14:01:00.000+10:00

We've just launched some new advanced SEO functionality on our Australian Search Engine, and it's quite exciting.

We've been working together with some SEO experts and have taken some ideas on board, one of them being "Anchor text optimization".

When we designed clickfind we decided to go for a very controlled environment and look and feel - making all the pages look the same, so that information will only be the deciding factor for users.

A disadvantage of this is that users are not able to control the text that links to their website. Anchor text plays an important part in SEO, and we’ve therefore implemented some advanced functionality that allows the user to specify up to 3 words they want to use for the anchor link text.

To make sure it does not get abused, we will monitor its usage and have limited the words to a maximum of 3.

Existing users of clickfind will find this functionality under
- My account
- Business listing
- Advanced SEO
- Anchor link text

Any questions or suggestions, please let us know ;-)

Online Marketing

2007-12-27T10:38:00.000+10:00

In the past few weeks we’ve been really stepping up our marketing plans for the new Australian Business Directory and Search Engine.
One of the campaigns we we’re running was with http://www.adclicks.com.au which is owned by http://www.permissioncorp.com/

Please note: This blog entry is to share our experience with them. Your experience with them could be different than ours.

This online marketing campaign is just one of many, we also run Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, Yahoo Search Engine Marketing and many more…

We closely monitor all of our marketing campaigns with Google Analytics to see what results we are getting.

We started getting suspicious of Adclicks when their web statistics showed close to 7000 clicks. A click is obviously someone opening our site, that someone can be anybody, and they can open the site many times. We realize this and they acknowledge this, they’re saying that this is why are so cheap. We have no problems with this, however, when we show only 400 or 500 actual clicks hitting the site instead of the close to 7000 they are reporting, we start to get suspicious!

We created some weird campaigns like “DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD” and “Do not click here!” to do some testing. Funny enough these campaigns had more than 4 views and a couple of hits within a second of creating them. It just doesn’t make any sense. When we ask for an explanation, we get to hear about Bounce Rates and other stuff, but a bounce is someone actually hitting the page and creating an entry in the web statistics, which is not the case!

We tried to get our money back from these people. Normally there’d be no need to claim the money back, but their lowest entry campaigns cost quite a bit, so we gave it a go anyway. No luck. Eventually we gave up and are just running the campaigns to the end. Traffic from them has shown no increase and is still WAY different from what they are showing.

More than 7000 clicks, not one sale, and no searches performed either, this was money wasted, and much better spend on a charity…

Hackers/crackers

2007-12-27T10:19:00.001+10:00

It seems some hackers/crackers/spammers (whatever you want to call them) have been scanning our server and trying to find some holes.

Luckily our system detects these requests and writes a detailed report. We've contacted the perpetrator at revisedcode@revisedcode.com and are waiting for a response to see if he/she has a good argument for trying to attack our Australian Search Engine.

Some of the URLs scanned were:
http://209.97.223.207:80/forums/chat/messagesL.php3
http://209.97.223.207:80/phpMyChat-0.14.3/chat/messagesL.php3
http://209.97.223.207:80/phpMyChat/chat/messagesL.php3
http://209.97.223.207:80/chatroom/chat/messagesL.php3
http://209.97.223.207:80/chat/messagesL.php3
http://209.97.223.207:80/mails/README
http://209.97.223.207:80/horde-3.0.9/README
……

There plenty more entries, I can only assume they are looking for somewhere to SPAM. This is one of the reasons why we only allow users to contact our clients when they have a valid account.

The offending party is host.revisedcode.com or http://www.revisedcode.com/

Then there were also entries for the following;
http://209.97.223.207:80/stats/awstats.pl
http://209.97.223.207:80/cgi-bin/stats/awstats.pl
http://209.97.223.207:80/scgi-bin/awstats/awstats.pl
……

I can only imagine that’s to find a hole on the server.
The offending party is host.jdssimulated.com which is very odd indeed.
We’ve emailed the offending party at jobs@jdssimulated.com

And last but not least, someone trying to flood the server with countless requests, lucky for us anyone making countless requests one after the other gets denied access.

Possible leech attack from IP address: 211.215.134.172
Date and time: Dec 26, 2007 1:18 PM
Page requested: http://www.clickfind.com.au/business/listing.cfm?businessIdentity=xxxxx Number of requests made to this page: 51
First request made at: Dec 26, 2007 1:17 PM
Last request made at: Dec 26, 2007 1:18 PM
Average time between requests: 1.47058823529 seconds
ReverseDNS: 211.215.134.172

Made it back safely

2007-12-27T10:15:00.000+10:00

We all made it back safely. The ride was excellent!

Thanks to those who donated generously!

And if you haven't donated yet, now is your chance http://www.everydayhero.com.au/australian_search_engine

Charity fund raiser for Surf Lifesaving

2007-12-20T13:01:00.001+10:00

We're going to hop on the push bike this year and do a full 330 K from Eatons Hill to Maryborough!

We're raising money through the following link
http://www.everydayhero.com.au/australian_search_engine

Please dig deep to sponsor us. It only takes a few seconds.

Spread the word and send to as many people as possible.

Thank you very much.

Sponsors of this event are Australian Search Engine www.clickfind.com.au and Executive Results Boot Camps

Photo of the route

2007-12-20T13:00:00.000+10:00

Following is a link to a photo of the route

We plan to do 160K the first day and 160K the next, but that might be wishful thinking ;-) Either way, we'll have to do it in 3 days, as we've got xmas parties to attend!

See route