SEO Rants

How to view HTTP headers

2009-07-19T16:31:00.003+01:00

HTTP headers are the part of the webpage you don't see in your browser (usually); the special data describing the page to your browser software. HTTP headers are wehere you'd put redirects, information about whether a file is a PNG / HTML page / RAR archive, and where you say if the browser should open the file or present it as a download - as well as many other things. The full details are in

Breaking through Google's 1000 result limit

2009-06-20T17:01:00.006+01:00

Sometimes we want to get a huge list of URLs from a search engine. For example, you might want to find all the pages linking back to you. However, Google won't return anything past 1000 results; see this search for "south"; we're on page 99, with 10 results per page - and if you scroll to the bottom, you'll see that page numbers run out. So - how can we get more results?One technique for

Free links on Blogger

2008-10-25T13:34:00.003+01:00

Blogger, like many other popular services, offers an option to post-by-email. This lets you post when you're out and about. You pick a special email address, and when you send something there, it appears on your blog; the subject is the blog title, and the content is the blog post. Blogger's service doesn't offer HTML, but it will auto-link any URLs that you put in the email subject.According to

Free eBooks

2008-10-25T13:31:00.001+01:00

Yeah, it's been a while. There's a great archive of eBooks around - these ones are actually good, copies of published prints on computing. Grab the dir with:wget -np http://debian.yaako.org/ebook/

How not to keyword spin

2008-06-06T09:46:00.013+01:00

Unique content's a good thing, right? Not always.To get well written text, you need to invest some time, or pay someone skilled to do it for you. Both are expensive and slow exercises, so many SEOs choose to take a shortcut and "spin" articles. This generally involves taking one source text, and altering the language inside it to "create" a new article. The better spinning programs are aware of

No search engine traffic here please, and half you visitors can f*** off too

2008-06-03T14:14:00.001+01:00

You gotta love sites that hate spiders as much as this. Open up IE (if you have it) and visit www.fdms.com. No problem, right? I mean, it's a pretty bad site, with some clear SEO problems, sucky design, lack of content, etc, but you can see something, at least (hopefully).So, that's how things are meant to work - far from stunning, admittedly, but vaguely functional. Now, switch to something

Free fashion related links

2008-05-12T21:34:00.000+01:00

Run a fashion site? Want some free linkage? Leave me a comment, with the keyword you want - make sure I can contact you via it, perhaps include your URL (or a link to somewhere that has a contact form for you, don't make me think) - and I'll hook you up with some good deep links inside text, from a white-hat site.

Screw Lipsum

2008-05-10T18:12:00.003+01:00

People love (I mean LOVE) to fill up their mediocre templates with text from Lipsum:Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum But this

Ubercart initial review

2008-05-09T11:18:00.006+01:00

Ubercart is an open-source ecommerce solution. It's not osCommerce derived, which immediately fills me with hope. It's got a silly name, but great looking demo sites. It's based on Drupal, and plugs in as a module.The install process looks promising; Step 1's a remote installer! This needs FTP details, a MySQL login, and the hostname of the destination site. Great stuff. After setting up vsftpd

SearchMe

2008-04-26T01:28:00.003+01:00

SearchMe have a nice, shiny interface. They're based just down the road from Google, and are crawling the net at the moment. I've had quite a fun afternoon checking that I'm at the top for the words I want in this engine too (I am!) and flagging competitor sites as porn. Fantastic stuff. Take a look (watch out, may crash lesser browsers and will definitely break lesser machines):Searchme Visual

BT Web Clicks = Bad

2008-04-17T21:28:00.005+01:00

BT Web Clicks are sending out an AMAZING, unique offer!They then proceeded to ask me “what do we rank for on google?”, my response was “your company name, unless you request otherwise”.They then went on to mentioned that “the man from BT” can get us listed “at the top” of the search engine for “our keywords”.Interesting! What does Google say about companies offering that?No one can guarantee a #1

Opera Pagerank widget

2008-04-13T21:32:00.001+01:00

If you use Opera (think FF but faster and no memory leaks), you'll probably miss LivePR. There's an almost-as-good replacement available, and it's really easy to install:Pagerank in OperaIt's well worth spending the extra 30 seconds to set up the custom Javascript plugin mentioned there, too.

Flash SEO

2008-04-13T12:26:00.007+01:00

Flash is the leading vector graphics technology used in thousands of interactive and design-focused websites. According to estimates, over 98% of Internet users have Flash player software installed in their browsers.Well-created Flash animations can make sites more attractive, provide a better experience for users than text-based content, and allow designers to show off their creativity and

Meta Keywords Wordpress plugin

2008-04-12T15:18:00.003+01:00

Ahh.. nothing like a good, theory-centric, hype-free approach to SEO. There's an extremely sensible and (fairly) lightweight Meta Keywords plugin rattling around over at data dump.It seemed to me that a basic meta keywords tag should be trivial to include. According to Google’sword of mouth advice, meta keyword tags (apart from being mainly unimportant) shouldn’t contain more than six or seven

Free backlink analysis

2008-04-12T11:51:00.005+01:00

Yeah, you heard that right. Debra at thelinkspiel got a hookup with Receptional. Get over there and see how many authority links you have (if you didn't already know!).Tool URL: http://labs.receptional.com/links/User & pass: thelinkspielOne thing this tool could do with is some kind of drill down into each category, where it showed you the domains that were providing links in each instance, or

T-Mobile UK SEO Audit

2008-04-10T17:13:00.001+01:00

Well, I've had this internal document on my desk for a few years, and it's kinda heavy - and certainly not pertinent enough any more to cause damage. So, here's a high-grade commercial SEO Audit, worth somewhere around 1500GBP at the time of production. Enjoy.T-Mobile UK SEO AuditI suppose the most shocking thing here is the quality of the site - thankfully it's improved since then - it's really

Blatent Plug

2008-03-27T17:54:00.000Z

The digital point forums are full of crazy people who can't read specs, the webmaster world ones full of crazy people with huge egos. However! There's a rather good SEO Forum starting up - http://forums.seohelp.org - run by experts who have maintained a free help service in their spare time over the past four years. Drop in!

AMEX advice for idiots

2008-03-26T15:28:00.000Z

AMEX have been blasting out some fairly self-contradictory advice recently, according to WebProNews. They suggest that small businesses avoid employing SEO guys:don’t waste money on so-called Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) specialists. Search engines are very quick to penalize sites that try to trick their filtering techniques, and once your site has been put on Google’s blacklist, it will

Google forgets everyone's News settings

2008-03-17T09:18:00.000Z

Google news is great. You can view a bunch of categories of news, add and remove these categories for various regions (e.g. take out US entertainment, add Global politics, that kinda thing), as well as control how many stories show for each section. Plus, you can show stories relevant to a specific keyword (say, "SEO", or "free chocolate"). There's even this great thing where you can drag and

MSN Search API in PHP

2007-08-08T05:09:00.000+01:00

Here's some code for accessing the MSN Live Search API from PHP. You can get a developer key here by going to Configure Applications, Create and Manage Application IDs. You'll need a Microsoft Passport to get your key.You'll need the PHP5 SOAP library enabled (make sure extension=php_soap.dll is uncommented in your php.ini).To run a search on MSN and scrape results, set up a variable called $

BuyBlogComments.com review

2007-08-08T04:23:00.000+01:00

BuyBlogComments.com is a service launched in July 2007 and run by Jon Waraas, where you can pay to have someone leave relevant blog comments on a bunch of blogs in your industry, with an anchor text and URL of your choosing. This gives a mild SEO benefit (despite most blog comments having rel=nofollow applied) and a bit of traffic toward your site. Many people hire freelancers from the likes of

How make successful landing pages

2007-07-22T16:36:00.000+01:00

I'm going to do something I generally despise here, by posting about someone else's article. It's pretty much a bookmark for me, too. If you don't want to read the article, that's fine, I'll relieve your visitors of their cash instead.The article is 11 ways to improve landing pages by Michael Nguyen. I keep coming back to this article year on year; it's a clear and concise guide on how to create

pownce invitation

2007-07-19T07:54:00.000+01:00

I don't want my pownce invitations. Link to me, and leave a comment with your email address, if you do. There are some left right now; I'll edit this post when I've run out.

Optimaliser.no

2007-07-19T07:40:00.000+01:00

Poor old Netty - they sell undertøy (lingerie / underwear). Scroll to the bottom of their front page; see a weird thing in the bottom right? Let your mouse cursor hover over it. Their "SEO" company has placed links to all their other clients on the frontpage! I say, sue the buggers. Don't use Optimaliser.no! They're selfish scum, abusing their clients. See video below for the full insult they've