Nagios is (IMHO) the de-facto standard in website and server monitoring. It has been around for quite some time. Here I will talk through the functionality and how to install and configure Nagios.

We shall shortly be offering remote monitoring, configuration and alerting as a service, please contact us if this is something you would like to discuss.

For the purposes of this tutorial, I will be installing Nagios on a Fedora Core server and monitoring a remote CentOS server through linux firewalls and a router with NAT (though if you are not usng firewalls you can simply ignore those steps).

Functionality:

In short, nagios is a monitoring tool, the depth at which it can check services and servers is quite suprising for a new user. Out of the box, some of it’s most useful checks are:

• host-alive (though ping_check / icmp_check)
• Current CPU load
• Current logged in users
• PING
• Root partition size/space
• Free space on harddrives
• SSH functionality
• FTP functionality
• Monitor any service(s)
• SWAP useage
• Total running processes
• Total zombie processes

….and many more. Nagios does this by querying these services on local and remote boxes. When all is well, Nagios displays a big green “OK”, when the warning threshold is reached then an amber “WARNING” is given and when a check fails, a red “CRITICAL” alert is given. Nagios can also be configured to email, text or otherwise alert you of a failed service. For the purposes of the tutorial, we’ll be using email as an alert method. NB: Use a third party email address (such as hotmail/yahoo/gmail) for alerting as it is unlikely to be affected by any service outages.

Nagios will monitor the local machine it is installed on by default, it’s most practical to be using Nagios to monitor a remote machine as well, you can then also install Nagios on the remote machine to monitor the connectivity of the 1st machine thereby ensuring redundant checking of all of your services. It also means that if connectivity to your local machine goes down, the remote machine can alert you of it. The downsides to this (if you do it across many machines) are that you can receive a high number of alerts if a single service goes down. A round-robin approach could solve this for you. For now, we’ll look at two machines monitoring each other).

Installation of Nagios (local machine):

These instructions are specific to RedHat based OS’s. Whilst they may work on other distributions, you should be more careful and aware of what you are doing. For my installation, I installed on Fedora Core 8 using these instructions.

Prerequisites

During portions of the installation you’ll need to have root access to your machine.

Make sure you’ve installed the following packages on your Fedora installation before continuing.

• Apache
• GCC compiler
• GD development libraries

You can use yum to install these packages by running the following commands (as root):

yum install httpd
yum install gcc
yum install glibc glibc-common
yum install gd gd-devel

1 ) Create Account Information

Become the root user.

su -l

Create a new nagios user account and give it a password.

/usr/sbin/useradd -m nagios
passwd nagios

Create a new nagcmd group for allowing external commands to be submitted through the web interface. Add both the nagios user and the apache user to the group.

/usr/sbin/groupadd nagcmd
/usr/sbin/usermod -G nagcmd nagios
/usr/sbin/usermod -G nagcmd apache

2 ) Download Nagios and the Plugins

Create a directory for storing the downloads.

mkdir ~/downloads
cd ~/downloads

Download the source code tarballs of both Nagios and the Nagios plugins (visit http://www.nagios.org/download/ for links to the latest versions). At the time of writing, the latest versions of Nagios and the Nagios plugins were 3.0.3 and 1.4.11, respectively.

wget http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nagios/nagios-3.0.2.tar.gz
wget http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nagiosplug/nagios-plugins-1.4.11.tar.gz

3 ) Compile and Install Nagios

Extract the Nagios source code tarball.

cd ~/downloads
tar xzf nagios-3.0.2.tar.gz
cd nagios-3.0.2

Run the Nagios configure script, passing the name of the group you created earlier like so:

./configure --with-command-group=nagcmd

Compile the Nagios source code.

make all

Install binaries, init script, sample config files and set permissions on the external command directory.

make install
make install-init
make install-config
make install-commandmode

Don’t start Nagios yet - there’s still more that needs to be done…

4 ) Customize Configuration

Sample configuration files have now been installed in the /usr/local/nagios/etc directory. These sample files should work fine for getting started with Nagios. You’ll need to make just one change before you proceed…

Edit the /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/contacts.cfg config file with your favorite editor and change the email address associated with the nagiosadmin contact definition to the address you’d like to use for receiving alerts.

vi /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/contacts.cfg

5 ) Configure the Web Interface

Install the Nagios web config file in the Apache conf.d directory.

make install-webconf

Create a nagiosadmin account for logging into the Nagios web interface. Remember the password you assign to this account - you’ll need it later.

htpasswd -c /usr/local/nagios/etc/htpasswd.users nagiosadmin

Restart Apache to make the new settings take effect.

service httpd restart

6 ) Compile and Install the Nagios Plugins

Extract the Nagios plugins source code tarball.

cd ~/downloads
tar xzf nagios-plugins-1.4.11.tar.gz
cd nagios-plugins-1.4.11

Compile and install the plugins.

./configure --with-nagios-user=nagios --with-nagios-group=nagios
make
make install

7 ) Start Nagios

Add Nagios to the list of system services and have it automatically start when the system boots.

chkconfig --add nagios
chkconfig nagios on

Verify the sample Nagios configuration files.

/usr/local/nagios/bin/nagios -v /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg

If there are no errors, start Nagios.

service nagios start

8 ) Modify SELinux Settings

Fedora ships with SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux) installed and in Enforcing mode by default. This can result in “Internal Server Error” messages when you attempt to access the Nagios CGIs.

See if SELinux is in Enforcing mode.

getenforce

Put SELinux into Permissive mode.

setenforce 0

To make this change permanent, you’ll have to modify the settings in /etc/selinux/config and reboot.

Instead of disabling SELinux or setting it to permissive mode, you can use the following command to run the CGIs under SELinux enforcing/targeted mode:

chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t /usr/local/nagios/sbin/
chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t /usr/local/nagios/share/

For information on running the Nagios CGIs under Enforcing mode with a targeted policy, visit the NagiosCommunity.org wiki at http://www.nagioscommunity.org/wiki.

9 ) Login to the Web Interface

You should now be able to access the Nagios web interface at the URL below. You’ll be prompted for the username (nagiosadmin) and password you specified earlier.

http://localhost/nagios/

Click on the “Service Detail” navbar link to see details of what’s being monitored on your local machine. It will take a few minutes for Nagios to check all the services associated with your machine, as the checks are spread out over time.

10 ) Other Modifications

Make sure your machine’s firewall rules are configured to allow access to the web server if you want to access the Nagios interface remotely.

Configuring email notifications is out of the scope of this documentation. While Nagios is currently configured to send you email notifications, your system may not yet have a mail program properly installed or configured. Refer to your system documentation, search the web, or look to the NagiosCommunity.org wiki for specific instructions on configuring your system to send email messages to external addresses. More information on notifications can be found here.

11 ) You’re Done

Congratulations! You sucessfully installed Nagios. Your journey into monitoring is just beginning.

So that gets you monitoring your local machine which is very handy, you can also repeat these instructions on a second machine and follow the next steps to start monitoring remote systems. By setting up a second machine on a different connection, you can monitor the machine you have just setup and therefore know if it goes down.

Carry on with PART 2 - Setting up Nagios checks on a remote Linux system

OR

PART 3 - Setting up Nagios checks on a remote Windows system

Images:

Nagios home

Service detail page:

Technorati Tags: Array, Connectivity, Core Server, Cpu Load, De Facto Standard, Fedora Core, Firewalls, Free Space, Free Ssh, Functionality, Gmail, Green Ok, Linux Firewalls, Linux Router, Monitoring Tool, Partition Size, Remote Monitoring, Root Partition, Running Processes, Server Monitoring, Service Outages, Size Space, Ssh, Threshold, Zombie Processes

“A lot of hard work has gone into this site and it is indeed a deserving winner”

iCare is the brainchild of the Nice 2 All site owner who has an obvious passion and drive for accessibiliy. The iCare award is something and nothing. In my opinion, anything which increases the awareness of accessibility and web development standards is a great idea in my opinion. Whilst I haven’t seen anything similar, it probably does exist (do prove me wrong here though!), sadly, it isn’t well known either. This award would be of greater impact and importance if it was widely recognised (something I hope to help in some small part with this post).

So what does the award mean and why is it silver?

Copied verbatum from the original site:

The iCare Awards come in three levels, gold, silver and bronze. To qualify for any of these awards your site/blog will be evaluated against the following criteria:

All you need to do to earn iCare bronze is to ensure that the main page of your site/blog contains valid (X)HTML. The validity of your site/blog’s markup will be checked via the W3C Markup Validation Service. Meeting this criteria is not difficult but valid (X)HTML is essential to any further accessibility features.

To earn the iCare silver your site/blog needs to meet the criteria as mentioned for the bronze award PLUS your stylesheet(s) also needs to have valid markup. The validity of your CSS will be checked via the W3C CSS Validation Service.

To earn the iCare gold your site/blog needs to meet the criteria as mentioned for the bronze and silver award PLUS your CSS will be put through a further test which actually consists of two tests:

The fore- and background colors used in your CSS will be put through a color contrast test. This test will be done via the Juicy Studio CSS Analyser. This same validator will also be used to check that you have no fixed sized fonts anywhere in your CSS. To pass this final, double test, the validator must not return any warning or error icons whatsoever.

These criteria are really not very difficult to meet and they do indeed only cover the very basics of website accessibility. These criteria are however very important if you want your site/blog to have any measure of accessibility or even usability.

All sites/blogs that are evaluated will be notified of the result of the evaluation within 7 days from the date of application.

If you know your site/blog meets these standards, you have already done the hard work and the rest of the accessibility standards are within your grasp. Please come and claim your reward for getting this far. Come and get the recognition you deserve

What haven’t we done?

I’ve said it before and I really hope I don’t keep saying it….the blog is poor. Our site was developed with both standards and accessibility in mind. For every usability functionality there is an accessible alternative. Unfortunately the blog is a theme which we have not designed from scratch. I have made a number of changes to the theme but more importantly I need to make a large number of changes to the various modules(/plugins) we use in the theme. This means I need to spend a fair amount fo development time on it.

I’m really keen to get it done, unfortunately other things have taken priority recently both at home and at work. I will make the changes in the not too distant future.

Where would we like to be?

Gold of course! I would like us to be the best at anything we attempt to do, we are not there yet but we will be, at which point we will re-submit th site with a view to obtaining a Gold classification. Until then we are reliant on users with accessibility needs letting us know if something doesn’t work well enough for them. That feedback is both difficult to get but incredibly valuable to us so please do feel able to comment on it.

I would be really grateful to anyone who takes some time to take a look at the iCare awards and feed back on them, submit their site to them and advocate them where possible. I have no vested interest in the site or the awards, I just think it’s a great idea and one which should be promoted.

List of iCare award winners

Criteria for an award

Technorati Tags: Accessibility Features, Accessible Design, Background Colors, Brainchild, Bronze Award, Color Contrast, Deserving Winner, Design Content, Gold Silver, Icare, Markup Validation Service, Passion, Silver Award, Stylesheet, Validity, Verbatum, W3c Css Validation Service, W3c Markup Validation Service, Web Design Website, Web Development

Our blog is definately lacking in accessible content and it’s something I am hyper-aware of. Primarily this is because that as a web developer I view any restriction on user base as a bad thing, a mindset which has helped me to convince clients and users of the benefits. That said, rather than becoming easier, I am finding it harder to justify the extra work (and it is) to provide a really accessible site.

Where is the extra work?

Well, it’s in checking, changing, re-checking, validating, usability testing etc etc. I can make a site that looks the way I want it to look in a far shorter time than I can make it 100% (or near as dammit) accessible and compliant. This cost has to be transferred somewhere and unfortunately it’s the customer who takes that hit. My main justifications (in the order the customer normally cares about most) are:

• It aids in SEO and placement within search engines as the spiders can more easily navigate and digest your content
• It may be a legal requirement depending on location and or business sector
• You may be opening your business up to an untapped sector of society
• It’s good practice

In honestly, my experience is that most businesses and individuals don’t really care about restricting the people who can use the website they are providing. If however, you offered them a ground floor accessible building with wheelchair access to all areas they would tout that as a real feature of their offices compared to the 5th floor office with stair access only.

It’s hard to change this mindset and is something I have been trying many approaches on over time. I liken it to the frontpage debate. I’ve said before, I hate it. It turns every home user into a “web designer” with terrible coding, no compliance, no interoperability and just plain looks hideous (assuming you are using the built-in frontpage “features”)…. it gives people a total misconception which they feel is completely justified. In a word it looks OK in general but the scaffolding holding it up is made from chewing gum, spit and paper. Accessibility is a strong scaffolding but noone ever sees it (unless you really need it).

With all that said, I can also see SOME of the points of view offered by the customer. Noteably, that the cost outweighs some of the immediate and direct benefit. It can be difficult to justify spending more when you can’t always see the benefit yourself. It’s not like offering them some funky new state of the art functionality for a bit of extra cash. A lot of the time it’s the code and the non-obvious stuff which costs them the money.

I like to think that through CSS/XHTML standards driven development I am doing what I can to confirm to at least the most basic of accessibility requirements even if our customers point blank refuse to pay for more accessible development. I also know that I’m sure many high-horse developers will be tsk’ing at me not producing completely accessbile designs by default and this is one area where I have to agree with my customers…….the cost for me to cover the development of accessibility would reduce my business to very little if the costs weren’t being covered by the customer. On that basis I think education, profile and selling the benefits are my key tools. If you encounter similar situations and/or use other arguments when discussing accessibility I would really like to hear them. I’m sure I am not the first and I definately won’t be the last to have those sometimes difficult conversations.

Technorati Tags: Accessibility, Accessible Content, Aids, Business Sector, Compliance, Controversial Question, Frontpage Features, Interoperability, Justifications, Mindset, Misconception, Restriction, Search Engines, SEO, Spiders, Usability Testing, Web Designer, Web Developer, Wheelchair Access, Wor

If you have no idea what I am talking about the background is here (along with the only tips we have used to improve our rank): http://www.hungerfordwebdesign.com/blog/seo/increase-your-alexa-rank/

To view the original and current Alexa rank: http://www.hungerfordwebdesign.com/blog/alexa-monitoring-page/

In short, we started a small experiment to improve our Alexa ranking in a month. I didn’t have very high hopes but the thought processes were sound so I decided to give it a go. We have moved up over 1million ranks to a (at time of posting) #573,850. This is an incredible improvement given a small number of changes and some consistent approaches to our posts.

I hope these tips serve you as well (or better) than they have us. If you would like any help/advice with these tips and how to improve your Alexa rank please do post a comment and I’ll be happy to help.

We’ll do a number of similar experiments in the future to target particular technologies.

Technorati Tags: 1 Million, Alexa, Com Blog, Consistent Approaches, Current, High Hopes, Improve Ranking, Rank Improvement, SEO, Thought Processes

What defines a whitehat? Maintaining the integrity and morality of your site as defined by the major search engines you are working with. (is that a fair description?)

Each search engine normally publishes whitepapers, guidelines and sometimes rules for inclusion in their services and following this is one of the descriptions of a whitehat. An equally valid description is simply a webmaster who creates their content for their users, not for google. The obvious byproduct of having a solid, committed and returning userbase is probably better rankings.

Internal linking

You have to tell a search engine where to look. An effective way of doing this is to have a link on your page, pointing to another of your links. This is why having simple links with descriptive text is extremely valuable. E.g. If I was going to link to an imaginary page for adobe reader:

• Good: Are you struggling with PDFs? Why not use Adobe Reader
• Bad: Are you struggling with PDFs? Click here to use Adobe Reader

The difference is that a search engine spider will be attempting to index your link based on the context in which it is given. “Here” is such a pointless word in terms of its descriptiveness that it will be ignored. When linking internally, avoid the use of phrases which don’t describe what you are linking to and attempt to be consistent in the use of that text.

Reciprocal linking

Exchanging links is one way of both increasing your site presence and also your search engine exposure. *Caution* be aware of the reputation of the sites you are exchanging links with and in my opinion, stay well clear of any sites promising you that your site will be exchanged with thousands. Firstly, in all honesty, the sites taking part in the program will be of an equal or lower ranking than yours (thereby not helping with your ranking) additionally, your links are more than likely to be buried in a site structure not given any weighting by search engines.

Website optimisation

Optimising your site is to follow the guidelines laid out by the search engines themselves. Clear, easy to read links in association with well written content and considering accessibility will all help.

Some SEO related info from major search engines:

• What’s an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?
• Google webmaster design guidelines
• MSN/Livesearch Guidelines for successful indexing
• Yahoo search content quality guidelines

Content

Good quality and regularly created content will bring both visitors and search engines alike. Make your content related to your site, create unique content offering your views and opinions. It’s my belief that making your content interactive through forums, guestbooks, blogs and other similar systems keeps people and spiders coming back again and again. For me, it also enriches my experience. Knowing that people are reading, learning from, thinking about what I’m saying really enspires me. The more comments and feedback I get, the better.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Reader, Byproduct, Caution, Descriptive Text, Exchanging Links, Google, History Experience, Honesty, Inclusion, Integrity, Labels, Major Search Engines, Morality, Path, Pdfs, Phrases, Presence, Progra, Reputation, Risk, Search Engine, Search Engine Exposure, Search Engine Spider, Search Spider, SEO

Duplicate content

Duplicate content can be entirely justified. The primary reason would be something like a site of indexed articles such as a library of works. Whilst not always penalised, the site may be given less weighting than that of an equally diverse site containing 100% unique content.

Paid links

For advertising your products or services, paid links are both encouraged and entirely legitamate. The potential comes when purchasing links simply to increase the search engine ranking or other benchmark. Question the reason for you buying links, it is unlikely that you will be negatively affected so long as you are purchasing links from a reputable source with diverse and strongly rating sites. Difficulty is more likey to come about when your link is placed in a link farm environment or a site which seems far more heavily weighted toward its external links rather than it’s content.

Cloaking

As discussed in the blackhat tactics article, there are some valid reasons behind cloaking (although it must be said, there are safer ways to achieve the same results). Nowadays, it is far safer to use the same content regardless of visitor. You can elect to offer different information via internal link (such as a no css version of your site for accessibility without images).

Scraper sites

The use of scraper sites by greyhats is well documented and understood. Whilst blackhats will be looking for any content ranking high enough to use, regardless of how much sense it makes, greyhats will be focusing on readable, good content. So, whilst using automatic methods, there is still a strong focus on actually giving the site visitor what they were expecting to see and it being legible.

It is often mentioned that greyhat (grey-hat, grayhat etc) doesn’t really exist. Many whitehats consider grey to simply be a blackhat with some morals. I disagree on the basis that even those morals create a differentiation which means that greyhats should not be bundled into the same box as blackhats.

Technorati Tags: Accessibility, Array, Automatic Methods, Css Version, Farm Environment, Greyhats, Images, Link Farm, Reputable Source, Search Engine, SEO

For informational purposes, I’m hoping to cover some of the more common tactics of each type of “hat wearer”. I would like to stress that many of these tactics did or can negatively affect your site if you are caught using them. Some people will have great success with them in the right circumstances but these people are fully aware of the right situations to use them and are prepared for the risks associated with using them. I am not advocating (or otherwise) these techniques but I do particularly want to warn people who don’t understand the impact NOT TO USE THEM.

Hidden text

Hidden text is probably the most frequently used tactic by beginners in site design and SEO. The thought process is that you can include keywords and searchable text which will not be visible to your users but will be picked up by search engines. Nowadays this is easily detected as spiders become more style aware and many suggest that you will find yourself easily reported for using this technique. Additionally, users with screenreaders will readily identify what you are doing and will be among the groups of people willing to report you.

Cloaking

Cloaking is basically the act of presenting different information based on the visitor. It was fairly common a few years ago as a useability method for displaying your site in the correct way based on browser version. This was then adopted as an automatic way of presenting keyword heavy, different content to search engine spiders. The danger here is that some users will deliberately present themselves to your site as a search engine spider (googlebot being the most common). When they see what you are doing, they will most likely report you.

Doorways

As a user these are eternally frustrating and no doubt we have all seen them. Nowadays, doorway pages are automatically generated by software. A keyword heavy page is created and indexed. When you type something in google and it’s very obvious that the site itself has no real bearing on the page then it’s probably a doorway. I have found this to be very common in web design pages which are targeted at geographical groups. As a site which does focus on a geographical area, I can type “hungerford web design” and get pages from sites based in areas hundreds of miles away or even in other countries. These pages really annoy me and thankfully they are generally easily detected and removed.

Redirection

In blackhat terms, redirects are used in conjunction with other techniques. Primarily, a redirect would be use to transfer a visitor from a content-less doorway page to a real page containing genuine content. It can be really effective depending on the method used. Again, this is probably fairly defunct as search engine spiders frown on certain types of redirect. The most effective of the redirects probably relies on detecting a user agent and redirecting based on whether it seems to be a spider or a genuine visitor.

Keyword stuffing

In relation to search engine spam, this is probably one of (if not) the most prolific offenders. Keyword stuffing is essentially the practice of creating a very keyword heavy page. It doesn’t really have to make much sense so readibility is often not a consideration. The idea being that of all of the
keywords and phrases included, the spider will identify a good portion of them as useful, thereby creating a greater diversity of searchable phrases. These can be doorway pages and redirection can be applied to create a more useful browsing experience for genuine visitors although it is more common to either put the text in a lower part of the page or to hide the content with
hidden text.

Duplicate sites/content

Employed in different ways there can b a number of reasons for duplicating content. Duplicate content can be detected and removed from listings fairly easily, if done correctly you could have the content of a competitor removed. Equally, you can have multiple instances of your content in a number of sites which differ slightly and threfore can perform differently.

Spamdexing

In essence, spamdexing employs a few of the processes discussed above to manipulate the spider to index based on terms and keywords which bear little or no relation to the main content (if any) on the page. Spamdexing normally features hidden text, keyword stuffing and potentially doorways and redirects as well. In hindsight it’s probably more accurate to discribe spamdexing as the collective name for most blackhat tactics.

Scraper sites

Scraper sites are a little similar to doorway pages. The site software will use search engine results to glean (steal) content from the origin site on the basis that the content was good enough to reach the top spots. With a wealth of proven god content, the scraper site can and has exceeded the ranking of the original site or sites.

Link spamming

Link spamming has the main purpose of manipulating search engine algorythms which provide reputation based on inbound links, primarily this means Google pagerank.

• Link farms
• Spam blogs
• Hidden links
• Expired domain purchases
• Sybil attack (definition from wikipedia)
• Comment spam

Googlebombing

Googlebombs (whilst serious) can be very humerous sometimes. By virtue of the way it works, google will rank a site higher if all of the link text pointing to the page uses the same phrases. Some of the most prolific google bombs include the search phrase “Weapons of mass distruction” which resulted in a fake 404 page stating that “weapons of mass destruction cannot be found” in reference to the Allied search for WMD’s in Iraq. Equally funny was the “More evil than satan himself” which brought back Microsoft homepage as the top result. The serious uses for this kind of “attack” can be easily seen.

Know more? drop me a line and I’ll add other useful descriptions of blackhat SEO techniques.

Technorati Tags: Act, Array, Black Hat, blackhat, Circumstances, Doorway Pages, Doorways, Engine Spiders, Groups Of People, Hidden Text, Informational Purposes, Keyword, Keywords, No Doubt, Novice, People, Search Engine Spider, Search Engines, Search Spider, SEO, seo techniques, Spiders, Stress, Tactic, Thought Process

In the same way that hackers, scripters and crackers tend towards particular techniques and acceptable disclosure practices, SEO’s have adopted a similar standpoint. What are the hats?

The three main colours of hat are black, white and grey. Each hat describes a set of principles which the wearer predominantly adopts. That isn’t to say that one won’t dip into the other on occaison, or even regularly use a particular technique associated with another set of ideas/ideals.

Black hat

In short, black hat SEO adopts a set of techniques which are mostly frowned upon or completely disallowed by a major search engine. The useage of such techniques are both high-risk but also potentially high yield can be obtained from using them. The benefits can outweight the risks but the downsides could see your site penalised in search results or dropped completely from listings.

Grey hat

It’s often considered that grey being between black and white whould naturally be the middle ground in terms of the techniques employed. That isn’t the case in SEO… It’s my opinion that white is absolute, if tainted by any other colour then it just simply isn’t white. By that token, grey is simply a lighter shade of black. I believe grey hat SEO to focus on what isn’t said. As an example, a white hat SEO will focus on following the guidelines, rules and suggested practices, a black hat SEO will use the same guides and decide which to ignore or do the complete opposite of to improve their rankings and a grey hat will find holes in the policies where actions and rules just simply aren’t covered.

White hat

It probably needs little description, especially given the descriptions above. White hat SEO’s follow the rules. When google, yahoo and msn release their whitepapers and guidelines on conforming to their rules, the typical white hat will read, digest and act based on what the rules say.

These descriptions are very much putting types of people into boxes, the truth is that many of these tactics are ambiguous and overlap each other. I believe that the mark of a persons true hat is their natural tendency and intent. Whilst a whitehat could fall foul of a mis-advised or understood practice, they maintain their whitehat status by definition of their intent. Those working towards guidelines and rules and doing their best show a good level of integrity and morality (in search engine terms), grey hats walk a fine legal line, and black hats do what needs to be done to reach their goal.

I would definately class myself as a whitehat but not conciously. I simply follow good webmaster design and development practices. I write good syntax, I do my best to tick all of the right boxes and I don’t do anything which would knowingly negatively affect any of my visitors or people linking to me. It isn’t a concious decision, it’s simply the way I do things.

What about you? would you consider yourself any particular hat, or not really informed enough to make the decision? It’s interesting when speaking to whitehat SEO’s as the majority are almost biblical in their quest for “whiteness” and will report and attempt to negatively affect sites employing bad tactics. Ask that same person if they would employ a blackhat tactic if they KNEW it would only positively affect them without any consequences and watch them pause for thought…..

Technorati Tags: Array, Black And White, Black Hat, Black White, blackhat, Colours, Crackers, Disclosure Practices, Focus, Google, Google Yahoo, greyhat, Hackers, Hackers Crackers, Hats, High Risk, High Yield, Holes, No Doubt, Scripters, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Standpoint, whitehat, Whitepapers, Yahoo, Yahoo Msn

First and foremost, in search engine optimisation, we are attempting to get a non-visually aware system to read, navigate and digest our content. Whilst accessibility does not only cater for and promote useage by the blind or visually impaired, it is one strong facet.

I recently read a comment which described in a single sentence what I am trying to say. “A search engine spider is, by definition, blind” (credit to follow when I find the link).

SEO has become so much more than simply setting the right keywords. It has become key that your content is readable and legible to both man and machine alike. For disabled or impaired users this is key as many rely on machines such as screen readers, text browsers etc to give them the information they are looking for and which (hopefully) you are providing.

I’m by no means perfect on this front, I have sacrificed my morals on accessibility to have a nice looking blog. Both are achievable in equal measure but when you are dealing with someone elses code it isn’t always easy and finding the time to offer something for free when your job is to do the same thing for money is very difficult. No excuses though, this blog should be accessible and it isn’t (yet!).

So what are the correlations between the two in more detail?

Using the analogy above, a search engine spider is your most regular disabled or impaired visitor (70% of my traffic is search engines - shame it doesn’t translate into real visitors lol). A search engine spider is fiercely critical of your design, content and code. What I mean by this is that if it is unable to read it then it only has two courses of action: bury it or disregard it, neither of which is good for your site.

A number of accessibility standards conform exactly to web design standards, for example, the use of heading tags and seperating your content and style.

In short, if you develop your site for good accessibility and good SEO, the two compliment each other exponentially. Try to do one without the other and you may find that it’s all too easy to fail.

Our main website is both accessible (in terms of standards at least) and somewhat optimised for search engines, at least it was… In a recent code update we added some javascript which it seems may make it difficult for some software to view our main site.

Are you a disabled, visually impaired, or other type of screen-reader/text browser user? If so, I would really welcome some honest critical feedback, primarily on our main site : http://www.hungerfordwebdesign.com although I would equally welcome any feedback on any portion of our site(s).

As I have said before, our site is commercial and therefore I would hate to be losing money/customers/opportunities because I have excluded any type of user. The blog is non-commercial and about me being able to share information with peers and learn from visitors and so I am equally disappointed that I am potentially excluding valuable visitors.

The last point I would like to make which I have lightly touched on before, is that for UK site designers, the UK disability discrimination act may well apply. I would hate for someone to make the required changes just because the law says so, I think it is about getting support from site owners and designers. The simplest way is by selling the benefits to them. “Not only will your site have the ability to support a more diverse visitor group but search engines will more readily index your content, thereby inticing more visitors” - no losers!

I have listed a few of the tools which we have used in the past to emulate or recreate a disabled users’ experience (primarily lynx and built in OS screen readers), if you have any suggestions for tools we could use to be more productive in this area, please let us know.

For those in the UK - have an excellent extra day off this weekend!

Technorati Tags: Accessibility Standards, Analogy, Array, Correlations, Design Content, Different Contexts, Facet, Heading Tags, Job, Man And Machine, Money, Morals, Screen Readers, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Spider, Search Engines, SEO, Shame, Traffic, Truth, Web Design Standards

The SEO Quake toolbar/plugin is available directly from http://www.seoquake.com/

Installation:

I’m installing into Firefox V2.0.0.14 on Mac OSX Leopard (10.5.2). The first window that the app presents me with is this one:

You have a choice of installing the Seobar version or the Seotoolbar version. I have a couple of minor observations with this which didn’t instill me with huge amounts of confidence at first glance.

1. There was an obvious difference in the look and feel but I didn’t really understand what the benefits were. There is a one-line explanation but it didn’t make sense to me.
2. There was a spelling mistake (fickle I know but hey - I’m being honest)

I decided to go for the Seobar option (for no reason other than it appealed to me more).
ohhhhh more options

Here I need to select whether I would like the Seobar to display horizontally or vertically. I really did want to install the horizontal version (so I wasn’t losing either content or screen width) but decided that I wanted to be able to report on as much of the functionality as possible so selected the vertical option.
I then had to chose to load the site information on page load or when I would like to see it. I decided on the latter so as to only show what I want to see when I want to see it.


Wow - even more options (I don’t remember being asked any of this on the IE install (which might be why I thought it was so poor) - I’ll have to revisit that and see if I missed something.
Here I am showing my plugin configuration, I have selected these plugins based on the information I am interested in, you will want to customize this to your own level of interest. The plugins are then installed and Firefox restarted:

First Contact:
On reload, I am directed to the SEOQuake changelog and the new menubar appears on the left hand side of the screen.

Here as an image of the SEObar populated after a quick check of the SEOQuake site:

There are a couple of things I noticed very quickly which I liked:

1. The menubar can be moved around the screen simply with a click (of the SQ icon)+move - great when it’s obscuring something
2. The text is pretty small which means this box can be pretty small.
3. The simplicity meant that the details where easy to see and seek out exactly what you want to know.

….and a couple of things not so hot (or to be improved on):

1. A level of transparency in the bar would negate me needing to keep moving it to see what’s underneath. If I could see that I wasn’t interested in that area of the page it would limit the hassle of it being there (although I could have chosen to install it into the toolbar instead).
2. Echoing #2 above, the text is small, this could be a limitation for those with sight difficulties (yep -they do SEO )
3. I think there is a lot of scope for making this a more interactive gadget through AJAX (perhaps use it as a feed reader?!)

So what information does it give me?

1. Google Pagerank
2. Number of Google indexed pages
3. Number of Inlinks in Yahoo (for the page)
4. Number of Inlinks in Yahoo (for the domain)
5. Number of Inlinks in MSN Live Search
6. Alexa Pagerank
7. Domain Age (Date of registration)
8. Technorati Inlinks
9. Whois Lookup (at whois.sc) - This doesn’t work at the moment but it seems to be an issue with me or domaintools as doing it manually in the browser didn’t work either.
10. Page source code
11. Robots.txt link
12. Sitemap boolean
13. Keyword density link
14. Links on page (number)

I also noticed that when viewing the main search engines, I had a host of (for me, annoying) additional functionality, although there is arguably a clear and massive benefit to having this when comparing search terms and competing sites:

Google:

Yahoo:

MSN:

With the great degree of forethought I obviously had when putting together the main HWD website (i.e - it was lucky), the Seobar was nicely off to the left and not obscuring any part of the content (nice!).

Overall I really like it - I’m still not sold on the info being on the browser, I like using sites to periodically check the status of our site(s) but I do wonder whether repeated use of tools such as this one could negatively affect positioning (although I doubt it). It also seems to clutter my browsing experience although I can’t really think of a better way of doing it myself. If I installed every toolbar which had a degree of functionality I like, I would have about an inch in which to view sites as the rest of the window would be full of toolbars. This does seem to have a lot of features though and is more customizable than any other toolbar I have come across and that deserves serious kudos!
I need to revisit the IE version as for me, it very nearly prevented me installing the Firefox version as all and had that been the case, I would have been a little less tooled up for my SEO. This one will definately be added to the “box of tricks”. It’s fair to say that this really is just the basics of this application, the more I look, the more I find so I will follow up with a more detailed look into the application relating to some of its more advanced features.
Let me know how you get on and what you think of the plugin(s), any particular tips and tricks I may have missed as well as any improvement suggestions.
All images in this post:

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