Yahoo! Cache Date
It would really be helpful if Yahoo! included a date for cached pages in its index, like Google and Bing do. Is that too much to ask? The official Yahoo explanation mentions nothing about a cache date, but merely a “snapshot” in case the original one was somehow unavailable. http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-09.html. Oh well, it won’t be long before Bing takes over Yahoo. And so we wait.
SEO for Developers - Web Developers & Search Engine Optimization
SEO for Developers - While it is ideal to incorporate search engine optimization practices at the beginning of a new web development project, that rarely seems to be the case, especially with large projects and multiple departments getting a say in how the website should be built. Often times, SEO falls by the wayside and is considered a lower priority and something that can be done after the site is launched. However, that could be further from the truth when you’re dealing with huge, complex and dynamic websites. Other issues seem to pop up and take higher priority over the SEO, and thus the site will never rank in the search engines.
I will put together a longer post in the near future but here’s a good starting point - The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet.
Dreamweaver FTP Sucks - Dreamweaver FTP Problems - Filezilla Plugin for Dreamweaver
Let it be said that I hate Dreamweaver’s FTP. Yes, Dreamweaver FTP SUCKS. The FTP client included with Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, along with every other version of Dreamweaver that I’ve used, is so painfully slow and worthless. I’ve experienced way too many “Operation time out - canceling…” errors in a row for my own sanity. Sometimes it helps by ticking the Passive checkbox but that certainly does not completely the solve the problem, especially if you’re uploading a ton of files. If only there was a way to add a Filezilla plugin to Dreamweaver, then I would be happy. But of course that will never happen…
/rant
Break Out of IFrame Automatically with JavaScript
I’m sure I’m not the only webmaster who gets a little peeved when other websites link to your site but enclose your site in an IFrame with their site navigation or banner ads on the top frame. Well, look no further. Here is a great snippet of JavaScript to insert into the HEAD of any/all pages of your site to automatically break out of the IFrame!
<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
if (top.location!= self.location) {
top.location = self.location.href
}
//–>
</script>
GMail Manager Not Working - GMail Manager Firefox Add-On Plugin Stopped Working
Why is the Gmail Manager not working!!! The GMail Manager add-on for Firefox which I so heavily rely on has stopped working for the past week. Apparently the reason why it stopped working is because Google changed something on their end regarding authentication because several other Firefox plugins for Gmail stopped working recently as well. I have scoured the web for answers and have found several other people discussing the same problems, but nobody has any solutions! This is driving me nuts!
Fix Paging Navigation in Wordpress under IIS
For the last few minutes, I have been trying to figure out why next_posts_link() did not work on a template for a clients’ blog, under IIS.
I found a great tip, but I prefer standard functions over things that work.
Then I found out under IIS, PHP returns a wrong value for $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]. The link to the previous page was index.php/Index.php/page/2/. Notice there are two “index.php” (for Windows, index and Index are just the same.)
The real, working, clean and easy solution is to add a simple line of code in the clean_url() function in wp-includes/formatting.php:
$url = str_replace('index.php/Index.php','index.php',$url);
just put this at the beginning of the function before any “if Statements” only thing is you have to remember to do this again if you upgrade word press.
Source - http://wordpress.org/support/topic/202348
Yahoo SERPs Using Anchor Text for Title Tags
It looks like Yahoo! is using anchor text from the first link found on the page in place of the designated TITLE tag. I just noticed it today on two separate sites so I am not sure how long it has been going on and whether or not it will be a permanent change. At first I thought it might be pulling the TITLE from a Yahoo! Directory listing or DMOZ listing, but neither site is listed in either directory. So I dug a little deeper and realized it was the anchor text of the first link on the page pointed back to that page.
Not sure if I am explaining this clearly or not so here’s an example. Let’s make up a fake site about dogs called DoggyExampleSite.com.
The keywords you want to target are “dogs for sale” so you put it in the TITLE tag.
<TITLE>Dogs for Sale | Doggy Example Site</TITLE>
The first link found in the source code of the page is a link to DoggyExampleSite.com with the anchor text “Doggy Example Site.”
Let’s say your site has come up number 1 on Yahoo! for years for the keyword “dogs for sale.” When somebody searched for it, your site would come up first with the “Dogs for Sale | Doggy Example Site” as the title in the SERPs and everybody was happy.
But if today’s findings are going to be permanent, your site would now display “Doggy Example Site” as the title in the SERPs instead of your desired keywords. It’s yet to be determined if the actual ranking of the site will drop, but I imagine that the CTR would decrease as the searcher may opt to click through to the 2nd result that might have “Dogs for sale” in their title.
So basically this could become a problem when it comes to SEO for Yahoo! I will definitely keep my eye on it in the next few weeks.
Keyword Elite 2.0 Review
I am getting inundated with emails, tweets, links all about the keyword research software Keyword Elite 2.0 which apparently launched today. While it may be a good product, obviously the hype is generated by affiliates trying to make money off selling the software, which should be no surprise to anybody who makes a living online. I have never used the original version so I am a bit hesitant whose reviews to believe.
The feature that catches my eye is the “Google AdWords Time Machine”, which reveals data on which competitors are bidding on which keyword in the past 6 months. The premise is that if a competitor is bidding on a specific keyword for an extended period of time, then theoretically that keyword is making money for them and you should consider bidding on that keyword yourself.
I think I’ll wait a few days before thinking about purchasing Keyword Elite 2.0, unless somebody out there can convince me that I need to buy it sooner!
Screening Anchor Text in Contact Form Spam
I wrote a blog post last year about “How to Stop Contact Form Spam” and it seems to do the job to weed out the bots from hitting your form processing script automatically and submitting a bunch of spam. However, it looks like one of my websites is getting hit manually by a person or script - they are filling out all of the required fields with a valid-formatted email address and actually clicking the submit button to access the confirmation page. However, they are flooding the “Message” textarea box with thousands of pharmaceutical words, some of which are hyperlinked to their spam sites. The most logical way I can think of to combat these spammers is to screen out all submissions that have keywords in the anchor text of any links submitted. I don’t want to disallow URLs completely, but only those that contain custom anchor text. I’ve Googled variations of “anchor text contact form spam” but have come up with nothing.
So I will need to figure out how to do this myself, either with PHP and/or JavaScript. I DON’T WANT TO USE A CAPTCHA or any other question to check if it’s a human or not, because there’s a very good chance that it is a human! If anybody has any suggestions, please leave them in the comments!!
Maria Belen Shapur Photo is Today’s Most Searched Keyword on Google Trends
This is just a quick followup to the post I just made about “maria belen shapur photo” being the most searched keyword on Google Trends. Here is the link to the Google Trends graph so you can see the explosive volume in the past 6 hours - http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=maria+belen+shapur+photo&date=2009-6-25&sa=X
