Fiddled Wordpress htaccess, Got 404 on Internal Posts, Fixed It

Posted on March 18, 2008
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What a waste of an hour. I fiddled with the .htaccess file on one of my other blogs and for some reason every single post other than the home page was displaying a 404 error. Tried to find help by searching for things like 404 on all internal pages wordpress and 404 errors on all my wordpress posts +htaccess and largely found a lot of pompous wankery and duh… i dunno answers from supposed wordpress know-it-alls.

How To Fix

Eventually I found a “this might work” suggestion to reset my permalinks. I went into Options > Permalinks and hit “Update” without changing anything. Hey presto, my posts were back. Thanks to whoever suggested that.

And that’s how I solved my 404 Errors on Internal Posts after editing htaccess on my wordpress blog. I’d hate to think some poor surfer would get a worse user experience than the one I intended for them. Heck, a page full of ads is better than no page at all… and it converts a hell of a lot better, too!

Degrees of Separation in Links From Trusted Sites

Posted on March 5, 2008
Filed Under Link Building, Search Engine Optimisation | 3 Comments

A good Search Engine Optimiser should work harder at working smarter rather than pursue less fruitful, more arduous activities. Link Building serves as an excellent example to illustrate this point. With Google devaluing links left, right and centre in an effort to combat manipulative linking practices it makes sense to only focus your efforts on attracting high quality links from trusted sources. If you can’t get links from the top dogs, take the next best thing, links from sites trusted sites link to.

Two attributes of a successful SEO;

  • smart
  • lazy

Andy Hagans

Get Links From Trusted Sites

I will demonstrate a system of discerning the wheat from the chaff using the Australian Tourism Industry as an example. Within established industries there exists a hierarchy of authority with many stakeholders to categorise - from spammed MFA travel sites to OTA (online travel aggregators) to owner/operator travel retailers all the way up to Government sanctioned tourism organisations. Taking a top-down perspective, I want to find the source of influence (i.e. the Gov) and from there follow the stream of link love.

Finding Trusted Sites Within Your Niche

Since this a geographically specific exploration of Australia I will limit my search to Google.com.au >> Pages from Australia. I want to find the site that ranks for tourism +site:.gov.au because I know any site that can rank no.1 for a phrase like that on a local search must have incredible amounts of trust, authority and a .gov extension. That’s the kind of site you want linking to your travel site.

First result is tourism.vic.gov.au aka Tourism Victoria. Looking quickly at the site we can see they link out to visitvictoria.com - now it’s time for some sifting!

Find Outbound Links From Any Site

Jim Boykin used to have a free tool for checking outbound links but he’s since required users sign up to his very expensive IM Ninjas program to access it. Oh well, that’s his perogative and we needn’t worry ourselves - live.com has a very cool linkfromdomain: function that does the same thing for free. Querying linkfromdomain:visitvictoria.com will show us the sites considered to be trustworthy aka linkworthy.

Now it’s just a matter of going through this list of sites and finding out who will link to you!

Get Links From Sites Trusted Sites Trust

It’s probably not feasible to get links from all of your top targets. Don’t let this discourage you. It could be that a link to your site does not belong on such trustworthy sites and in such a case you need to follow the diffusion of trust from the top down. By identifying the sites linked to from the Alpha site, and the sites linked to from these sites (and so on), you should have a decent sized list of potential link partners.

Theoretically, the further down the hierarchy of trust a site sits, the less objection they should have to linking to your site if you’ve yet to build enough trust of your own. Of course this depends on individual webmasters and whether you have a compelling argument for them to link to you.

Know Your Place in the Food Chain

Not only this, you should be able to determine where your site fits into the overall heirarchy of this particular universe of websites. Knowing where you are now will help set a path to where you want your site to be. Acting as a useful participant in that space will enable you to attract the links your site needs to progress up the ladder of topical trust.

This approach to selecting topically relevant, trusted sites to get links from applies also to .edu.au’s and, to a lesser extent, .org.au’s. You could carry out this method for .com.au and .net.au, as well, if you wanted to be really comprehensive.

Not to suggest that sites without the .au localisation aren’t relevant but in order to target domestic search you’re going to need links from sites that exist within your local universe. Bear in mind, of course, that numerous Australian sites are hosted locally but not on .au ccTLDs so it may be worthwhile to keep them in mind. The “pages from Australia” function doesn’t mind if you haven’t got a .au!

Revealed: The Leading Cause of Skydiving Fatalities

Posted on March 4, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Hitting the ground really fucking hard.

Video Comments: Wave of the Future or Already Dismissed and I Didn’t Get the Memo?

Posted on February 29, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 4 Comments

I’m just wondering why I’ve never seen anyone allow, let alone drop, video comments on blogs? It’s really easy to hack wordpress to allow video comments and it seems like every knob and his dog has a video camera and too much to say. Perhaps I’m reading the wrong blogs. Perhaps that’s a good thing.

How to Enable Video Comments for your Wordpress Blog

Apparently there’s a wordpress plugin that allows you to embed video content in your comments but I was looking for the code hack. I’ll edit this section if and when I find the page that sorted me out when I added video commenting back in october

GOOGLE You’re Not Helping

Grr I’m having trouble finding what I need so I refine my query to allintitle:”video comments” and google and gives me the “sorry there’s a chance you might be a spammer” page. That’s completely irrelevant! I just want to find a blog post whose author went to enough effort to write something about video comments that they’d put it in their title tag like I have.

***EDIT: God damn what an ordeal. I had a LOT of trouble finding the original post but here is the way to hack wordress to embed images and video in comments

You need to edit your wp-includes/kses.php file as outlined below:
WARNING: Make a backup of your kses.php file first!

To allow images add these lines after // 'ul' => array(), but before );

‘img’ => array (’alt’ => array (), ‘align’ => array (), ‘border’ => array (), ‘height’ => array (), ‘hspace’ => array (), ‘longdesc’ => array (), ‘vspace’ => array (), ’src’ => array ()),

This will allow image tags to be embedded in comments

To allow Youtube Videos add these lines

‘embed’ => array (’src’ => array (), ‘type’ => array (), ‘wmode’ => array (), ‘height’ => array (), ‘width’ => array ()),

‘object’ => array (’src’ => array (), ‘type’ => array (), ‘wmode’ => array (), ‘height’ => array (), ‘width’ => array ()),

‘param’ => array (’name’ => array (), ‘value’ => array (), ‘wmode’ => array (), ‘height’ => array (), ‘width’ => array ()),

This approach can be modified to allow videos from any site as long as you add the right Tags and Attributes

Thank you, Ayush Saran.

Why Would You Not Allow Video Comments?

Because marketers will whore your blogs out like they do with comment spam but much worse and more disruptively. Page load could suffer as well. Some videos allow you to click through to a landing page where you can buy stuff. Not to mention the potential for full frontals and deep you know what getting all up in your readers’ face. Then again, who doesn’t moderate their comments for spammy comments?

The Future of Video Commenting

I can kind of picture a bunch of experts having a back and forth in real time through video comments, like on a conference call or webinar but archived for posterity.

It’s friday night and I have to be places so I’ll leave it at that. Why or why wouldn’t you allow video comments on your blog?

Joe O’Brien on Twitter

Posted on February 29, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

It took me a while to get on, laggard that I am, but here is my twitter page.

*AHEM* I signed up at the bequest of Mr. Benjamin Theodore Wilks, an underground seo from brisbane who needs to update his life :P

Engine Summary Report

Posted on February 28, 2008
Filed Under Keyword Research | Leave a Comment

Let your competitors know exactly what keywords you’re targeting by showing them your Engine Summary Report.

q allintitle:”Engine Summary Report”

They’ll have plenty of fun going through your Engine Summary Report if you’re generous enough to let google or yahoo or live index it.

robots.txt?

Thus concludes my Engine Summary Report

RIA Sucks for SEO… So Far

Posted on February 25, 2008
Filed Under Search Engine Optimisation | 2 Comments

reading an electronic newspaperThere’s nothing like being handed a brand new topic to research - especially when you’re running on less than adequate sleep. I was recently asked to investigate why an implementation of a magazine / catalogue reader application wasn’t being indexed very well by Google, despite the software makers assertions that it was designed to be Search Engine Friendly (SEF). After a little snooping I discovered that I had practically no knowledge of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and the SEO implications thereof outside a few vague assumptions.

The application in question is the sort of thing that lets you browse magazines and similar print publications online. You may or may not be familiar with Zinio or the New York Times Newsstand electronic newspaper. I wasn’t, though I’d seen similar software in use previously but never paid it much heed.

What is a Rich Internet Application?

I’m feeling lazy so I’ll reference the wiki:

Rich Internet applications (RIA) are web applications that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. RIAs typically transfer the processing necessary for the user interface to the web client but keep the bulk of the data (i.e., maintaining the state of the program, the data etc) back on the application server.

RIAs typically:

  • run in a web browser, or do not require software installation,
  • run locally in a secure environment called a sandbox

SEO for RIA, OMG WTF? XML Not SEF!

Anyway, as far as I could discern the SEO problems with RIA’s are rooted in the fact that such applications are pure flash or AJAX or some other BS that gives nothing to the spiders to chew on. The pages get indexed but have no content other than titles and descriptions. The only other text content in the source is the “you need javascript to use this” in the noscript tag.

Worst of all, it uses XML sitemaps to cram these empty pages into the G hole. I didn’t really twig on to that being a bad thing until i read about it on daveN but it seems obvious that XML sitemaps are not always a good idea for getting pages indexed.

Ok.. question…

Is it true that the big 4 search engines are all link based, this means that for a page to do well in a Search Engine it needs 2 things .. internal links and external links ?

So that in mind if a Search Engine can’t find a page on your site, would it not be better to go get a link or two and point it to that page, that way we know the SE has found your site by a method which it values !

and

I would rather have 10 pages indexed from a 1000 page site than 1000 pages included in a index because of an XML sitemap, IMO XML sitemaps are a quick route to supplemental hell. Make your SEO’s life easier and don’t use an XML sitemap.

I had a hell of a lot of trouble getting an example of this technology to rank for “exact match string in quotes” and in the end found one page on one site out of two dozen or so I tested. This suggests that it works, but not very well!

Will RIA Always Suck for SEO?

Probably not but this assertion may hold true for a good while yet. I read somewhere that Adobe and Google were doing some stuff to come up with a better moustrap and a way to crawl and interpret flash content. Throw in a bit of SVG and OCR and you might even have text within image and video showing up in the SERPs.

Can These Issues Be Overcome?

The only solutions I could find (or come up with) were to:

Hmm… if it’s do-able that last one sounds like it might just work :)

Got any suggestions or know a better way to do SEO for RIA?

SeoDigger Premium Account: Should You Upgrade Your Membership?

Posted on February 14, 2008
Filed Under Keyword Research, Search Engine Optimisation | Leave a Comment

*Read this first* If you have no idea what SeoDigger is, it’s a Free Keyword Research Tool for gathering Competitive Intelligence. To find out more you might like to read the SEODigger review I wrote when they first launched back in May 2007.

It looks like the guys behind SeoDigger have just rolled out a “Premium Version” of their keyword research tool. This is hardly surprising as it appears to be the logical progression for sites like these - offer a powerful tool for free while you are beta testing it and add progressive layers of value and iron out the bugs as you gather user feedback. The same thing happened with SpyFu and no doubt other products will follow a similar evolution in the future.

At this point I can’t find a whole lot of useful information on the site regarding the features and benefits of upgrading to a premium seodigger membership. As usual, the developers seem more focussed on development and deployment than documentation. That’s fair enough, stick to what your good at and fix the rest up as you go. Besides, once you’ve used SEO Digger a couple of times you’ll see that it’s a fairly simple interface to get your head around.

Features and Benefits of SeoDigger Premium Membership

It took me a little digging around (no pun intended) to find out what is the difference between regular SeoDigger and Premium SeoDigger. In a nutshell:

With Premium account you can perform up to 1000 queries per hour. Also you can export in CSV up to 100000 results for each domain (if you need to export more than 100 thousand queries, contact us). You can choose duration of Premium account for 5, 30 or 180 days.

That’s some pretty meat axe shit right there. Currently, the free version is limited to 10 queries per hour for registered users (5 queries per hour for non-registered users) and CSV exports are limited to the first 1000 results. So, if you’re researching a site that ranks for 2000 keyword phrases you have to download the first thousand results and step through another four pages, cutting and pasting 250 results at a time. This represents a minor inconvenience for researching small to medium sites (or piddly niches with low competition). For larger sites with 10k+ keyword phrases, you might as well forget about it unless you’re willing to upgrade to premium access.

It appears also that the free version has been crippled just a tiny bit by requiring you to wait for your reports to be processed before being made available for download. Please note when I tried this it only took a couple of minutes. I’m not sure if this applies to premium exports yet as I haven’t tried it out yet.

The core benefit that I can discern is quite simple - it will save you a lot of time to perform aggressive and large scale competitive keyword research!

SeoDigger Premium Account Pricing

The premium pricing model will be familiar to anybody who has signed up for other premium keyword tools such as wordtracker or wordze. Subscriptions are based on the number of days access you receive and is broken down as follows:

Available Subscriptions

As with wordtracker and other tools, unless you are a heavy user you would probably be better off putting all your research jobs into one basket and going nuts on them for short, intense periods rather than paying up front for longer term access you may never use. If you think about it in terms of a solution to a pressing keyword research problem, $5 to get a bucket load of data in a short burst of time makes good economic sense.

Are the Improvements to SeoDigger worth the Premium Price?

If you need to do some hardcore competitive keyword research then the premium account sounds great and I will definitely try it out next week when I start my new job (more on that when I know more about it). Previously, you would have been limited by the number of queries you could perform in an hour as well as potentially having to copy and paste many pages worth of results for sites that rank for huge numbers of keywords.

Is There An Affiliate Program for SeoDigger Premium?

At the time of writing I can’t see one but it would make sense for them to roll one out sooner rather than later. Allowing users to benefit from spreading the word will help extend their reach. Again, given the similarities between SeoDigger and other keyword research tools like WordTracker and WordZe (both of which offer affiliate programs) I would say it’s only a matter of time before SeoDigger Premium follows suit and starts signing up affiliates. If and when they do, I will gladly sign up for it because I find it extremely useful for quickly immersing myself in new niches and keyword landscapes and will happily recommend it to others.

keep looking »