Taking short cuts with your website content ?

You might find Google’s latest algorithm of interest then.  It’s got it’s sights set on keyword stuffing and cloaking.  If you do either you’ve probably been hit – or you will be soon.

Cool huh ? !!

I think so, too.  In fact it’s almost laughable that after all these years so many bone heads don’t get it.

Stuffing Is For Turkeys!

We see practices as outlined here in the article Where To Get Traffic which discusses comment spamming software and other snake oil.  What you could term a fail waiting for impact, something to be targeted just like Penguin is targeting dullards stuffing and cloaking their website content.

Cloaking – The Raincoat Brigade of the SEO World

You might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later somebody smarter than you wises up.  That somebody probably spends most of their life looking at the same techniques and methods you do.  That somebody frequently works for Google, or Yahoo – or Bing!

Then whining starts.  The “no fair” and calls for “help”.

Meh!

I’m not a religious person.  However that doesn’t prevent somebody – including me – from appreciating the guiding principles.  Mostly because, in many instances, they work in more things than we sometimes expect. Believe it or not the whole issue of SEO is one of them.

The “big secret”, the “real deal”, the “guaranteed results” are pretty much distractions from the whole shebang.  The “Golden Rule”, if you like:

1. Follow the guidelines the search engines, and in particular Google set out.
2. Do unto others with your website as you would have others do unto you.
3. If the technique is shiny, bright, tantalizing and to good to be true – don’t do it!

What’s With Googles Black And White Critter Theme Anyhow?

 Hmmm.  A message here?  Panda’s are black and white. Google’s last big algo roll-out was titled “Panda”.  Penguins are black and white.  This roll-out is titled “Penguin”.  What’s up next?  Magpie?  ;-)

You can read more about Penguin and what you might be able to do to save your website Here.

 ——

Scott

Quote:

“I would prefer even to fail with honor than to win by cheating”
Sophocles

Website Content – Penguin Attack – Website Content Short-Cuts Equals Fail ?

 Singleton Marketing On App Stores
A Race To The Bottom

Ask some folks and they’ll tell you the App Store concept – not talking just Apple here – is the future upon which we either should or will or ought to be considering basing our businesses upon.

In a nutshell that’s Singleton Marketing…

*Disclaimer: referring to App Store marketing as a “Singleton” method has nothing whatsoever to do with the well-known and extremely successful John Singleton who is an advertising legend down-under.

The App Stores Concept – A Marketing Singleton

To be clear, Singletons in programming are roundly criticized by some.  I believe, like most methodologies, one should be eclectic and use what makes sense in a given situation.  So I’d not rule their use out all together.

But I do not believe for a moment we should use them everywhere and never as a default method, which some developers do.

It constrains us, it limits rather than merely simplifying.  It obfuscates our primary goal.  Shipping an app.

This is the problem with the App Stores concept for marketing.

It is a Singleton when it is the only, primary or merely major method by which independent developers of software use to market and distribute their products.

A sealed black box that experience has shown us (most recently Apples App Store) becomes a race to the bottom in terms of return on investment for the majority.

Witness the consumer complaints in Apple App Store products that dare to break the 99 cent or $1.99 barrier.

An obfuscation because most products, as per the Apple App Store, are difficult to find – even when using built-in search.

It tends to have a proclivity to reward gimmicks and disregard creative problem solving solutions.  It’s sexy for the media, because it’s pure marketing of a single entity – the store.  Within that store is the hidden value which is sealed in such a way as to prevent transparent examination (searching for a product).

(The media have the same attraction to the two party preferred political system, too, it should be noted, ignoring other “options” as irrelevant and sometimes jokes)

It has a lot in common with the 20th Century High street store or chain that sold software based entirely upon brand name and who the supplier decided would give the supplier – and then the store – the best return on their investment in the shortest possible time.

Commoditizing A Complex Profession Is Not In Our Interest

I don’t expect the average person using a computer to grasp the impost of the App Store concept.  But turning a profession into a commodity, pricing the output of that profession at a level that precludes the purchase of a cup of coffee isn’t in the software industries best interest.

To be sure, if it’s not in the software industries best interest it will ultimately not be in the average persons interest either.  The first casualties will choice, quality, functionality and a missing chunk of the economy – at that point in the pockets of a few huge corporations.

Fewer jobs – oh one could go on here…

We Know Apple And Microsoft Want It – Now Intel Too?

These kind of concepts have a habit of attracting “me too” efforts.  The end result is dilution of the original intent and further obfuscation of legitimate, independent marketing and sales.  Where have we seen “me too” attempts at controlling a marketplace in this industry on the Internet?  Oh yeah – Download Sites.

So I was disturbed, though not at all surprised, when a staffer at Intel posted this on the business of software:

Gates Viewed Hardware As A Commodity

Jobs Maintained A Reverse Contention

Probably this is best illustrated in the video of the interview of the two located here: Video, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Interview.  For Microsoft the ISV ecosphere – they invented the term ISV after all - was to be encouraged as it helped support sales of their own software through variety – or choice.

By reversing this equation one arrives at a completely different outcome.  Commoditzing software may well sell more hardware, but it will also reduce variety.  Reducing variety also means less independent innovation as the reason – in this case it can’t be separated from ROI – is fewer players are ready to invest in the necessary level of effort.

This issue, I believe ties in extremely well with Andy Brice’s article The great digital certificate ripoff? because certificates now feature prominently in both Apple’s and Microsoft’s “App Store” plans.  I do not know, however, if the likes of Intel intend something similar.

Scott

————

“Before the monopoly should be permitted, there must be reason to believe it will do some good – for society, and not just for monopoly holders.”
Lawrence Lessig

App Stores – Singleton Method Marketing ?

Website traffic stats are the metric we use to measure website success.  But are you relying on garbage to make business decisions?

If you’re using an analytics tool, like Google Analytics, Piwik, Get Clicky and similar tools you are nearly always measuring human visitors.  That’s because most bots don’t load java script upon which these tools depend.  That’s already a factor in your favour.

However many folks rely on their Apache logs – and similar logs – for statistics using tools that come bundled with hosting accounts such as Awstats and similar.

A recent report from Incapsula, a provider of cloud-based security for web sites, concludes 51% of web site traffic is automated software programs.  A majority of which is potentially damaging, automated exploits from hackers, spies, scrapers, and spammers.

Soak that up for a second in light of your assumptions about your traffic, conversions and so on.  Pause to consider your bandwidth margins and how much is being wasted by this garbage.

Incapsula provide a breakdown, taken from 1000 sites that use their service:

• 5% is hacking tools searching for an unpatched or new vulnerability in a web site.
• 5% is scrapers.
• 2% is automated comment spammers.
• 19% is from “spies” collecting competitive intelligence.
• 20% is from search engines – which is non-human traffic but benign.
• 49% is from people browsing the Internet.

Personal Data Shared

The reason this is significant, given most Analytics packages like Google Analytics, Piwik etc is because much of this traffic was real machines too, not just bots, that are either being used by humans to manually spam., scrape, dictionary attack (doing it in person is lame, I know, but there you go!) and hunt for vulnerabilities.  After blocking them my Askimet spam stat’s dropped from 707 spam comments for the first two weeks of March to 7 for the last two weeks of March 2012 and the first two weeks of April 2012 – and that’s just this blog alone.  The effect was also seen on all the websites I manage.

That’s a hell of a lot of traffic I didn’t have to waste bandwidth on.  In fact it’s exactly this much bandwidth saved, human spam and scrapers plus bots inclusive:

Nothing to be sneezed at for sure, now imagine this kind of statistic across all the sites I manage (currently 20 +).

Where To Get Traffic ? – FAIL ?

This is another reason as to why it’s so utterly stupid to be running around asking questions like Where To Get Traffic as I wrote about recently.  Auto blog commenting software is going to be challenged – that’s what Cloudflare does once IP addresses, bot recognition etc is processed by Project Honey Pot.  They are going to fail the challenge page and end up a statistic above – if Google doesn’t penalize those fooled into buying tools like auto commenting software – aka comment spamming first.

A proactive website owner, using a service such as Cloudflare, is going to maually ban them at the first opportunity – like this:

Ending up, potentially like this:

See, where some people are asking inanely Where To Get Traffic ? some of us are asking Where To Get Rid Of Traffic?

Internet Experience Suffers For Your Real Visitors

Make no mistake about it.  The human user experience suffers massively when your site is receiving this level of garbage traffic.  Across the board on the Internet this only magnifies the problem.  This is why I get so cross with scumbags writing software designed to consume traffic on other peoples websites for their own gain – as recently witnessed on the Business of Software forums.

Something for all of us to consider, at some level, at least.

“Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.”

Adler, Freda on crime and criminals

Updated 16/04/2012 8:35 am Aust EST

Just as I was getting ready to post this one of my site security systems announce that the IP address 80.35.97.91 was locked out attempting to log into this site.  A quick look at Project Honey Pots page Here for info on this IP shows it’s regularly engaged in brute force attacks against WordPress installations.  So he’s blocked at DNS level now across all the systems I run as a consequence.

Website Traffic Stats Indispensable Intelligence Or 51% Garbage ?

Is the Micro ISV phenomena facing a bottle neck and if indeed so what could be causing fewer people to become involved?

A recent thread on the Business of Software forums asked “ List postings here down 85% from peak…why? ”  The person asking the question – Che – noted that:

On that forum and on others it’d be fair to say there is some anecdotal evidence that this is indeed the case.  Che also asked if people thought it was down to “mobile platforms eroding desktop software” or changes in how that particular forum was run.

A number of regulars chimed in and signalled a number of other possible causes, none of which are necessarily wrong and none of which are necessarily correct – in isolation – either.

The Industry Suffers From Boom and Bust Bubbles

The technology sector, which includes software development of all varieties, is cyclic.  Like most industries we witness booms and busts.

I argue the Micro ISV phenomena is no different.

I’d also argue that when a sector, such as that of the Micro ISV bootstrap push we saw during the latter half of the 2000′s, becomes newsworthy and is painted as exciting a lot of people are attracted in that might never otherwise have participated.

Once in, if expectations are not met, they leave.

That exodus is more pronounced than the slower build up that one sees at the beginning.  In fact the parallel is similar to many other boom and bust cycles – and just like those seen in other parts of the economy the balloon goes up slower – but pops comparatively instantaneously.

Global Economics Vs The Micro ISV

If that coincides with wider economic issues – and I would argue it often does – as it has recently then the capacity to comfortably bootstrap is much less attractive.  When it comes to economic safety in a boom risk is more attractive even to the generally more risk adverse.

Come a bust, like the global economic crises,  risk adversity becomes the norm.

Lets Not Forget Social Networking In The Equation

Forums, blogs and similar mid to late 2000′s tools seem to be much less sexy since the likes of Facebook and Twitter became mainstream.

Social Networking has not been kind to individuality or creativity.  Indeed the converse is true. Social Networking tends to become the ultimate, cross geographical border, group think.

This was witnessed on a smaller scale on FIDO, Bulletin Boards, Compuserve and Usenet.

Looking at how people I see and hear interact with these platforms the phrase “social networking” is a misnomer.  To my mind Anti Social Networking would more often than not be an apt turn of phrase.

(See: Are You A Social Media Bullant ? )

I tend to suspect this could be another causative for a number of possible reasons.

1. The mISV Goldrush is over and people are drinking the social media cool aid to “strike it rich”.
2. People have become entangled to the point of losing sight of where they are heading within social meida.
3. People have a fantasy that the big dollars are in social media advertising, services and related enterprises.
4. It’s more satisfying approving and dis-approving of anothers efforts than to put your own balls on the line.
5. All the above and some others
6. None of the above.

Have We Seen A Similar Phenomena In The Sector Before?

Yeah, pretty much.

In the mid 1970′s we saw the meteoric rise of the Commodore – Vic 20, C64, Radio Shacks range, Amstrad, Apple’s comparatively (by their own current standards) primitive range and ultimately into the 1980′s with the ubiquitous IBM compatible – later to be better known as the “PC”.

From the mid 1980′s, even though the sector was growing it went through a bottle neck.  Fewer survivors.  Bottle necks, it should be noted even in genetics, do not represent an extinction event for the whole, rather a narrowing of the available options.

This was the time of the IBM PC clones – a configuration nightmare for software developers where compatible was often an oxymoron.

The industry survived, but it evolved.  Less hardware options, in respect of manufacturer variety, an era when Windows for example never seemed to be released regardless of promises – and when it was we wondered why.

Signs of the struggle continued into the 1990′s to be sure.  IBM’s OS2 – written by Microsoft – showed amazing promise.  In the early 1990′s the bulletin boards peaked, shareware became the marketing method of bootstrappers.  Fido, Compuserve ruled until the Internet arrived for the masses.  The same questions, at the beginning of this article asked on the Business of Software forum were in fact asked.

During this whole period the world went through two major economic squeezes – if we discount the oil and credit squeeze of the mid seventies.  The early 1980′s were tough times.  The late 1980′s and early 1990′s saw recession.  During the same period real wages sky-rocketed in the developed world, at least.

We saw a rush in the mid 1990′s again, the Internet and software development led to a boom.  At that time I was a software development consultant.  It seemed every second person had a “huge idea” that they wanted you to write for them – and they’d pay you after you finished from the sqillions they were going to make from it.

Yeah - some things never change.

Naturally the Dot Com Bust is an example many more people would be able to identify with. It’s more recent and probably affected many more people than the earlier examples.

At the time I moderated three Big 8 newsgroups that pertained to software development.  Their demise can be mapped to the collapse seen in the shake-up that took place between 2000 and 2002.

In fact the same questions were asked because the same things were seen.

Less participation in forums, fewer “wantrepreneurs“.

It’s A Cycle – It’s A Cycle !!

Yep.  That’s the boring conclusion.  It’s a cycle.  It occurs with the frequency of a ticking clock.  I’m not aware of any statistical evidence beyond anecdotal – and would be delighted if somebody either crunches those numbers sometime or shows me something else that contradicts it.

But, in a nutshell, as a group – the human race – we can almost be predicted.  Isacc Asimov wrote in his books about a fictional character called Hari Sheldon and his theorum of Pshco History and it’s capacity to predict events for humanity based on psychohistorical equations – or group psychology.

It’s a cycle.  It’s born of ourselves, promulgated usually with a complete misunderstanding by the media, embraced and soliloquised by participants and proselylized by government and educators.

It’s a cycle.

It’s bunk.

Why aren’t you writing code or marketing your product instead of worrying about it?

If you need the herd in order to be “cool” or “sexy” in your work – you’re probably in the wrong sector.  A conclusion born out by most popular cycles and fashion.

Only conceit would lead us to believe the Micro ISV Phenomena has been any different.

[googleplusauthor]

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
Oscar Wilde

Is The Micro ISV Phenomena Facing A Bottle Neck ?

Are your WordPress Category pages not indexed by Google?  Yes? No?  Hmmm.  Probably not.  In fact for all the effort we place on semantic linking our Category pages and Tag pages are generally not present in the search engines – Google in particular.

“It’s a shame!” you say.  ”They are a great resource!”  you splutter.

Well, quit whining and blubbering about it, fact is there’s a reason why they are not being indexed and there is a solution.

First off I should point out that Categories used to get indexed just fine, but as Google has improved it’s algorithms the “junk” gets increasingly filtered out.  This is the fate of many, if not all on some sites, category pages. Check WebMaster Tools at Google or do a site:yourdomainanme.com search and see how yours are fairing.

Here’s the problem.  You’ve got a blog, or a news site or some such similar website.  You’ve got all these articles.  You can get some or even all the pages indexed in Google, but when you look inside Google’s Web Master’s Tools you see your Categories are not being indexed.

WordPress Category Pages Not Indexed The Why

Remember all that scary “Google Duplicate Content Penalty” BS from a few years ago?  You know, the one Google says doesn’t exist?  Well, Google’s motto is not “Don’t be Semantic”, now, is it?  It’s true there’s no penalty that can be measured – but there is still a duplicate content issue.  That issue is a filter that removes duplicate content from search results.

Your category pages, more likely than not, are duplicates.  The reason is simple, for starters you have published articles under multiple categories and probably quite frequently.  Thus the ones you use frequently are probably actually duplicates by definition.

WordPress Category Pages Not Indexed The Solution

If you’re thinking the solution is to ensure the Category pages are not presenting duplicate content then you are half right.  Half right because you’re probably also thinking about “auto generating meta descriptions” or “Category Descriptions” on the pages.  Right?

Wrong!

For two reasons.  First meta descriptions are not part of your SEO beyond presenting something meaty and clickable to the person searching when they do find your sites pages in the search engines.

Second, Auto generation, no doubt using some SEO plugin to “fill in the blanks” for you is just going to end up putting you back at square one with duplicate content.  Face facts, if you haven’t written unique specifically it’s not going to get any more unique by having code insert it willy nilly.  Sure you’ll fluke it some of the time.  But wouldn’t it be nicer to craft your Category pages so that they play a real role in your WordPress site and it’s SEO campaigns?

Yup.

OK.  WordPress actually supports this.  That is to say it supports a nice Description for each Category Page.  Problem is very few WordPress themes implement it.  Dunno why, maybe because they need to get a clue?

So.  To the technique, a way to end the WordPress Category pages not indexed dilemma.

Warning Geeky Code Stuff Ahead!

OK.  Click this link, it’s to one of the Category Pages on this website.  It’s indexed on Google just fine.  After you’ve had a look come back here.

Note the description at the top of the page, below the header and above the list of posts?  ”WordPress For The Micro ISV. WordPress is not only a great blogging platform…” yada, yada, yada.  OK.  That is the bit we are talking about here.  That’s the bit that’s going to get your Category Pages indexed.

Your theme will have a file, usually called archive.php.  It can vary with some themes where the developers decide to get fancy.  You need to perform the following steps:

1. Backup your theme file – this should go without saying.
2. Be prepared to experiment a little with positioning if you’re not familiar with PHP or your theme developer loves calling functions within functions or rewriting the WordPress API with “stuff”.
3. Insert the code below, save and test with your theme.

[code]

<?php echo category_description( $category_id ); ?>

[/code]

You can get fancier, if you wish, and do something along the lines I did with mine:

[code]

<?php single_cat_title('Currently Browsing: '); ?>
<?php echo category_description( $category_id ); ?>
<?php echo "<hr>"; ?>
<?php echo "</br>"; ?>

[/code]

OK.  THIS IS IMPORTANT

You now have a very tasty potential category description capability.  What you need to do now, though, is go to each Category in your WordPress Admin Category section and fill out the Category Description.

The final step I’ll save for another post here, because I’m going to also recommend STRONGLY that you get rid of the plugins All In One SEO Pack and Headspace.  I’m going to recommend a replacement that not only does it better, is 100% free and GPL (no missing features) and doesn’t re-write your post titles like some of the others (like Headspace) do.  That’s going to save you lots of pain should your SEO plugin lag behind in WordPress updates and you have to disable it, only to find your Post and Page Titles go from “My Really Cool Page Title” to “$^$^$^%$%$%#%#####@@@@”

No.  I’m not kidding on that last line!!

I Don’t Use Tags Any More

Seriously, they are superfluous in the context I set up my sites on.  I personally recommend choosing either Categories or Tags and not both.  The days of Technorati are pretty much gone unless they change a bunch of things.  Google’s Panda saw to that.  So the Category pages make great sense – on their own.

If you insist on using both then to get the Tags indexed you’re going to have to try a variation on the technique used above for Categories.  Given the number of tags often involved that’s going to take some serious work.

In closing, I’d love to know whether or not:

1. If WordPress Category Pages Not Indexed describes your site.
2. If you find this tip helps you out.

“Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.”
Dorothy Allison

WordPress Category Pages Not Indexed? Most Are Not – This Tip May Help.

Where To Get Traffic

The Web Owners Dilemma

Where to get traffic for your website? Do you:

a) Use cheap software promising the world?

b) Cheat using some eBook “secret”?

c) Grab a bottle of some other snake oil from the guy with all those Twitter followers?

No, in fact where to get traffic is the wrong question to even ask…

You’ve read the blurb, perhaps downloaded an ebook or some software promising the world!  Your site may be well-designed, as far as website coding standards go, but you’re struggling for visitors.  You possibly realize the reason is because people can’t find it. You may be one of those folks who can’t even find your own site on Google.  There’s some software, frankly there’s a lot of software out there, that promise you simple solutions.  Tell you it’s all in the targeted backlinks to your site.  Promise to make it happen for you, cure your SEO ills, guarantee killer results, but wait there’s more – cure Aunt Bessie’s gout too!

Are They A Solution To Where Websites Can Get Traffic ?

Frankly no.  The reasons are varied, but in a nutshell just backlinks alone are not enough.  It is simplistic to think a complex system, like a web search engine and it’s plethora of algorithms are going to use backlinks as the sole single guide to the value or quality of a website.

So It’s Got To Be Meta Tags and Description Tags – Yeah?

No.  Google has made it pretty clear for a number of years now that meta tags are fruitless as they do not use them.  Yahoo and Bing! have said very similar things.

Is Lots Of Content The Correct Answer ?

No.  Not on it’s own.  In fact “content” for contents sake is what got websites in trouble with the Google Panda algorithm in 2011 and again in early 2012.  The reason I’ve harped on (and recommend) content is because the majority of websites out there are brochure sites without any content at all.  It seems folks confuse “lots of content” with relevant, helpful content specifically written to support the primary theme of the website.  You can almost train a chimp to copy and paste any old nonsense – in fact that’s almost exactly the level of quality many “article sites” and “content farms” produced and offered as services causing the rout that resulted from Google’s Panda - and continues to do so.

Content is useful in SEO only when it’s relevant and only if it answers, solves or proposes a related thematic problem a human being is interested in.  It’s best at generating long tail search.  That is to say supplemental results your landing pages do not already provide for.  In short, it can bring in targeted prospects looking to solve a different but related problem to whatever you are offering as a solution.  Long tail and landing pages are a bit like foot traffic and passing traffic in a bricks and mortar store.  A good proportion of foot traffic arrives with the intention of entering.  A lot of passing traffic comes in because they are interested in solving a related problem.

That their problem is related gives you a shot at introducing your solution which, as it’s related, solves another problem they are hopefully facing.

So You’re Saying It’s About Site Speed ?

No.  On it’s own site speed is not going to do a lot to help you if you haven’t got – and maintain – the fundamentals.  Site speed is valuable, in SEO, when you and your competition have the fundamentals right and you and your competition are currently running average or slow websites.  Optimizing for site speed is then a leg up.

So There’s No Answer ?

There is an answer – or rather a number of interrelated answers – to the question Where to get traffic.  But you need to begin by asking a simpler, more honest and more thoughtful question.

See, that simple question in the underlying premise for modern search engines, in particular the behemoth Google.  If you’re goal is to become part of the solution and not part of the problem this is the question you need to be asking yourself.  No quick fixes or solutions because there are none.  None that last.  Certainly none that ultimately, history shows us, do not end up penalizing your efforts or at the worst end of the spectrum (Panda) destroy your web site  presence utterly.

Indeed, you can only truthfully answer this question by creating relevant information to a websites purpose.  If it’s a product website that information will be about the area, industry or interest that product is sold into (your customers).

The only way to answer this question and implement it as an actionable solution is to make sure the information – your website and it’s content – have a measure of quality.  That measure is applied by human beings reading your site.  Those human beings are what the search engine algorithms struggle to emulate.  I say struggle in the sense the algorithms improve yearly.  They move closer towards achieving that goal.  Quality means original content that is relevant to the human searching for answers.

Quality means well laid out and accessible, or to put it another way – easy to navigate.  If the fundamentals are there, and the degree of effort will depend on factors such as competition’s content quality, competitions website age, competitions incoming quality links and the overall relevance of the content under consideration on your site.  Though extremely simplistic this is more powerful than the inane question where to get traffic ?

Indeed, if you throw away the inane ” where to get traffic ” and begin to get the question and goals right, with honest to goodness, roll up your sleeves, sweat and effort you can at that point start to look at the other elements such as site speed, HTML coding quality, image size and a plethora of other things that people pay consultants a great deal to do for them.

Write Relevant, Quality Information – The Rest Follows Naturally

My product websites get targeted traffic.  They get almost zero accidental traffic.  They tend to have a stickiness where a large proportion of people either explore the sites further or take a directed action.  That works because they generally have articles explaining how or why a certain thing should or could be done a certain way relevant to the overall topic of the site.  That takes domain knowledge.  On most things ISV’s do domain knowledge, if they don’t have it already, is fairly easy to achieve with work, especially in the digital era.  Point being the question where to get traffic was never asked when they were being built and being maintained.

The focus was of relevance.  Pleasure, a great deal in my own case, is attained in the process of providing some information that will help somebody relative to the websites target audience.  That’s a long way from some hokey where to get traffic conundrum you shouldn’t permit yourself to get into in the first instance.

Thinking this domain knowledge is hard to get?  I’ve spent my whole life in front of a computer and never been on a farm for longer than it takes to buy a punnet of strawberries or a dozen eggs.  But – ask me about organic agricultural fertilizer sometime…  As software developers, as most readers of this blog are, we tend to forget that not every problem can be solved with software.

Beware The Lure Of  Useless Un-Targeted traffic

This blog on the other hand receives a good deal of un-targeted traffic.  Comparatively it’s historically received up to 5 – 10 thousand times the amount of traffic of the product websites – emphasis on historically as I don’t blog as frequently as I used to and I’ve pulled many articles.  It does not tend to be “sticky”, very few people react on this blog in a manner that I direct because it’s a broad spectrum website covering a lot of  topics and it makes no effort to sell anything.

I can pretty much guarantee I would rather the tiny proportion of relevant, targeted traffic that comes into the product websites than the stream that at times visits here simply because the latter is cannot be leveraged as sales, where the former can and is.  The question, rather than where to get traffic, becomes how to prevent un-targeted irrelevant visits.

Concentrate On Quality Relevant Traffic Not Where To Get Traffic

Stop asking the question, where to get traffic, and start instead to concentrate on quality.  Become part of the cure and not another instance of the disease.

If you need help with this or want to see the kind of quality professionals provide Software Promotions is a perfect example (that is not a paid link, I’ve known Dave and his company through decades of reputation that he has painstakingly built up through quality).  I also recommend his blog for some top notch SEO tips that you will probably find as valuable as I do.  I can guarantee Dave is neither asking nor telling you where to get traffic.  His approach is simple, honest and sincere.  His approach is about quality and ethics.  His results stem from becoming part of the solution, not part of a massive, ever growing mob of nincompoops who convince themselves they’ve found the secret snake oil and now want to sell it to you simply because you didn’t know any better than to ask the question ” where to get traffic ? “

Taking this further – who you are linking to can and does factor in how Google perceives your trust.  If you wouldn’t trust your daughter with the kind of person running the site you’re considering linking to THEN DON’T LINK.

Automatic blog commenting, for example, is not going to help you.  The technique is a whale waiting to fail, even though the person designing fails to understand this.  The same can be said for spamming blogs and forums by paying people to do it for you.  You might get a temporary advantage.  You are pretty much, however, guaranteed to get a long term penalty from the likes of Google.  Incoming links are important but they are not nearly as important as they used to be, though quality links are still valuable.  In fact it’s possible to outrank a site with many incoming links on relevant, quality content alone.

Remember – there are many factors at play.  Some are pretty obvious and clear, some are shrouded in the mysteries held at places like Mountain View.  Second guessing the likes of Google has proven to be systematically stupid.  Search engine history is full of people who tried and failed.  The only thing that’s proven to work is hard work, ethics, relevant and quality content.  That’s why asking ” how to get traffic ?” is irrelevant to your goals.  Start on the right foot.

Forget about how to get traffic and concentrate on producing quality, original, relevant content.  Take the time to learn from the plethora of honest, ethical people out there who can help you.  People like Software Promotions mentioned above, the guys and girls and Copy Blogger to name a few.

Or.. You could disregard this and other peoples similar contention on the topic.  Buy yourself a bottle of that slick sexy snake oil – and keeping asking the wrong question – ” where to get traffic ?”

Scott

Quote:

All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy.
Scott Alexander

Update: Explanation of this post:

This post is affectatious.  It purposefully over uses a specific keyword phrase to prove a point being made elsewhere.  I do not recommend 13 instances of a keyword or keyphrase in SEO copywriting.  It can cause you all manner of ills.

[googleplusauthor]

Where To Get Traffic ? Is Where To Get Traffic The Right Question ?

TimThumb The Stupidest WordPress Idea To Date ?

Don’t skip reading this if you use WordPress for anything.  You may have a fixable vulnerability and not even know it’s there.

TimThumb is a WordPress plugin.  Essentially it takes an image you upload and resizes it to a thumbnail.  Sounds pretty innocuous until you understand how it achieves this magic.

Firstly it really prefers it’s image cache directory to be world writeable.  Yup, that’s chmod 777 on a Linux server.  This isn’t just bad – it’s totally fracking INSANE!!

On most servers you can get it to run with less risk inducing parameters such as chmod 775.  Most.  But not all.

You’d think the 777 directory permissions issue was the only daft thing this plugin would need.  Right?

Ha!!  Never fear – “TimThumb is here!”

…to paraphrase a 1960′s sci-fi series character who was also a complete loser.

Why?

Because TimThumb wants to invite a select group of other servers to have at things too.  Not that those other servers themselves are at all bad.  But external write permissions UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES is completely NUTS!

Now that we’ve established the sanity issues here…

Oh wait…

No…

Er.  We haven’t…

There’s one more…

Themes And Other Plugins Combining TimThumb Is Mega Lame!

Now.  Theme dev’s like WooThemes did address the problem, to be fair, when the first wave of hacks occurred on the net last August.  As did Thesis theme and some other conscientious theme developers.  They also made damn sure it was optional and in addition offered routines to take advantage of the built in WordPress core functions for image resizing.

• Most plugin vendors offering freebies that include TimThumb did not.
• Few ThemeForest themes even bothered to update until begged.
• None that I have seen on ThemeForest removed the dependency.

It Happend To Us – It Can Happen To You

I live and breathe WordPress.  Everyday, running multiple sites, running a tight ship.  I run external “watchdog” services that monitor the health of the system(s) I manage.  So you can probably imagine my astonishment when one of them started reporting on an instance of WordPress multi-site I manage was officially distributing malware drive by attacks.

The culprit?  A plugin a client installed – who had plugin and theme installation capacity (against my better inclinations) in his settings AND a theme that uses TimThumb to resize.  Said “client” is no longer with us.  Seems he felt the theme and plugin were more important than security and that us server Nazi’s should put up or shut up.

After terminating his account it took several hours to fix this issue.  Checking WordPress core code, directories, database tables etc.  Certainly fixable, but never tolerable.

TimThumb Solution

The solution is EASY.   Delete it.  Do not install, allow to be installed, play with, fiddle with, patch or anything else this ridiculous plugin.  If your theme developer includes it in your theme - variously the file name is timthumb.php and thumb.php but could be something else – and deleting it breaks your theme then use another theme.

Write permissions are no joke.  They are not a techy option.  They exist for a reason.

Granting external permissions is completely insane unless you really – really – know what you’re doing and the likely consequences.  Even if you yourself control that external website.  Keep control or lose it.

A final word for theme and plugin developers – especially premium ones:

People are paying (or donating to) you for you to perform a level of service.  You are supposed to understand your craft.  If you do not understand your craft DON’T DO IT.  I’m all for code reuse – but on fundamentals that’s what the WordPress core is for.  If you, as a plugin or theme developer, are having difficulty understanding the necessary steps to use the core then DON’T CODE FOR WORDPRESS!

I’ll shut up now.  My voice is hoarse from all the shouting in this post.

Scott

“Stupid is as stupid does.” 

Forrest Gump

TimThumb or How To Get Your Site Hacked In One Easy Installation

In early February, after another hard drive fail, I decided to try an SSD Drive Experiment.  I say experiment because if you look around the net feedback is a veritable cocktail of positive and negative feedback.  But then, the stability of the traditional moving disk hard drive seems to be becoming completely hit and miss.  While SATA was a step forward from the old IDE that I’ve gotten used to since the 1980′s reliability seems to have struck off in a different direction to storage capacity and lost it’s way.

So, with the price of SSD’s lowering I figured it was time to see if there was any value in the reported speed increase this technology is designed to deliver.  Given it was to be used as a drive for the OS and not for data storage I decided to bite the bullet and give it one try.

Buying an SSD in Melbourne is no mean feat.  I tried six stores on the phone only to be told, variously:

• Nobody uses them.
• What’s an SSD drive?
• Yes, we have them but they are really called USB sticks and we have them on special for $10.99!   (Grrrrrrrrrrrrr)

Arming myself with one proved to be difficult.  However I did find a nice little shop in Box Hill who stocked them, knew what they where and was enthusiastic to sell one to me for under $200.

Installing was painless, and watch out for vendors who want to sell you an “adapter”.  There’s a myth that modern 2.5″ hard drives do not operate in desktop machines that take 3.5″ hard drives.  It’s bollocks.  The power rails are the same rating.

After teaching my 2009 BIOS what it needed to know about the disk I installed Windows 7.  At this point you may detect a slight increase in perceived speed.  But the Windows 7 install is still sufficiently slow to make you wonder if there’s any difference at all.

Seven Seconds To The Desktop

That’s how long it took to get from the Windows 7 loading splash to a fully loaded desktop.  OK.   At this point I’m impressed.  The next task was to make sure the Users folders where pointing to another location in a bid to minimize the number of writes to the drive.  There is still a maximum number of writes in the millions and there is a reported correlation with the bigger the drive the more writes.

Once the Users folder was pointing to one of my SATA data drives I proceeded to install Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010 and my other business software.  VisualStudio now loads almost instantly.  The Windows versions of iTunes and Safari, veritable dogs when it comes to load time are literally instantly loading.  I have perceived no speed drop off as one would expect to see using a standard drive over the course of a month.  I’d have to say the SSD is a massive productivity boost.  Seriously.  Things in general just get done faster.   Booting is an necessary evil that, one month after install on a traditional SATA drive, would include making a cup of coffee.  With the SSD it’s still Seven Seconds to the Desktop.

Got to say, overall that the SSD for a developers system is something Jeff Atwood got right in recommending. Definitely something worth checking out for yourself, the speed and productivity boost alone has so far been golden.

Scott

“Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology”
John Tudor

SSD Drive Experiment

For those of you who are wondering what’s going on with Google Chrome and the warning it gives – Appears Malicious - about your downloadable executable or MSI this post might be of some assistance.

A recent update to Chrome has begun labelling some executables rather rudely and flatly as “Appears Malicious” either during or at the end of a download.  This is probably going to scare the pants of your customers if they are using Chrome.

The reason for this is that in the recent updates Chrome has started scanning for malicious files, primarily executables.  It attempts to match the executable against a white list of known files.  Failing that it apparently looks at a sites history.  A new site with no history – such as your start-up for example – isn’t going to be in any lists.

You might assume you’d be given the benefit of the doubt.  Innocent until proven guilty and all that.  However this is the 21st Century.  Web 2.0, so drop your old 20th Century notions of fair play and grasp that your executable may well be being labelled thus.

To check if you’re affected by this “security feature” you’re going to have to install Chrome.  Whack it into a virtual machine if you’ve got strong objections to that idea.   Next visit your site and download your executable installer. If you get the “Appears Malicious” warning  during or after the download completes you have a problem.

Given that there is no way to add your file (or site) to a white list there seems to be only four possible solutions:

1. Wait until Google decides you’re a good net citizen.  No idea how long that process takes, appears to vary and could be months.
2. Host your download on a site that has the tick of approval.  Works in a few instances, but not all.
3. Use an SSL certificate with a fully qualified link such as https://   If you’re on shared hosting this will not impress your host if it’s a shared certificate.
4. Buy an SSL certificate and use it so as to have a https:// fully qualifed link to your download.

There is a fifth way – a lot cheaper than buying an SSL certificate or upsetting your web host by using theirs for a download.   That solution is to use Amazon S3 which does offer a secure https:// certificate protected, fully qualified URL.  I’m not sure how long this method will last however, given how malware producers destroy pretty much everything decent folks use.

UPDATED: 11:26 pm AEST.  March 5th.

Quick note on code signing and this issue.  Code signing DOES NOT prevent an executable from being flagged by Chrome.

Scott Kane

“We worried for decades about WMDs – Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now it is time to worry about a new kind of WMDs – Weapons of Mass Disruption.”
― John Mariotti

Google Chrome Appears Malicious Executable Download ISV’s Take Note

Web site speed testing, like it or not, has become one of the metrics we need to optimize in that ever changing landscape that is SEO.   Since I began this blog in 2008 I’ve moved from not thinking a great deal of WordPress (from memory version 2.4) to being absolutely obsessed with it.  Not because I’ve not tried anything else, either.  I’ve built sites using Joomla!, plain old HTML and even messed around with DotNetNuke.  But nothing – worth repeating – nothing has come close to what I’ve achieved using WordPress.

For shear SEO, ease of use and some pretty slick designs WordPress has got to be the bees knees for Micro ISV’s.  Here’s a few things you might have missed…

With Google – and some of the remaining search engines – now factoring site speed into rankings it can be tough getting a database driven CMS to perform.  Clicking the image to the left shows the relative scores from Google’s Site Speed and Yahoo’s ySlow site speed tests.    While it could be argued there’s a little bit of improvement to squeeze out of it yet I’ve got to say that I’m pretty happy with the optimizations on this blog completed this weekend.  I have noticed that after optimizing a site in this manner it does in fact make a difference to ranking.  It is however important to be realistic.  If your on page and off page SEO sucks and your competitor has a mature domain with incoming links you are still going to struggle.  But at least the page speed of a database driven site, such as this one, isn’t letting you down when it’s applied.

This is why I’ve raved at times about certain WordPress themes.  I’ve found Woothemes to be largely clean out of the box and Thesis to be pretty darn good.  There are others that I could mention that are great too.  Importantly they are premium themes.  They are not freebies.  They are not from ThemeForest.  Having bough a number of themes from ThemeForest I regret to say – the ones built by designers who haven’t scampered or had their designs pulled from that site – are all to often total rubbish.  While there are exceptions – finding them requires buying themes in such quantity as to make a WooThemes or Thesis investment appear entirely logical.

Bob Walsh at 47 Hats and author of a growing collection of books for Micro ISV’s is writing a WordPress book Titled WordPress For Start Ups.  Get over to his site and sign up for an Early Adopter Promo Code.  Now – in case you are the kind who break out in hives at the thought of clicking on a link that might be a paid one – the links are direct, no wishy washy affiliate code, no under the table payments from Bob or the Federal Reserve or anybody else.

Though if you know of anybody on the Federal Reserve I’m always open to a “bail out” being “to small to fail”.  

If you are curious about doing your own  web site speed testing there’s a whole array of sites that’ll do it for you.  Some paid, some freemium.   The one used for the illustration in this article is fairly simple to use and so I’ll point you there for starters.  Again – no affiliate links - http://gtmetrix.com/

Scott

————

“I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”
Arthur Hays Sulzberger

Recursive Speed Test – Web Site Speed Testing