Sep 20

How to add an xml sitemap to Phpfox

Cybertowns, Feed the Spiders, Google, Heavy construction, Social abuse, Web 2.0 Cutesy Bullshit 1 Comment »

Here is how to add a sitemap to Phpfox.

First of all, you will need a script that is now paid, but my version is an old free one. I have it available for download here, the sitemap generator.

Just unzip the file and add the generator folder as it is on your root, so that you have yoursite.com/generator

This script can actually generate sitemaps for any engine, so you can use this for other engines as quirky as Phpfox. Its installation instructions are pretty straightforward, follow those, but you will need a few hacks as well.

You will need notepad++ to edit the .htaccess file. Please note that the .htaccess usually cannot be seen from most ftp clients, you will have to get it from your host’s file manager. If you can’t find notepad++, here is a download page.

Now, all you need to do is add exceptions to the htaccess so that, one, you can access the xml generator script and two, so the sitemap.xml is accessible.

Open the .htaccess with notepad++, and add these 2 lines of code:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/generator/.*

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/sitemap.xml

to the first batch of commands, and again the same two lines on the second batch of commands. Save as .htaccess, and upload. Then you navigate to www.yoursite.com/generator/index.php and configure the script.

After you set it to spider your site and the sitemap is generated, you can submit it to google.

Popularity: 3% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , , ,

Sep 16

Stats for the “site in a box” method

Feed the Spiders, Heavy construction, Mind over Pixels, Noobs, Techniques 10 Comments »

These are the current (as in, taken today) stats of the site I made with this methodology. All the traffic is organic, as in from search engine or incoming links. The site ranks for many of the keywords.

I am certain most people took my post with the step by step guide humorously, but it is not. It is a real methodology, and it works. I am also certain people will say the stats are fake. I don’t care.

Read it again, and just fucking do it.

Popularity: 5% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: ,

Aug 08

SeoPivot, a new seo tool from the team that made SeoQuake

Feed the Spiders, Heavy construction, Inorganic agriculture No Comments »

I just ran a beta trial on the new tool by the SeoQuake team. The tool is called SeoPivot, and it is basically a “which keywords does my site rank for” tool that truncates the data by the most searched terms.

You can do the same process for your sites by using google webmaster tools and the adwords keyword search tool, and check out the most trafficked keywords. But the SeoPivot tool does the same faster and better.

For example, the results for glowleaf.net are these.

The potential and the position columns are those that interest us. For example, I could easily rank for the keyword monies for the linked page, as it ranks at #35 and the seo potential is 2500, which is juicy enough.

The first result is the keyword “2fight” which I am not sure that is a real traffic maker. This may be a silly result from an algorithm (oh wait, the whole SEO world is run by silly algorithms…)

Also, the “Seo potential” is overly optimistic, since it assumes that you can rank for #1 and get 50% of the search traffic. The statistical data per serp positioning on traffic gain are roughly as shown by the picture below

Even the #1 position does not ensure 50% of the traffic. You also have to factor in google’s sublinks in serps, extended site listing as well as adwords competition (the ads are bound to steal some traffic even from the #1 listing, its their job). As a rule of thumb, I would take into consideration 20% of that column’s value.

Anyway, the tool works fine and shows some data that can be used right. The free trial only shows the top 5 results, but a single day run only costs $12.39 which is pathetically low. Realistically speaking, you only need to run this once for all your sites and then do the seo optimization.

Finally, I would like to add something. Since this was posted on a forum, some of the thread replies were “This does not generate much data, it only shows a bunch of keywords”. The data it shows are filtered to the level that it shows only the keywords that will actually bring in traffic, AND the keywords that you have a chance of ranking for (<300 site position). Also, if you run the tool on your miserable 2 month old website, what did you expect to get?

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Popularity: 10% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags:

Feb 01

Reverse engineering a bought link

Cardinal Sin, Feed the Spiders, Google, Mind over Pixels No Comments »

I have been thinking whether or not to write this post for about two months. Today, lucky for you, I was in a “what the hell” mood so I wrote it.

Why? Because the issue discussed here is a diamond. A real, valuable gem among the sea of trash. Seriously. Let me explain.

As I have posted before, I like selling links, it is a an easy/automatic way to monetize your sites with a very stable income. Also, it doesn’t clutter up your site. I use TLA on many of my sites. A few months ago, as I was checking out my network and stats, I saw something very interesting. It is not every day, that you see a well known domain in the “link buyers” section. Yes, a well known site, had bought a link from my site through TLA. As a paranoid affiliate marketer that I am, I couldn’t just feel good about my minute of fame and move on. I had to investigate.

Please do understand that I will not say the known site’s name, or the page that the link is located. I may be an asshole, but I am not a fool, and I don’t want to expose them (don’t bother looking for the link, you will not find it). I shine the light on this issue because it is valuable information for the right kind of man, not to harm a well known site. The site discussed is really, really well known. We are talking about an Alexa rank of ~3000. It is one of the blogs almost everyone knows about.

Ok, so, bigasssite.com bought a link from me, through TLA, with the anchor text widgets (the real keyword is a hot, high traffic and competitive one). The link has been live for 3 months I think, and it keeps going.

Why should we care? Well, I looked at the page linked, and I saw a post from 2006! Yes, 2006. Now that is interesting… 

I check the link price, its the standard TLA 8$. Nothing much, but someone bought the link! Someone on that site’s SEO team sat down and confirmed the sale. In order for that to happen, there must have been a reason. (Unless that site had a monkey as an SEO that did random things, there must have been some kind of logic behind this)

I check my page, the one the link resides on. It is a page that got a lot of traffic, a review that turned into a successful linkbait, getting diggs, links from other blogs, lots of social votes, and even linked from two high traffic forums. That means the page is a juicy one, making the bought link pretty valuable for SEO purposes (and a lot more valuable than 8$, but lets not get into that…)

Investigating the domain is pointless, it is one of the most trusted, old, ranking sites on the net. 20 million backlinks. Why does it need mine?

Ok, so, lets investigate the culprit page. It is a nice, PR3 page. Yahoo shows 200 links pointed at it, which is rather much for a single page, but not that weird. Its a fucking blog post, like the rest of the site…

There is a difference though. The site is separated in categories (technology and internet related). It is mostly a news site, and the culprit page is just another news story, almost like everything else in there. What was I missing?

I check the comments, a classic series of useless rants from nobodies on the net. The trackbacks on the other hand are something interesting!

There is a series of trackbacks, all from authority news sites, quoting the post. As it seems, badasssite.com managed to be first, or at least one of the first to announce the story. The other news sites in the niche had to link to the original article. Bear in mind, the story is classic industry news, nothing earth-shattering. The links are not many, but they surely are authoritative! (the widget keyword is included in the article title, so the incoming anchor is “blah blah widget”)

I closely inspect the page to find an affiliate link (the widget has a lot of paid services with nice affiliate programs to refer to). No aff links, no internal php files with redirects, nothing. Who would be crazy enough to not monetize a page and at the same time buy links to it? (The page has ads on it, the same ads all over the domain. I cannot say the exact keyword, but it is one that every SEO would monetize with an affiliate link without blinking)

To the SERPs then. I check the rankings for our widget keyword. To my surprise, or not that much because the keyword is competitive, I see a shitload of results. Top ranks are all from authority sites, and right there, on spot 19, I see our culprit page!

Now that is a ton of traffic. Even being on the second page is enough to bring in the visitors. I assume that the culprit page was ranking under #19, and it just needed a gentle push to get higher. The traffic is not converted right away, but since the badasssite.com is a, well, bad ass site, it gets more loyal readers by the minute.

The widget keyword is not one that the badasssite.com’s SEO team would normally strive to rank for, but it is certainly one that they would be happy to rank for. I would have done the same, if I saw my barely relevant site rank #22-23 for a keyword like that.

So, what do we learn from this experience?

  • Big sites buy links. Screw Google and their best practices.
  • Big sites can buy links and get away with it. Screw Google and their best practices.
  • Smart SEO means optimize even for the keyword that is not that relevant. Opportunities do not grow on trees.
  • If you see something being done by someone more experienced that you, that you don’t understand, study it better.
  • If there is a cheap, effective, easy way to optimize, by all means go for it.
  • Sometimes a slight push at the right direction is all that is needed.
  • If that slight push happens to come from a page with a lot of linkjuice, then you are set.

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Popularity: 48% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: ,

Dec 15

You can now set your own Googlebot crawl speed

Feed the Spiders, Google, Heavy construction, Internet Marketing No Comments »

crawlspeed.jpg

You can now set your own crawl speed on Google Webmaster Tools. What does this mean?

Many things actually.

1st, this shows that Google acknowledges that its automated settings are sometimes crappy, and an algorithm cannot always predict the perfect crawl rate for a site. Google is seldomly known to give options to the webmaster that affect rankings.

2nd, this makes Google Webmaster Tools even better than they already were.

All of you newbies, try to resist the urge to set the crawl rate at max. You don’t need it. On 99% of sites, the automatic setting works fine. There are only a few cases where you might need a custom setting. For example I have a few sites with thousands of pages, but only 10% of them are indexed. I assume that setting a faster crawl rate on those will help index a few more thousand pages.

It will be rare for someone to want to reduce it, despite the fact that Googlebot is the most frequent visitor, the automated setting is usually optimal. Maybe on huge indexed database sites? Nah, not even then.

So, when should you increase it? If you have a very new site, setting the bar at max might increase the indexing time. No idea, I am just guessing here. Try it.

Also, you might want to increase it a bit if you have a frequently updating site and you don’t see your new posts on a search after a few hours. Although, as I said, the automated settings usually adapt to that scenario. But, if it does fail, here is your setting that will fix it.

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Popularity: 47% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

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