Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: links

  • Panda and Vince – Googles latest updates

    And… there was also a caffeine update.  Well, mid October there was an update to Panda – somewhere in there was a Vince update and then caffeine saw an update in early November.  Did you notice a change in the search results?  Do you feel like they’re better or worse?

    Panda Gao Gao in San Diego Zoo, USA
    Image via Wikipedia

    I’ve had several sites that have “fluctuated” through these updates, some better, some worse.  One or two were dramatically worse.

    I don’t seem to be alone in seeing some impact and here’s a summary of what the issue is and what to do about it.

    Panda is about lowering the importance of sites that are thin in content.  It has been easy to rank sites without much content for some time.  Just throwing a few back links (in many cases also thin on content) and you could do quite well.

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  • Ranking for a Search Phrase in Google

    I guess by now you’ve noticed that I’m not keeping up with the 1 post a week rate that I had for a while there. I’ve been thinking that at this point I’m going to be getting in one a month or so. More if the mood strikes, but from what I’ve been seeing that should be more than enough…. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately experimenting with getting good google rankings for search phrases and thought I would take a moment to give some details…. Maybe I should back up a few steps first though for some background….

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  • PHP Link Directory and Importing Links

    I’ve fought this evening with Php Link Directory. I had a list of addresses I wanted to add in bulk and managed to string together the correct format of a csv file for import. It’s somewhat of a long story, it started with lynx dumping the source of a web page, sed trimming just the links, then just the link titles, etc. Finally a few scripts later I had a basic spreadsheet. Added NULL values in a few fields and tried the import. Everything looked good, so I thought I’d test adding a link through the user interface and see if everything was good.

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  • Web Site Promotion Through Directories

    When I first started building web sites I seemed to have very good “google luck”. I designed pages, published and then submitted to 4-5 search engines and a couple directories and the traffic started coming in. The search engines were altavista, google, hotbot and a couple others and the directories were yahoo and dmoz. Lot’s of things have changed though. Recently submissions have been down to Google, MSN (Live), Yahoo and the Yahoo directory and the DMOZ. The DMOZ has been more and more frustrating in recent years as it seems to take several years to get added. So is that all you can do to get traffic for your site?

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  • So many browser tabs, so little time – the swirling vortex

    The last few weeks have been fairly eventful and I’ve accumulated quite a few web pages open in tabs that I’m still holding open (just counted 49 tabs across two windows.) Many of these things are just for my own memory and others will be posted because I thought they’d be of wider interest. For starters I had a bad attack of vertigo on August 30th. This is the second time I’ve had such a spell (first was April of 2006.) They seem to be triggered by allergies… which leads to fluid in the ear – fullness/roaring in the ear and some difficulty hearing and… if it keeps up for a week or so the equilibrium goes out. Sometimes it’s just mild dizziness, but this was “category 5 hurricane riding out in a small dingy” vertigo…. I’ve been carrying Meclizine around with me since then and have been reading about Meniere’s disease which sounds strikingly close to my symptoms. I haven’t yet seen a doctor for official diagnosis, but plan to setup an appointment to get a bit more aggressive on the allergy front. Anyway… below the fold are some links to info on Meniere’s disease.

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  • Another set of interesting tools for investigating how google sees your sites.

    There is a nice collection of tools at www.iwebtool.com, specifically at http://www.iwebtool.com/tools/. It’s more than just how google sees your site, there are tools that show how your page ranks at alexa, etc.

    http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank for instance is the Visual Pagerank tool and http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_prediction is the google pagerank prediction tool.

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  • Link spam surge….

    Spam spam spam spam…. the last couple days have been busy for the akismet spam plugin for my sites. They’ve been catching a lot of spam comments it appears. Many of them (the comments) seem to be filled with links to forum posts. I’ve noticed several have been shut down at this point. It’s not clear to me if the spammers are exploiting true vulnerabilities in the forum software, or simply finding forums that allow anyone to sign up and post. Either way, they’re leeching other peoples bandwidth to try to hussle (hustle?) their stuff. Along those lines, I wonder if there is a good listing/directory of legit sources of prescription drugs online? The topic is so awash in spammy/spamvertised/offshore based sites it’s hard to know easily who to trust/who not to.

  • Network swiss army knife

    There’s no better way to say it, netcat is SOO useful, and there is an encrypted variation… cryptcat, you can do quite a few interesting and useful things VERY easily with these two utilities. (*It’s one of the utilities I used to image a live running system to a file on a network server.) The source is available from the previous two links. There are binaries for windows for both netcat and cryptcat available here, but with all such tools you should be wary of where a precompiled binary comes from.

  • Clamav 0.88.5

    Clamav antivirus software – multiple security issues addressed with release of 0.88.5

    project page, release notes

    binary download links

    source download

  • Clearing the deck….

    As you mgiht can tell, I’ve been trying to “clear the deck” of posts that I’ve been meaning to put up. Some are just links to several pages that I’ve kept up for a few days because it was interesting. But just so you know we’re in the midst of a post flood.