Duplicate Content

// February 3rd, 2011 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

Matt Cutts recently announced a Google Algorithm change launch that aims to “drive down spam levels” by devaluing content of sites that republish content and have “low levels of original content”.

Content re-publication is a big issue for content developers, particularly bloggers. There is nothing more frustrating than taking the time to research and write a post to only find it appearing on someone else’s site – often with no credit (even with credit I personally still feel ripped off!).

ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse also wrote about the change in an article, Do You Republish Other People’s Content? You’ll Want to Read This. Commenters on the post were united in welcoming the change however like most of what Google does there seems to be more questions then answers.

For example how does Google determine something has been republished? If a site publishes an article it’s only the main body of the page that duplicates – the header, footer, side-bar, comments, etc will all be different still. Google would need to have a threshold where it’s deemed to be a copy – could this incorrectly penalise a site quoting content?

Another important question is how does Google know who the original publisher was? The first site where a Googlebot finds the content doesn’t necessarily mean they are the original author – your site might only get indexed once a week whereas the other site could get indexed daily.

Ideally I would like to understand this more just to make sure Google gives you the credit for your content. Logically I think the “low levels of original content” is the key – i.e. if a site is known to republish a lot of content then it assumes all it’s content is copied.

I’ll let you know if I find out more.

Why Spam a post about Spam?

// November 11th, 2010 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

Want to hear something weird? My previous post about Avoiding Forum Spam is without a doubt the most spammed posts on this blog. What’s the deal?

Could publishing another post on spam be asking for it???

Drupal

// November 4th, 2010 // No Comments » // Drupal

As far as CMS go you tend to see most people recommending WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. There are hundreds of other CMS platforms but these are often quoted as the three main ones.

The thing that separates these three platforms tends to be the complexity involved – WordPress is considered the simplest, then Joomla followed by Drupal.

My issue with WordPress is that it’s predominantly a blogging platform – and a very good one. With a fantastic community of developers developing add-ons and themes WordPress can no doubt be used as a generic CMS system – I admit that I am often amazed at how people utilise WordPress! However I get the impression that with WordPress you need to hack it a little to get what you want. I believe you end up needing to compromise because of it’s blogging origins.

At the other end of the scale appears to be Drupal – a more fully featured CMS however often regarded as too complicated for most.

So in between is Joomla and this seemed to be the logical choice for me however when I last looked at Joomla I wasn’t that impressed – I didn’t think it was that easy to use at all.

So with Joomla ruled out I’ve decided to bite the bullet and look at Drupal, so far I am impressed with the documentation and the community. Whether it fills my needs remains to be seen…

MM Forms, WordPress Form Plugin

// January 14th, 2010 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

There are an abundance of WordPress plugins for Contact Forms.

I’ve used a couple of different ones however the one I’ve settled on is one called MM Forms.

My main decision in selecting MM Forms was the requirement to automatically acknowledge the contact e-mail via an e-mail message. At the time I couldn’t find other contact form plug-ins that had this option.

I also believe it’s popular for saving form results in a CSV file – obviously something handy if you wanted to collate a lot of responses.

It’s quite powerful however relatively easy to use – I suggest checking it out.

I did experience a problem with it recently where the form hung on submit however I upgraded to the latest release and the problem was resolved. The only issue I still have is that the date format for date fields (with calendar control) is MM/DD/YYYY – for now I just used text fields.

A fresh look

// January 6th, 2010 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

What better way to start the new year but with a fresh look!

I have just loaded up the free WooTheme called Irresistible.

I will probably need to do some minor tweaking in the coming weeks. For example, one thing that I found weird was that with the default styling hyperlinks weren’t standing out at all unless you rolled over them. I presume this was to make Post headings look cleaner but not having links highlighted I felt was a bigger issue. In any case I was easily able to add the following quick custom style and they are now underlined.

a, a:link, a:visited { color: #fff; text-decoration: underline; }

The other thing I noticed and have found in most other WordPress themes is that the heading sizes are out of whack – Heading 1 within a post will be dramatically larger than the post heading itself. Is it just me or don’t most people use the heading styles?

Anyway, it’s handy that WooThemes have an extra custom.css file where you can put any custom styling without editing the default styles. Means you can easily switch between your styles and the defaults.

Hosting in Australia

// September 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

In the last couple of weeks or so I have moved all my sites from a US based VPS to one located in Australia.

I am going to be hosting an e-commerce site and since it was targeting the Australian market I wanted to be confident that it is going to be as fast as possible for Australian visitors.

When my sites were in the US there was no real noticeable delay browsing the sites but now the server is in Australia you can really see the difference – the response times are great.

You can really tell a difference when FTPing files. A 300MB file took over an hour to download from the US VPS, now it takes less than 10 minutes.

The problem is that the cost of this additional performance is costing about an extra AU$70/month – I was previously paying US$45 (about AU$54), now I am paying AU$125. The specifications of the Australian server (disk space and traffic) is also much less too!

However when you are investing $1000s of dollars on an e-commerce venture the $70/month is insignificant price to pay.

To me the most important aspect was responsive and qualified support. After doing my research I’m confident I’ve found it and so far I am very happy with the move. Wish I wasn’t paying more for it but as I said, is it really worth the risk?

“Make Money Blogging” ebook

// August 30th, 2009 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

6-figure/year earner Daniel Scocco of www.dailyblogtips.com has released a free “Make Money Blogging” ebook on his blog.

In the 54 pages Daniel covers 5 main areas. They are:

• Content,
• Design and Usability,
• Networking,
• Promotion, and
• Monetization.

Its a great read and is packed full on helpful tips on blogging.

I will personally be going through and trying out a few things, particularly in the area of networking and promotion. The book isn’t too heavy however it still manages to cover the whole process from deciding a niche all the way through to how to make money from the site once it’s established.

I thought the idea of creating “killer articles” mixed in with normal posts was a great suggestion. It gives me some great ideas for a blog site I am planning on starting.

To get your copy, go to http://www.dailyblogtips.com/make-money-blogging/.

Plans for this week

// May 25th, 2009 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

Firstly, how did I go last week?

Pretty good for me! I think putting pressure on myself through my post last week has worked.

freecssgallery.com – tick! I have posts scheduled on freecssgallery.com until 25th June – I decided to only do 5/week so I was able to stretch out the templates a bit longer!

diyweb.com.au - tick (kinda)! I did give it some more thought however not 100% sure on what I will do yet. See my post on Friday on Mid-term goals.

Other things...
australianwebmaster.com still gave me a couple of distractions initially – seems I have to keep involved to some degree, I wish I could get a couple of mods to commit to it.
I did keep up posting here at jono.me although Friday was a bit of a stretch.
web design brief – tick! Posted on DigitalPoint.
outsourced project – tick! Posted on getafreelancer.com and hireservices.com.au.

What else happened? I got a really good ad sale for one of my sites – was pressured in to a 12-month link but it gives me some money to play around with. Not too sure how I’ll spend it yet. I do have a number of bills coming in – e.g. a lot of my domains are due for renewal around this time of year as well as my vBulletin licence is due for renewal however I feel that this is a bit of a bonus and therefore I can do something special with it (ie. invest it in something).

Plans for this week?

Well I’ve managed to hurt my back yesterday so I’m not going too good at the moment, however this is what I need to achieve this week:

Server Issues

// May 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

On Saturday evening I received a DOWN alert from my server monitoring tool, Pingdom.

It was strange because I could still see the sites. I then worked out the sites I hadn’t visited for a while I couldn’t see, but those I had been to recently I could. We then received e-mails from people who we run sites for saying they couldn’t access their sites.

I’ve had my current VPS for coming up to 12 months now and probably 3 times now the sites become unavailable. Typically though after about 5 minutes things come back up. I sent off an urgent support ticket to my hosting providers and to cut a long story short apparently the server started using too much RAM so it decided to kill some processes.

A reboot of the VPS fixed the issue and everything is normal again. The hosting company had everything back up and running within probably 30 minutes.

The sites we run aren’t all that big so a little surprised to see that RAM was an issue, we have just over 512mb of RAM which is pretty decent. We tend to hover around the 50% mark normally. To see if we can find an explanation my hosting provider has installed a cPanel add-on called Munin Service Monitor. This tool shows the usage of all your different resources – looks very comprehensive.

Avoiding forum spam

// May 16th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Webmaster tips

I hate forum spam. It’s very demoralizing to wake up in the morning to see that someone has posted all this rubbish all over your forum. Not to mention the damage it can do to your site’s reputation when new visitors are greeted with it.

I compare spam with graphiti.

What can you do? Well more importantly, want don’t you do? Definately don’t implement a “solution” that is going to hurt your users – that’s just making this worse. If your willing to hurt your users just to beat the spammers then you may as well pull the plug.

Think about the real issue – what the motivation for the spammer? Work out what can you do to address that issue without effecting your users.

For me the real issue was that it looks bad.

My forum was using vBulletin so a search through the vBulletin mods turned up a great solution. Called Prevent Spam this mod will place any post containing certain keywords in to moderation for approval. I defined the the keyword “[URL]” as a spam word, which just so happens to be the keyword vBulletin uses to designate a link – therefore any time someone posts a link, the post is placed in moderation. The mod allows you to define how many posts that users need to have to avoid this, for me I chose 10.

It’s not fool proof however it addresses 99.9% of my spam. It means I have more moderation work to do but I’m on my forum several times a day so it doesn’t wait too long before it’s approve. Obviously having moderators would lighten the load too.

I did also turn of signature links for new members. This is breaking my own rule however I considered this acceptable. Even if a legitmate user’s only intention is to post so their signature is displayed, then I don’t think they are going to be a great contributor to the forum. I purposedly set this limitation to users with less than 5 posts so for the legitimate users it’s a minor inconvenience.

Note: If you do make these types of limitations I recommend you alert members in their welcome message. Cuts down on a lot of confusion.

Another thing I implemented was a random question on registration. I chose a vBulletin mod called NoSpam!. This in addition CAPCHA and validation e-mails gives another level of protection against spammers.

So remember, be creative in addressing the issue but whatever you do, don’t hurt your legitimate users. Unfortunately it seems spam is here to stay, but still make sure you put up a good fight!