Website update

It has been said before that the websiteadministrator.com.au website was started as a test site to discover just how effective the last ten years of my part time studies of SEO bear out against the scores of "seo specialists" that are around today.

So i hand coded an old school html website with a little help from dreamweaver, ultraedit, htmltidy and a few other bits from here and there.

I use alexa as a benchmark site and statcounter for collating statistics.

I stopped pushing the seo optimization on that website a few months ago when it ranked under 250,000. The momentum still carried it to under 200,000 where it has been hanging for a few months now. It should start to back away soon until i get i get the time to be serious with it and push the site higher again in earnest.

So, what have I learned that I am willing to share with you?

What I found is that inbound links and pagerank are not high priority (though the inbound links total have now jumped in the last couple of months). Nor is the "look" of the website too important.

Content is just as important as you may have thought.

Also, there are a lot of people who claim to be expert at seo but they mostly talk about improving ad placement, how to make your ads more effective or how to buy cheaper ad placement. Well, this all can and does help drive in more hits whether you are a top 100,000 site or not. But for those of you that want higher page ranking in the first place should look at the seo course I have made available for you online.

If you don't know how to do it, hire me, I am cheaper than you might think. You can also ask me to evaluate your website too.

I will not guarantee that I can place you into the top 200,000. But for 99% of you, I will be able to get your website to freely attract many more hits.

Well, that's about all the rambling I will do for now. I hadn't posted in a little while and there is plans for some interesting stuff to soon start to appear. So stay tuned.

The fb_xd_Fragment and the FaceBook Like button

The fb_xd_Fragment
This is bit of code can appear sometimes in facebook's link back to your site from the facebook like button. However, it's not you, it's them that are creating the extra work for you.

Some sites recommend you correct this in google, bing and yahoo webmaster tools etc. Probably the smarter thing to do is to first ensure you use correctly the canonical  link rel tag. View our How to use the link rel canonical tag.

If you are using apache, you might want to include some code to get around any blank page issue. The following code and the above link are also on our web page that discusses the fb_xd_Fragment

This is the apache code we recommend at this time:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine ON
#Facebook Redirect For Added String
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} .*fb_xd_fragment.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.websiteadministrator.com.au/$1? [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

This either drops enough of the offending code or removes it completely from the browser link (use your own www address). So this seems to do the job but should probably be modified a little further. Feel free to add your work-arounds to this post.

Follow up on the above fb_xd_fragment note:
The above code seems to have correctly resolved the issue i was facing on my host. To follow the error, i was using statcounter's landing page url. The landing page is now correct in my reports. No reference to the fb_xd_fragment is reported in the landing page data anymore, just the correct url.

Zombie Cookies - Back from the Cookie Hall of the Slain cookies

Cookie Valhalla seems to have developed a glitch in it's Matrix. Dead cookies are coming back as undead zombie cookies. No, it is not a cookie with similar or new information you are looking at, it is the exact same cookie you deleted that is back to stalk you from the same place it left off in it's previous life.

We have penned an article on this exact manifestation in our two page introduction to the LSO Cookie article. The Lso is a flash cookie that can stalk you for years and years without you ever knowing it. You have to be online and visit adobe's website to set the preferences for how it interacts with you. And Microsoft has now developed their own version of this type of cookie and use it in their Silverlight software (The Microsoft version of Flash). Visit our link above for more data.

And today I thought i might expand the subject with some facts that were gathered by some people kicking around some study campuses around Berkley in the summer of 2009 and who threw together an interesting pilot study on the subject of cookies in general [click on of the four buttons to download the 2mb .pdf file].

Now, we all take what we want from a study. But here is some of the data:
Inspecting cookies set from a list of the top 100 websites, it was found that 54 of these laid 157 LSOs which resulted in a total of 281 flash cookies. And during that same course of study, 98 of these sites set a total of 3,602 HTTP cookies.

The study went on to find that some of the LSO cookies and HTTP cookies had the exact same identifiers stored in variables which of course means you can match the exact same visiting computer. They also found that some of these cookies re-spawned after deletion. Read the study your self for more data.

But what does this tell you? It can only mean that cookie cutting is essential to an excellent seo result. No?

Adwords and using phone numbers in adsense ads

Some Adwords ads are starting to appear that use phone numbers directly in the ad which is displayed in the adsense ad.

Now, this is a little sneaky and underhanded because it means the owner of the ad can draw in clients with out having to pay the adsense publisher one red cent for the service of building up his website and doing the work to allow the displaying of the ad.

What can the adsense publisher do about sites that display phone numbers in their ad?

Google gives the adsense publisher a tool to sort them out. It is called the Competitive Ad Filter. You'll find it in your adsense setup page. From there, you simply select the Competitive Ad Filter and add the url of the offending site into this list provided and that will ban them from covertly trying to get advertising on your site for free.

And the best way to do this is to fully block their site by entering the domain name without the www part of the address. for example, you would enter www.example.com/deals as simply example.com

Google aussie does it too for their $75 adwords starter kit freebie, but i let that one slide. But the other two that I found today, let's just say you'll not see those businesses advertise on my websites anymore.

I am sure some might say "But these are display ads!" to which i would say "Prove it". There isn't a way to tell at the moment, and as display ads can be as little as 50 cents per 1,000 views, i don't think the lost revenue will be much missed by most. That might explain why some click ads don't convert. But I am certainly not convinced this is true for many of these that are starting to surface.

That'll learn 'em!

Content Genius For Hire

One of the facets of the websiteadministratorcomau website is to have an easy point and click job finder tool for those that are seeking work on websites. I singled out the core countries that were hitting on the site and posted links into various job boards which should return a great resource of jobs that are current in the area.

But i gotta admit, when it comes to content of a website, many techies have no idea. Hint: Brush up on some grammar and have fun with the language. Especially if you would like to offer seo.

And i too enjoy a good play with words now and again and sometimes i will write something that is just way cool and i end up going 'gee, that is way cool', and that above link is an example of some my content genius that is for hire.

I actually pulled my first ever website article from the site because it might have been just a little too much along this same line and a little too confronting, no matter how true it was (is). Occasionally on the site, you'll find these sudden bursts of literary prowess ebbing forth that may very well signal an epiphany in another.

Affiliate Website Support and Commssion Junction

Affiliate Website Support is something that larger affiliate sites should take note of.

Commission Junction is one of those larger affiliate network sites which webmasters can join a link to products and services that are more applicable to your web page rather than leave it to the advertising gods and gurus to randomly select products that compete for your business rather than compliment your business. Ah, but they seem to have lost a bit of marketing nous at the moment.

Lo and behold, the websiteadministrator site has been officially forewarned that due to no paying hits over x amount of time, they plan to cancel the affiliate status. This doesn't particularly bother me as what is the point of my promoting someone else's website if it is not returning a commission as planned. Though sometimes it is not about money, but rather support. And i don't use them exclusively, in fact i much rather prefer Share-a-Sale. And you should try and find a products that better compliment your pages so that sales do occur in an orderly manner. There have been many visitors from my site to Commission Junction, so in my view, it is the marketers inability to close the sale, not my inability to provide a warm lead.

But this is not the point, there are two sad sides to marketing reach with his behavior.

One is that if you have a small website that does not get a lot of hits, this is one network you should make sure you do not join. I quite like the idea of smaller websites being able to set up a web page, link in some affiliate products (because of the reasons above) and let the owner go off and do his thing til the cows come home. More than likely, over the next ten years or so, he will sell a product here or there and that is great for all. And the product gets free promotion for years and years. That saves a bundle in advertising costs for the product.

Two is, that if you are a smaller business promoting your products through affiliates, you lose all these prospective clients til the cows come home and all that free advertising that goes along with it. There are more sites have much less hits than our site, so to me, Commission Junction has proven beyond doubt that it is not really interested in supporting small business to become big business. That's just imho.

Perhaps clickbank is the better solution. They also pay much a higher commission with a much greater range of products on offer.

How to submit a sitemap.xml for your blogspot blog to Google

So i was wondering how you would submit your sitemap.xml for your blogspot site when you can't upload one to the root dir. And that is ok because these guys offer a great little service for all.

And it can be done very simply if you have another site that you have previously (or if you do this in the future) Google Verified. These are sites you have listed in your Google WebmasterTools. We can upload the map to our blogger blog site to any of our verified sites in the list. Choose one you can upload files to.

So go ahead and create your site map for your blog but save it as a unique filename like MyBlogOneSitemap.xml (or if you have more than one blog site), MyBlogTwoSitemap.xml etc.

Then upload the map(s) to the verified site you selected that appears in your WebmasterTools. Browse to sitemaps (you'll find it under site configuration) and use the Submit a Sitemap to upload your blog sitemap.

As long as google has verified you as the site owner, you can load as many sitemaps as you like from the one location. You can even combine them into one site map if you like. Just remember to link them different urls correctly if you choose this path.