RSS Feeds: Getting Back Into The Groove
My wife departed on Philippine Airlines flight number 102 last night at approximately 10 pm. She's now at the Los Angeles domestic terminal for United Airlines, waiting on her flight to Phoenix.
The UV SEO Series – Part Five – Keywords
In part one of "The UV SEO Series", I introduced the series. In part two, I wrote about having one website address. In part three, I wrote about internal linking strategies. In part four, I emphasized meta descriptions and meta tags. Today, I'm going to give you some ideas about keywords, keyword density and keyword placement.
One Bad Scraper Foiled – Success with Google
After receiving a Google Alert with my domain name on it (for link:www.untwistedvortex.com), I found a website that had scraped 40 of my articles from my full feed, in their entirety, and put them up exactly as retrieved. The website in question, elanso.com, is based in China so it's not like I could get my point across even if I did find out who owned the site. Last week, I reported the site to Google and a day later, found they had 39 more articles than what I found before (for a total of 79).
Defeating Bad Scrapers the Free and Easy Way
As a website owner, you should be worried when someone scrapes all or part of the content of one of your pages. If you're not familiar with it, the Copyscape service is one way to find them and start the elimination process. There is a procedure, which you can do for free (Copyscape charges for more than 10 searches per month) over and over again, that will never cost you anything.
Reducing AdSense Impressions from Robots
(Update: On second thought, never mind. AVG has seen the error of their ways and the other code simply keeps logs from showing the Live Search referrer data. I'm blocking the log data a different way now. Another update will be in a later post with a similar title.)
I've spent the last umpteen hours scouring the Internet for this information. There are two robot sources using JavaScript robots and causing extra AdSense impressions. They had to be terminated.
Here are the .htaccess rules that can stop them both:
What Google Considers Hidden Text and Links (Cloaking)
This actually a follow-up to my "lesson on surreptitiousness" and a more formal response to a comment by Hari of Hari's Corner. Hari said "…any content that is hidden from readers but available to search engine crawlers is considered "cloaking" by google according to their ToS and would be considered spamming their search engine."
A Quick Lesson in Website Surreptitiousness
Instead of heading off to bed like I should, I decided to stay up for a few minutes longer to pass on a trick that you may or may not have thought of. I also wanted an opportunity to use "surreptitiousness". I love that word and every variation of it. It means "obtained, done, made, etc., by stealth; secret or unauthorized; clandestine". In my case, it would be a case of "stealth blogging".
The Value of Comments in Search Engines
I haven't been keeping any secrets. I've been testing search engine optimizations since January and have been verifying the results. Whenever I find anything of significance, I usually write about it.
Splog Wars II – The Scrapers Don't Get A Chance To Strike Back
At the request of HMTKSteve of Ramblings from the Marginalized, and because I've been meaning to write this anyway, I'm going to tell you why Google restored my PageRank again.
Never mind that I no longer do sponsored posts. They're all gone and my PR was restored after I requested reconsideration from Google. It dropped again last month, while I was out of the country, and I requested reconsideration again upon returning. The cause for the drop the second time? I'm pretty sure it was splog (scraper/spammer blog) linking effects combined with someone reporting a banner in my left sidebar as a paid link (when it isn't). The latter situation gets my goat because Google dishes out the penalties first, without proof of any kind, and removes the penalties only when you contact them.
I digress. My PageRank dipped because I wasn't paying attention to the sploggers (I had other worries on my mind) for the last couple of months. This mini-tutorial will tell you how I managed to get my PR back up, and a point higher than I expected.
Google XML Sitemap
The Google Webmaster Tools is the starting place, but before you use them, you need to make sure your blog is set up to make it really easy. The first thing to do is include an XML sitemap at the root of your website. There's even a handy WordPress plugin that does the dirty work called Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. Pardon the term, but you can Google for sitemaps for other kinds of websites.
Google Webmaster Tools
If you don't have an account with Google, go to Google webmaster tools and create one. After you've done that, or after you've logged into your Google account, you should find yourself at the "Dashboard". This is where you add your site, upload your sitemap for the first time, and verify site ownership.
The dashboard is also where you do another form of dirty work, as you'll see if you look at the links to the right of the page. You can download data (once the data is populated in their databases), report spam in their indexes (this is where you report sploggers), report paid links (be careful to report verified paid links only — they're pretty easy to spot) and request reconsideration.
Google Alerts
If a splog links to you, you may or may not receive a ping. If you do, so much the better. If not, use Google Alerts to find out when anyone mentions your site anywhere that's indexed by Google. If it isn't indexed by Google (you can find out by searching and I'll explain that in a moment), Google can't and won't do anything about it. Here are the search terms I use for my blog:
link:http://untwistedvortex.com
link:http://www.untwistedvortex.com
Untwisted Vortex
UntwistedVortex
untwistedvortex.com
www.untwistedvortex.com
It may seem like overkill, but this catches them all.
Digital Footprints
When you get a ping or an alert, Google wants to know what search term caused the splog content to appear in their index. I use the FeedEntryHeader WordPress plugin to prepend (yes, it's a word) my copyright information to the beginning of my full feeds. When I search, I search for "2008 RT Cunningham" (with the quotes) and every site using my full feed, scraped to partial or otherwise, pops up. Most are legitimate sites, like social sites, while others are blatantly obvious sploggers.
I just did searches for 2007 and 2008 and found 24 links, all legitimate. There were many more when I first returned to the Philippines and I reported the bad ones.
Request Reconsideration
Don't even bother with requesting reconsideration if you have paid links on your site without rel="nofollow" added to the links. Your request will be denied. Otherwise, go ahead and do it once you've reported all the spam you find. Even if you don't find any spam, and your PR dropped, request reconsideration anyway. People make mistakes.
I shouldn't tell you this, but I will. Even if you have paid links without the "link condom", you should request reconsideration, especially if the paid links are only on certain pages and not sitewide. I don't need to say this, but stay away from payperpost.com and text-link-ads.com — Google has already made it known that they'll penalize you for their links and sponsored posts. Of course, if you don't mind a PR of 0, it really doesn't matter, in which case you shouldn't be reading this.
Contact The Sploggers
Or contact their web hosts, whichever works best (most splogs don't have contact information). Attempt to get the offending page(s) removed so they don't accidentally get indexed by Google again. Remember to preserve the evidence (screenshots work) before contact.
Thoughts on Themes, RSS and Splogs
In our never-ending efforts to get more readers, more traffic, better statistics, and whatever else we're trying to achieve, we do things we think will make our blogs more attractive to readers, advertisers, search engines and others. Sometimes, I think we're wasting our time.
Changing Themes
I've noticed that a lot of bloggers have been giving their blogs face lifts. For example, Agent Sully over at Life Learning Today replaced her old theme with another theme and announced it with "Life Learning Today Gets a Makeover This Weekend.". She is just one of many.
Changing themes can make blogs more attractive to readers, but only to the readers that actually visit the blogs. The only reason I would ever change a theme would be because I'm tired of looking at it. Why? Because regular readers will normally subscribe to one of my RSS (really simple syndication) feeds and visit only to leave a comment. Sadly, this is an indisputable fact.
Blog design DOES matter, though, and Lin tells us why with "5 Ways To Make Your Blog Posts SCREAM For Attention". If a blog suffers from too many widgets, slow-loading times, and doesn't take advantage of hotspots and readability, changing themes may be the only solution.
RSS Feeds
I spent a few hours clearing out the feeds from my Google Reader account and then re-subscribed to the feeds for the blogs that are still active. In the process, I found quite a few blogs that didn't have subscription buttons, links, or anything to make it easy for me to subscribe. And some of those blogs didn't have the auto-discovery code in their themes, so subscribing to their feeds was a challenge to say the least. I hate to point fingers, but "Ramblings from the Marginalized" is one such blog. I could have constructed the feed address, but I found the FeedBurner chicklet on his "advertise" page. Most of the blogs that either didn't have a button/link or had it way down at the bottom somewhere were Blogger (blogspot.com) blogs. It seems that people who have self-hosted blogs tend to make them more visible.
I can understand if bloggers want to get actual visitors versus feed subscribers because feed subscribers don't see and click ads. The important thing to remember, however, is that regular readers don't click ads. Regular readers contribute in other ways. Why not make it easy for them and put your subscribe button or link in a prominent place?
Splog (Scraper Blog) Concerns
I could go on and on with this topic, but I'll direct your attention to "Should You Let Scrapers Link to Your Blog?" and add my two cents. I haven't seen too many scrapers linking to my blog since I started using the FeedEntryHeader plugin. I think it's because most sploggers are too lazy to strip the links completely out.
When some not-so-lazy sploggers steal my content, at least enough to show up in Google's index, I report them using Google's Webmaster tools. That's part of the reason my blog's PageRank recently rose to 5. By the way, did anyone notice?
Final Notes
Since I've re-subscribed to a whole lot of blogs (and I really mean a lot), you can expect to see my avatar (the vortex image) to appear in a bunch of sidebar widgets (for those that use them) and my name appear in many more comments. Speaking of comments, a lot of people are wasting their time building links with "dofollow" blogs. That's a topic in itself and I'll leave it at that.
