Web Talk

If you are a webmaster, there are a lot of ways to optimize a website or a blog to be placed high in the SERP (search engine results page). One of this is, without any doubt, eliminate duplicate content from your web pages, articles and posts. As a matter of fact web engine spiders (such as Google Bot, Yahoo Bot, MSN Bot etc.) while crawling a website tend to look for suspicious content which may look too alike to something they already “saw” while surfing other sites. For a spider, the more a website has got unique content, the better. This, to make sure that what a web author produces is original and has not been forged or copied from somewhere else. That’s why, if your website has got a lot of similar content, Google and other web engines will place it low in the search result for a particular keyword or a whole set of them, with the side-effect that less people will read what you have written. But, what is a duplicate content exactly? Duplicate content is everything which looks similar to something else. Two articles speaking about the same topic will inevitably have something alike, but if the similarities are too many and whole sentences are exactly the same, because they are the result of a copy-and-past action, well, this is duplicate content. But web spiders go beyond all this. As a matter of fact, if two posts have the same, or too similar addresses, for the these spiders this is another good example of duplicate content.

We don’t know when, why or because, but sometimes it seems like that when Google spiders a website, it might end up getting wrong URL link locations by arbitrarily adding an extra or a triple slash (//). For example, Google might crawl the article www.mywebsite.com/testpage.php correctly, but at the same time it could even crawl something like www.mywebsite.com//testpage.php, which in your website doesn’t exist at all, of course, but for Google is another real page belonging to it. At this point Google bots will mark them as duplicate content, and when next time a person will look for the keyword testpage, your article could be placed in the 344 position, lessening in this way the chance to be read. Luckily for us there is a little trick to avoid all this. All you have to do is write this little piece of code in your .htaccess file which usually is located in the plublic_html folder, in the root directory of your site.

1. Open your FTP client and reach your website.
2. Open public_html folder.
3. Right click on the .htaccess file and click edit. If the .htaccess doesn’t exist, just create a htaccess.txt file with Windows notepad, put it in the public_html folder and rename it .htaccess
4. Copy and past the following code in the .htaccess:

# Remove multiple slashes anywhere in URL

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)//(.*)$
RewriteRule . %1/%2 [R=301,L]

5. If you want something more efficient copy and past the following code in the .htaccess:

# Remove multiple slashes after domain

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsitename.com/$1 [R=301,L]

6. These codes will just remove douple or trible slashes anywhere in your website addresses.

Until some years ago Google Dance was very well-known to every webmaster knowing a little bit about Google and the way it works. Google Dance was that lapse of time, usually from 6 to 8 days, where a major index and ranking update of the Google search engine was performed. During these days Google also recalculated backlinks of every page in the Internet to determine how important and authoritative a certain website was. Once this big check was finished Google had to update all its datacenters scattered all over the world. This was made little by little because a lot of data was involved and, as a result, some datacenters were updated right away while other ones not. Google Dance occurred on average every 36 days or 10 times per year. It was very easy to spot because your website, your most competitive keywords and such could disappear or be placed low in the SERP from one minute to the very next one, while other not-very-famous websites and their pages were placed high in the search for no apparent reasons. To check if a Google Dance is on and if your website is affected by it, just perform this simple check. As I said there are a lot of datacenters which have to be updated. A datacenter is just a particular server having a web address giving you, as a result, the well-known Google search page. On this page just writesite:www.yourwebsite.com. Do this for every datacenter available. After that compare all the results (I mean the number of your website’s pages which are indexed by that datacenter you performed the query on). If you see that some datacenter has not indexed all of your website’s pages while other ones do, it is highly probable that your website is undergoing a Google Dance. Here are the datacenters’ addresses:

• www.google.com
• www2.google.com
• www3.google.com
• 216.239.37.99
• 216.239.39.99
• 216.239.41.99
• 216.239.51.99
• 216.239.37.104
• 216.239.41.104
• 216.239.37.147
• 64.233.161.98
• 64.233.161.99
• 64.233.161.104
• 64.233.161.105

Since August 2003 Google Dance doesn’t exist anymore…officially. Its name has been changed into a more professional and less dramatic Google Everflux and it is performed every week, with most movement occurring on Mondays. The results, anyway, even though less traumatic than the ones seen in the Google Dance, have the same effects but for a shorter lapse of time (some hours or a day at most). Anyway there are still a lot of people thinking that the famous Google Dance still exists. I am myself prone to think like that because once in a while my blog undergoes a dramatic drop in its visits. This effect just lasts 4 or 5 days and, all of a sudden everything comes back to normal. I don’t think that it has to do with Google Sandbox at all, since with the sandbox the drop should last longer than a few days. I don’t even think it has to do with demographic waves that periodically hit all websites because they are linked to specific periods such as: summertime, good weather, holidays and such. The only thing which explains what happens to my blog is just the Google Dance

The whole story started about five days ago when, all of a sudden, Web Talk started experiencing a great drop in its visits. Basically, from almost one thousand visitors a day, at the present time Web Talk just manages to gather a little more than two hundreds people. I have lost around 80% of visitors, and considering that all of Web Talk’s readers come from Google search, well, this has obviously to do with Google itself. This tendency is still on because, while I am writing, my visits are still dropping dramatically by the hour. If it continues, I fear there will be just a dozen of people here at Web Talk. I have to tell you that this thing worries me a lot. That’s why, a few days ago I started Googling to find out if I could get a solution or a reply to this big issue. To my big surprise I learnt that this is not a lone case but a spread tendency, courtesy of Google and its Sandbox. But what is Google’s Sandbox? First of all let me tell you that Google denies any Sandbox algorithm in its policy and, as a consequence, there are lots of theories about it, all of them getting to the conclusion that, despite what Google says, there is a kind of Sandbox behaviour on Google’s side. But let’s start from the beginning. Let’s start from what means being in a sandbox and why it was created. Google’s Sandbox was put in place in March 2004 to prevent fake and spam sites from being placed and ranked highly in the Google Search. Basically, if a website manages to get a lot of visitors, or a high rank or perform well in the Google Search in a short laps of time, Google gets “funny” about the website and, because of this reason, tends to think that something weird, bogus and not-legal was made in order to trick its algorithms. That’s why it puts the website in a sandbox to play…just with itself. As a result the website will stop performing well in Google Search, and while the whole website is still indexed, its keywords will perform badly and its pages will be shown very low in the search result. Solutions? No solution are available at the present time. The only thing to do is waiting. Usually Google puts a website in the Sandbox for a period of time which varies from one month to one year at most. I don’t want to discuss about Google’s policy because a lot has already being said in the Internet. That’s Web Talk situation right now. I can not do anything but continuing writing my posts as usual. For the few of you guys who were able to find this blog, stay tuned because more news and guides are coming up. If you wish to know more about Google’s Sandbox here is a list of the most interesting articles I manged to find while surfing. Continue reading »

I know that this topic maybe of no or very little interest, above all to people who know very little about blogging, SEO and Google pagerank. I also think that bloggers may find this tool useless or boring since there are tons of them promising you to predict your pagerank. Anyway the reason why I posted it here is because I have been looking for a tool like that for a lot of weeks. Since I successfully found it, I decided to share this little discovery with you. What makes this pagerank predictor different in comparison to the many available on the Internet is that…it works! True, there are many tools like, but the majority of them don’t work or are smart trap to spam your blog. This one promises you to predict your pagerank accurately giving you, at the same time, the number of backlinks and the accuracy percentage. Enjoy!

	PLEASE NOTE: This tool will provide an estimation of the future PageRank and should not be considered precise. Your Domain (URL): Utility from www.iwebtool.com

If you didn’t have the chance to read this article of mine about my concerns regarding duplicate contents, please read it now. As you know I am very worried (to the point of being paranoid) about duplicate contents in my blog, since web engines like Google and Yahoo tend to give blogs with such an issue a very poor page rank, without speaking about the fact that the more duplicate contents a blog has the more it is indexed poorly. This means that your beloved blog will be shown in the 12.549 page after a search. Since I don’t want this, but I want exactly the other way around, namely being shown in the first pages of a search engine after a search, you can guess how sensitive I am about this issue. So, today I want to speak about another way (or trick) to avoid duplicate contents and it has to do with all those blogs which are programmed in PHP. Honestly speaking I think that 99,99% of blogs are in PHP nowadays, so I guess that this issue may be YOUR issue as well. But let’s start from the beginning. Did you have any chance to see how Google indexed your blog’s pages? No? Well, do it right away. Go to Google and write: site:www.yourblogname.com. Google will show you all the pages it managed to index coming from your blog. It will also show you all those pages which are duplicated content. In some cases duplicated content pages are quite easy to spot, since they have a well known web address with attached something that it is completely foreign to you. One day while browsing my indexed pages I stumbled upon something which left me at loss. As a matter of fact I saw lots of pages with the following extension: http://www.webtlk.com/…/3022334?PHPSESSID=1dcc03b2a4b. My first reaction was to say: What the hack is this? My second reaction was to browse the web looking for more info. This was what I found out. Continue reading »

Some time ago I wrote an article about SEO and the ways to improve your blog visibility in the search engines. In the article I wrote about the choice I made to use a very good plugin called “All-in-one-SEO-pack” by Uberdose that lets your blog be found by search engines in an easier way. This has the consequence to improve the quantity of people visiting your blog. I still confirm this last point. Readers do have increased, so has the clickrate in Google Adsense. Today a Web Talk’s reader has written to me to help him solve something about the plugin I mentioned above. Let’s read his email together. Continue reading »

So, my quest for a perfect website still continues and, among the things I have discovered, is that there is an issue concerning the duplicate contents. All this started when, among the Google results for my website, I started seeing Web Talk links ending with weird strings such as: ?wpcf7=json links or ?wpcf7=json&wpcf7=json. There are even longer strings, all having the ?wpcf7=json code nested over and over. So, at this point I started trying to look for some infos about this and, to tell you the truth, I didn’t find anything relevant, apart from the good article you can see here. One thing is for sure. When Google bots crawl your website and discover duplicated contents or pages having similar addresses well, Google will penalise you sooner or later. But where does that string come from? Apparently from a Wordpress plugin named Contact Form 7. This good plugin (I still have it) was using the code only during AJAX submitting (POST) process, but that was enough to generate the problem. Now the issue has been resolved by the author plugin named Miyoshi who states:

“Dexter and some people told me that there seems be a SEO issue in Contact Form 7. The “?wpcf7=json” code is used by Contact Form 7 only in AJAX submitting (POST) process. I wonder why Google indexed such URLs even now. Anyway, I worked around the issue. Now Contact Form 7 doesn’t use “?wpcf7=json”, so I believe that kind of problem is fixed. But Google’s existing indexes are still there, I can’t do anything for that.” Continue reading »

So, after installing All-in-one-SEO pack my worries didn’t stopped. As a matter of fact, since its main keyword source are Wordpress tags (I don’t want to use many of them since I want to keep my blog structure as simple as possible), I thought search engines and Google Adsense could need more words to play with. That’s why I decided to add to all my posts more meta tags. To get keywords I decided to use the useful Google Keyword tool which looks for the best keywords available, giving you at the same time, some statistics about the current month volume and the average search volume for each given word. Despite the fact that the All-in-one-SEO author said to me that the plugin best keyword source should be WP 2.3.x tags and the words provided by categories, there is no proof that using other keywords may damage my SEO or page rank. Some results are already visible in my posts anyway. In fact my Google advertisments seem to be more pertinent to the post contents, and the posts feteched by people through the searches engines seem to be increased. In fact lots of people landing to my site from Google are usually looking for Windows Vista hacks and tricks. In the last few hours it seems that other people have joined looking for other topics. This make me think that something has changed! Apart from all these speculations one thing is for sure. Since I installed All-in-one-SEO pack my wesite registered 50 visitors more per day! (so far)