Website Building Biz

Google Considering Internet Search Version 2.0

The future of Google search might look a lot like the current set up on sites like Reddit where users can submit, comment on, and vote for links they like. A limited number of Google users have begun to see up and down arrows next to all links on a search result page, and a place to leave comments about a website that appears in said search results.

Of course, Google’s current search results are based on a protected, private algorithm that somehow uses the number of incoming links, the relevancy of the pages linking to each other, and the organization of text and anchor text on the pages. Specifics aren’t completely known, but SEOs are always picking away at anomalies and establishing patterns that help explain the visible search results. I’ve had my own first run-in with an obvious penalty that knocks me down relative to what had been ever-increasing positions, so obviously there is a little more subtlety than just counting everything up and taking the highest pagerank.

A lot of this business could simply “go away” if Google moves forward with a new version of search that has been tested and tweaked for the last few years: The Industry Standard is reporting that “Google is considering allowing users of its search engine to tinker with query results by re-ranking them and commenting on them”

For now, Google is only trying this out with a few people’s accounts, and even then each search result profile is stored as a personalized result.

But obviously, this opens up a bigger arena of whats possible from letting users edit search results. Google is almost certainly learning how sites like Digg and Reddit use surfers decide on how to rank links in a democratic fashion. As long as Google was able to reign in abuses of people using bots to automatically vote links to the top of the search results, a democratic system of web rankings could be beneficially as a means of knocking out made for advertising and other spammy websites that don’t deliver what they claim to promise.

So what becomes of the backlink-building school of SEO workers? Perhaps, back to journalism, photpgraphy, art, and programming school - because the new internet search version 2.0 would be ruled by the value of content first. Of course, links will always be important even if its just for the direct traffic they bring in. Yet we can already see that they don’t carry quite what they used to in terms of SERPs and the adoption of this new democratic ranking technology will only further dilute their importance in gaining search engine traffic.

Here is what it looks like in action, courtesy of Justin Hileman’s site.

Over Optimized - the Minus Thirty Penalty Strikes

Well it finally happened to me, I’ve been hit with what looks like some sort of minus thirty penalty in the big Google. One key search phrase was slowly moving up the list, and I was impatient. So I sought out links, lots of links - but I never paid for them. Anyway, about last week, the page I had been promoting completely fell off the SERPs and one of my related pages ended up ranking 30 spots behind where the original had been.

For a less competitive keyword phrase:

Week1

• Page A = #9
• Page B > #1,000

Week2

• Page A > #1,000
• Page B = #39

Yet, for the more competitive one-word search, Page A still ranks in the top 20.

These appear to be indications of a minor, page and phrase specific minus 30 penalty. Luckily, it hasn’t hit my entire domain and hopefully this “warning shot” from the search engines will be the wake-up call that gets my future SEO better in line with the best practices in the industry.

What causes the minus thirty?

Here is some advice from Google itself via Adam Lasnik regarding the minus thirty:

• Is my site providing unique and compelling content?
• Would most consumers find my site to be more useful than others in
  this space?
• Am I abiding by all of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines?

The first two are obvious: Write awesome content. Write the kind of page that really helps people understand what they are searching for. Anticipate the questions visitors are asking, like: What causes a minus thirty penalty? How can I recover?

Webmaster world has written the tome on this issue, nearly 200 pages of discussion to be precise. I’ve dug through the thread as far as I can without signing up for their paid, premium service, so I’ll share what I know.

The common theme in the minus thirty penalty is “Over-optimization.” Here are the most suspected causes:

• “Thin affiliate” - not a lot of content, mostly just commercial content
• Ultra-repetitive anchor text - Did you get 100 deep links this week with the exact same anchor text, and does that anchor-text happen to be a highly competitive adwords keyword phrase?
• Do all of your backlinks come from the same few sites?
• Do you have ten times more backlinks than the sites you’re ranking next to in the SERPs?
• Are you keyword-stuffing? Are your targeted keywords repeated excessively in the content? Does this match the anchor text coming in from suspicious sites?
• Are your backlinks decaying or turning-over rapidly? (Do you post to several high PR bookmarking sites just to have your link fall off the page an hour later?) High PR backlinks are great - but they need to be stable and last. Constant wild fluctuations will trigger another flag.
• Are you spending significantly more time on SEO than creating new content?

What I should have realized was that the sites ranking at the top of the phrase I wanted to be on all had very few backlinks and had organically achieved their top spots over the course of a year or more. If the top website has two years of age and 20 backlinks, my two month old page with 200 backlinks was obviously going to look suspicious.

Now what? How do you recover from the minus thirty?

My plan is to simply spend more time on the content and less on the backlinks. Already, I’ve seen my number of indexed pages jump up a little bit higher since I’ve adopted this strategy and at least Page B is now moving back up the SERPs mountain, even if its coming in from 34 spots away.

This isn’t guaranteed by any means - and there’s a good chance that my Page A will never have the same search ranking it used to have (ahh the good old days).

The best cure is prevention. Write content. Get a few backlinks from authoritative websites. Just don’t overdo it! Even white hat SEO can turn grey when it is used excessively.

Are you sure?

No! Absolutely not! The internet is a guessing game. All you can do is listen to Google webmaster guidelines and read about the experience of those who have gone in before you. If you figure out the puzzle, you can succeed.

The only thing I’m sure about is that content matters. There’s nothing quite like going viral - not just for immediate traffic but also for long-term search engine position. Google seems to know the difference between real hype and manufactured marketing. If people like your website, search engines will too.

Shared Hosting is kind of like Fractional Reserve Banking

I want my bandwidth!

Think shared hosting deals are too good to be true?
Upset about “overselling” of network resources?

That’s fine, you can pay more and get 100% of everything 100% of the time. But if you want to hold this opinion consistently, you might need to go withdraw all of the money from your bank accounts because modern banking - Fractional Reserve Banking - works the same way.

You see, the banks take your money as a deposit and they hand you a receipt saying they’ll pay it back to you, but they only have to keep about 10% on that on hand. If enough people went down to your local bank and demanded deposits equaling 15% of the bank’s total obligations, they’d have to shut the doors and stop honoring their promises.

Most of the time, this doesn’t happen. Most of the time, people only withdraw the bandwidth, processing, or cash that they need at the moment so the system runs smoothly. And in many ways, its way more efficient than “safer” alternatives. If you have a small site and a private hosting server, you can be almost certain that you’ve purchased more resources than you need. If you hold cash on hand or under a mattress, you give up the physical security at the bank and any chance at earning interest.

The run on the bank or… data

Of course, the worst thing that can happen is that everyone goes to the same bank or the same website on the same day. The tellers and routers won’t know what to do, this isn’t the volume we’re used to!

Well, the risk of failure on shared hosting is pretty small compared to its fractional banking counter-part. Maybe your site goes crashes and you really do need to upgrade to get it going again. Even this risk can be offset my optimizing your server processes for bursts of traffic.

Local News can Survive Online

It should be pretty obvious by now, but the internet is radically changing the nature of the publishing business.  Much like Johann Gutenberg’s original printing press, online publishing software and content management systems reduce the capital investment required for a writer to make the transition into publishing and media distribution.

Old media industries - particularly television and radio and local newspapers - have been hard hit by the resulting shift in advertising dollars.  The internet allows advertisers to focus their message on target audiences in a much more specific way than “mass media” could ever hope to accomplish.  Niche marketing creates higher conversion rates, because the viewer of the advertisement has already been matched as someone who is more likely to be interested in the product in question.

And wow, has local news been hit hard.  Even big time papers are announcing mass layoffs and permanent closures of certain departments ranging from literature to local cultural events.

But its not all gloom & doom: My own local paper is adapting, and they’re going online to deliver local news in Jacksonville.

Here are some technological advances they’ve incorporated to get the most out of local news coverage:

• Crowd-sourcing:  There’s plenty of space on the digital paper to include more community-based journalists and local university students who might not otherwise get published.
• Interaction:  The “Just-In” stories use a blog-style format that allows users to contribute comments directly on the news item.  There’s also a forum where people can discuss topics in greater depth, but it has serious limits in my opinion as the software is old and it doesn’t support images or hyper-links. This just means even more potential left untapped for now.
• Updates:  When was the last time a paper and ink newspaper told you what the traffic was like right before you got in your car to go to work?  When hurricane Fay recently hit our city, the local newspaper had constantly updated storm reports online.

And of course, the money must be good.  While a lot of local newspapers are firing long-time staff, ours is looking for new advertising managers.

How is your local newspaper doing?  Have they adapted with the times, or are they slowly fading away?

Pligg sites crashing, getting spammed, and attacked

I’m a big fan of Pligg - its a free to use web 2.0 content management system - but if you’re going to use it you need to realize it can be quite a handful to keep things operational.  In the last few weeks, some of my favorite Pligg-based sites have become victims of code corruption, security loopholes, and even automated spam attacks.

Of course, just a few weeks ago I posted that one of my sites was taken down by some sort of Pligg security vulnerability that corrupted my administration access and lately I’ve seen similar things happen to other sites before they go down too.

Pligg is free to use, and quite frankly I have no idea what the business model is.  Its on version 9.9.5, but technically everything up to 1.0 is supposed to be beta.  Last year it seemed like one of the major partners behind Pligg wanted to sell it, but this is sort of confusing because of the license it was released under treats it like its open-source.

Well, people do make money on the thing.  There are a lot of templates for sale - and for good reason.  Every time a new security hole is discovered they end up changing enough so that the templates have to also be upgraded.  Its not long before an out of date template starts to create some funky distortions.  Maybe they do have a business model - selling these templates every new version.

Some people (like me) avoided upgrading to keep the “cool template” we had tweaked to kind of look right on an older version.  Well, this is the result:  a massive campaign of Pligg database injections that I apparently got caught up in, too.

I have to say this is a really great piece of software, I still use it myself - just a little more carefully this time around.  It is definitely accessible to technical newbies, but it does take quite a bit of time investment as far as learning the code structures, template variables, and security maintenance.

Remember, even if you’re fully updated to 9.9.5, there is a known Pligg captcha problem!  I recommend using Re-Captcha because it is still working for me so far!

Pandora Online Radio - a Victim of too Much Traffic

Pandora internet radio is an excellent advertising-based online service.  You just sign up and start adding bands or albums that you like into your customized radio station, and the Music Genome Project figures out other groups and songs that you’ll probably be interested in.  The best part is it actually does that well - and I’ve found quite a few new musicians and tracks that I enjoy listening to based on these recommendations.

So - free music, its online, its fast, it responds to the users’ demands instantly and intuitively - what could go wrong?

Pandora Radio brings in a ton of internet traffic, and the few advertisements it displays bring in a ton of revenue.  You’d imagine that the CEOs are sipping margaritas on some sunny beach, basking in the sun and their success.

Of course, you’d be wrong with that assumption because it does not calculate the immense greed of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).  Since content licensing fees for any internet site playing music was increased recently, sites like Pandora and Yahoo Radio are quickly finding their profits turn into a loss.

See, the RIAA isn’t content with free publicity.  Its not good enough that music enthusiasts like myself can find out about new bands - they insist on being paid per song played, and per user who listens.

Unfortunately, the episode reminds us all that more traffic isn’t always a good thing for website.  For starters, all websites have to consider the physical limitations of their hosting infrastructure - hitting these limits can lead to big overage charges, or total downtime for the website.  Generally, I would want 50,000 people to visit my sites every day.  But if you asked me if I’d rather have 10,000 or 50,000 tomorrow, I would have to pick 10,000 because anything more than that would put my servers at risk and end up with 0 people actually seeing the site.

Also, its important that any growth in traffic corresponds with a steady increase in revenue, or at least does not lead to costs that scale better than returns.  If a website starts out with a highly targetered niche base and delivers spot-on advertisements with high conversion rates, “more traffic” could just have a dilutive effect on the relative value of the traffic.

Dreamhost Review

Dreamhost Shared Hosting Review

Perspective: I’ve been using Dreamhost shared hosting servers for about eight months now . So far I am using a few Wordpress sites and a few Pligg sites with no problems. Here’s a basic banner describing what they offer:

Who should use Dreamhost shared servers? Dreamhost is a great option for new webmasters, because the automatic software installers can get your first website up and online within 10-15 minutes - and you don’t need a bit of technical know-how to get it done. Just pick the type of software you want to install, configure a few options, and Dreamhost’s automated installation script will email you with more instructions when you’re ready to log in and start modifying your pages.

Wordpress software allows a user to set up a website, choose a visual design, and add new articles as quickly and easily as one can write a Microsoft Word Document (Probably quicker, since MS Word is a slow piece of software and Wordpress runs fast). This site right here (websitebuilding.biz) is run on Wordpress.

Who shouldn’t use Dreamhost? Too much traffic isn’t a problem except for the largest and busiest of websites - most shared services can handle thousands of visitors a day as long as the sites are properly optimized to use minimal processing time. If your website is heavy on the traffic or you’re using experimental software that hasn’t been stress tested against heavy loads, you might want to consider upgrading to a Virtual Private Server. People with already successful sites might give a bad Dreamhost review for shared hosting - but realistically they should be able to afford more than $6 a month if they have too much traffic for a shared web host.

Unlimited Domains on one account: One domain is free and unlimited additional domains are always available for $10 a year. Domain names make a great investment too, because they appreciate in value both as the website becomes established but also due to the ever-increasing scarcity of good name choices. Pick up a keyword-rich name now, build it up, and it could be worth a lot more than $10 in a year or two. The cost of trying is almost nothing, and the odds of some return are pretty high if you stay patient and put some work and useful content into it.

There are a few notable advantages that Dreamhost has over other shared hosting services:

• Support & Auto-Install for Beta Software - Many shared hosts do not allow users to upload and install software in beta stages because a fear that instability and bugs could cause problems to the entire server PC. Dreamhost not only allows beta software, it also includes more popular ones for auto-installation like Pligg (a site that allows users to submit their favorite websites, vote on them, and discuss them.)
• DreamHost Reselling Review - Chances are, even with a shared host, you may have more bandwidth and resources than your websites use. This then, is where reselling comes in - you could add other peoples’ websites to your account and charge them whatever you like. This is great for people who design pages for local businesses or home pages for individual users. Even with a shared account, you can host other people’s websites on the server at whatever terms you and they agree on.
• Dreamhost Coupons and Dreamhost Discount Codes - Customize your services and the price you want to pay by selecting from one of several discount & promo codes. For similar shared hosting services, these guys offer a great bargain. The nature of the coupon is that you can customize the price you pay and the features you get. Before you sign up, make sure you check out all the Dreamhost coupon codes available

Bluehost review - one year later

Well I have been hosting my websites with Bluehost now for just over a year. My first site, UndergroundPolitics.com, was registered and set up in the first week of August, 2007.

Before that, my last website was actually a hand-coded HTML file hosted in a directory of my local BBS - yeah, if you know what a BBS is you know I’m talking about ten years ago (jeez, maybe more.)

So, a lot has changed in the internet since then and my hosting experience with Bluehost kind of confirms and exemplifies the evolution of building websites.

Bluehost reliability review:

Bluehost uptime is higher than 99.5% even on the most skeptical of calculations. I haven’t signed up for any services to monitor my uptime, but in the more than a year I’ve been using Bluhost hosting I can say the only time I’ve ever seen the sites down for scheduled or unscheduled maintenance were once at about 3 AM for a fifteen minute planned down-time.

Bluehost capacity and burst-traffic review:

Maybe your shared site only gets a few hundred hits a day. Any shared hosting server can handle that. But this is the internet in the era of 2.0 - what happens when your article “goes viral” and its link is at the top of every page looking for the latest internet meme?

While highly sought after, this social traffic burst can be a burden to shared web hosts - and it can be an early end to what might otherwise be an internet hit.

So how does Bluehost compare? I’ll share my experiences:

Beginners luck: I submitted a story about forum drama related to the presidential elections. A few hours later I noticed my traffic was up… and suddenly my site was down. Wow! Process timeouts! Wait - there was one particular add-on that was clogging up the process requests - so I disabled it and within two more minutes the site was back up! More than 17,000 people viewed that dynamic, inefficient, non-cached Joomla page that day.

Obviously, Bluehost doesn’t have infinite resources backed into every shared server, but just by taking out the most poorly coded addon I was able to handle the front page Digg-effect “back in the day” when stories on the front page stayed up long enough to collect thousands of votes.

Know your audience: My second and third social media submission successes were on the same political site - and they were largely successful because I knew who I was writing for and what types of news they wanted to hear. Seriously, hang out on these social sites and participate - you’ll figure out what they want to hear.

Anyway, with the old mod replaced by a new one, my second and third trips to the front page of social bookmarking sites went flawlessly. Even with about 10,000 visitors in each of the two days, pages would load quickly and there was never a delay. Now that my sites are moderately efficient, I won’t be worrying about too much traffic.

Bluehost software and usability review:

These software installations are a god-send for a website building newbie like me. I knew what .html was but I didn’t know the difference between PHP and CSS until some time after I was running websites that utilized them. Although the original installation and configuration is mostly automatic, Bluehost’s FTP allows you to go in afterward and make any modifications you can imagine. I’m definitely a “hands-on” learner so this has been perfect for me.

Conclusion -

I recommend it because I use it - and it works. I’ve built up websites with moderate levels of steady traffic and occasional bursts past fifteen thousand daily visits.

Heck, this site is hosted on Bluehost. Look around, load a couple of pages. You’ll see why I’m a fan for yourself. Then just face facts and sign up for Bluehost yourself. You probably won’t find a better host for less money, and if such a thing does exist I’ve never heard of it.

No $97 Dreamhost coupon since 2007 - but we have the best cash Dreamhost discounts in 2008

As of 10/20/2008 I’m glad to announce that we’ve got a Dreamhost coupon that’s better than $97 off! I started this post to kind of chide those who were still promoting expired coupons, and if I’m not careful it will end up being outdated, too.

073799889805

$150 off any Dreamhost 5 year sign up, $200 off a 10 year plan!

Get four times the regular disk space and bandwidth

There’s a lot of paid advertising by people trying to offer $97 Dreamhost coupons, but I have to say this promise is pretty misleading. See, Dreamhost discountinued the $97 code near the end of 2007 - and any of those promo codes only provide a $50 cash discount if they’re being used today.

I mean, feel free to try them out and see what kind of discount you get. I’m just telling you in advance that they’ll only be worth $50 off

If you are looking for that max cash Dreamhost coupon, we have a whole list of Dreamhost discounts to choose from here at WebsiteBuilding.biz

You can use Saves50 to save $50 on Dreamhost services right now, or you can look around at the complete list and find something that fits your personal website building business model.

Need a lot of domains for a long period of time? 3Free4Life will give you a total of four domains registered every year for the life of your Dreamhost hosting account. After two years, this Dreamhost code would give a bigger discount than just $50 cash - and after four years it would even be better than the old $97 discounts!

Maybe you need lots of extra bandwidth - then maybe Power50 for 50% extra bandwidth is the code you want to use.

See why it pays to shop around? What sounds like the best deal on the surface might just be an expired promotion - and the cheapest price depends on your exact plans & outlook.

True Costs of Free Web Hosting

If you’re starting up a small-scale online business (say, as a publisher and/or affiliate salesperson) and you are completely risk-averse - you can always choose to operate solely from free web hosting services.

The advantage is obvious - you don’t put any cash/physical capital up front. The only thing you can really lose is the time and effort you put into the online project, and even that offers a minimum return of gained knowledge & experience.

However, don’t think that “free hosting” is completely free of costs. In determining economic profit, we must also consider opportunity costs of free hosting services. There are plenty:

• Editorial Control - Free hosting services tend to have more restrictions on the types of content allowed on the server. Now, I’m not even talking about illegal things - things that are perfectly legal aren’t allowed on a lot of free hosting servers. Some types of sites might hurt other types of sites just by association. Maybe they’re just trying to build a family environment, and maybe they just don’t want to deal with the cut-throat types of competition that pop up in those niches. Even some shared servers have their limits above and beyond the letter of the law - so always make sure to read the fine print before getting started.
• File and Database backups - You can always save a copy of the content on your site, but can you zip up and download whole backups of not just the files but also the database entries? A prolific writer working on a Blogger or Wordpress hosted website might have a hard time keeping all of that backup information organized.
• Total Advertising Control - While Blogspot hosted domains have a lot of freedom in advertising policies, some of the other free hosting services aren’t quite so hands-off. Some free hosting sites put their own ads in parts of the page that you can’t edit - some don’t allow advertisements of any kind anywhere on their domains. Heck, some won’t even let you link too often to your other websites because of some unexplainable phobia of all things related to promotion.

Fact is, “You get what you pay for” and that means that even free services have costs attached. A website - a domain name and an established online presence is a valuable commodity. Don’t leave it at someone else’s whims because you’re afraid to spend a few bucks a month.

Upgrade Early, Backup Often - How I learned the hard way

I’m sure you’ve probably heard the advice: Make sure your website software is up to date, and make sure you keep regular backups of all your files and database data. The reasons should be obvious and I should have known better!

I hate to say it but this week I let that obligation slip by just a few days longer than I should have, and as a result I’ve lost a minor side-project and had to stay up all night rebuilding it. The good news is that my current website build is a lot more stable, functional, and search-engine friendly than the out of date version I had been keeping alive through occasional tweaks and modifications. Sure, the template I hadusing was designed for the version that came out a dozen public releases ago, but I thought
it looked cool and I wanted to make it work, even if it meant cutting corners on security and missing out on functionality.

Well, I won’t make that mistake again.

Here’s what happened. A new version of Pligg was released about two weeks ago because some vulnerabilities were discovered. I got a nice notification from the people at Pligg and Dreamhost even updated their one click installer to facilitate easy upgrades to the newest secure version.

“Well, its not my top priority site. ”
“Well, I’m very busy with other projects and articles right now.”
“I’ll do that tomorrow or next week…”

Well it took two weeks for them to find my vulnerable website and they struck immediately. At first it was comments and links about bad neighborhood types of content and I casually dealt with it by manually removing the comments. I went to bed and didn’t think about it until later the next night…

When I looked again that next day, it was chaos. Hundreds new submissions and comments had been added to my site of originally just 50 pages. Almost every link was offensive to say the least, and had they been allowed to stay it would have certainly hurt my reputation with Google as a reference to quality resources in my niche.

The worst part was when I went to the tast of manually removing this spam/vandalism. As I clicked on the comment moderation button of my admin panel, I was actually redirected to an affiliate linked storefront!

To make a long story short and spare you the details of my resulting work-marathon, I’ll summarize by saying I had to delete everything associated with the website and re-build it from the ground-up with a new MySQL database, account name, passwords, and everything.

So now the site doesn’t look as good (the nice template is hopelessly beyond my ability to bring up to code) but at least I’ve got a solid & secure Pligg installation again.

Next time I won’t wait a two weeks to update my content management software when a security release is pushed - I learned my lesson the hard way this time.