MMMeeja

The Huomah SEO Dojo Is Open To The Public

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:08:00 GMT

Any SEO worthy of the title will have heard about David Harry’s SEO Dojo by now. The dojo is a knowledgebase, forum and community hub for SEOs, information retrieval geeks, social media maniacs, link buiders and more that places a heavy emphasis on education and information exchange.

I was lucky enough to get a membership when the site was still in its beta phase and I’ve been astounded by the quality of information available and as the community grew, I was blown away by the helpfulness of the other members.

Remember, I’m not an SEO (I just do some SEO from time to time) but the dojo’s members are just as happy to answer confused noobie questions from people like me as they are discussing page segmentation patents.

It’s Not Just About The Forums

David and the community hand pick the best tools, patent publications, webmaster videos and research papers relating to information retrieval and (by extension) SEO. The result is a single source of high quality search-related news and ideas in one place - kind of like Sphinn’s hot topics but without the sock puppets and manufactured controversy.

You can spend hours in the SEO dojo’s library, diving deeper and deeper into different aspects of search technology - and I often do.

Even if you don’t join the dojo, sign up for the newsletter to get the latest sent to your inbox - you’ll miss out on the great discussion that goes with it though.

SEO Downloads

There is some great unique content available to dojo members - David’s SEO handbook e-books (including the linkbuilders edition, well worth a read) and Excel worksheets for linkbuilders and directory submitters.

The big draw, however, is the amazing SEO site audit framework. You know that document template that you always meant to write covering the basics to look for when first analysing a site (or a competitor)? This is it.

Eight pages of solid SEO wisdom that will ensure that you don’t forget any detail. It is constantly being updated, too, so it won’t become obelete as technologies change.

Weekly Chats Too

You can get involved in the discussion in real-time by chatting via Skype. These great sessions are used to answer questions, build resources and just chew the fat.

What Are You Waiting For - Get 30% Off!

If you weren’t as lucky as me and missed out on the beta period, you will want to join the dojo but it’s now a paid resource.

There are monthly, three month, six month and twelve month plans available, starting at 30 bucks for one month. The longer you sign up for, the more you save and the 6 and twelve month plans get loads of valuable freebies thrown in.

On top of all that, use the coupon code dojofriends to get a massive 30% off your sign-up!

There are no affiliate links in this post and I don’t make any money from it. I wholeheartedly endorse the SEO and think that it is a top notch resource. My only connection with the Huomah SEO Dojo is that I’m a satisfied member.

You can find me on the Dojo with the username andymurd - say hello!

Get The MMMeeja Toolbar For Your Browser

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 04:00:00 GMT

I’ve been experimenting with the Conduit toolbar system and come up with what I think is a useful offering (and I’ve been impressed with Conduit’s product in the process).

The MMMeeja toolbar works on Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Safari and on Windows, Mac or Linux. Like most browser toolbars, it adds a horizontal menu of extra functionality across the top of your browser pane.

Functionality Offered By The Toolbar

All Conduit toolbars come with a Google search box built-in, as the Conduit company make money via an advertising revenue sharing deal with Google, but the rest of the toolbar is completely customisable by the creator. The tools that I chose to add are:

A feed of the latest posts from this blog (got to have some self-promotion!)
A ShareThis button, allowing you to quickly and easily share pages with a huge variety of social networks. Supported networks include:
- Digg
- Delicious.com
- Reddit
- Yahoo Buzz
- Stumbleupon
- Facebook
- Twitter
- And loads more
A gadgets menu that allows you to jot down quick notes as you surf. You can also customise your toolbar installation by adding more gadgets (there is a large range to choose from.
A domainers menu that provides quick and easy access to whois, DNS, ping and keyword lookups.
An SEO toolbar that can display the Alexa data, Google pagerank, Google/Yahoo/Bing indexed pages, backlinks etc for the current page.

Hopefully, readers of this blog will find the toolbar useful. Let me know via the comments if you have any suggestions for more tools.

Download The Toolbar

You can download our toolbar by clicking on this button:

Make Your Own Toolbar With Conduit

I found the whole process to be pretty easy and intuitive, although I haven’t tried building any custom applications or gadgets yet (again, any suggestions are welcome).

If you need a little help getting started, try searching YouTube as there are lots of screencasts and howto videos on there. Here is one of the better ones:

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Hacknorth Cancelled But SNZero Was Good

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:52:00 GMT

So, most of you now know that Hackday North was cancelled after Dom’s announcement on his blog. To borrow Dom’s words, I’m gutted too - it promised to be a fun day, with lots of geeky (and non-geeky) activities planned.

After a chance meeting on Park Row, we decided to meet up for a beer and catch up. As luck would have it, we settled on Wednesday evening - the night of a new event called Social Networking Zero (AKA SN-Zero).

Social Networking ZERO

Organised by Matt Pallat of 26.point.1, the premise behind SN-Zero was to get back to the roots of social networking, to allow digital marketing professionals to talk to each other around tables that had beer on them, not netbooks with free wi-fi.

The event fulfilled its brief perfectly, thanks to sponsor Hotfoot Recruitment’s generous free bar and the hard-working staff at The Adelphi.

The night was well-attended by a mix of people from the tech scene in Leeds and everyone was getting merry when I left (quite early, sorry!). I hope that Matt continues to organise more SN-Zero events.

Barcamp Adelaide, Anyone?

Whilst I’m on the subject of social geeks, it looks like a BarCamp is being organised for Adelaide. It’s still in the very early planning stages but if you want to get involved, do get in touch with Monnie.

I hope to get involved, and I might even present something.

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Back In Leeds For Hackday North

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:45:00 GMT

First, an apology: it has been far, far too long since my last blog post. Emmigration, moving house and a well-deserved holiday have kept me away from the keyboard. I’ll be getting back up to speed and putting a few projects together in the coming weeks.

I am currently back in Leeds, visiting friends and whilst I’m annoyed that I missed this year’s Think Visibility, organiser Dom has teamed up with mad scientist Tim Nash to put together a hack day and I can make it!

Hack Day Ideas

I need to think of some project ideas to fill my time at Hackday, so here are a few initial thoughts. If any interest you or you think I would make a good addition to your team, do get in touch.

SMS

The event is being held in AQ Ltd’s headquarters in Leeds. AQ offer an excellent (and easy) SMS to CGI gateway that I have used before so I’d like some kind of mobile/SMS element to the project. Twitter has shown that integrating SMS technologies with the web can be hugely successful - largely due to simplicity and accessibility of the ideas.

Location

Maps are favourite tool of mashup makers and 24 hour hackers are no exception, so a location element would be a good addition to the project. Getting location data from a mobile phone can be tricky though, any mobile developers going to Hack Day able to offer assistance?

As the YDN are a sponsor, Fire Eagle might also be a good fit for the location data.

Data, Data, Data

A nice big dataset is always useful for a quick mashup (saves a lot of time entering or discovering the data yourself) and there are a lot available on the web if you know where to look. (BTW Wikileaks has the entire UK postcode database avilable, have a search).

Another event sponsor is SUN Startup Essentials who offer (amongst other things) MySql licenses and cheap hardware, so a big, fat RDBMS could be on the cards.

My Skills

I should outline how I can help your team or why you should join up with me for the event: I have over fifteen years of experience developing software across a range of platforms and industries, I can write Perl, PHP, Javascript, C++, SQL and HTML. I have experience of network programming, database design and user interface design too.

So, if you want to discuss project ideas or put a team together then please get in touch or leave a comment below.

There are still tickets left, get yours free now if you haven’t signed up already. See you there!

Creative Commons Licensed Photo by wEnDaLicious.

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Delicious.com Becomes A Sharing Hub

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:36:00 GMT

Since delicious announced new tools to share bookmarks last week, I’ve been on the lookout for examples of them in the wild. It seems that the Twitter integration is becoming popular because I’ve noticed quite a few tweets that make use of delicious’s URL shortener - icio.us. Here’s a search that shows all those tweets as they arrive in realtime.

The URL shortener is a nice use of the old del.icio.us domain - one of the original (and coolest) domain hacks on the web, that spawned a thousand imitators.

Tweets sent via delicious require your password (instead of using the more secure OAuth protocol) which is a shame but I think we can probably trust Yahoo with our passwords (it has been my OpenID provider for many years). The tweets are also marked as being sent via the API but hopefully the twitter devs will add delicious to the list of approved applications very soon.

Whilst I have my misgivings about the new delicious frontpage, and I’m not alone, I like these new features and I hope that delicious continues to integrate and becomes a bit more daring in some of its future innovations.

More On Delicious:

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Twitter Domain Names

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:13:00 GMT

In a bored moment the other day I was idly looking to see which (if any) other top level domain names are owned by twitter.com. The answer is, none.

This is quite a common mistake made by startups, they work incredibly hard to become a global brand and then discover that a bunch of domainers and/or squatters have taken the different, localised variations of their brand name.

However, it seems that Twitter might be about to remedy the situation as Smart Company (AU) reports that Twitter retained Melbourne IT company to manage its domain portfolio. My investigations (below) show that one of the biggest threats to Twitter’s brand comes from twitter.com.au so that might indicate a reason for choosing an Australian company, although there’s no official comment yet.

Let’s have a look at those other twitter TLDs that are polluting the brand of a company that might be worth as much as $250 million US:

Global TLDs

twitter.net - a site for birdwatchers with a nice big link to twitter.com on the homepage. No real brand pollution here.
twitter.org - a squatted domain with no website (the owner is missing out on some adevertising revenue methinks). If a website appears, it could do some brand damage to twitter but there are no immediate problems.
twitter.info - redirects to a twitter users account. Nice use of the domain name and no brand damage here.
twitter.me - another squatted domain with no website.
twitter.biz - a squatted domain, currently parked at GoDaddy and displaying Twitter related products.
twitter.mobi - another one that’s squatted without a website.
twitter.name - redirects to twitter.us.

Country Specific TLDs

twitter.us - parked at GoDaddy and showing twitter related adverts.
twitter.co.uk - this should be ringing some alarms bells at twitter.com. The page sells advertising and donates the money to charity but it does complain about twitter.com’s policy of not verifying email addresses for new accounts and the story was picked up by the UK Guardian’s Digital Media blog. By all accounts the owner is not maliciously squatting the domain, nor does he want to sell so twitter.com could easily address his grievances to remedy any branding issues.
twitter.com.au - This site seems to be an out-and-out attempt to cash in on the twitter name - lots of irrelevant adverts. Ev and Biz want to get this fixed ASAP.
twitter.fr - redirects to twitter.com. It’s registered owner is Melbourne IT, so owned by Twitter.
twitter.ie - parked and displaying adverts.
twitter.es - parked but no website.
twitter.ca - a nice little informational website that makes clear it has no affiliation with twitter.com.
twitter.co.nz - parked and displaying adverts.
twitter.tv - parked and displaying adverts.

All of the other ccTLDs I tried were parked with or without an associated website.

Misspellings

I tried a few misspellings of twitter.com (such as twiter.com and twiitter.com) and they were all parked too. There is also twittersucks.com for a few LOLs.

So, What Should Twitter Do?

It would make sense to keep the owner of twitter.co.uk happy and block signups using an email address from twitter.co.uk as that is what he wants and a quick, technical fix should satisfy the guy.

The squatted domains may be different. Twitter is still a very well-loved service but users are fickle and domain squatters could be quick to exploit (or provoke) bad feeling. If I were in Twitter’s position right now, I’d buy up a few of those top level domain names using a discreet third-party and (hopefully) without resorting to legal threats.

Most domainers are happy to make a quick buck and it is usually cheaper to buy them off than to pay a gaggle of lawyers. Keeping branding issues out of the press can also be a consideration, so a quiet back-channel can be useful. Whatever you think of the morality is domain squatting, it happens and successful companies will need to deal with it at some stage - better to do so earlier than later.

More On Twitter:

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Who Says You Cannot Build Links With Twitter?

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:22:00 GMT

In August 2007 Twitter introduced the use of nofollow for external links from its websites, closing down a neat way of gaining a lot of links quickly if your content went hot. This should hardly have come as a surprise, the service was getting too popular so either twitter had to do something or Google would have devalued the links anyway.

Most SEOs now use Twitter for building a buzz and getting traffic, but don’t discount its value for building links - even with the nofollow on twitter.com!

It’s All About The Syndication

Twitter’s API is its strongest feature, allowing people to syndicate, mashup and/or republish their tweets on other websites. Lots of bloggers have Adobe Flash or Javascript widgets in their sidebars showing their latest tweets - but these also pass no useful link juice. Tracker sites like tweetmeme provide a dofollow link for a short period, but your link will be lumped in with a lot of irrelevant, sometimes spammy, links.

Enter the lifestreamers.

You’ve probably seen sites like FriendFeed and LifeStream.fm which aggregate a user’s data from a wide variety of web 2.0 sites (including Twitter) and then display it all in one place. Both of these services nofollow their links too but there are some open source lifestreaming packages that people install on their own websites - and many of these are dofollow!

Open Source Lifestreaming Software

Sweetcron is a very popular stand-alone lifestreaming platform - and it follows all links by default. You can easily google for Powered by Sweetcron to find sites using the software.

There is also the Lifestream Wordpress plugin which adds a lifestream page to any self-hosted Wordpress blog. Search for Powered by Lifestream from iBegin. to find sites where it is installed. Some Wordpress themes also offer lifestream or Twitter support, like the ones listed here - check out the demos to find out which pass link juice.

Some SEO Considerations

You’re probably asking whether these links from lifestreams are of any use to improve your search rankings and that’s a good question. I think that is like asking whether a link from a blog is of any use - it all depends on the blog in question! So look for lifestreams that are high quality and relevant to your niche. The number of on-page links can be an issue too, so prefer shorter, slow-moving streams and those with archives.

Should lifestreamers nofollow their links? That is entirely up to them - a person’s lifestream is like their blog, they can link to anyone, however they want. A tweet or delicious bookmark is very much like an endorsement so nofollow should not be necessary for personal sites but using a link condom is sensible for sites like FriendFeed.

Get Your Links Tweeted

So, you’ve identified a number of non-spammy, relevant lifestream websites that pass link juice, now you need to get your links onto those sites.

There is no great secret to this - follow the owners on Twitter and interact with them. Tweet their links, retweet their tweets, build relationships and your new friends will reciprocate, and when they do you get a link from their site. Sweet.

Get The Most From Tweeted Links

Short URLs are the key here - you don’t want Twitter to (re)shorten your URLs (see @pageoneresults’ excellent analysis of how, when and why Twitter converts URLs).

The best URLs shortener to use is one on your own domain, which is easy for Wordpress bloggers but be sure to follow all the changes to use 301 redirects.

If installing your own URL shortener is not an option, use a shortening service that provides a 301 redirect and allows you to customise the shortcode, such as kl.am. Remember that Twitter uses the URL itself as anchor text so get some keywords in there!

Ensure that you track referring URLs and evaluate which lifestreamers send you the most traffic too - links are good for more than just pagerank.

Wrap Up

Hopefully you now see how Twitter can be used for linkbuilding and the process is not too different from traditional link building:

Identify and evaluate targets
Build relationships
Offer linkable content
Try to control the anchor text

I came up with this concept whilst evaluating the impact of a popular post on delicious.com (which uses a robots.txt to block search engine spiders) and noticed lots of bloggers cross-posting their bookmarks in a weekly wrap-up. Applying the same reasoning to Twitter allows us to leverage the social aspect - unlike delicious which is less gregarious. If you like the post, please give it a Sphinn, if you think I’m an idiot then leave a comment.

Use Robots.txt To Prevent Yahoo Pipes & YQL From Scraping Your Site

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:56:00 GMT

Yahoo’s Open Search strategy is great news for mashup developers but it could also be used by scrapers to grab your content and republish it on their own sites, but thankfully Yahoo play by the rules and honour the robots exclusion protocol. This article will help you to block the services that can be used to scrape or remix your content.

None of the robots.txt changes will prevent die-hard blackhats, though, because they are unlikely to be using Yahoo tools for their nefarious activities. Most blackhats will have their own toolkits so you would need to go through your server logs to look for patterns of IP address, user agent, cookie use etc to block them effectively.

It should be noted that I fully support Yahoo’s efforts to open up the search results and that I only recommend blocking their crawlers if you’re specifically having problems with content theft. I haven’t implemented any of these techniques on this blog, so you can remix away to your heart’s content.

I do take content theft and scraping seriously though, so I check for scrapers regularly using tools like CopyScape and FairShare to check for pliagiarism. I report all content theft to Google via its webmaster tools (which usually delists the site and stops the problem) and if problems persist I’ll contact the infringer’s ISP to get their site shut down. Luckily, I’ve not (yet) had to take any further action - probably a sign of the blog’s unpopularity :-)

Yahoo Pipes

One of the most common ways that your content gets scraped is via your blog’s RSS feed and Yahoo Pipes is a handy tool for tweaking and mashing RSS feeds. If you are publishing your feed through Feedburner, blocking Yahoo Pipes is easy, just follow these steps:

Log in to your Feedburner account and choose the feed that you are concerned about
Click the “publicize” tab and then the “NoIndex” service
You can then choose to block Yahoo Pipes by clicking the second check box - don’t forget to activate the service

If you don’t use a service like Feedburner but serve your RSS feed yourself, you need to block using either server configuration changes or robots.txt. From the FAQ, we can tell that the Yahoo Pipes user agent is “Yahoo Pipes 1.0”, so add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 1.0 Disallow: /

YQL

I found it quite hard to find any information on YQL’s user agent string and ended up asking on Twitter. @jonathantrevor provided the answer:

YQL uses "Yahoo Pipes 2.0 " for fetching robots to see if its allowed, and then uses mozilla for the content

My tests confirmed this as correct.

Yahoo BOSS

Yahoo BOSS allows you to create your own search engines using Yahoo’s data (like my recipe search engine).

As it uses Yahoo’s search index, the only way to prevent access to your content through BOSS is to block Yahoo’s search crawler, Slurp, which is probably not what you want.

There are rumors of a closer integration of BOSS to some of the other services mentioned here, so if/when that happens the other blocking methods given here should apply.

Search Monkey Data Services

Search Monkey is a technology that allows developers to create widgets to embed into the Yahoo search results (which I mentioned before). It behaves differently to YQL and Pipes in that it does not use a web crawler, so you cannot use a robots.txt entry to deny access. Instead, you can modify your web server configuration to deny access to the user agent.

Search Monkey user agent strings are quite distinctive, so you can alter your httpd.conf or even .htaccess files (if your host allows) to deny access with the following code:

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Yahoo! SearchMonkey 1.0" noMonkey <Limit GET POST> Order Allow,Deny Allow from all Deny from env=noMonkey </Limit>

This code was taken from the SearchMonkey user guide, which also lists an email address that you can contact to have your pages blocked at the source.

Putting It All Together

If you want to block all of these services, you’ll need to add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 1.0 Disallow: / User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 2.0 Disallow: /

Add this code to your server configuration too:

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Yahoo! SearchMonkey 1.0" noMonkey <Limit GET POST> Order Allow,Deny Allow from all Deny from env=noMonkey </Limit>

There you have it, a few configuration changes to block opportunist scrapers.

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Short Domain Names For Sale

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 04:59:00 GMT

Over the years I’ve amassed a bunch of domain names that I planned to build something with or were just too good a bargain to miss. It’s time for a clear out so I am offering these three and four character domain names for sale.

Short domains are great for domain investors as the number of available character combinations is small and demand is constantly rising, or you could use one of these domains to build your own URL shortener for microblogging services like twitter.

They are all currently parked at sedo and registered with hosts that allow free transfer (like name.com, GoDaddy, etc.) Check the WhoIs data for the full details, including domain age and expiry date.

If a domain catches your eye, then contact me to make an offer, or you can arrange the sale through sedo if you prefer.

Three Character Domain Names

1g1.org

jc7.net

Four Character Domain Names

00gb.com

00mb.com

1kis.com

1xel.com

4dac.com

7cvs.com

7kia.com

ae02.com

dab3.com

dr4g.com

hcs5.com

lez3.com

ses7.com

ssg0.com

If this sale is a success, I’ve got some more domains that I might put on sale. The offer is for the domain name only, no website or email. Payment via PayPal or escrow.com for large sums.

It’s first-come, first-served so get your offer in quickly!

Creative Commons licensed photo by woowoowoo.

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Blog Housekeeping

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 10:41:00 GMT

I’ve been guilty of neglecting the site for the past couple of months so I’m taking a few hours to do a little housekeeping. I noticed quite a few problems over the last week or two:

My Twitter profile search monkey application had broken, either due to a change in Twitter’s markup or a tweak to Yahoo Search Monkey.
The sample recipe search had problems, thanks to my host switching the default to PHP 4 (from PHP 5).
Yahoo deleted the recursive pipe that I was using for twitter map widget which meant that markers weren’t showing up properly.
The blog comment form stopped working. Not sure what caused this, something to do with FCKeditor and browser compatibility, I think.
I was getting a lot of spam comments, so a few tweaks were made to confuse the spambots.

All these problems should now be fixed but please let me know if they recurr or if you find any other issues.

I recently relaunched my personal site too, which is now a Web 2.0 lifestream so head on over and check it out.

There is some great content in the pipeline for the next few weeks too, including a new look at hSlices, so don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed to get new posts the moment they are published.

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MMMeeja

The Huomah SEO Dojo Is Open To The Public

It’s Not Just About The Forums

SEO Downloads

Weekly Chats Too

What Are You Waiting For - Get 30% Off!

More posts on SEO:

Get The MMMeeja Toolbar For Your Browser

Functionality Offered By The Toolbar

Download The Toolbar

Make Your Own Toolbar With Conduit

Hacknorth Cancelled But SNZero Was Good

Social Networking ZERO

Barcamp Adelaide, Anyone?

Back In Leeds For Hackday North

Hack Day Ideas

SMS

Location

Data, Data, Data

My Skills

Delicious.com Becomes A Sharing Hub

More On Delicious:

Twitter Domain Names

Global TLDs

Country Specific TLDs

Misspellings

So, What Should Twitter Do?

More On Twitter:

Who Says You Cannot Build Links With Twitter?

It’s All About The Syndication

Open Source Lifestreaming Software

Some SEO Considerations

Get Your Links Tweeted

Get The Most From Tweeted Links

Wrap Up

More SEO Articles

Use Robots.txt To Prevent Yahoo Pipes & YQL From Scraping Your Site

Yahoo Pipes

YQL

Yahoo BOSS

Search Monkey Data Services

Putting It All Together

Related Posts

Short Domain Names For Sale

Three Character Domain Names

Four Character Domain Names

Blog Housekeeping