RelevantText.com

Automatically post friendly URLs to Twitter and Facebook

January 12th, 2008 Jason

In a fit of self-propagation, I set about this week to explore making Wordpress post to my Twitter any time I update.

I found a basic, but functional, plugin called Twitpress, which does exactly what I wanted. Except…I’m also using the All In One SEO Pack, which rewrites page URLs into an SEO-friendly format. (Really, a must-have plugin.) Twitpress by default will tweet the stock version of a post URL:

http://RelevantText.com?p=24

instead of the format I want to show:

http://RelevantText.com/making-the-most-of-server-errors-20080111/

Now, I know that a)Twitter links are nofollowed, so this doesn’t really matter for the spiders, and b)Twitter also automatically turns long links into tinyurls, but it still bothered me (more on why in a minute). So, I set about to fix the plugin.

After reading through what the plugin code was doing, I surfed through the WP database tables a little bit, and discovered that I needed to change one line in Twitpress. Hooray!

In the twitpress.php code, replace line 85:

$proto = str_replace("[link]“, get_option(’home’).”?p=”.$postID, $proto);

with

$proto = str_replace("[link]“, $post->guid, $proto);

‘guid’ is a field in the wp_posts table, if you care.

Bingo. I’m very pleased with myself.

So why, you may ask, do I care about how the links look in Twitter if they aren’t spiderable? Because I’ve also installed the Twitter App on Facebook, so any time I update Twitter, my Facebook status updates as well…which means the link is then being pushed out along the newsfeeds of all my contacts there. The link is still not spiderable, but it is potentially much more likely to get seen, followed, and possibly linked to. Through the tinyurl redirect, it now goes to the right version of the URL, and when people subsequently link to the post, I want them using the right one. This, I think, will help that along.

Jan 14 Update: After my initial excitement, I’ve discovered that this is still slightly buggy - notifications occasionally appear on twitter with the p= URL, and sometimes with no URL at all.  This seems to only happen when a post is first published, and not when later edited, but I’m not clear why, as the ‘guid’ field is populated with the first publish of a post. So, this is cool when it works, but I’m still looking at it. 

Posted in Facebook, Twitter, geek, php, plugins, seo, site, wordpress | No Comments »

Making the most of server errors

January 11th, 2008 Jason

Nobody thinks twice about planning for and dealing with 404 errors on their website. It’s going to happen, right? Not because you didn’t properly redirect when you moved a page or something, of course! But you expect that somebody will mistype a URL someday, and you plan for it and have your fancy or funny 404 page in place on launch day.

I was reminded today that people often don’t deal with 500 server errors at all, but on a large dynamic site these errors are just as bound to happen as 404s, and they’re far more troublesome. They are unpredictable, untrackable (unless you want to trawl through server logs, which I for one don’t), and harbingers of doom for your site because more often than not, they are indicators of something very bad going on behind the scenes…and you can bet your AdSense check that if a user sees them, a search spider does, too. When a spider hits a server error, it’s usually dead in the water, and that spells disaster for your rankings.

The good news is, it’s actually not too hard to deal with them properly.

One of my large corporate sites was having some massive issues with server response time last year, and as a result we were seeing a significant uptick in the number of 500 errors being reported in Google WMT’s crawl stats.

For the most part, it seemed like simply backing up and reloading the page usually got past the error, but GoogleBot isn’t going to do that. We really had no way of knowing just how pervasive the problem was, but we knew it was affecting the user experience, and clearly killing GoogleBot on a regular basis. While the technology group worked on the backend issues, we stemmed the problem from the front end by creating a custom error page to display any time a 500 error occurred.

The criteria were minimal:

1. Improve the user experience when an error occurs
2. Provide search spiders a way to continue through the site, and
3. Be able to solidly track the number of server errors being delivered as part of our overall statistics

Fortunately, both .NET and Apache make it very easy to define a custom page to display when a server error happens.

In Apache, it’s dead simple - add a line to your .htaccess file like this:

ErrorDocument 500 /friendly500.html

(the nice thing here is that you don’t need to tweak the server config file, which you probably can’t do if you don’t manage your own servers…)

Microsoft servers are a little more involved. For a friendly error page in .NET, IIS tells yout to edit the web config file to include this code:

<customErrors mode="On" defaultRedirect="errors/friendly500.html">
</customErrors>

As noted here on Techrepublic, you may define different pages for different errors:

<customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="errors/ErrorPage.aspx">
<error statusCode="400" redirect="errors/friendly400.html" />
<error statusCode="401" redirect="errors/friendly401.html" />
<error statusCode="403" redirect="errors/friendly403.html" />
<error statusCode="404" redirect="errors/friendly404.html" />
<error statusCode="408" redirect="errors/friendly408.html" />
<error statusCode="500" redirect="errors/friendly500.html" />
<error statusCode="503" redirect="errors/friendly503.html" />
</customErrors>

The page can have either an .aspx or .html extension, but keep in mind that if the server is having problems there’s no sense in trying to deliver another dynamic page. Keep it static.

One caveat : IE will try to display a friendly error message of its own, unless the error page is over 512k, so put some text on it.

As our existing 404 page is essentially a sitemap, we quickly realized that we could simply duplicate it as ‘error.html’ and with a few text changes, use that. Users now get a friendly “Oops!” message, and spiders and users alike have a variety of useful links enabling them to continue navigating the site instead of going elsewhere.

Results?

A snapshot report from Google WMT in July showed 218 server errors that happened during their crawls in the previous two weeks. Today, there are none listed at all. (To be fair, the tech guys have been doing loads of work to make things run better as well, and credit where credit is due.) But we can also now see in our statistics that regardless of what GoogleBot is seeing, the error page has actually loaded…um…let’s just say “rather a lot” this month so far, and we can now start assembling solid numbers of how much the server issues are affecting the user experience and to argue for even more improvement work on the backend.

Posted in geek, seo | No Comments »

The Week in Search - Week 1

January 6th, 2008 Jason

The plan is to do a weekly roundup of articles I found interesting and useful in the last 7 days. Holidays and guests and travel this week, so just a few links for week 1 of 2008:

Google Operating System: Google Artificially Promotes Recent Web Pages
One of many articles on the subject which probably caused the most stir this week. I even contributed my own two bits about whether ‘new’ equals ‘better’ at Google now.

DomainTools blog: Lazy webmasters cost their employers millions of visitors
Whether it’s laziness or thoughtlessness, I’m running into this all the time. From the user POV, making a site work both with and without ‘www’ is just a no-brainer (and, frankly, I want people to anticipate my mistypes.)

On the other hand, from the SEO POV, it’s a pain in the ass if there’s subdomains or alternate spellings creating duplicate content issues that I don’t know about. But, letting our domain management service profit from our parked domains is also a huge wasted opportunity.

Problogger.net: Using stumbleupon to get on the radar of other bloggers.
A useful reminder that the best results are not instant results.

10e20.com: Top 50 search and social media happenings for 2007
Of course loads of people did ‘end of year’ posts; this one was particularly exhaustive and includes a number of small but significant events. Definitely a good collection, with loads of links that are worth a read.

Posted in Week in Search, links | No Comments »

Does new equal better at Google now?

January 2nd, 2008 Jason

An interesting question on the Google Operating System blog, related to my post about Google’s quick indexing: does the new hi-speed indexing mean that newer pages are being artificially weighted to rank higher?

The argument is that a brand-new page won’t have a bunch of backlinks pointing to it, so there’s no reason it should appear near the top of the SERPs directly after being indexed…unless Google is giving greater importance - at least temporarily - to newer content.

Maybe it’s only true for whatever they currently identify as ‘hot topics,’ but it’ll be worth watching. I may try a little experiment to document later today or next week; I’ve certainly seen Google give a nice big boost to a newly indexed page before it fell off into a more stable position. If, by interpreting ‘more recent’ content as ‘more relevant’ content, Google has slipped up here, it’s only a matter of time before the blogspammers start capitalizing on it by simply posting more crap more frequently to maintain consistent high rankings.

Posted in Google, seo | No Comments »

5 important search developments of 2007

December 31st, 2007 Jason

I’m not saying these are the ‘top 5 most important’ changes of 2007, I’m just pointing out some things I’ve seen as significant. There’s certainly more (like the whole paid links debate), but I’m on holiday, so I’m stopping at 5 I find worth mentioning. In no particular order:

1. No more supplemental index
   Supposedly, this means more relevant results for all searches, all the time. (Interesting, since I thought that was the goal anyway…) But probably a key thing here is more relevance for foreign language queries as well, which may ‘translate’ into Google getting a bigger slice of the bits of foreign search they don’t already have. I think it will also mean less confusion about just how deeply/thoroughly a site is indexed.
2. Sphinn
   Sphinn is no Digg. Only SEO’s are going to see any traffic boost from Sphinn; it’s not something that Bob’s Widgets is going to try to game for traffic and links. But it has quickly become invaluable as a means of connecting the vast network of search marketers out there and bringing attention to important and interesting news or opinion…without having to monitor eight hundred blogs every day.
3. Universal search results
   Of course, with Google’s acquisition of YouTube happening this year as well, it followed that YouTube content would start getting a higher visibility in the SERPs, but Google and Yahoo! both started integrating video, news, and image results into the ‘main’ results page this year, and it all seemed conspicuously timed as a response to Ask’s big facelift. But it’s much more than a presentational change; it’s really completely affected how search marketing works and shifted the focus of what’s important to get noticed and rank well.
4. Facebook?
   Sure, Facebook has been around for a few years, but it was this year that anybody with an email address (i.e., not an academic one) could join, and it blew up into the place to be. And now everybody and their dog’s company thinks they need to build a Facebook app. I think it remains to be seen whether a good Facebook app has real SEO benefit, but it can a big deal for brand recognition, which of course can have a real downstream impact on what people are searching for.
5. I got a job
   Okay, this is a cheese-out, but it’s true. Landing in SEO seems to have really taken all the bits of technology and marketing and general geekery I’ve been cobbling together over the years and focused them all into a very clear path.

Posted in seo, social networking | No Comments »

Bebo opens up to application development

December 13th, 2007 Jason

It’s all the rage today: Bebo announces the “Open Application Platform” which will allow existing Facebook applications to easily port into apps for Bebo as well.

Good on them. While the article notes Bebo is a “distant third” in the US market, in the UK Bebo is generally seen to have a bigger reach than MySpace (supporting article on NewMedia.com from August 2007, though by some accounts it’s down to how you slice the data - see September article on paidContent.co.uk). For everyone who’s been banging away on Facebook apps being the new “must-have” marketing tool, the opportunity has now just doubled.

Here’s what caught my eye, though:

“Deployments of the same applications on both Facebook and Bebo will have the potential to link up with each other. For example, Facebook users of Bunchball’s Nitro gaming application will be able to play against Bebo users of the same application.”

As I think I’ve said before, needing to keep track of a dozen different online network profiles is a total pain in t’ass. With the recent announcement of Google’s OpenSocial APIs, and the opening of the Facebook platform, we’re two steps closer to having online networks really start mirroring the interaction and crossover that happens between networks in real life.

Posted in social networking | No Comments »

Microsoft acquires Multimap

December 13th, 2007 Jason

So, Microsoft has acquired Multimap…which is interesting since I’ve often found live maps to be better than Multimap anyway. Is this acquiring new technology or simply removing the competition?

Posted in geek | No Comments »

The swag that keeps on giving

December 10th, 2007 Jason

When we got our badges at PubCon, we also got handed a decent little tote bag with a bunch of lit inside. I ended up needing to use the bag as my carryon for the flight back to London at the end of the week.

Well, of course, to those who were there, this is like having a big neon arrow above my head flashing “I WENT TO PUBCON!” Sitting in the airport I am approached by at least two different guys from the con who are on the same flight. Now if only I’d hadn’t given all my cards to Justine…

Posted in pubcon | No Comments »

How quick is Google?

December 8th, 2007 Jason

I was at Pubon’s “Tools of the Trade” session yesterday afternoon. I took some notes, but missed a URL that I found myself wanting to check out this evening.

Todd Malicoat (aka Stuntdubl) was speaking, and mentioned a bookmarklet he used which would give a listing of the sites associated with an IP block. Right, so, Google: “stuntdubl number of sites on IP”

Number two is a blog entry titled “Tools of the Trade,” which is the seoroundtable liveblog entry from the session. With a reference to the tool I’m after: seolog’s Reverse IP domain tool. Boom.

I know that Google has gotten really good in the last few months with basically “instant indexing,” but this is the first time I’ve really seen it in action. Nice. A little scary, but impressive and powerful as well.

Posted in Google, pubcon, seo, tools | No Comments »

10 excuses to use when you don’t have a business card handy

December 4th, 2007 Jason

Day one at PubCon and I’m already feeling the full weight of not having cards ready before the trip. Sure, I can blame work for being slow about getting them processed - I’m sure they’ll be sitting on my desk when I get back - but it’s my bad for not having something to pass around, and it means the onus is fully on me to keep up with people I meet here.

Meanwhile, I’ve been practicing various reasons for not having one available:

1. “Dang, I just dropped my last one in the box for the iPhone drawing.”
2. “They’re in my luggage, which ended up in Las Vegas, New Mexico instead.”
3. “The English don’t really do business cards; should we grab a pint?”
4. “I think the TSA confiscated them, because I know I packed them.”
5. “Dang, I just gave my last one to Matt Cutts/Michael Gray/Rand Fishkin.”
6. “Can you believe it, I lost them all at the poker table last night.”
7. “Y’know, I just got new ones, and they botched the contact info, so they’re really no good at all.”
8. “Cards are so 20th century; would you like a DNA sample? I have a swab right here.”
9. “I can bluetooth you a vcard, will that work?”
10. “I just gave my entire box to Justine.”

Come to think of it, the bluetooth thing isn’t a bad idea…

Posted in conferences, pubcon | No Comments »