Archive for 'Technology'

There is a lot of fuss about Page Rank in general, but in particular the current "update". The update has seen many sites lose Page Rank; some sites lost Page Rank due to penalty and of course some sites lost Page Rank indirectly due to the penalties. What does this mean?

Site A is a vote for Site B however Site A has had a penalty due to the current update and Site B has a PR reduction as Site A’s vote is not as strong as before. The reduction in PR does not necessarily mean your site was targeted directly by Google but rather the reduction was due to the recalculation due to other sites’ losses in PR. A simple way to look at it is: previously, your vote was 4 + 4 + 4 and this gave you PR4. However, due to the penalty on the other websites the vote changed to 2 + 3 + 2 and this caused your Page Rank to be recalculated to 2. (Please note: I do realise that Google does not use such a simplistic equation; this was just an easy way to give an example of what is going on.)

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My web directory is now closed. It will not be reopened as I feel that my time is best focused elsewhere. Additionally, I believe directories have very little role in Today’s way of searching for for what we are looking for. Their usefulness has ended as search engines have evolved and results have become very relevant.

Frankly, it is quicker to type a search string in to Google, Yahoo!, Live, Ask or whatever search engine you prefer and (usually) find what you want within a few seconds than spending 5 minutes or so browsing through an often spam-filled directory.

Google has recently updated their Webmaster Tools to provide even more useful information for Webmasters. Perhaps most usefully, there were changes in "Statistics > Top search queries". In particular, there is now access to historical data (up to 6 months) which can be helpful in analysing trends in how, in terms of keywords, visitors (using Google) are finding your site and what content they are interested in so you can deliver more relevant and related content to further satisfy your visitors’ requirements.

Additionally, top search queries and top clicked queries has a new column (%) showing the percentage that the search/clicked queries ranks for out of the top 20, e.g. searches for "google webmaster tools" may account for 34% of your top 20 search queries and "yahoo site explorer" for 16%.

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I have been trying out several Adsense plugins for Wordpress and found that one way or another that all but one did not meet my requirements (fairly basic ones, I think), so I decided to write up a review of it as it may help someone else looking for a similar Adsense Wordpress plugin. My requirements were as follows:

• The display of no more than 3 Adsense ad units at once.
• Flexibility of placement, e.g. ability to call an Adsense ad unit from within php theme files as well as from within a post.
• Easy to use.
• The ability to include the original Google Adsense Code (as generated by Google Adsense Setup).
• The ability to include some additional HTML, e.g. div wrapper, without having to modify a Wordpress theme and leaves the adsense code untouched.

Well, I have just finished setting up the plugin and customising the ad layout on my blog using a plugin which does meet those requirements: Adsense Deluxe.

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I recently had some problems getting mod_rewrite to work but in the end I got there. Although the module was loading, the rewrite rules were not taking affect and I was just getting 404s.

For others having the same problem, firstly check that the module is set to be loaded by apache in the configuration file. On openSUSE 10.2 this is in the file /etc/apache2/sysconfig.d/loadmodule.conf and specifically the line:

LoadModule rewrite_module        /usr/lib/apache2-prefork/mod_rewrite.so

Additionally, the file /etc/sysconfig/apache2 should have rewrite in the line beginning:

APACHE_MODULES=

If you’re not using openSUSE 10.2 then check the documentation coming with your distribution for where module loads need to be located. Finally, restart apache with one of the following commands (depending upon your Linux distribution) as root in a console/xterm:

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