Surf Roots, Software Thoughts

Lots of people speculate that Google has about 60% search market share. It seems to me that this is totally wrong — seems to me they have well above 90%. I pulled up Google Analytics for all eight of the sites that I have it installed on and did a quick query to see what percentage of people hit my sites from Google vs. other search engines. Take a look:

blog.bestseattlebars.com	97.5%
helpd.org	100%
alexloddengaard.com	99.0%
bestseattlebars.com	73.8%
cellarspot.com	100%
dirtyinq.com	100%
huskysnowboardteam.com	50%
timedex.org	100%

Small sample size/poor statistical analysis? Yes. 60% search market share? No way.

What do you think?

10 comments

It took the Google crawler all of 15 minutes to index my last post about PowerEdge Ubuntu RAID monitoring.  That is utterly ridiculous.  It boggles my mind that they can so quickly index, compute PageRank, and cache everything in that little amount of time.  Perhaps they don’t do all of that right away.  Maybe they assume a fresh post has a high PageRank.  Maybe they really do compute the PageRank on the fly.  Regardless, I’m totally amazed.

3 comments

When I first launched Best Seattle Bars a few months back, I had worked only shortly on a pseudo PHP controller to support keyword-rich, pretty URLs. The controller also handled the case when a page wasn’t found. In this case, the controller would simply output a 404 message. I thought this was good enough.

About a week after our launch, I did a few Google queries to analyze our search engine performance. I noticed that the only pages indexed by Google were those of the previous version of the site, which was a terrifyingly bad set of informational pages generated by some sort of Yahoo page builder. I was curious why our performance was so poor, so I decided to take a look at Google Tools for Webmasters and ran their diagnostics report. Everything checked except for one thing – I was missing a 404 page. I first thought that Google was wrong – I had a 404 page! It displayed “404!” Then I quickly realized that Google isn’t going to recognize a 404 page by its contents but instead by its HTTP header information. I added the following line of PHP code to my 404 page, and my problems were solved.

<?php header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found"); ?>

Having a 404 page is essential for search engine performance, because it allows you to flush out the old pages and perform better with the new ones. Probably a day after I made this change, our search engine performance jumped and traffic was flowing. Usually you get a 404 page for free with Apache or any other web server, but my controller put the handling of 404 into my hands. Make sure you have a 404 page.

No comments

I wanted to say more about viral sites. I think there are two really cool features that can be implemented to improve your SEO and also utilize the Blogosphere more.

Widgets - get people linking to you
Offering widgets makes it very easy to get people to link to you. For example, I could create a widget for Best Seattle Bars that allowed people to drop some code on their site and display a list of the best Seattle bars. I could also create a widget for Best Seattle Bars that allowed people to drop some code on their site to display a search box. The two best advantages of using widgets are 1) you get people to link to your site, which improves SEO and also increases referrals, and 2) you get to control the way that people link to your site. Here are two examples of widgets that Trulia, a Redfin competitor, offers:

Pretty nifty, huh?

Trackbacks - encourage bloggers to link to you
Bloggers love to blog. If you have rich content on your site such as homes for sale, restaurant reviews, or travel tips, then chances are good that bloggers are already blogging about you and linking to home, restaurant, and travel pages. Reward them and maybe they’ll blog about you more. Setup a mechanism on your site to capture trackbacks sent by blogs, and put a link on the page that’s being linked to, linking back to the blog post. On Best Seattle Bars, an example would be to put a link to each blog post that links to a particular bar page at the bottom of that bar page. You would probably want the link to be nofollow, but bloggers would still get referrals from these links.

The largest factor of PageRank is link analysis, so the more people that link to you, the better you’ll perform in search engines.  The better you perform in search engines, the more people you’ll get coming to your site.

3 comments

I’ve always wondered how to handle pretty URLs in PHP. Read the whole article, but in summary, you setup an Apache Rewrite:

Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule .* index.php [L]

And setup your index.php file with the following framework:

<?php $requested = empty($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) ? false : $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; switch ( $requested ) { case '/dogs': include 'animals/dogs.php'; break; case '/apple': include 'fruit.php?type=apple'; default: include '404.php'; } ?>

Turns out pretty URLs in PHP are super easy, and they’re great for SEO.

Update: You need to be a little more careful will 404 handling. Your 404.php page must have the following line at the top of it:

<?php header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");?>

If you don’t do this, then search engines who come across your “404″ page will get a status message of 200, indicating that the page loaded just find. This means that they’ll add this page to their index and also not remove any pages already in their index that no longer exist.

2 comments

I made a post a week or so ago about how to make a viral site, and I wanted to add to my list of TODOs.

1. Make the registration process easy
   1. Either require as little information as possible or use a social framework like Facebook Platform or OpenSocial

This great blog post describes a usability study that looks at the registration frequency for different types of required information such as email, password, address, etc. Go take a look if you’re designing a registration process.

Update: more here.

2 comments

I’ve now failed twice at making a viral site (Cellarspot and Helpd). I’m starting to notice that this blog is growing virally. I think I learned something tonight. If you want a viral site, then you must at least do the following things:

1. Create features that will allow users to share
   1. Invitations, tell-a-friends, etc
2. Create features to get people to link to you
   1. RSS feeds, widgets, etc
3. Offer a good product and/or good content

Invitations and tell-a-friends make it easy for users to get their friends involved. RSS feeds and widgets make it easy for your content to be placed on other sites. When your content is placed on other sites, it’s much more likely to be viewed by people who haven’t heard of you yet. For example, my blog has an RSS feed (thank you, WordPress), and some people subscribe to my RSS feed with their Google Reader. Some of these Google Reader people share certain posts with their gFriends, which puts my blog in front of the eyes of people that haven’t heard of me yet. Item 3 is a tossup, because I’m not convinced that my blog has good content ;).

Perhaps this is old news to some people, but I wanted to share just in case.

Am I missing anything? Want to add anything? Write a comment.

Update: more here and here.

6 comments

WordPress allows posts to have pretty permalinks, but they don’t work right out of the box. Permalinks of this form perform much better in search engines. I had to fiddle with some Unix permissions and some Apache configs to get them working correctly, so I thought I’d share my experience. While working through this, I commonly got 404 and 403 errors when accessing my blog, so be careful when applying these settings.

Step 1: Apache
Apache needs to be configured correctly. The following code needs to either be put in your virtual host file or in the main Apache config file (apache2.conf in Ubuntu and httpd.conf in others).

<Directory "/your/htdocs/directory"> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride FileInfo Order deny,allow Allow from all </Directory>

Step 2: Unix Permissions
Eventually you’re going to have to change some options in the WordPress admin panel, but some permissions need to be setup first. When you change your permalink structure, WordPress is going to write to .htaccess in your WordPress installation directory. This means that this file needs to be world writable before WordPress tries to write it. Run the following commands in a shell to make sure .htaccess has the right permissions:

cd /your/wordpress/base touch .htaccess chmod 666 .htaccess

Don’t forget to sudo if you’re in Ubuntu.

Step 3: WordPress Options
The last step is to change some options in the WordPress admin panel. Navigate to the “Options” -> “Permalinks” tab and select the option that looks like “http://www.yourdomain.com/2007/12/11/sample-post/”;

After fiddling with WordPress, you should be good to go! Shoot me some comments if you run into any problems.

2 comments