Archive for the 'Technology' Category

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Moving My Web Hosting

Published on September 18, 2007 in Blogging, Technology and Web Hosting. 0 Comments

After almost 2 years with my current host I’ve decided that I’ve had enough of the sluggish page loading and really slow control panel access so I changing.

As I have several domains on my account, this is not a decision I’ve taken lightly as it will be, I suspect, a nightmare. Why? Because I’m changing control panels to CPanel and it isn’t a simple swap over from my current panel. In fact I’ve spent that last few evenings writing scripts (still to be completed) to do much of the donkey work for me.

But 1 thing has bugged me for days – how to forward an email address to multiple people as the online CPanel help was pretty terse on the subject. Well Google’s your friend and it came up with this little gem

So I’m sorted, if a little mad ….

Excellent SEO Tip to Stop So-Called Duplicate Content

Published on April 25, 2007 in Technology. 0 Comments

I came across a great tip concerning Google and so-called duplicate content caused by the various ways that surfers can access a web page. Although humans can figure out that www.philipdelisle.co.uk is the same as philipdelisle.co.uk is the same as www.philipdelisle.co.uk/index.php etc, it seems that Google (and other search engines?) find this difficult.

If you get hit by this, Google might think that you have different versions of the same content on your site and penalise you accordingly.

Jason Potash of Portal Feeder published code to insert in the .htaccess file on Apache web serve. It works brilliantly provided that you realise that there is a typo on the first line (see my comment #14) which Jason may have corrected by the time you read this.

[Edit - the code has been corrected]

Does it pay to buy links?

Published on March 9, 2007 in Technology. 2 Comments

The perceived wisdom is that to get a good natural position in the search engines, you need to have one way incoming links from sites with a good page rank (normally 5 or more).

There are lots of 2 page word cloud sites with a decent page ranks. And the links are cheap – $10 a link isn’t a lot to pay for a decent placement.

But do they work?

And how come these sites get page ranked so well when they don’t seem to offer much in terms of content?

And am I brave enough to use some of my marketing budget to find out???

What’s Google playing at?

Published on February 27, 2007 in Technology. 0 Comments

I was doing some research recently into how Google works so that I can improve the ranking of my other websites. We all know that content is king, and I’ve always been very sceptical about using SEO to improve rankings, preferring, perhaps naively, to create a pleasant site with interesting information in the areas that I work in; these are not mainstream so I’m unlikely to get business directly from the web. So my playing with my sites is safe from a financial point of view.

However …

I’ve now got Google to index this blog. And I’m pretty disappointed to discover that my entries are in the supplementary index which is clearly not a good thing.

I’m confused as to why this should have happened as blogs, particularly Blogger ones, are supposed to be loved by Google.

So experiment time …

I’ve changed the name of the blog for reasons I won’t bore you with and rewritten the description to make it more relevant to me and what this blog is about.

It will be interesting to see if this makes a difference when Google makes another pass in a few weeks time.

I’ll keep you posted!

Video Diaries

Published on February 26, 2007 in Blogging and Technology. 0 Comments

I had a great meeting today with an old friend, Stephen Harvard Davis. I showed him how easy it was to create a video for uploading onto YouTube/Google Video/MySpace etc using the default tools in WinXP and a cheap DV video camera.

The results were surprisingly good with titles, credits, voice overs etc. After about 15 minutes of thought, it looks like we might have come up with a new business so stay tuned!

Time to think about a video diary too …