Internet Business & Marketing Strategy - Andy Beard » wordpress plugins

Cloudflare – Potentially Mindblowing e-Commerce CDN Solution

Andy Beard — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:35:16 +0000

I first heard about Cloudflare when they presented at Techcrunch Disrupt. I am not writing about every startup that presented there, just a couple that caught my eye as something that I think will have a significant impact for my readers.

Cloudflare is a distributed DNS, website security, & distributed Nginx powered reverse proxy (for static content) & caching proxy with content delivery network with some additional tracking and reporting ability.

That is a whole load of technology but what this means to you is:-

On average, a website on CloudFlare …
… loads 30% faster
… uses 60% less bandwidth
… has 65% fewer requests
… is way more secure
All for free!

This is how your website is normally exposed on the web.

You are in direct line of fire for everything that can possibly be thrown at it.

With Cloudshare you have an intelligent doorman in the way, only allowing through certain requests. Some high volume menial tasks such as answering the door to the postman and deliveries of groceries get handled by the caching proxy/cdn – unlike a normal CDN the URL for any file doesn’t have to change so it is very much like you set up a reverse proxy with Nginx or Squid yourself and assigned the traffic to a media server.

Simple Setup

The basic setup is fairly straight forward and only requires changing your nameservers. It is only as complicated as your initial setup, so if you have a little bit more going on… Google Apps, domain keys etc, though it looks more complicated those actually get bypassed.

There are also some extended settings

I haven’t explored these too much, but there are some things to be careful about with a blog. As an example some services such as feed readers often pull images directly and thus might be blocked by any hot linking prevention.

There are some interesting options for identifying geolocation and content obfuscation from certain types of visitors, though that doesn’t mean they are designed for cloaking content from search engines.

This is also where you assign security level with the recommendation being to use high security. You could look on the security as being a little similar to Bad Behavior, though with a CAPTCHA. I wonder if they have thought of monetizing the CAPTCHAs?

Security

The threat control is pretty interesting in that it can block web spammers, botnet zombies and exploit attackers of various types, and that is just with the free version.
The team has a lot of pedigree in this area as they were behind Project Honeypot. With the CAPTCHA and I believe also a message facility, there is also a very effective safety net in case of false positives which do happen, though some bots won’t fill in CAPTCHAs is caught by mistake such as Googlebot. I noticed today some discussion about Google’s sitemap crawler being blocked, and some suggestion of lower crawl by Google resulting from this.

In many ways Cloudflare could be looked on as an extension or next generation Project Honeypot, with the additional bribe of actually providing active protection and a huge bribe by caching content.

Analytics

The analytics features look quite interesting as an aggregate view.

They mention why the numbers might seem so much higher than javascript stats though don’t mention browsers pre-fetching content which is fairly standard these days.

Cloudflare seem to (or claim to) have knocked a second off my load time, though from what I have read that is based on the load time of the home page from another server in various locations.
Overall performance and relative performance will depend on what other optimization you are using.

I am currently using:-

W3 Total Cache Enhanced static page cache to disk
W3 Total Cache Database Cache using APC
W3 Total Cache Object Cache using APC
Autoptimize for combining/minification of CSS/jscript
Header & Footer – I discovered this gets added after Autoptimize has done it’s thing, so useful for adding things that I don’t necessarily want cached such as tracking stuff I am testing.
Cloudflare effectively as my only CDN (though I have a Amazon Cloudfront/S3 and a few other alternatives)

I could possibly improve performance a bit by locally caching lots of javascript, combining/minifying and then having it loaded from the CDN, but there is a lot of bug checking.

I don’t use APC for page caching as I found, at least on my Liquid Web Storm On Demand server that that was a lot slower for time to first byte.

Advanced Setup

You will initially hit problems with IP referrals and your server logs – the ideal solution is to to install “mod_cloudflare” on your server.

There is also this alternative (one of 2) for dealing with just the referrer within WordPress, but this won’t fix your server logs.
You would add this to wp-config.php

if ( isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) && !empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) )
{
$X_FORWARDED_FOR=explode(",", $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']);
$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']=trim($X_FORWARDED_FOR[0]); //take the first element in the array
}

Security For Premium Content

This isn’t a secure solution for paid membership sites – you might be better using a real CDN which can either domain lock or generate one time links.

I haven’t actually tried it with video yet.

Mindblowing for e-Commerce

If you are using an e-Commerce platform such as Volusion or BigCommerce which charges you a fortune for bandwidth, but you have control of your Nameservers and DNS this is the most amazing product / solution you will ever find.

Ideally you would go for the pro version with better security and performance which for most e-Commerce stores would likely be just $20/month. The savings for many store owners would be $80+ per month.
Then without messing around with remote hosted image hosting you can have CDN performance and a massive reduction in bandwidth excess fees.

This isn’t the only reason people face extra fees on services such as Volusion and BigCommerce, but it is a major one, and the extra performance and killing the bots makes it a best in class solution.

For further reading I came across this great post comparing the performance of various technology blogs earlier while doing some testing.
TechCrunch: The slowest tech blog, or one of the fastest? Turns out, it’s both.

p.s. I get to use Cloudflare for free, but everyone can – no barter deals for links & currently they don’t have an affiliate program.

Note: This is beta – there seems to be soe problems with some bots currently – most notably Googlebot seems to be having a few problems with this service and my crawl rate dropped by 90% and time to index a page more than doubled – I have currently switched back to my normal nameservers, and a conventional CDN

Tags: BigCommerce, CDN, Cloudflare, content delivery network, e-commerce, ecommerce, Project Honeypot, volusion, wordpress plugins

Anchor Sitelinks – WordPress Table Of Contents (Part 1)

Andy Beard — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:08:42 +0000

With Google now providing convenient anchor links as sitelinks within search results for long structured documents I thought it would be prudent to examine current solutions for WordPress and see which of them is most likely to help you obtain anchor links.

Read carefully – there is a competition at the end to get my bonus for Stompernet without buying anything

These anchor links have been around for a few weeks now, first reported on Google Blogscoped, but it was announced on the official Google blog.

Benefit Of Sitelink Anchor Links In Search Results

For users, quicker access to the information they are looking for avoiding the need to scroll through a long article (initially)
For site owners… I have no eye-tracking screenshots to show you, and I have only seen them on the first result so far, but at a guess if the first position gets you 40% of the clicks, this could bump that to 50%, a 25% increase in traffic for a top listing.

Would this result in higher conversions? Possibly, but bare in mind the visitors might never see what you prepared for them above the fold, so you need to include a marketing message at the bottom of a page as well.

Lets take a look first at the examples Google provide

Trans Fats

The first example Google provide is for trans fats

The top results is for a Wikipedia page

Google link through to the anchor for nutritional supplements from a horizontal line of sitelinks

Lets take a look at the structure of the elements on the page.

The Table Of Contents

This is what it looks like

Here is the code





Contents
 [hide]

1 History
2 Chemistry

3 Presence in food
4 Nutritional guidelines
5 Health risks

5.1 Coronary heart disease

5.2 Other effects


6 Public response and regulation

6.1 International
6.2 Australia

6.3 Canada
6.4 Denmark
6.5 Switzerland
6.6 European Union
6.7 United Kingdom

6.8 United States

6.8.1 Local regulation in the United States




7 Food industry response


7.1 Manufacturer response
7.2 Major users' response


8 See also
9 References

10 Further reading
11 External links

The links to the named anchors:-

Used relative named anchors – that may or may not be suitable for a blog post depending on what level of interaction you want to provide for someone viewing from an RSS reader.
Use human understandable names
Wikipedia use underscores as a separator – a hyphen would probably make this easier for Google
The anchors contain no unique reference which could potentially cause problems in an RSS feed or on a blog.
Are arranged in an unordered list

The Named Anchors

Lets dive straight into the code

[edit] Nutritional guidelines

It is nested within an H2 element on the page
The anchor doesn’t use a name construct which was deprecated in xhtml 1.1, but an ID id=”Nutritional_guidelines”
It could be considered suboptimal, because there isn’t an easy way to grab a link to that section of the page
The ID is applied to the span within the H2

Good Cholesterol Level

This is the Google search result pointing to this page as the first result.

Google provide a siltelink to a named anchor or ID from within the snippet

American Heart have a double listing even without the exact search term in the Title Tag and URL
The anchor link is placed immediately below the snippet title in the search results listing, and is almost like an ancillary title.
Either Wikipedia are slacking and don’t have a suitable page, or Google might have decided they are not a reliable source for medical information – their highest position is an article on HDL that references the 2nd article from American Heart – of course with a nofollow

The Table Of Contents

Here is what the TOC looks like on the American Heart Association site

Here is the code

A complete fasting lipoprotein profile will show:


Your total blood (or serum) cholesterol level

Your HDL (good) cholesterol level

Your LDL (bad) cholesterol level

Your triglyceride level

The links to the named anchors:-

Used relative named anchors – that may or may not be suitable for a blog post depending on what level of interaction you want to provide for someone viewing from an RSS reader.
Use human understandable names (though short)
Only a single word so no idea of separators
The anchors contain no unique reference which could potentially cause problems in an RSS feed or on a blog.
Are arranged in an unordered list
Whilst the anchors were short, a saving grace is that the link text matches the title

The Named Anchors

Lets dive straight into the code

Your HDL (Good) Cholesterol Level

Uses both named anchor and ID – named anchors were deprecated in xhtml 1.1 and replaced with the id tag
A link is provided which can be copied to link to that section of the page
Both the ID and Named anchor are applied to the link
Both the ID and named anchors use a keyword that appears within the link, but notably it is not the search query
The anchor link contains the search query that was used within the rich snippet

Anchor Links In Search – Requirements

On the Google Webmaster blog they have gone into further detail on the requirements for the additional listing

We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links). There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors. The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant queries, so you won’t see it on the results all the time — only when we think that a link to a section would be highly useful for a particular query.

WordPress TOC (Table Of Contents Plugins)

First of all I am going to explore common attributes, desired features and required features to achieve rich snippets and anchor sitelinks, and we will look at how many each of the current offerings fulfil.

I am not giving points for supporting the latest WP2.8.4
A plugin gets no additional point for being in active development – if it works it works
My ranking criteria may be totally different to a typical WordPress designer or user – ultimately I want something that works first, has fancy features second.
In compiling the lst of features I had glanced briefly at some of the existing plugins and noticed some failings, but all judging was carried out after requirements were specified. (I am not picking on anyone)
I might well overlook something especially on plugins that don’t seem to meet a number of requirements – this is a work in progress to help me make decisions as much as anything, and possibly some motivation for plugin authors to improve their offering.

Required Features

5 points – Automatic mode – it should be possible to create a TOC just by placing a shortcode, or having a widget with no specific editing
5 points – Ability to place TOC after a few paragraphs of content as an introduction. This might be a factor when creating excerpts, which in theory may or may not have the TOC, but certainly shouldn’t have it mangled.

10 points total

Anchors

2 points – IDs (Not Named Anchors) – To satisfy the validation nazis, we shouldn’t be using deprecated XHTML where possible, and we want something that is universal
2 points – Keyword Rich IDs – Google has specified this as a factor, though it appears it may not be universally necessary as long as the keyword is within the element
2 points – Unique IDs – I could list this under desired, but many blogs have full content appearing on their home pages or categories, and would frequently have something such as a download link or preface – IDs on a single page have to be unique.
2 points – Anchored elements contain keywords/section title – there are ways to do anchors that might create an invisible link or span first, and then a separate element would contain the actual title – this isn’t appropriate as the ID can’t be assigned to the text
2 points – ID is applied to a link that can be copied easily at he place in the text where the content is (no scrolling to TOC)

10 points total

Desired Features

1 point – Widgets
1 point – PHP Code for manual placement
1 point – Shortcodes
1 point – Ability to prevent placement on home page if desired
1 point – Both Ordered and Unordered Lists for TOC
1 point – Support for WYSIWYG editor buttons
1 point – Support for non-WYSIWYG buttons
1 point – good styling of TOC
1 point – appropriate styling of anchors
1 point – can it cope with code within a post that might contain headings

10 points total

GRAND TOTAL 30 POINTS

Reader Competition – Almost End Of Part 1

This article is already quite long, so I am breaking things into 2 parts, with the “review” of the existing plugins in part 2.

However I want to leave you with some example code from one WordPress plugin just to analyse here in the comments and to see who gets closest to my final score though if you find more problems I miss, those would be added to my “final score” (moving goal posts).
Whoever gets the closest will get the same bonus package as I have offered to those people purchasing Stompernet through my link.

WP-ToC

WP-ToC (blank page) but can download on WP.org

Chosen as the first on the list if you search from within WordPress – a ToC is placed just using a shortcode

The Table Of Contents

This is what the “broken” Table of contents looks like

The Table Of Contents (Code)

Note: I manually removed the code for the edit link shown in the screenshot


Benefit Of Sitelink Anchor Links In Search Results
Trans Fats
The Table Of Contents


Contents
The Named Anchors


Nutritional guidelines
Good Cholesterol Level
The Table Of Contents
The Named Anchors


Anchor Links In Search - Requirements
WordPress TOC (Table Of Contents Plugins)

Required Features

Table Of Contents
Anchors


Desired Features


Reader Competition - Almost End Of Part 1

WP-ToC

The Table Of Contents
The Table Of Contents (Code)
The Anchor Links (code)


Competition Rules

The Anchor Links (code)

Reader Competition – Almost End Of Part 1

Competition Rules

No Purchase Required
If you have already purchased Stompernet through my link, I will double the time I spend with you
All Countries Eligible
No need to sign up to an email list to enter, but use a real email address for comments/entries so you can be contacted
Leave a comment with the total score, and just to prove you thought about your answer, list at least 3 of the reasons why you gave that score (no random guesses)
I will delete comments that link to junk websites, don’t include a name in the name field etc Just because you make a pseudo entry doesn’t mean you can get away with spam.
Judges decision is final
First correct/nearest entry wins based upon date/time entered
All entries shoulld be a new comment, not a reply
Minimum of 10 correct entries before I publish part 2 with the results for all plugins
Anyone who charges their clients more than $100/hr or has what I would determine an established business can join in for fun, but will not be eligible for the prize – I won’t help with 3rd party “client” sites
No linking, tweeting, Stumbling etc required to enter – Google doesn’t like that but I do
Provided I have received enough qualifying entries, part 2 should be published within 48 hours

Enjoy… I now have to go and fix someone’s website that Google has maimed in the search results

You don’t need to place an entry to comment – let me know what you think

Tags: anchor links, search engine optimization, SEO Blog, site links, sitlelinks, stompernet, table of contents, toc, wordpress plugins

HowTo: WordPress Multivariate Split-testing With Google Website Optimizer

Andy Beard — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 02:43:47 +0000

WordPress Sales & Affiliate Themes

I spent the better part of a week and a few hundred dollars ($300-$400) on various WordPress sales letter and affiliate themes – I came to the conclusion that they weren’t something I would use.

Some I would class as pretty but lacking substance (polite version of crap)
Every single theme was designed around the concept that you run a single theme on your blog at a time
They all suffered from what I regard as a horrible plague – theme option pages – if you need to set up lots of options after you have uploaded a theme, you have lost a sale, unless I can also import and export settings.
The worst aspect of theme options pages is using them for the content that might appear on a page, because it is a nightmare to set up split testing, and when editing, you really want all the words on the page in front of you.

So I set about creating a solution for myself…

I started of with Thematic which I had already been playing around with for a good 8 months. Themeatic is an offshoot or branch of Sandbox of which I was also a fan, but built upon a grid system that hopefully I won’t totally destroy when I finally get around to theming on this site.

The first challenge was custom CSS for every page, and navigating my way through the maze of which functions initialized at which time within the WordPress core, such that the style sheet used is determined by the page selected in the default custom layout selector.

The end result is only 160 lines of code in functions.php, plus some in individual custom theme pages, and that may well get shorter as I optimize things, but the end result is something unique and useful.

I am a strong believer in doing things once

Once I have created a custom sales page theme for this system, though it is not limited to sales pages, it can be used without any setup overhead other than selecting it within a dropdown list and hitting save.

And of course, everything is created based upon a child theme of Thematic, thus when Thematic has one of its frequent updates, there will be very little if any pain in upgrading.

WordPress Split Testing With Google Website Optimizer

There are a number of plugins that claim to provide support for Google Website Optimizer. Most only work with A/B split testing as the authors couldn’t figure out the best way to add tags to post content.

In addition often the GWO code was placed in the wrong place in the header, it needs to be after Doctype, but before the CSS to effectively fully replace the CSS – I realise CSS is meant to be cascading, and you can force your way through when it doesn’t quite work out, but sales pages are meant to load fast.

So our single CSS file by default no matter what style the page is gets wrapped with GWO selectors by default. The most important element on the page, the post title which most of the time is used as a headline also gets wrapped in selectors by default.

You don’t have to test them all the time, but they are there when you want them.

I eventually selected one plugin solution, from an Italian company who do landing pages. I may end up tweaking things more, moving various thing from functions.php into the plugin, though many of the hooks I have used are specific to thematic, even the one I ended up using within the plugin to get the correct placement of the GWO code in the header.

Whilst I claim that this video would only be 5 minutes at the start, it is actually 8 minutes, but demonstrates the full process of setting up split testing with my current solution.

I am sure you are also curious about how it works, so here is the demo sales page from the video, with split testing currently enabled.

The reason I haven’t yet implemented shortcodes are 2-fold.

I don’t need them
Using PHP, it is quite easy to use most of the work I have done with any other split testing software, either javascript or PHP based, for those with tin-foil hats (most affiliates using Adwords extensively?)

The PHP plugin I discovered rocks – I tweeted about it a couple of weeks ago.

Implementation for other theme frameworks isn’t immediately planned, and code after some more tweaking will be made available in various ways (for the geeks whose shoulders I had to climb on to get this far), and I will probably package things in some way for those less technically inclined looking for a “solution, along with modified versions of various themes I have rights for.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, google website optimizer, gwo, landing pages, multivariate testing, split testing, thematic, wordpress, wordpress plugins, wordpress themes

WordPress Possibly Related Posts With Sphere

Andy Beard — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 02:48:01 +0000

The new WordPress.com possibly related posts is game changing – and gaming changing if they get it right.

The following are some notes I am taking whilst testing

http://blog.valuewiki.com/2007/03/14/my-blogging-lessons/

http://www.gischeleman.com/2007/06/04/popularity-hadnt-occured-to-me-until-today/
http://www.tweblog.com/2007/02/05/67-million-blogs-and-15-million-blog-posts-each-day/

Some notes about these links

It is not just WordPress.com blogs, as Doug Haslam is using .org
These are all old posts, the newest is over 9 months old
There have certainly been many more related posts, such as on Mashable.
I tested whether the links were indexed in Technorati – they weren’t, but then the WordPress.com blog doesn’t have a normal feed and might be banned from Technorati as it might skew things a little with 3,000,000 sitewide links pointing at it
The links were also not shown in Google Blogsearch, but again… no feed

As an experiment, I pinged the page in Technorati anyway to see if things update.

Other pages such as this one (new dashboard) on the WordPress.com blog has more relevant fresh links, so it does sometimes work.

So we need to visit a bloger who is obviously still in Technorati such as… Lorelle, with her most recent blog challenge

Lets see where these links point

http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/weekly-digest-quarter-through-two-months-of-guest-blogging… ok I shortened this URL a little
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/11/04/blogging-challenge-should-all-business-professionals-blog/
http://hollironquillo.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/how-to-get-started-as-a-freelance-blogger/
http://yrikendrick.wordpress.com/2008/03/20/write-a-successful-blog-hot-tips-on-how-you-can-start-writing-a-blog-successfully/
http://enkerli.wordpress.com/2006/11/04/blogging-ethnography/
http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/04/killer-stress-b.html

Notice 2 of those links are on her own blog, and they are highlighted in bold and listed first – that is useful if you don’t have an alternative using plugins such as Simple Tags.

I suppose from a reader point of view it also enhances the browsing experience… at least a little.

I checked all the URLs, and again Technorati wasn’t showing any links from Lorelle’s blog to those blogs listed as possibly related. So I gave them a ping as well, and we will see if there are long term results.

What Does Sphere Say?

The official Sphere announcement shows a little more information

A Sphere-powered module resides beneath posts on all WordPress.com index pages showing related articles from three sources: from the author of that article, from across the WordPress community, and from sources in our mainstream media index.

Sphere are owned by AOL

In Matt’s post there is talk of pushing this out to WordPress.org blogs, and probably that also includes WordPress MU as well.
If you decide to opt out, your links are no longer shown.

It Is No Longer Javascript

I had a little look at Sphere some time ago, and was accepted into their program for the widgets. I just got a little tied up around Christmas moving house so I did nothing with it. The acceptance email was actually still in my gmail inbox along with 9000 other emails (some of those are actually read and actioned, just not archived) – they didn’t send a followup reminder, and I had been waiting over a year to be included.

If I am included within the network by displaying the widget at the bottom of posts, I might then also be included within the WordPress.com possibly related blogs as being a “mainstream blog”

So I would be giving out a javascript link, which might send some traffic away, but in return I get a nice search engine followable link from all the WordPress.com blogs that decide to use this feature.

In addition to the original registration that was possible (and actually still seems to be available for a normal widget, there is also a WordPress Plugin listed in the tools section.

Cool

What is strange is that 2 of the above blogs originally mentioned are not running Sphere links or the widget.

Also significant is that the WordPress.com version which has the links in HTML doesn’t seem to include the links in feeds, which on many blogs is where the readers are. Maybe that is just oversight.

I certainly wouldn’t include a “live links” version of the code unless it appeared in the feed, and would probably prefer live links in feed, and Javascript on my blog.

The lack of links in the feed might also be a reason that Technorati isn’t picking up the links (though they could have code to filter already) and why Google Blogsearch isn’t picking up the links, as that works just with feeds.

Hmm It Is A Link

There are widgets and widgets – some widgets are pure javascript, and others are links that get rewriten by javascript.

Sphere: Related Content

As far as I am concerned that is linking to a search query, thus it should have nofollow on the link, but it doesn’t.

That might need to be tweaked in the plugin.

So I now have a “Sphere It!” button, lets see if I start appearing across 3 Million WordPress.com blogs, and large news sites.

For those on WordPress.com who are worried about this feature, Lorelle now has a warning and no doubt WordPress Wank will be entertaining.

There are major issues among more controversial hate related blogging, and editorial control – I suppose the same problems exist having Digg headlines on your blog.
Also of note is that I forst spotted Lorelles new post when testing my Sphere widget after I posted. Not all the blogs listed are junk.

Why TrafficJam.com really…

Andy Beard — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:32:28 +0000

I could finish that title in all kinds of ways

does suck
is amazing
can bring you masses of targeted traffic
can be used for market research
can help you optimize your titles
can be used for discovery
is overrated
is underrated
is useful
is a waste of screen pixels

Get the idea? It all depends on perspective and objectives.

Even if you have absolutely no interest in TrafficJam or Blogrush, I strongly suggest you read this post, especially if you are interested in viral marketing techniques that are guaranteed to build you an email list.

John Reese launched TrafficJam just a few days ago with the slogan – “Speed Read Thousands Of Blogs!”

TrafficJam vs Techmeme & Megite vs Activity Streams vs Feed Readers

Meme trackers are great ways to discover what people are blogging about. I stop by Techmeme on a daily basis and it brings me a great overview of what is happening in technology. It is a little elitist, the blogs and other news sources that get picked up are carefully selected, though the algorithms will also pick up other news sources if the central seed blogs link to them, or if other blogs link through to the lead stories or Techmeme, effectively saying “Hey, I have something to say as well”.

Megite allows you to create personal meme tracks, so I might also stop by the Search Engine marketing meme tracker based upon the Online Marketing Blog Biglist.
Some time ago I also created a meme tracker based upon my Technorati favorites, but because technorati Favorites is still broken and not showing all my favorites, this is proving next to useless and it can’t pick up the “undercurrent” of the z-list

Obviously I have my feed reader, but whilst I have subscribed to 300 or so blogs, I rarely have time to read them – using Google Reader with my current connection is cumbersome and the same would be true of other online readers such as Netvibes and Bloglines – I am currently also experimenting with FeedDemon which was made free not too long ago. It is a good option for those feeds which are “must reads”.

Blogcatalog’s Dashboard – the new activity stream is great, I have actually set it as my home page – my friends need to update their profiles so I can see what they are up to, but it gives me a good overview without getting bogged down. In some ways this is similar to what you can achieve with Netvibes or Pageflakes, but without the need to add all the feeds yourself.

TrafficJam highlights the undercurrent

TrafficJam highlights what is currently hot, without requiring high traffic numbers, a “trained audience” encouraged to click things to bring you more traffic, or anything else.

Clicks are based purely on headlines – if you have a headline that visitors to other blogs find interesting, you are going to gain a few clicks, even if you have a very low traffic blog – Blogrush already favours low traffic blogs in this regard because they gain lots of free credits.
How many free credits? Well I have had my WPPlugins site listed on Blogrush since it launched, and it is a very low traffic site, that hasn’t been updated in a long time, and the headline of the last post is hardly captivating.
The site certainly hasn’t earned many credits on its own – it has however been allocated almost 400,000 credits.

If you imagine the potential for a niche website, with a carefully optimized title being the one appearing within Blogrush, leading to a well optimized page which has been designed with a suitable traffic funnel, a CTR of 1% would give you 4000 visitors.

4000 visitors might not seem very much, but that is probably the equivalent to being linked to from 10 A-list bloggers in the blogging, seo and internet marketing niches with what I would call a “good” link, intended to send readers to look at something.

I know how much traffic I get from such links, and whilst they are not always sculpted to send maximum traffic, and there is an audience cross-over, there are very few sites that have sent me over 500 visitors from a single link in a short space of time.
If I delve into Google analytics and filter based on referrer, there are a few links that over a long period of time bring me more traffic, but those are invariably a well highlighted link in corner-stone content that attracts lots of links in itself.

Blogrush – Poor Click Through Rate

Despite improvements in targeting and improved quality filtering, the CTR from the Blogrush widgets has drastically reduced.

I think this is down to a number of problems

Public quality perception – if you have moaned about or subjected Blogrush to public ridicule (some Internet marketing sites are very much like Ripoff Report in that respect) then you are unlikely to click.
Different focus of attention – manual comment spammers are going to be focused on visiting the next blog on their list, entrycard droppers on their next drop zone, Stumblers are just as likely to hit the stumble button.
Ugly widget – some people still don’t like it
Poor positioning of widgets – it is an exit point, and people don’t really want to encourage others to leave their website, though to be frank in most cases other than sales pages, they are likely to do that anyway. Obviously many people are also looking for maximum monetization

My hope is that over time these things will be improved, but ultimately Coke tastes better than Pepsi.. right?

TrafficJam Is For The All List

A list like that makes me excited, because half the blogs I had never heard of or visited, and there was some great content to be found. Not all of it, titles alone can be a little misleading, and I am sure could be gamed, but often someone who can write a good title can also write good articles.

Well not quite everyone is an unknown, there is a post from the Income.com blog on the list, as well as from Alice Seba, and one from Lynn Terry @ Clicknewz – they probably have more paying customers than many A-list bloggers have subscribers

Then I noticed Kieron has had some problems with people gaining a front page Digg… with content they ripped off from him – whilst Kieron is in my feed reader, I missed this post because I haven’t been using it as much due to connection difficulties.

I also noticed a couple of posts from Linda celebrating 5 years in the affiliate management industry and an analysis of salaries for affiliate managers.

I am not going to pretend that one link from me is worth the advertising space that Blogrush takes up, but bloggers clicking through on specific content written by other people in their niche has the ability to magnify the traffic.
It doesn’t take many links and new visitors to enhance the effect of social media, and add subscribers.

Before you moan about Blogrush not bringing any traffic make sure you have carried out the following:-

Read my previous articles on Blogrush
Installed a plugin to create a custom RSS feed which you can use for testing

Mark was one of the first to offer a decent solution that doesn’t involve manual editing of an RSS feed, and since then a good solution was created by Pawan Agrawal of Max WordPress with his Blogrush Click Maximizer.

Pawan actually released a new version yesterday (22 feb), and even if you have no interest at all in Blogrush, you have to download this new version hosted in the WordPress plugin repository, and go through the activation process – it is a brilliant piece of coding by someone who really understands list building.
If you are doing anything to do with WordPress, whether it is plugins or themes, you have to see how he is doing this. Even better, the plugin is released under GPL, so you could easily reuse his code.

I think Pawan has a snse of humor as well. He said in the update notes that there were small changes made… that trebled the code size. Seriously this is list building artwork.

Created a custom langing page or optimized your site to maximize conversions
Actually clicked a few Blogrush links every day since launch – if you don’t use it, how can you expect any traffic from it
If it turns out to be a good post, Stumble it, bookmark it – I have enhanced friendships and loyal readership by doing exactly that

TrafficJam Teething Problems?

Whilst I am overly positive that this is going to be a very useful service (if people give John and his team a little slack), there are things that should be cleaned up a little.

Session IDs – for some reason clicking links from TrafficJam leaves ?PHPSESSID=llrg8vvclv49dko9ekp38uf2v7 or similar on the end of the links, and WordPress doesn’t clean that up automatically (and I hope they never do, unless used for other purposes) – this is something that needs fixing as it can mess up some things with social media, and looks ugly.
Not displaying Blogrush – there are sites still listed that are not displaying Blogrush – I am sure this is because whilst they are no longer displaying Blogrush, they referred a lot of people – I am not sure how to handle this – as an example Linda isn’t displaying Blogrush on her blog, but from memory she was mainly displaying it on her forum previously. I am sure she referred tons of people, and will always have credits from referrals.
Stats – make all traffic and credit stats crystal clear, and exactly how they came about
Positioning – TrafficJam could be used as an incentive for good positioning of the widget. If blogs send more traffic due to good positioning, they should in some way have their feeds highlighted. Alternatively or in addition you could just have recent clicks highlighted.
Design – I would like to see the category choices at the top or bottom, with the right side of the page reserved to highlight more content such as positioning benefits.
Blogrush Widget – it really needs excerpts and maybe some kind of additional ratings for a post just read. A blog is gaining a benefit from a click based upon a title, but a title has to deliver on the promise +1/-1
For Blogrush – I want to be able to promote my downline, I don’t really need more referrals, but my readers do

Unlike many, I am willing to give John a chance to make this a success – there is a need, and someone needs to fill it. This is only the second part of Income.com, I am looking forward to the third, and probably largest piece of the puzzle that John started launching over 1 year ago with a small green blob.

Do also make sure you check out Pawan’s plugin – there are actually a few flaws in the process which I am going to suggest need fixing for his next upgrade – it doesn’t seem to work with multiple lists, so I ended signing up to 2 lists of his this evening, when I have been on some for the last 2 years or more, and as it is on WordPress plugins, you don’t know who the referrer was – it would be good if there was a “where did you hear about this plugin” field.

Tags: blogrush, rss, subscribers, traffic, wordpress, wordpress plugins

Answers.com Answerlinks Plugin – How Much Are Those Links Worth?

Andy Beard — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:58:36 +0000

WordPress.com owners Automattic, working in conjunction with Answers.com and former WordPress core developer Alex King have just released a new plugin which allows WordPress.com users, and WordPress.org users to easily link to topics and definitions on Answers.com.

There are literally hundreds of such plugins for linking to various Wikis and shopping sites, but for some strange reason those haven’t been included on WordPress.com

Users on WordPress.com aren’t really very SEO savvy and thus are most likely to be “link happy” and of course with the plugin being so convenient, they are more likely to link to Answers.com now than rival sites.

A deal such as this if you were a link broker would be a 7 or even 8 figure deal – especially if there was some level of exclusivity.

If Automattic are being paid for including the plugin, surely they should let their user base know that they are receiving compensation for the links.

Whilst such links are being provided editorially by bloggers, the plugin is like doing the decorating, and then giving a baby a box of crayons to play with.

I am sure they would like the option to nofollow the links, after all much of the material sourced from Wikipedia is user generated content.

If I was an investor in Automattic, and they didn’t receive significant financial compensation, I would be extremely upset. Not only for the lost income, but also the lost leverage and link equity.

If Answers.com were ever in the market to buy WordPress.com, the value to them is vastly reduced. They already have the link juice.

For a competitor to Answers looking for link juice, the value is also vastly reduced, because they will be sharing links, and it would be very hard to tell users…. “Sorry, you can’t link to Answers now, you have to link to XYZ instead”

At a guess, this might knock at least 50% off the value of WordPress.com – it is like damaged merchandise, deflowered.

Then of course Automattic are so against webspam, they wouldn’t dream of handing a stick of dynamite to a baby along with a box of matches and of course they would do it out of the goodness of their heart.

Tags: answerlinks, answers, Automattic, paid links, plugins, wordpress plugins, wordpress.com, wordress

Sphinn Greatest Hits – Could The #1 Be Some Useful Content?

Andy Beard — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 14:38:00 +0000

John Andrews currently has the top rated article on Sphinn with a truly brilliant display of link baiting and social media awareness.

I am not sure I am going to be able to knock him off the top spot, and this very post will probably gain him a few more votes, but I would like to think that one of my older articles could at least be a contender.

If This Content Is So Good, Why Hasn’t It Been Submitted Before?

There are a number of reasons why my old post on WordPress SEO and Dynamic Linking might not have been submitted by anyone in the past, and I think it is important to elaborate.

The post in question was originally written in June, thus it pre-dates Sphinn – Danny doesn’t mind older content being submitted as long as it adds something of value.
It was written as a Paid Post – I am sure some people are shuddering already, and others might just have a little gleam in their eyes – after all what better way to emphasise a point about some paid content and links being of high value than to have it highly rated on Sphinn
Sphinn Might Not Accept a Paid Post – This is one reason I personally didn’t submit it sooner, because I respect the wishes of the admins, as well as the community. I asked Danny in a comment on Sphinn and I have taken his reply to mean that this submission would be acceptable.
I was unsure of the “current climate” regarding paid links – I think in part SES San Jose has brought even some of the most white hat SEOs to question Google’s stance, and whilst Google’s stance is like a rock against a storm tide, hopefully… eventually… we will have some clarification on some of the more grey areas.
The article was a load of junk? – no one has given me that reaction so far in the comments, or the other correspondence I have had about the article – the article also generated a lot of consulting enquiries which I turned down or have yet to progress to the next stage
The content wasn’t original – whilst I reference other people fairly often, it is never without my own opinion, and in this case I think most SEOs think “siloing” is advanced linking structures – this article goes well beyond siloing

Gaming Sphinn?

Of course not…

I am just making my readers aware that I have submitted an article they might have enjoyed or even been tempted themselves to submit to Sphinn, if it wasn’t for the “stigma” of it being a paid post that might damage their reputation in some way.

Want to Make A Statement?

This might be one way of doing it…

Matt Cutts reads Sphinn, at least occasionally.

So do a lot of people who don’t fully understand the arguments frequently raised by SEOs about paid links, and services such as ReviewMe, Sponsored Reviews and PayPerPost

This post in particular I feel highlights something wrong with Google’s arguments and I am quite happy to provide it as an example (many people would be scared to do so)

Won’t Google Discount The Links?

All links within the site review were given editorially. The PPP interface doesn’t really provide for this, but it was negotiated before acceptance and I have documentary proof though it is private communication.

It Looks Like Google Have Already Discounted The Links

Google Backlink check on Emonetized

I should note at this time that the review was a one off “contract” and thus I am not receiving any monetary compensation for the links in this article.

Tim has just started a series on finding niches which I am sure many of my readers will enjoy

That also proves that Tim’s blog is in the same area of topical authority, it is natural for me to be linking to him, and all the links are relevant.

Tim was honestly giving me a little compensation for the time I spent on a review.

Unfortunately it is impossible to prove whether my links to Tim really pass some Google Juice or not, because Google’s link: command doesn’t provide all the results, and might even skip some of the most relevant.
SEO Round Table highlighted today a few ways to check if links pass value – I have checked a number of my other links to other people and have seen my links credited. My WordPress SEO article has received a fair number of incoming links, and I have linked to it multiple times from pages that received links.

It was also syndicated in full and listed as the feature article on Searchnewz.com (note – I didn’t give a followed link to my syndicated article, although it is syndicated with my blessing)

Using Nofollow To Control Juice?

Matt seems to say that using nofollow to control Google Juice is ok, as long as you don’t orphan content.

Voting

I really don’t want this post submitted, despite the fact it might have evidence (though inconclusive) that Google are discounting some links they probably shouldn’t.

However if you liked my old post “WordPress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches” I would appreciate a vote on Sphinn, whether you thought it was great content, or because you want to highlight to Google that some paid content can be great, and the links editorial.

If you think it is junk, tell me so in the comments on that post, and give me some better examples.

Obviously I could just change the permalink to bring it to the front page and give it a little more attention, but I am saving that for a future test on Google’s algorithms

Tags: payperpost, reviewme, search engine optimization, SEO Blog, sphinn, Sponsored Reviews, wordpress, wordpress plugins, WordPress SEO, wordpress themes

WordPress Plugin – Custom Query String – UTW Edition

Andy Beard — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 21:26:15 +0000

This is the first release of this modified “classic” WordPress plugin and is based upon the original Custom Query String by Matt Read which has been looking for a permanent home for a while.

It contains some simple modifications extending the operation to include the UTW is_tag() function.
The changes made are not unique, as they are the same as have been described on a number of Non-english language blogs such as 082Net – a little hard to find if you don’t speak Korean, and as I have found in the past, if hacks are not provided as a distributable final version, very few people use them.

This plugin is intended to be used in advanced linking stuctures such as those described in WordPress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches

Rather than blocking duplicate content pages, they can be used to your advantage, but as customized landing pages and a method of channelling “Google Juice” away from pages that are receiving the majority of links, to pages that you wish to rank well, and also to your homepage to enhance monetization.

This plugin allows you to modify the default number of posts displayed by the WordPress loop before it creates a new page.

Not Just For SEO

There are all kinds of ways this plugin can also be used for aesthetic appeal and improved navigation.

It should be noted that this is a totally white-hat solution that even Googlers would approve of, as it is frequently recommended these days that sites should be developed to have a wider footprint rather than a deeper one.
It is one of the best solutions to minimise supplemental results on WordPress which are typically from a lack of PageRank, and not as many assume, duplicate content.

Full details and new permanent home for Custom Query String

A couple of additional notes in passing.

It is possible to use the original plugins (which was up to version 2.7) with UTW, but it involved jumping through a few unnecessary hoops which would decrease adoption and also prevent a number of useful linking structures.

This plugin was really in need of a home to ensure that people download a fully working version. Many links are broken to the original, and those that exist are to older versions.

As my readers appreciate, I just tinker with code, thus if extensive modifications are needed with the release of WP 2.3, I might need to strong-arm a friend into helping me manage the programming.

That being said, I am quite capable of supporting the plugin, and explain how it can be used in various ways, which is often more time consuming than the actual coding.

Whilst my advanced WordPress SEO tips might look a little daunting, Custom Query String is actually very simple to use.

Just install it as a regular plugin, go to Options >>> CQS and set up declarations for categories and tag pages, and date archives if you use them (most installations have them somewhere)

Update

There are a few versions of CQS now available for WP2.3+ including Custom Query String Reloaded

I have some additional changes I still want to make with my own version

Tags: Custom Query String, custom wordpress, search engine optimization, SEO Blog, ultimate tag warrior, utw, WordPress Loop, wordpress plugins

Sphinn Support – Antisocial (SEO Friendly Sociable) WordPress Plugin

Andy Beard — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:14:59 +0000

I have just added support for Sphinn to my hacked version of the popular Sociable plugin.

For those unfamiliar with Antisocial, these are the differences

All links have nofollow added – this might sound strange coming from someone who strongly supports the removal of nofollow from comments, but there is no logical purpose having a followable link to a social bookmark site that just points to a submission form
TwitThis Support – for those that like Tweeting
StumbleUpon Fix – The original has a bug in the StumbleUpon link
New support for Sphinn – lots of people are going to use it, so I am sure it is a welcome addition

I am aware that Eyefall previously posted a modified version of the original to include Sphinn, but it doesn’t include the other necessary changes, and who really wants to use a plugin that sucks for SEO, especially the primary users of Sphinn, most likely SEOs.

Another valuable note, very few people will actually take action and use patched files, or even files presented as phps which you have to copy and paste.
If you don’t distribute plugins in an idiot proof zip file, very few people will use it.

I learnt this from experience by offering initially instructions on how to patch Sociable, and how many of my readers didn’t take action.

If you are still unsure about why you might want to use my version of Sociable, you might appreciate this “blast from the past” about how many blogs can retain as much as 50% more link juice internally.

For more information on the plugin itself, please visit the main download page.

For those that know all about it, here is a quick download link for Antisocial

Note: As always, no version number change though I have updated the notes within it – I still look on this as not being a branch of the original, just a hack for SEO minded individuals.
It still contains the sociable bug with WordPress 2.2.1 as I recently mentioned

Tags: sociable, social bookmarking, social networking, sphinn, stumbleupon, twitthis, wordpress, wordpress plugins

Sociable Plugin Error With WordPress 2.2.1

Andy Beard — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 20:41:08 +0000

There seems to be a bug with the Sociable plugin, for which I provide a hacked version with a couple of minor modifications. The bug seems to only be for users of WordPress 2.2.1 (which you should upgrade to for security reasons)

When you save options, the following error is encountered

Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Bad arguments. in /home/andyeu/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sociable/sociable.php on line 659

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/andyeu/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sociable/sociable.php on line 770

The display of all the draggable icons is severely messed up.

From what I can see in the code (as a tinkerer, not a programmer), this does not prevent the options from being saved, and the correct saved settings appear to be reflected when the page is refreshed, and on the blog itself.

The error appears to be in a section of the code that is related to the default icon set, but I haven’t spent too much time trying to fix it, as I would hope this will be fixed in the original.

I don’t look on my version of the plugin as a branch, I have left all default options “as-is”, thus I will await an official fix, and then update my slightly modified version.

Many thanks to Edwin De Jong and Mindy Koch for making me aware of the problem so I could test it out with WP2.2.1

p.s. I did try to coax a website out of Edwin to link too, but he declined

Tags: antisocial, Bookmark Plugin, sociable, wordpress, wordpress plugins