Free niche site giveaway update

Posted by stuart as competitions, competition, seo, search engine optimization, search

Well it’s ten days now since I launched the free niche site giveaway competition, so I thought it’d be nice to have a bit of a look at where things stand so far.

The site is now indexed in both Google and Yahoo, it took about 6 days to be listed in Google, and I discovered the Yahoo listing today .

We got our first organic search visitor today, the search term was lello pasta maker, which we’re currently ranked around number 16 in Google for.

We’re not yet ranked for either of the terms Pasta Maker or Pasta Machine in Google, which is not surprising, but here’s a few terms we are in the top 100 for:

• Pasta Machine recommendations (6)
• pasta n casa pasta machine (1)
• Kenwood pasta maker (27)
• Commercial pasta maker (36)
• Weston pasta maker instructions (6)
• Norpro pasta machine (19)
• De Longhi pasta machine (71)
• Cucina pasta machine (30)
• Cuisinart pasta machine (17)
• Lello pasta machine (25)
• Norpro pasta maker (15)
• De Longhi pasta maker (80)
• Cucina pasta maker (58)
• Cuisinart pasta maker (67)

If you’re not sure what this is all about, go visit the Pasta Machine and Pasta Maker niche site giveaway, drop a link somewhere on one of your blogs or sites (or lots of links - every link counts as an entry), and go into the draw to win the site on the first of August!

Glad this dudes not in control of my PPC budget

Posted by stuart as stupid, adwords

Why would you buy AdWords spots for a seacch term you already own the number one spot in Google for?

How long can you keep it up?

Posted by stuart as php, site statistics

Update:

Thanks to the comment from one dollar a day, I discovered that for sites that redirect www to non-www, and vice-versa, the script didn’t work. The following code does, by testing both the www, and the non-www version:

$url = “someurl.com”;
$url1=’http://www.’ .$url;
$url2=’http://’ .$url;
@$results = get_headers($url1, 1);
if (strstr($results[0], ‘200′))
{
$status = “OK”;
}
else
@$results = get_headers($url2, 1);
if (strstr($results[0], ‘200′))
{
$status = “OK”;
}
else
{
$status = “borked”;
}
echo $url. ‘ is ‘ .$status;

============end update==============

Just discovered a nifty trick new in PHP5 that allows you to check the status of a site.

Here’s the code:

<? $url = ’someurl.com’;

$xurl=’http://’ .$url;

@$results = get_headers($xurl, 1);

if ($results[0] == ‘HTTP/1.1 200 OK’) {

echo $url. ‘ is <font color=”green”><b>online</font></b><br>’;

} else {

echo $url. ‘ is <font color=”red”><b>down</font></b><br>’;

}

?>

Pretty simple I reckon. You can see it in action here

What does this mean for businesses like siteuptime I wonder? I would imagine that it would be fun to set up a monitoring service like this. (Siteuptime only offer four monitoring stations as well - 3 in the US, one in the UK.)

This could be fun, we could set up a monitoring service with hundreds of test points! , super redundancy over dozens of datacentres, the mind boggles…

Why Yahoo’s demographics data is all buggered up.

Posted by stuart as stupid, yahoo

I downloaded Yahoo messenger today so I could have a yack with all round good bloke Dave Starr from Retired Pay World and Talar Systems.

After the installation, I fired it up and tried to create a new account. I entered my first and last name, my sex, and my postcode.

Seems Yahoo is another organisation that believes that the world starts at New York and ends at Los Angeles. Yeah, that’s right, I know an east coat and a west coast city in the US, bet you don’t know the same from Australia!

Apparently you can’t use Yahoo Messenger unless you have a five digit zip code. My four digit postcode is simply not up to scratch.

So what did I do? I just added a random number on the end of my post code.

Have fun with your fucked up demographic data you xenophobic twits!

Like finding money in the street

Posted by stuart as seo, search engine optimization

I bought a domain for a client today, when I logged into my account at MyDomain, I thought I’d go have a look at the list of domains I own (on the heavy side of fifty - I’m a bit of a domain whore).

I noticed a couple of domains I’d bought about six months ago, local niche related ones in the finance sector (think real estate finance). All these two domains had on them was some keyword stuffed dynamically generated text, not dis-similar t0 this. (I can’t believe that that page has survived in the google serps at number one for about a year!).

I’d linked to those two sites once only from other sites, just to get them indexed, then removed the links from the sites in question. In the name of curiosity, I fired up the Google Ranking Tool, dropped in the keyword in question, and the URL, and got the shock of my life.

One site ranked number four for its keyphrase, the other number twelve. These were sites that I basically forgot about, so never got around to building links to.

I logged in to the CPanel accounts for each of the sites, and it seems I’ve been missing an average of about 50 unique visitors a day between the two sites, with no monetisation on the sites at all.

So of course, I’ve decided to write some actual content for the page, throw it all into an optimised template, and add some monetisation.

The next port of call in this situation is to check out the sites above me for both cases, and work out what I need to do to get above them.

It would appear that it’s all about the links baby. The SEO on all the competitors is pretty terrible, and none of the sites above me have what I would call an insurmountable link profile.

Like finding money in the street!