It’s easy to be a bad company these days. Just don’t give too much of a hoot about your customers AFTER you’ve got their money for instance. I can think of quite a long list for that.
On the other hand, how about being deliberately deceptive, and actually publishing the fact that you are for the world to see? Now they probably aren’t alone of course, but since I’ve spotted it may as well name and shame:
chainreactioncycles{dot}com (can’t put a link – keep reading….)
They have an alluring “Exchange links with us!” page. There’s a load of gumpf about how echanging links with them will benefit your site. They’ll even pop your link on their homepage for a day or so. Sounds great! But wait….what’s that in the header of your “Partner Links” page. Some appears to have mistakenly added an extra meta tag:
<meta name=”robots” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW” />
Hmmmm – it’s also mistakenly been pasted into the headers of all the other link pages – the ones listing the 800 or so gullible webmasters who fell for this. I just love the way the noindex and nofollow are in all caps to – maybe they are really hoping that’ll make sure Google knows how little these guys think of their llink partners.
On the off chance you don’t know what this meta tag means:
NOINDEX – they are telling the search engines NOT include these pages in their results.
NOFOLLOW – they are telling the search engines they do not vouch for the quality of the sites they are linking to. That’s a bit rich since their “exchange links page” states they check your site to see that it meets their guidlines – I mean, are they doing that or not, and if so, why the nofollow?
They do, it seems, put their newest “partners” on the homepage, but they seem to habve missed out the NOINDEX meta tag. Not to worry, they found a solution to that by cloaking the link with redirects. Fiendishly inventive.
Honestly, this whole “hoard your PageRank” and ongoing battle to trick other webmasters in to thinking they are getting something when they are not is really cheesing me off. The blame has to lie at Google’s feet as they started this whole nofollow nonesense. The initial idea was sound enough – the tag should be used for UGC and I agree with that. I don’t, however agree that it should become a tool for webmasters to manipulate their ranking in the search engines and I’m pretty sure it’s intention was to try and put a stop to that anyway. The most laughable example of course is Wikipedia “nofollowing” the links to their sources. Shame on you Google.
Footnote: chainreactioncycles may well be, in all other ways, a reputable company selling quality kit to lots of satisfied customers. I have no experience with which to comment on that though.
New laptop time – this time around it’s a shiny Sony Vaio VGN-FW48E. Sony were kind/vindictive enough to pre-install the machine with Windows Vista which was no good to me as I actually want to do some stuff with the machine, not sit looking at a boot up logo all day or wait 15 minutes to find a file. So I installed XP Pro. And you can too.
Firstly (this is more for the event the laptop ends up going to someone else) I ran the create recovery media wizard so it can if needs be get back to it’s factory installed state. You ought to do this too just in case.
Second, completely wiped the harddisk by deleting all the partitions, creating a new one and formatting. Quickest way to accomplish this is with a good boot disc – I used the Ultimate Boot CD for this.
First problem – XP isn’t going to recognise the hard disk controller as it’s not in it’s driver section. You could go for the F6 option during the XP install and load the drivers from a floppy disc, but of course this machine doesn’t have a floppy and I’m not about to buy a piece of 90’s hardware to fix this 2010 machine. Find your driver then slipstream your XP installation disc using nLite. It’s not nearly as hard as it sounds, and nLite is a free download. You’ll just need access to a machine running Windows, your Windows Disc, a copy of your Drive Controller Driver and a blank CD.
Then you can install XP. On a side note, I installed XP Pro using OEM media, but the license key from my old VAIO that this one replaced. Didn’t seem to cause any issue at all, and activated online without a hitch. Once you’re up & running you’ll need to find drivers for all the hardware so you end up with a device manager that looks like mine does:
Everything as it should be. Wireless networking, ethernet, bluetooth, camera, media keys, card reader etc all functioning. It’s a pig of a job to find drivers that will work though, so be warned. Here are some links that may, or may not help:
Modding ATI Catalyst. Basically, you probably won’t get the right driver from ATI for a laptop – they will tell you to go to your Laptop Manufacturer (Sony in my case). Sony haven’t made an XP driver for any of my hardware as they don’t support it, so modding the Catalyst is the only option. It works and it’s free.
Sony Vaio FTP Driver Archive. Basically, Sony may not have written XP drivers for my machine, but they have for plenty of others and the hardware in them is all the same stuff. I just used drivers from similar models.
HP (for the Ricoh Card Reader) This was the last one I had trouble locating. In device manager it was simply listed as “Base System Device” so finding out what it actually was was the first trick before I could start trying to find a driver.
There are other places on the web purporting to have XP drivers for Sony VAIOs, but treat them with caution and virus scan anything and everything you download.
Good luck.
Been having a problem getting my Sony Vaio to boot up XP this week. On each boot, XP started running the add new hardware wizard claiming it had found “ACPI Uniprocessor PC”. Sometimes it wouldn’t load Windows at all, falling into a never ending loop of reboots. A bit of Googling and it seems lots of people are having the same issue. As is usually the way, almost without fail all the answers on forums from “experts” fell into these three categories:
- “You’ve got a virus” – followed by complicated instructions to run various virus scanners, edit the registrty and perform multiple reboots in between.
- “Your XP installation is screwed – re-install Windows” – this is the one Microsoft themselves seem to suggest.
- “You’ve got a hardware fault – send it back for repair”
I didn’t fancy any of these approaches as for one, they would all demand a great deal of my time, and for another I didn’t actually believe any of these was actually going to fix the problem in any case (I know re-installing Windows will fix almost anything – but it’s a bit like buying a new car just because the old one is a bit dirty or has run out of fuel).
I did a bit more Googling to find out exactly what the ACPI Uniprocessor PC is. Something to do with the processor itself and the HAL. That in turn appears to be connected to power management. So….
I’ve switched off power management, and the problem has gone.
Of course, if you use your machine on batteries this may not be the best answer in the world. It does, however, mean you can use your computer a bit as oppsed to not at all. I only run my machine at home and at work, so I’ve always got mains power.
***UPDATE*** Turns out I’m wrong, and this was the first sign of impending hardware failure. The system board actually died completely on me. I’ve got a new post up about how I set up my new VAIO with XP Pro.
I don’t do a lot on eBay, but this week I’ve got a couple of my Playstation games up for grabs. They’re both on auction at 99p starts:
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Both going with free delivery to some lucky UK buyer. Get in fast as auctions close Saturday.
Got this one today, the joke being this was arrived at from a link within Webmaster Tools itself. It would have been bad enough if it was in Google search results considering it’s one of their own pages. Obviously my favourite part is “Part of this page has been removed” – that would be the content then.
Got this one when trying to get into the forums on mysql.com
Working on a new Drupal site at the moment, unfortunately today while trying to access the Drupal site itself I got this one:
This is what a Drupal site does when it’s having problems. Trouble is, that link to the handbook isn’t a lot of use when the handbook is on the site that isn’t operating 
Started playing around with Drupal, and got this advice in my status report. Put simply I needed to increase the amount of memory available to PHP as I only had 64M available to it. My hosting is with Godaddy and after much Googling found a couple of possible solutions – add a line to .htaccess or edit the settings.php file in /sites/default.
First off, tried adding a line to .htaccess as explained here. It didn’t work. So I went for modifying “settings.php” (instructions at the same link I just referred to). Editing the file was no problem, uploading it was. My FTP Client couldn’t do it (I just got “critical error” each time it failed), and modifying permissions on the file, and it’s parent directory didn’t help either. Drupal “protects” the settings.php file as a security measure, and nothing my FTP client could do would get around it (that may just be a good thing).
The answer to overwriting this file with a Godaddy account is to use Godaddys’ own file manager. Log into your hosting account and make your way to hosting control center>content>file manager. Browse your way to the folder sites/default then click the little “Upload” icon, tick the “overwrite” checkbox and then use the browse to locate your modified settings.php. Worked for me
Amazon requires you to supply a 12 digit UPC, 13 digit EAN or 14 digit GTIN code for any product you wish to sell through their platform. This is a bit of a problem if you don’t have that information, and it is NOT displayed on (or hidden in the source code of) the product page on Amazon.
To find the UPC/EAN/GTIN you can view the rss page of the product and search for the relevant tag such as <EAN>, or <UPC>. For example to get an RSS page for the 80GB Sony Playstation 3 which is listed on ASIN B001DTETLS, you’d use this URL:
http://webservices.amazon.co.uk/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&AWSAccessKeyId=youridhere&Operation=ItemLookup&IdType=ASIN&ItemId=B001DTETLS&ResponseGroup=Medium,Offers
You’ll need to substitue “youridhere” with your own AWSAccessKeyId. I’m not publishing mine here, but you can get one for free yourself by signing up to Amazon Web Services. You could also just Google for someone elses as other people do publish their keys.
You can substitue the domain extension in the URL if you want to look it up on other channels such as .com .de .fr .ca or .co.jp.
This RSS page has a bunch of useful information in it. The static URLs for images for example and also the lowest prices for both new and used and of course, the EAN and UPC code.
If you’re loading your products into Amazon using flat files (which you really ought to) then there’s another interesting option. Amazon’s flat files require the field “StandardProductID” (this is your UPC EAN or GTIN) and “ProductIDType” (this is just the right prefix for the “StandardProductID” you are using so the allowed values are UPC, EAN or GTIN).
What Amazon don’t tell us is that their is a fourth “StandardProductID” type the system will accept – have you guessed yet? Yes, we CAN put an ASIN number in “StandardProductID” and enter “ASIN” into “ProductIDType”.
This has a couple of advantages. Firstly, we don’t need to bother with an EAN, UPC of GTIN code and secondly we can be absolutely sure we’re listing onto the correct ASIN.
Some people may wish to NOT list onto the correct ASIN. Typically if you’re selling a product and you’re not the cheapest seller for it it is going to be very difficult to get the buy box on that product. So you stand a much better chance of a sale if your product sits on it’s own ASIN. To do this, you’d need to supply Amazon with a unique, and also incorrect UPC, EAN or GTIN code.
This took longer than I thought to figure out. I wanted to use a server side include so I can use files on my webserver, but that are not within my WordPress installation. I tried a bunch of stuff, but luckily was able to see the error messages when it failed by viewing the source code of the WordPress blog. For instance, I got “syntax error, unexpected T_STRING”. This is the right code (assuming, of course, that the file you want is on the same server, but just in a directory outside the WordPress installation):
<?php include(ABSPATH . ‘/filename.html’); ?>
ABSPATH means, as you can no doubt imagine, absolute path. So if the file you wanted was in a sub directory such as “myfiles” you’d change the above to:
<?php include(ABSPATH . ‘/myfiles/filename.html’); ?>
You’d typically be calling for a file with an extension such as .html, .htm or .php. I need to do this as I plan to merge a new WordPress blog into an existing site, and the site has CSS style menus driven with an unordered list of links in a separate html file which I only want to have to edit in the one place.
Got bored with using Blogger – seems to be a total headache to maintain and doesn’t give enough control, so I’ve migrated the blog over to WordPress. For now I’ve added a theme, and messed about with it a little. I intend to mess about with it a lot as (while it looks quite nice) the guy who wrote it left it littered with errors, and the layout isn’t quite “right”. Didn’t bother doing any 301’s for it, unlike the TKD site.
Made my comments now to have “Nofollow” removed by default as I don’t agree with the whole nofollow thing. I moderate comment, and I do check what the comment links to. Regardless of the quality of the comment, if it loks like it’s purpose is to promote some “bad” area of the web it just doesn’t get published. So There.
My Taekwondo site had sat for years on a subdomain at http://tkd.tomcatuk.net. I felt the site deservered it’s own domain, so I did a little keyword research using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
Ran the keyword “taekwondo” through it, then sorted the results by global search volume. Top of the list (of course) was “Taekwondo” with over 3 million monthly searches. Obviously taekwondo.com, taekwondo.net and taekwondo.org have all been taken up long since. It does surprise me they don’t actually have sites on them, and are just cyber squats. Presumably the owners are waiting to make a fortune selling them.
Next on the list – “Taekwondo Olympics” with 110,000 global searches. Then at number 5 “Olympic Taekwondo” with 49,500 global searches. I know I’m going to have to go for a two word domain, and this looks like the number one keyphrase. Time to visit my registrar.
Bingo – managed to get a domain I really like – http://www.olympictaekwondo.org/ . Quite surprised it was available (checked Alexa and it’s never been registered so no issues with it being used for bad purposes in the past either). Perfect! No dashes or underscores, just two totally relevant keywords with a “reputable” domain extension (I don’t like URLs with special characters or numbers and suspect Google doesn’t either). Anyone who’s tried to register a domain knows just how tricky it is to find any good ones. I was only interested in getting a .com, a .net or a .org. Didn’t want any of the “lesser” extensions such as .biz, .info or .me. As the site is really suitable for an international audience, I wasn’t keen on .co.uk, but would have accepted one of those if the name was good enough.
Next step: copy all the content from the old subdomain over to the new FQDN (still on the same server). Since the site uses Blogger for the blog I had to republish that after changing the publishing settings within Blogger. Then write a 301 redirect into the .htaccess file within the old sub domains root by entering this line into it:
redirect 301 / http://www.olympictaekwondo.org/
Publish the .htaccess file on the old sub domain and bingo, any clicks to the old sub domain now get automatically redirected to the new domain. This will include any links on other sites, links in people’s favourites and, of course, most importantly and links in SERPs.
Prior to doing this, I double checked what the Google PageRank was for my pages – Homepage a 3, Blog page a 3 and all content pages a 2. The “About” & “Contact” pages had no PageRank which I kind of think is good of Google as these aren’t pages I expect to rank in SERPs. Individual Blog entries had a mixtures of 0,1 and 2 PR.
I did a little reading up, and it seemed the consensus was that when using a 301 redirect I could reasonably expect Google to start showing the new URL in search results, in the same position as the old pages in about two weeks. It should also reassign” the PR from the old to the new in about that time frame.
The 301 was put in place on July 10th 2009. I’ll amend this post when I have a proven timeframe for the SERPs positions and PR of the new domain matching the old.
***Footnote***
Google’s webmaster guidlines recommend using the “change of address” feature in Webmaster Tools to advise Google of a moved domain. Sounds good, but unfortunately it doesn’t help in this case. They do not give an option to move a subdomain, only a FQDN.
***Update 1***
On July 15th (just five days after implementing the 301) I have PR0 on most pages, notably the homepage and blog homepage. Some of the internal pages seem to have regained their PR2 value already. Google Webmaster tools refuses to make any statements about the PR of the sites’ pages, so presumably at this stage it is still all still ironging itself out.
***Update2***
July 20th – all the PR2’s that appeared have moved down to PR0. Webmaster tools now states 100% of pages have “low” pagerank. Interestingly, this, by default, means no page that’s been crawled is “not yet assigned”. Keyword rankings appear unaffected. Rapidly closing on the supposed 2 week period at this stage.
***Update3***
July 22nd – the new domain shows up in SERPs where the old one used to. Still zero pagerank across entire site. Keyword rankings still appear unaffected, although the site is starting to rank for “Olympic Taekwondo” (about number 15 on Google.co.uk and number 17 on Google.com).
***Update4***
July 25th – no change, and we’re now over the supposed two week period.
***Not exactly an update***
I just read this article by Danny Sullivan on 301′d pages/websites and their backlinks, and now I’m wondering if Google is going to pass the weight of all the backlinks the site had where it was before. Danny’s article kind of suggests that a moved site may well lose all the link juice it previously enjoyed as Google may not count the links to the old domain as still relevant. If that’s the case it’s a tad worrying as I had a LOT of backlinks, and from good places too. A lot of them were, in fact, what I would deem “the perfect link” in that:
1. MOST IMPORTANTLY – I didn’t ask for them.
2. They were from sites on topic with mine.
3. A lot of them were deep links to my site’s content with perfect anchor text.
If I’ve really lost all that link juice, yikes.
Tags: Google
