Search engine ranking algorithms are a mysterious thing. Very few people on earth have access to their exact blueprint, for those of us who think we have cracked it, it all seems relatively simple. Put enough of the right things in place in the right combination and presto you are in, right, simple huh? In reality of course, hardly.

Work at the coalface dictates that the safes combination gets harder to crack as more people try to open it for their target terms. It just doesn’t do anymore to think of ones documents in simple structure word count and number terms. As the document numbers increase, some keywords can take on an almost esoteric level of attainment. The access parameters are ratcheted up to a point of ‘hey if you want to score here, you gotta be doing real good‘. So, whats a man to do then?

Techno crackhead SEO’s on observation acid

SEO minded people who think about this sort of stuff might well share some of my musings, specifically in terms of thinking like a search engine algorithm. The theory being of course that any successful understanding of anything makes it a whole lot easier to apply what we have learned and therefore, apply in attacking it – hardly rocket science there.

Too many people I think, tend to approach SEO from a rigid bits and bytes approach. They forget that at their very core, search algos are built by ordinary thinking human beings, subject to similar influences as us all. They are people who visit the same kinds of conferences, interact with the same kinds of people via forums and blogs and pubs and restaurants. The only difference between them and us, and lets not make no mistake about it, it is very much them and us is that they hold the keys and are in a state of continual defence and counter offence.

Observation observation observation

If you look at most sites that perform well consistently today, then amongst the more competitive of SERPs, there are a number of observable constants.

It seems almost obvious to say, but I’ll say it nonetheless that most good sites with good competitive rankings are relatively well balanced and have the right combinations of the required signals to rank.

Really Rob? No shit sherlock, well yeah but it doesn’t hurt to say them out loud now does it.

Content content content

On the content side its pretty safe to say that a site has to have the right level of keywords, spread about in the right kind of way. In the overwhelming majority of cases pages that rank for keywords have them on the page.

Trust me baby and I’m popular too

On the trust side a site needs the right level of authority in its field, with the right kinds of people linking in, in the right kinds of way.

On the social side its not a bad thing to to hope that the site is discussed often enough in the right web social circles.

Do people hang at your party?

From the visitor perspective, we know that search engines can deduce a hell of a lot from the actions of people who are either logged in or have a toolbar installed. Toolbar data being a great way of obtaining that vital user behaviour data useful for indicating the right positive or neagitive feedback signals.

If you can objectively measure how people behave ‘on site’ then overtime, with sufficient data, some excellent assumptions can be made.

If questions like, ‘Once on a site how long do visitors stick around‘ can be answered or ‘Are they off in a heartbeat flicking back to the SERP for a better result‘ then asking the questions of ‘Is this a common phenomena‘ and ‘How many different people in different parts of the planet engage in such behaviour patterns‘ really do help to make assumptions and say that these would be the kinds of signals that should be folded in and added to a sites overall ability to rank.

We don’t like SEO’s we don’t want or need their sphere of influence

For the Search engines, an SEO’s ability to influence the latter aspects mentioned is next to zero. As a result, this information should outweigh many of the other established or accepted signals that many assume to be weightier.

For me, this should be the holy grail of a search engineers work, creating an algo that is next to unmanipulable, at least by the direct actions of search engine marketers.

Other contributions of course are things like ‘user personalisation’, often talked about as the next big SEO challenge, with algos tailored towards surf history, age and user behaviour; almost dictating that the day of the universal SERP are on their way out.

SEO on its deathbed?

Absolutely not! Good SEO’s who appreciate the ever shifting sands already have an excellent take on all of the factors required to rank. Even with the private data mining capabilities mentioned, the search engines still require good, well structured sites made and promoted by people with a good understanding for what creates and sustains buzz and interest in this Internet world – that demand isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

Conclusion

Its no surprise that the big search players all make a big play on the benefits of membership to their little cookie clubs and whatnot, and maybe a day will come even, where they are arrogant enough to make you play their game or go off and find something else to search with, who knows.
They can hardly be blamed mind, cos after all, it all helps in the quest for the perfect algo right?

Related posts:

1. Want success on the web? Work hard, say something
2. Unfairness inherent in authorities – just another flaw in an algo
3. Run a local business? Get directorified!

Brad wrote an interesting piece today which got me thinking about the topic of linking out, authority scores, pagerank leakage and all those old chestnuts.

Lots of papers out there on PageRank and theories and counter theories on how linking out can effect your PR adversely/positively and all that, so I’m not going to rehash any of those arguments.

I have to confess, there was a time when I was kinda obsessed with the whole SEO PR leakage thing too, worring about ‘bleeding’ precious PR and all that jazz, however I do think the ‘game’ has moved on a little, in terms of the SE algo’s have matured to a more considered examination of what is and what is not a good or a bad page worth ranking. Why do I think this? Well just go and look at a few well ranking sites and see how they link out. One immediate one that springs to mind is Wikipedia, although their recent decision to stick a nofollow tag on their outbounds may come back and bite them ( I hope) .

Following on, I was looking at a few blogrolls on various blogs just the other day, most had a few links here and there numbering between 6 and 15. Some like Bill Slawski’s SEOByTheSea had a big long blogroll in excess of 30 links.I don’t have Bills ranking figures to hand, but I’m sure he hasn’t been too adversely affected by linking out so extensively.He provides quality viewpoints that others link to. If a Search Engine happened to penalise on the back of such extensive outlinking then it would, IMO be a little harsh, not to mention poor for its users. Its how the web works after all, links links links!

That said, I think generally it might be a sensible idea to maybe look at ensuring perhaps, that ones blogroll, especially if its pretty long, doesn’t appear on every single page for example, as this could help cut down on any sameiness factor, which could be a determinant in any subsequent ranking considerations. I’m thinking duplicate block/content issues here.

It may also be useful to bear in mind, that not all sites have an equal footing in terms of any authorative weighting system, so what one site may be able to get away with, may not necessarily apply to another with a lower hub/authority score.

One thing we can all be assured of is that this ranking in the Search Engines game isn’t a static target, it moves and shifts with subtleties that we mightn’t see for months or weeks after its happened. Toolbar PR for example is widely recognised as not being a true representation of ones actual pagerank, which again isn’t the magic bullet that people once assumed it to be.

Sure, links do indeed power the net, but its now a question of the types of links you are getting too. The days of mutliple footer links from low quality sites being able to boost you up a serp are long gone.

The advent of Digg, Reddit, Technorati, MyBlogLog, Myspace and all manner of other different types of Social Media platform that enable mass participation and citation dictate that the ground is a whole lot more fuid than it once was. These too are excellent pointers towards what is and what isn’t current. Who is ‘buzzing’ and who is not. Matt Cutts wrote a blog post about writing articles that users will love the core message being that if you do then people will pick them up in their readers and link back to you and talk about what you have to say – rocket science huh?

I’m reminded of something I read some time back. It was a thing called Block Level Analysis a process whereby a page is broken down into various sections and elements. The condensed version is that some links are worth more than others dependant upon where they are within a page. So navigational links may not be as semantically valid as a link found within a block of text in the upper part or main body of a block of text; if this, or a variation of were factored into an algorithm, then the placement or length of any blogroll ,could well be academic in any case.

From time to time, maybe we are all guilty of worrying about how a search engine may or may not interpret what we do or say. I’ve worked in affiliate spaces. I know that you can get cabin fever riding the ups and downs of the Search engine algo change waves. In many ways too there was a time when you just had to, there was no other way, if you wanted to keep ahead you had little other choice. They were continually evolving and we had to second guess their movements in terms of how they were weighting this aspect or that. Today, whilst its a whole lot harder, it is also a whole lot more straightforward too. The vagueries and theories relative to KW densities and tag structure and word placement are largely on the wane. The search engines seem to be applying a hell of a lot more weight towards what is current and who is creating buzz and new link juice. Authorities and white lists have been established, probably via some DMoz or Y! directory snapshot. New sites wanting to perform well in the competitive spaces, better be pretty hot. If they are, then they will create that buzz and will be talked about within social media spaces. Everything that follows will have been earnt by dint of being linkworthy.

IMHO of course

Related posts:

1. Can the power of blogs remove ranking restraints?
2. Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..
3. Using search engine query strings to optimise your content.

I love the recent Y! acquisition, mybloglog. Its like a myspace with bells on. Ive encountered some really nice and interesting people too. In case you haven’t seen or used it before its a social media platform. You can join communities, add contacts, upload photos and if you install a piece of code you can get stats and display photos of visitors from their network on your site as they arrive.

On the user front I think its kinda cool. IMO I think It adds an extra dimension to ones website by way of showing an extra human dimension. You can see the latest faces of people who have visited and if you so feel inclined, go and check them out to see what they are all about; at least thats what Ive found myself doing!

Their stats page is cool too. Gives you a non fussy overview of where your readers came from, what they viewed and what they clicked. It even tells you what ads they clicked on too.

Great, for some at least, a quick and easy way to see whats what, without the need for other 3rd party metrics. Your top 10 referrers, top 10 articles showing the number of times they were read, and the top 10 external off site link clicks within your blog posts. The ad clicking feature is good too, showing you what ad was clicked on, or at least the target destination. Ok, so its lacking in a lot of things and could be a whole lot better granted. But hey, its free and besides if you want something a little more involved there’s always Google analytics or Web trends or for the ultra paranoid amongst us, there’s the traditional on server log file analysis approach. Webaliser, Analog, AW Stats all do a pretty good job at showing you the why’s and the wherewithals (ad clicks aside perhaps).

The other day here lyndoman and I had a little light hearted discussion of some of the pluses and minuses of this whole tracking thing.

I can’t see porn sites using the widget, else you would just see a lot of hairy crusty blokes, viewing the hot lesbo action websites, lol. Good way to blackmail.

But what would be cool for geeks would be mobile phone text alerts that tell you when such and such has visited your site.

It’s a brilliant service with fantastic ways for it to go wrong.

It got me thinking about some of the privacy issues on all this; my cynical antenna went on to dark orange status and got me thinking in terms of if they wanted to, they could actually track your entire history throughout their network. Who you visited, what you read, how long you read it for, what you bookmarked, did you comment, what did you say etc blah. Lyndoman’s comical reference to Scott Rafer sitting in some room with multiple screens and white cat on his lap couldn’t be so far from reality.

Anyhow, it was for reasons like this that some time back I didn’t buy into the who Google personalisation/ search history thing. I don’t want Google or any other search engine for that matter knowing my searching patterns; especially when its aligned to me personally.Why? Just coz, EOS.What is really in it for me I asked myself. After a short while I realised, not very much at all. Great for them, hell yeah. Great user demographic info, priceless in terms of pushing the right products to the right people in the right places, provided I’d want them of course. As I’m not a big fan of cold calling anyways, I decided to pass.

So we have these privacy policies whereby we see that companies promise not to share data about us and all that – the whole thing of course, is built on trust. We entrust our actions to people and companies we don’t know. We assume that we are protected by law from infringements of our personal liberties and whatnot, we assume that just because they say they won’t do this or that, that they won’t. Just made me wonder really, what is there to safeguard us? Who if anybody monitors these things, where are the policies outlining who has access to the data and who doesn’t? We all remember the AOL user search revelations , we should also remember that everything we push out there into the big wide world goes through the servers of our ISP. Thats all of our Instant messaging, emails, web browsing, video conferencing – everything. I wonder who ensures the restrictions on all that too.

Important questions no? What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Discontinuing MyBlogLog visitor tracking
2. Mybloglog is evil – no seriously, it must be!
3. Mybloglog messaging system and why I think it sucks

Web Pro News have put together some really good videos together over at their site.

This link here entitled the do’s and dont’s of Digg is a great discussion on doing well in Digg as well as things to avoid. Its also a good general discussion around social media, tips for choosing an SEO, PPC and arbitrage, the future of search, trends in the industry and a few other related topics.

If you are interested in search and blogging and site monetisation and social media and all the other stuff that makes up this thing called the internet such an interesting space to play in, then go check them out, they are definitely worth a look!

Good stuff, well done Mike,Neil and Todd .

Warning: Make sure you have some time on your hand as I spent like um…2 hours watching all sorts of interesting stuff over there!

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I was just over at tech crunch reading some of the broohah about some deal that fell through regarding performancing and payperpost and was kinda surpised at the level of snorting and derision being applied there. There is this guy named Ted, who like most people trying to get things off of the floor in life has managed to obtain $3 million dollars in funding for an idea, which he feels might just fly. So far he has managed to stir up a bit of controversy, with various high profile people like Matt Cutts coming out against the idea in general.

So ok, I can see why a search engine might have an issue with squillions of bloggers being paid to promote and talk about things using keyword rich anchor text to distort the search landscape but thats just tough I guess, they’ll find a way to deal with it, or mightn’t bother even, hardly the end of the world for mfa sites adsense now is it. Besides what with all this talk about mature algos and whatnot, I doubt it’ll make a huge difference anyways, a storm in a teacup even? Perhaps, or maybe some might see it as the thin end of a wedge. The lines get a little blurred when you think ahead and envisage a SERP full of results containing blogs that have been written on the basis of some monetary consideration. In those scenarios, where would the distinction between paid ads and paid ads masquerading as free serps be drawn? Should the search engine be held accountable for its editorial decisions?

Google or any other search engine for that matter wants their free SERPs to be full of stuff that is diverse and in some cases ‘untainted’ by the dirty grubby mits of commerce. Its probably why we haven’t yet seen paid inclusion rolled out yet, its full of issues pertaining to disclosure and ads. Y! for example once had a program that enabled you to appear in their results, provided you paid - it was soon dropped amid a wail of criticism.
A Washington Post article discussing word-of-mouth-marketing references a petition from Commercial Alert, an advertising and marketing watchdog group based in Portland Oregon and the response from the FTC associate director.

“The petition to us did raise a question about compliance with the FTC act,” said Mary K. Engle, FTC associate director for advertising practices. “We wanted to make clear . . . if you’re being paid, you should disclose that.”

So ok, no harm done then, if you are going to blog and get paid for your posts then you should disclose that somewhere – isn’t that what tinytext and footers are for .

I haven’t looked too intently at either ReviewMe or PayPerPost so have no idea whether or not they enforce disclosure in any toc’s. That said, the FTC is just an American governmental organisation with no jurasdiction or enforcement powers outide of the USA. The web is a big place full of other people from different countries and nome de plumes, and aliases. Gambling is still alive and kicking on the net even after a ban , some things just can’t be legislated away.

When people like Guy Kawasaki talk about how he made a paltry $3k adsense revenue from 2,436,117 page views then its hardly surprising when people not half as financially astute look for better earning opportunities. If you are one of these people who write about stuff daily on a topic close to your heart then goodluck to you if you can earn from it too.

The way I see it is that people will soon see through any posts that extol the virtues of some commercial lot of tosh. Try it yourself – try and get enthused on a daily basis for stuff that you don’t really believe in or want to talk about, see how long it takes people to switch off from what you are saying.

I think thats where reviewme could make a difference. I think they say to the bloggers, “here is so and so a company, they want you to write about them, they’ll pay you too, and you can say what you like as well” wheres the harm?

SE Reps to the back of the room please.

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Building a simple database driven website.

This is part one of a multi part yet to be determined ‘how to’ aimed at showing you how to build a database driven website. There are squillions out there already of course, but in this one I’m gonna try and do it a little differently.

*disclamer:I’m not frickin perfect, this is not intended to be the best resource on the topic there is. I’m just sharing the benefits of my experience. Take it in that vein and hopefuly you’ll enjoy!

Ok for this recipe you will need.

• An idea of what you want to do
• Basic knowledge of HTML
• PHP enabled webspace
• An Apache hosted website
• A Mysql Database
• PhpMyAdmin
• A dataset
• Will and determination to get it done

Optional extras (desirable but not absolutely necessary)

• Flashy logo
• Cool design

An idea of what you want to do

When I built things like this in the past, I had to build from the ground up and learn things as I went. When I first went on the net back in um..1995 I think it was, I recall being vaguelly intrigued thinking, cool, I wonder how they do that.

My 1st ever webpage used the <marquee> tag! It slid a photo of a Ford Mondeo across the screen!Ha, I had this nutty idea that I was gonna create a raffle or draw of some kind and enthuse everybody to enter some ‘win a car’ competition. I never did put it on line but it did get me thinking about how people would find it and that search engines would probably be a tool they’d use. Here is a funny thought. I once thought that when you entered a search term into a search box, the search engine then went and ‘looked’ at all the computers in the world and found pages to give back, ha! I guess I wasn’t so far off, they kinda do that, only that they’ve already been out into the web and grabbed the data beforehand.

Ok, enough of my waffle, on to the meat and potatoes.

The project

In this part we will look at discussing the base concept, creating a database, creating the tables, discussing the data, inserting the data into our database.

Ok, having briefly introduced what this is about in the title of the page. Its time to be a little more specific.We are going to build a hotel brochure website from the ground up. We will discuss the creation of the site from A to Z . From initial site set up through to getting indexed in the search engines. During this process we will look at issues facing site owners and offer up good examples for avoiding the pitfalls. We wil look at adding value to affiliate feeds and offer up solutions to the many mistakes and problems that site owners encounter. Some of the areas we will look at will include.

• Planning issues
• Getting started
• Obtaining and working with a dataset
• Creating a database
• Using Mysql and PHP to output content
• Good site architecture and design
• Website script security
• Getting indexed in the search engines
• Promoting your website
• Common pitfalls to avoid

Planning issues

Whilst this isn’t a typical real world project its useful nonetheless to look briefly at what we are looking to do. Any good website serves a purpose, in our case we are going to build a hotel brochure website we are going to assume that none exist already, we are going to act like our pages are the only ones in the world and that search engines and users alike are going to love our content and gobble it all up. Our website will give its users what they need in a simple, easy to use way. It will be easy to navigate, quick to load and on topic to its theme. Ordinarily we would all sit around a table in a huddle and discuss our aims and objectives. We would look at our market, look at our competitors, aim towards building a niche with a long term view of steady user growth by way of new sign ups and traffic. Monetisation would be a key factor too. luckily for us, none of these are pressing issues for this project as its purely educational.

Getting started

Our first stop is to grab a dataset. There are two approaches we could take. We could start from scratch. Go out and canvaas lots of hotels and invite them to join our website by sending them our details, or a quicker supplemental route would be to go to a big provider like Venere or Superhotels, or IAN or even individual big hotel chains like Holiday Inn and sign up for one of their affiliate programs.

Most Ive looked at will provide you the data as a direct download. You can choose which fields you want to use, which areas such as countries or regions, you can also choose which informational data you’d like to show too. The data can usually be saved to your computer as a text file, delimited, by tab, comma, or any other delimiter of your choosing which can then be uploaded to a database. Some will even provide for the data to be obtained as an sql file which can then be directly ran through an sql interpreter and inputted direct tot he database. In this instance we will be using a Mysql database to store our data, and will be using PhpMyAdmin as the interface for inputting our data.

Create the database

Most hosts will offer you the facility to use a GUI to create the database. Plesk is one popular GUI as is CPanel. There are others too. Sometimes you might have to request your host to create one for you.Most good hosts provide the tools for you to do so.

If push comes to shove you can use php to create one for you using the mysql_create_db() function, something like.

<?php
$query = “CREATE DATABASE hotels”;
$result = mysql_query($query);
?>

For the purposes of this though, we are going to assume that youve created a database named ‘hotels’ and have opened your PhpMyAdmin interface and are ready to create the tables.

Create the tables

In this example Ive chosen to stick with a basic data set and have placed the data into two logically named tables. The first table Ive called ‘hotelcontent1′ and the second ‘hotelcontent2′

We will need to create all sorts of fields relative to what the hotel provides. Email address field (email), establishment name field (ename) , web address field (www), price field (price) and so on. The code below is the sql that we will use to create our tables.

CREATE TABLE `hotelcontent1` (

`hotelid` int(9) NOT NULL auto_increment,

`custid` int(9) default NULL,

`ename` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '0',

`phone` varchar(60) NOT NULL default '0',

`www` varchar(250) NOT NULL default '0',

`email` varchar(160) NOT NULL default '0',

`etype` varchar(20) NOT NULL default '0',

`price` varchar(10) NOT NULL default '0',

`currency` varchar(10) NOT NULL default '0',

`rating` char(2) NOT NULL default '0',

`numrooms` varchar(4) NOT NULL default '0',

`trainstation` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '0',

`tsdist` varchar(4) NOT NULL default '0',

`airport` varchar(75) NOT NULL default '0',

`adist` char(2) NOT NULL default '0',

`photourl` varchar(250) NOT NULL default '0',

`description` text NOT NULL,

`visa` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`mastercard` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`diners` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`amex` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`lifts` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`restaurant` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`bar` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`disabled` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`parking` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`childrates` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`tv` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`ensuite` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`fax` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`computer` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`pets` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`nonsmoking` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`roomservice` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`breakfast` char(1) default '0',

`childcare` char(1) NOT NULL default '0',

`attractions` text NOT NULL,

`testimonials` text NOT NULL,

PRIMARY KEY  (`hotelid`),

UNIQUE KEY `hotelid` (`hotelid`)

) TYPE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=0 ;

CREATE TABLE `hotelcontent2` (

`custid` int(9) NOT NULL auto_increment,

`name` varchar(50) default NULL,

`address1` varchar(50) default NULL,

`address2` varchar(50) default NULL,

`town` varchar(100) default NULL,

`county` varchar(100) default '0',

`region` varchar(50) default 'no address recorded',

`postcode` varchar(12) NOT NULL default '0',

`country` varchar(30) NOT NULL default '0',

`custype` char(2) NOT NULL default '0',

`date` date default NULL,

`ipadd` varchar(30) default '000000000',

`username` varchar(100) NOT NULL default 'user',

`password` varchar(28) NOT NULL default 'pass',

`renewal` varchar(20) NOT NULL default '0000-00-00',

PRIMARY KEY  (`custid`),

KEY `town` (`town`),

KEY `county` (`county`),

KEY `region` (`region`),

KEY `country` (`country`)

) TYPE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=0 ;

The data

One of the great features that mysql has is that it allows you to insert text files straight in to a table. Provided they are properley formatted, and you specify the correct delimiter used, then it will insert the data into the fields you specify

In this \t or tab delimited example for our ‘hotelcontent1′ table, we would upload it using PhpMyAdmins ‘import’ feature. We would specify csv as the option and enter \t as the delimiter of choice. A sample row of such data might look a little like this;

A typical line from a tab delimited file

"1" "1" "The supergroovynicehotel" "0044(0)*********" "www.supergroovynicehotelofchoice.com"
"info@supergroovynicehotelofchoice.com" "Hotel" "45" "pounds" "3" "32" "Aberdeen"
"5" "Aberdeen" "10" "http://www.supergroovynicehotelofchoice.com/Images/
supergroovynicehotelofchoice.jpg" "The supergroovynicehotelofchoice Hotel is now
under the new management of Rob and Delia Blogs. blah blah blah. " "y" "y" "y" "N" "y" "y" "y" "y" "N" "N" "y" "y" "y" "N" "N" "y" "N" "y" "N" "N"

Each “” enclosed piece of data and corresponding gap (tab) specifies that its to be treated as a seperate field. Multiple insertions would be picked up by way of a \n or new line within the interpreter.

Note: Full sample files will be provided at the end of the piece so don’t worry too much about where the data is at the moment, it’ll be there at the end.

An alternative way of getting our data into our database, would be via use of an actual .sql file containing the full insert instructions a typical line within would read something like this;

A typical line from an sql file
INSERT INTO `hotelcontent1` VALUES (1, 1, 'The supergroovynicehotel', '0044(0)**********', 'www.supergroovynicehotelofchoice.com',
'info@supergroovynicehotelofchoice.com', 'Hotel', '45', 'pounds', '3"', '32','Aberdeen', '5',
'Aberdeen', '10','http://www.supergroovynicehotelofchoice.com/
Images/supergroovynicehotelofchoice.jpg', 'The supergroovynicehotelofchoice
Hotel is now under the new management of Rob and Delia Blogs. blah blah blah.', 'y', 'y', 'y', 'N', 'y', 'y', 'y', 'y', 'N', 'N', 'y', 'y', 'y', 'N', 'N', 'y', 'N', 'y', 'N', 'N', '');
The outcomes of either method is the same, the route to which all depends on the tools, knowledge and requirements you have to hand.

Some data sets can be very clunky to work with and require all sorts of processing and preparation before use. In the past I’ve used combinations of excel, odbc, and phpmyadmin locally, to prepare my files for the live database. These have been especially useful where the datasets provided were particularly large or in need of adjustment to fit my purposes.

Ok, so having stored our sample data in our database and tables, we are a step nearer the process of retrieving and outputting it to our webpage. In part 2 I’ll be showing you how to connect to the database using PHP choosing a good page template and discussing a few site architecture and design issues.

Related posts:

1. Promote my website online in 2008
2. Don’t ever bank on free traffic, build on it
3. Getting your website off to a flying start – use a blog, kickstart your domain

Easy come easy go… 

It’s no news to say that the days of easy rankings with easy commissions are long gone. With some search engines, it just no longer works. Anyone, and lots are, can whack up a DB or add a feed from some central source. It’s child play, and from a search engine viewpoint its just not welcome. They’d be happy to kick yo ass as soon as look at ya, and who could reasonably blame them? You can have the most well linked, beautifully constructed site in the world full of some mythical kw density perfection, css’ed to the nth with elements positioned to the max, but if you aren’t saying anything new, then the chances are that things could get pretty serious pretty quickly. Search engine death could well become you. Sure, you’ll get spidered, but expect to go supplemental pretty quickly, and if that don’t happen then you might get extra lucky and get lumbered with a nice fat -31 ranking penalty.

Fat or thin?

Over the years, there’s been quite a bit of discussion on what constitutes a thin or a fat affiliate. Lets look at travel. Fat boys like tripadvisor for example, are flying with lots of top spots on a range of travel related kw’s whereas others are floundering.

I recall a time when for like, 4 or 5 years a particular little travel network absolutely kicked arse on all of the big 3, Google, Msn and Yahoo. Be it ‘hotel in town‘ or  ’town hotels’ these guys had top spots usually in the top 5 positions. They were nothing other than a well constructed, well linked network of affiliate feeds that did little other than pump out content that their suppliers provided. It really was an education to look at what these people had done. Their strategy was for the time, basically fab. They hosted a variety of big sites across a variety of IP’s. They mixed pages up with a mishmash of approaches doing things like varying page element factors, curtailing product description content, differing kw and kp densities, different navigational placement, text types, god you name it they’d factored it in one way or another, and it paid them big dividends. I guess really it was a day when it was all about getting as many pages into the search engine db’s as you possibly could. Their duplicate content filters were so underdeveloped that provided you did enough variation in the places that mattered, ie page naming, title tags, H tags general kw peppering here and there in your content spread etc, then you’d be pretty ok. In fact you got massively rewarded and could do some great stuff with inward link creation too. You didn’t have to worry about going out and sourcing zillions of links from here there and everywhere, you’d just create your own and ensure that they were appropriately placed and hidden across a network of unidentifiables, albeit in the sense of what the spider saw and registered at least!

A different breed of engine

Today of course, these guys are nowhere to be seen, at least not in any recognisable guise. Their network was nuked and they don’t rank for jack no more. Things like the Google eval team have given people using that particular strategy a short sharp shock.

New generation networks, if they hope to have sustainable long term SERP viability have to be a whole lot smarter in 007. Content feeds and databases, particularly with regard to outputting their contents within a site needs special attention – noindex tags, robot exclusion protocols really are serious considerations, to not do so could really be a huge folly. Drastic?,Perhaps so, but what with duplication filters and all, the question is one of almost can you afford not to?

Sure, there will always be those who look to employ methods for circumvention, all that lovely content is just too good to pass up on after all, right? Not sure about you, but I’ve seen all manner of interesting adaptations; things like replacing keywords and phrases programmatically so that an aspect of a phrase like um…this hotel is decorated to a fine standard  is changed to read… this fine placename hotel is adorned to a splendid configuration instead, or variations upon that theme. I’ve seen sites that rank well by using contractions of product descriptions, eg chopping the first 40 characters from the phrase and outputting the remainding 180 chars. Ive seen others that just hide them all together, via a document.write or iframe method. Some go as far as employing people to write phantom reviews, and some even write programs that write reviews on the fly! It really is incredible to see the ingenuity and nous that people have with this stuff, it really is the most elegant of elegant of spamination. I think its fair to say that people do this because they realise that things may well be tenuous, they know that unless you are whitelisted then you need to tread very carefully as your income stream is very precarious.

As simple as adding value then…

Perhaps its simple though, isn’t it all about  thinking  in terms of adding value, going above and beyond what your competitors are doing, seriously asking yourself will you be able to pass some random manual inspection, which lets face it, if you are ranking in a competitive earning space, you are likely to receive sooner or later. You’d be an idiot for thinking that just because you managed to outwit the bot via some clever use of string functions, or tag placement or link generation that a human wouldn’t pick up and notice something amiss.It isn’t unreasonable to assume they’d ask whether your site handles all the look up processes - Does it check for availability – Are the payments handled insite, or do they go off elsewhere?-  They’d see through a hidden frame or  include or some obfuscated url redirect,  you just will not be able to get away with what you once did, and if you think you will then, i wish i could share your complacency, as any serious examination of what you do would look at exactly some of these things.

On the positive, some of the better providers and networks do offer more advanced solutions of course, this helps insulate both them and their partners and is basic good business sense, but lots don’t too and for those who are getting hit via various penalties resulting, its a bit of a shame at best and a damn tragic waste at worst.

Should these guys be helping their income generators in this way?

If you are a search rep then you’d prolly say no, it sucks and doesn’t help in the goal of delivering varied unique content, but OTOH why would any big supplier expose themselves to the vagueries of singular url streams of income that could be cut off at the whim of a policy shift. I know what I’d say of course, I go with the majority scatter and seed approach. Watch the darwinian process evolve and reward my best performers. I’d also help nurture and protect  newcomers too, my future top performers. Give them tools to get their users interacting, enable the creation of communities,  feedback tools, make it all that little bit different, employ advisors to help steer and encourage and generally add value all round, but I guess i’m me, and not some multi layered corp that moves real slow.

I’ve used travel as its any easy example to flesh out and one that I’m at least familiar with. I do wonder whether other sectors face similar challenges; I expect they do no doubt to both lesser and greater extents, especially in some of the mass product markets. It would be great to read some inputs, feel free to call me out!

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1. Keeping up with the blogging conversation

I was just over at Matt Cutts’s blog reading his thoughts on some of the challenges that he sees  Google generally facing through 007. He talked about Googlers in general almost suggesting that they were of the same pod, well not directly perhaps, but it was a thought that occured to me; and kinda got me thinking on this whole corp structure and ethos thing. Why do some organisations flourish whilst others flounder? Great management really does matter, not just of business and ideas, but people too.

Its interesting how people who work for a large organisation can often split or diversify into different mindsets. A company that treats its workforce well, as in gives good reward, recognition and purpose can do exceptionally well and take on all comers. It really is possible to get groups of people all singing and dancing from the same collective hymn sheet. Iv’e never worked at Google, to my knowledge ive not even physically met a Google employee, but I have watched a bod or 2 over the years, Matt Cutts to be specific. Matt’s online persona is pretty cool. He enages and crosses swords with all sections of the web community and seems to have a knack for staying balanced and true to his core message. You’ll never read Matt slating anybody in a rude or disrespectful way; hell, even when he gets mad at people he manages to inject a little dryness and humour, just go look at his blog and see if you can pick out the odd ass or two! Ok, so im in danger of sounding like I’m a paid up memeber of the MC fan club , I’m not, there’s quite a bit I could say that would give a different opinion, but thats for another day of course and is more Google policy than direct Matt related. No, the point Im getting to is that corporations, organisations, teams, are lead from the front. People stand to  gain a great deal of benefit from those who have purpose and vision. Shared purpose and values are a formidable force in any sphere of life and can be the making or breaking of an organisation.

A few years back I worked for a company; this company was locked in battle, split right down the middle. Workforce vs management. There existed 2 separate collective identities. Management were commited to winning. Great you’d say, ah but no, let me tell you. It was not so great at all.Management were commited all right, but for the wrong reasons. They were commited to trying to break the organisation of the workforce rather than growing any shared objective of the business and its values. They took great pains publically to paint a face of concilliation and shared objectives, yet their actions suggested that their motives were all together different.

The workforce representatives were just as bad. Most were locked into ideas of the past, ideas that had an inherent mistrust for the motives and pressures of business resisting change at every opportunity, lobbying intensley to ensure that public ownership was maintained and sustained. There was a complete lack of trust towards any idea that through shared objectives, shared vision, shared rewards the organisation could grow and prosper and move forward united, competing on the stage that rightly or wrongly is global capitalism.

God, when I think back to where it stood in say 1996 it really did have some massive opportunities to grab this whole internet thing by the balls. It had some 5000 outlets the length and breadth of the country,  a fantastic distribution system that accessed the rail, road and air networks. Some 200, 000 mouthpieces to help grow and spread the word of new products and initiatives. It could have diversified to become a world leader, an Amazon, an Ebay, anything it wanted to really, but was shackled, shackled by inertia and closed mindsets unwilling to either trust or dare to look beyond some point of conflict or dogma. it sat idley by relying on the patronage of governmental control and finance and years upon years of irrelevant industrial collective bargaining agreements.

Why was this? Well Im not going to go into too much detail about who did where and what and why, as a lotof it is just supposition and more opinion based thn anything else. I did know a fair few of the key movers and shakers and was involved in a lengthy dispute/resolution process or two, so lets just say that I came to recognise some of the almost impossible internal presures and hurdles they seemed to be faced with, on both sides of the divide, not to even touch on any idea of individual complacency!

So, what am I getting at? I guess Im saying that as organisations grow and get wealthier and are subject to new challenges and pressures then it can be pretty easy to lose track of where one is going. Reading what Matt wrote kinda made me think in terms of, well quite clearly matt is one of those people who knows how to push and prod and get things done within his sphere of influence. I think he may have been responsible for the appointment of Adam Lasnik. If you read Adam’s posts at the google blog or webmasterworld.com you’ll see that he seems to share some of the characterisitics that Matt tends to push out. Even keeled, considerate, user focused , as responsive as he feels he can be. Another firm hand on the tiller that is the tricky path of webmaster public relations. How many Adam’s or Matt’s or Eric’s or Larry’s are there at Google? Probably an army of them. It sure seems to be an organisation that is pretty sorted, and with people like Matt Cutts questioning and responding to criticism of google, even disagreeing with things that he feels are either just wrong or removed from what he sees as the general shared purpose of making the best search engine they can for its users, then its pretty safe to say that for the foreseeable future Google from a web search perspective, will continue to be ok. OTOH of course, should the hawks be able to grab a hold though and the push for profit is put before the push for users, then it could well be a different story. Altavista should be a word that haunts many a Google stock holder. If I ran Google, I’d stick up altavista is dead posters everywhere, just to act as a salutary reminder.

Happy new year, hope its a good one for you all. Im off to burn a few more calories on this cold English morning, thank god for bicycles

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