Pagerank Toolbar Export Imminent?

The visible Pagerank shown in the Google Toolbar hasn't been updated since April 2010, for many Pagerank data may not have updated since Dec 31st 2009, but there is widespread belief that Google will update the Toolbar Pagerank data before the new year or shortly after - however there is no sign of that happening at the present.

At the moment there are a growing number of retweets for a blog post speculating on upcoming changes to the meter and raising the question, will Google export Pagerank data before the end of the year?

Well there is nothing that would indicate Google are about to do something for the new year, I suppose they have a Doodle in store, but so far nothing to indicate any changes. Nor is their any information as to why the toolbar has not been updated, many have suggested that Google has dropped Pagerank and now uses something else to decide the order of Search Engine Result Pages.

Either way we shall see if Google do update the toolbar Pagerank data at the start of the new year or if they have something else in store for us - 2010 has seen many changes to Google's system. I expect many advertisers/publishers would like to see the toolbar updated but for most of us a Pagerank export doesn't amount to much!

New Project: A Ward School of Dance

We have just agreed to build a new website for the Hull Dance School A Ward School of Dance. The website will be based on the Word Press platform and will be used by the staff and pupils to keep them up to date on the latest news and events. It will also function as a show piece for the Dance School's many achievements as well as a place where everyone can have a chat.
The website will shortly go online largely using the Word Press default style until early next year when the site will have a visual design overhaul.

Stone Circle Healing reaches page 1

Almost exactly one week after starting promoting the Banbury Massage, Service Stone Circle Healing, the website has reached the first page for its selected key phrases.
The site currently ranks number 6 and there is still much for the search engines to index. Surprisingly this time Yahoo has been the slowest to respond only showing one extra link whereas Google, which has yet to update its stats in webmaster tools, has responded strongly suggesting it has indexed more of our work.

It is pleasing, while unusual, to see a site rise quickly through the listings and while there is still much more work to do, our client is very happy with the results so far. The niche for Banbury Massage services is not heavily contested but raising the site to the first result will take much more work.

Stone Circle Healing

The Banbury Massage & Reiki Therapy service, Stone Circle Healing, is to have their website promoted by us so as to improve the accessibility of the site via the search engines online.

Reiki Healing is a Japanese healing art where the practitioner helps the body clear toxins and stimulate a sense of well being in their patients. The Massage Therapy / Technique is not connected with a belief system so is suitable for anyone. Clare Stone, the owner of Stone Circle Healing says the treatment helps people to relax and rejuvenate allowing both body and spirt the time needed to regenerate while promoting the body's own natural healing process.

Stone Circle Healings website also contains a range of home fragrances to compliment the Reiki Therapy, special offers for treatments and Wedding Massage packages.

Installing SSL Certificates from StartSSL on Debian

Start SSL offer Free Class 1 SSL/TLS Certificates to secure web server traffic across a network and prevent eavesdropping. Setting up a certificate for your server the first time around can be a bit tricky so here's a quick guide to how to request, configure and install an SSL certificate from StartSSL.

First of all you need to register with Start SSL, you will need to provide your own home address to start the registration. Start SSL use these details to confirm your identity and create your personal account - if you are requesting a certificate for a business you will first need to go through this registration process to confirm your own identity to them. Once you have an account be sure to back up your Client Certificate as loosing it will probably mean you cannot get back into your account.

Before you generate a certificate for your domain you must first verify you are the domain owner (or at least have full access to the domain). Click on the validations wizard and select Domain Name Validation in the drop down and click Continue. Enter your domain name on the next page, click continue and then select an email address which StartSSL can use to send a verification code to.

Once you have verified your domain you can request a Web Server SSL/TLS Certificate via the Certificates Wizard (Selected from the dropdown 'Certificate Target' in the wizard). Be sure to set a strong but memorable password and click on continue.
This will generate a private key, be sure to take a copy of it and store it somewhere on your computer. Copy this file to the server and name it [sitename].key a secure directory (we often use /etc/apache2/ssl/).
This key is encrypted and needs to be decrypted to stop apache asking for a password when it restarts. To decrypt the key on your server run the following command:

openssl rsa -in [sitename].key -out [sitename].key

Next click continue and select the site you this certificate is to be used with and then add one sub-domain (i.e. www.yoursite.com). Carry on clicking continue after this and you will have generated your server certificate!
Again, take a copy of this file and upload it to your server (call it [sitename].crt)
Before we can install the certificates on our server we need some of the Certificate Authorities Certificates. For Class 1 Certificates we need to download the ca.pem and sub.class1.server.ca.pem
All StartSSL's certificates can be downloaded from 'StartCom CA Certificates' in the Toolbox of your control panel but a quick and easy way to get them onto your webserver is to execute these two commands while in the directory you are using to store your certificates:

wget https://www.startssl.com/certs/ca.pem
wget https://www.startssl.com/certs/sub.class1.server.ca.pem

And then secure your certificates by executing the following command:

chmod 400 *
If they are all in the current directory or
chmod 400 /path/to/the/file

Now we have everything we need to configure your server to use your certificate.

The standard Apache2 distro has mod_ssl built in but not enabled. To enable SSL copy ssl.conf and ssl.load from /etc/apache2/mods-available/ to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/

cp mods-available/ssl.* mods-enabled/

Now you only need configure your httpd.conf file to secure your site. In debian your httpd.conf is usually found at /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

First we need to have apache listen to port 443 for virtual hosts so we need to add the line:

NameVirtualHost *:443

Add this before or after any other NameVirtualHost entries in the file. Next find you virtual host record for your site and add the following entery after:

<VirtualHost *:443>
     ServerName example.com
     ServerAlias www.example.com
     DocumentRoot /home/example.com/public_html/

     SSLEngine on
     SSLProtocol all -SSLv2
     SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT:!SSLv2:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM

     SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/example.crt
     SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/example.key
     SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache2/ssl/sub.class1.server.ca.pem
     SSLCACertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/ca.pem
     SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown
<VirtualHost>

Replace [www.]example[.com] with your site name / domain and be sure to change the paths for the SSL Certificate files to the directory you have stored your files in.

All that is left now is to restart Apache and your website will support SSL (Should anything go wrong and your server stops serving HTTP requests open the httpd.conf file and comment out all lines starting with SSL with the # character):

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

If Apache restarts without generating an error your website should now be available via https!

Review: Quirk SearchStatus

Just a quick review on a new tools we've been using for the past few days.
As with anyone that's trying to promote a site hunting down sites where a link would be appropriate that does not nofollow everything can be quite tricky. We'd read about a tool called Quirk SearchStatus highlighting the nofollow links so downloaded it and gave it a go.
It's only available for Firefox and Sea Monkey but it works very well and highlights any link marked nofollow, it also comes bundled with a bunch of other tools which are handy to have + keyword density analysis which reports on where the keywords can be found in your document.

Worthwhile installing if you're promoting a website. You can download SearchStatus from:

http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

Google is watching you!

This can only be something recent as we've not noticed it before. Google has started to sculpt its natural listings for people who haven't got the Google Toolbar installed and are not logged into a google account.

In the last few weeks (at least) we've seen our own website start to appear alongside the sites we're working on when doing SEO work using 'clean browsers' to analyse the SERPs. Its not a major boost, often 4-5 places max and only if there is a keyword overlap but disabling cookies returns our site back to the place where we'd normally expect it to be (Private browsing has the same effect).

Blackhat SEO and Your site

Have site owners in your niche taken exception to your site and started a blackhat SEO campaign against your site? Us Too!! :)

It would seem that one of the sites we released in the last few months has attracted the attention of the owners of one of the sites currently sitting in the top 3 for the keywords we are targeting. They've been busy spamming some rather questionable forums, blogs and sites linking back to our site using some 'colourful' anchor text. Our friends have also been busy registering domains similar to the sites main domain and putting up blogs of their own, which stand empty at the moment.
In short these guys seem to be experts at 'spitting your dummy out' and are hell bent on doing anything they can from the site getting from page 3 in the google SERPs to page one.

I feel it is only fair though to point out that all of this effort you have put into this will probably amount to a small amount of misdirected traffic for a few months and much of what you have posted has already been deleted by the sites owners. Although I would like to thank them for not ploughing extra effort into your own website, which is really all you can do to fight off our own efforts. It has allowed us to make a serious dent in the lead you had.

So with that I have only one thing left to say: "COMING TO GET YOU!"

This blog is on the move!

In between working on Car Arena we've been working on the back end of our own systems before we move in to the new office on Chamberlain road. Almost all of the tc software website have been consolidated into one domain tcsoftware.net and the existing website shall be undergoing an overhaul on both content and visual design shortly.
This blog has now been moved to the address blog.tcsoftware.net however the old address custom-software-hull.blogspot.com is still valid and will redirect you to the new domain.

As part of the move not only will our address change but also our phone number. Once we've established ourselves in the new office the phone number on our site and in this blog will be updated.

Update your Flash player and get your free adware!

Ok, so perhaps Adobe hasn't sunk to the level whereby they're installing software that will fill your desktop with popup's of some questionable website but they are essentially distributing adware.
In the latest update to the flash player Adobe are by default installing an optional copy of McAfee Scan Plus and Scan Plus is simply a scaled down version of McAfee's virus scanner which will hunt down anything slightly questionable on your PC, report it to you in the most alerting manner it can and urge you to buy McAfee's products ASAP!

So if you don't want McAfee telling you a cookie found on your computer may cause the Large Hellion Collider to form a super massive black hole and crush the planet to the size of a pea, just uncheck the 'let me send you adware' checkbox on the download form.

Adobe feeling the post credit crisis pinch? Or just plain greedy?

BTW: Scan Plus does uninstall cleanly from your computer so it is only an irritation if you accidentally install it but it doesn't help the feeling of being violated by Adobe!

SEOmoz Linkscape update

SEOmoz have finally made a blog post regarding the last Linkscape update and cite hardware failures on Amazon's EC2 causing processing of link data to be restarted multiple times and missing the planned index update date. randfish tells us its not the first time this has happened but this month it happened during a critical part of the update.
Linkscape indexed 41 Billion pages last month, 99 Million domains and inspected 402 Billion links - an impressive haul! The next update is planned for 12th of November.

randfish also includes some more information on the way in which people are using hyperlinks on their site (canonical and nofollow links), you can read his post here

Competitor to KC?

The Hull Daily Mail is reporting that a company named Mediasat3 plans to provide alternative telecom and internet services to Businesses and Residents in Hull (article here)
Kingston Communications is the only supplier of these services in Hull  and the surrounding area. They hold a virtual monopoly on the area and are able to dictate the terms by which their network is used and sold. While technically anyone can buy wholesale services from KC and setup an alternative ISP Kingston have, quite naturally, engineered a situation that would make a competitor non-viable.
OFCOM the watchdog that is supposed to be looking after our interests turns a blind eye to KC and basically lets them get away with murder.

We had a quick look over Mediaset3 and to be honest its not very impressive (sorry if you're reading guys). In fact the article in the Hull Daily Mail appears to be more of an 'Infomercial' to promote Mediaset3's website than anything else. Mediaset3 seem to lean more towards providing Satellite internet access and business services.

Linkscape index update

The Linkscape update is finally here and the results of its crawl are available via the Open Site Explorer!
This time around Linkscape doesn't appear to have captured as much data as it usually does, perhaps as a result of the processing problems SEOmoz encountered earlier this month? But the link data collected is still very valuable for anyone promoting their website.

We're happy to say that linkscape has reflected our own SEO efforts with a general rise slightly below what we expected with the exception of one site which jumped from being not listed at all in the last update to a Domain Authority of 35/100. As linkscape has not detected many important links into the sites we're working on we are attributing the shortfall to the missing links, which we hope to see in the next update.

SEOmoz usually follow up an update with a blog post detailing the overall statistics of the crawl which we're still waiting for at this time.
Thanks to the SEOmoz team for the data and best of luck to you all!

Backlinks in Webmaster tools updated

Google has updated its backlink reports in Webmaster tools today. Most of the changes appear to be nothing more than reorganizing the data in a way that makes it easier to navigate when you have a large number of backlinks.
However there is some differences in the data reported. In this version of the tool some of the reported links have disappeared and, for some domains, links to www.somedomain.com have been migrated to somedomain.com when you have set google to show the shorter domain in your site configuration. Links which are redirected using 301 or 302 are now reported correctly though.
We've also seen that when a site has two domains (e.g. a .co.uk and .com domain) webmaster tools is now reporting links into a page from the other domain and it doesn't appear to matter that the URL after the domain name is different only that their is duplicate content. One of our sites shares its content from another site but has wildly different visual theme. The sites do share links between one another but only to the home pages and now webmaster tools is reporting links between these pages where one does not exist and never has.

Reported Anchor text within links also appears to be filtered in a new way. Some of our sites now have more phrases reported in the Anchor text while others have very few.

As this tool is brand new I expect there will be a lot of chatter about it on the Internet as people analyse the new data. Google have also released some information about the new tool on their blog.

Some ideas for getting your very first site indexed

Unless you already have a website which is crawled regularly by the search engines getting a new website you've created indexed can be a bit of a headache. And using the tools supplied by the search engines for submitting a site for indexing can leave you waiting for weeks before anything comes for a peek at your work.
Search engines take longer to crawl sites submitted via the supplied tools in an effort to counter short lived spam sites or sites which contain malicious code. There is no penalty for using the tools but you will have to wait a few weeks, perhaps a month, before anything happens.
Getting your site indexed within a few hours / days however is relatively easy with a little imagination by getting links in from another site which is crawled regularly.

First though, why would a link found by a crawler on the Internet mean your site is indexed faster than by using the tools provided by the search engines?

Basically it boils down to trust by the search engine. A trusted site is unlikely to link to a site which the search engines would normally ban, indeed if the trusted site did it would damage its own standing with the search engines. So if the crawler finds a link on a trusted site back to a new website there is a very good chance the new website is worth indexing.
However if the site is submitted only via the tools provided the search engine then it must assume that the site may be spam or attempting to distribute a virus. As the crawler has not detected any links into the site (ergo no one may want to link to it and damage their own standing because of what the new site contains) then the search engine must treat the site as highly suspect.
These tools are only provided as a final option by the search engines for people who really have no choice but to submit their content via them.

So how would you get your site indexed via a link found on the Internet?

Well forget everything you may have read about SEO so far and just concentrate on getting a link to your site on a page which the search engines crawl regularly. It doesn't matter if it's marked 'nofollow', just that it's a link to your site.

Forum signatures and Blogs are often a good place to start but you could also spend some time writing an article with a link back to your site and submitting it to an article mill.
You should also remember that the link only needs to exist long enough for the search engines to find your site when your aim is only to get it indexed. One such example is Craig's List, where the link will remain visible to the search engines for about a month.

Tools that promise quick indexing or sites that offer 'free backlinks' often do nothing for getting your site indexed or raising its authority with the search engines. Often these sites themselves have little authority with the search engines and/or link to damaging websites.
A good tip when selecting a page to place your link is to check its page rank. A page rank 1 or better should lead the search engines to your site with a day or two at the most.

Linkscape update (over)due!

SEOmoz have been plagued by errors this month while processing the data collected by Linkscape as it crawled the web. According to Linkscape the root of the problem is the Domain Authority score update from September and has caused them to revise the date the public Linkscape index will be updated twice now.

With Linkscape collecting such a large amount of data its understandable that even the smallest glitch can throw planned release dates off by days, even weeks, but with the scheduled update date being revised twice now and with around 24 hours to go it would seem SEOmoz are on track to release the data tomorrow.

We've been eagerly waiting for this update as some of our new sites have had a heavy amount of SEO work over the last month or so and Linkscape provides the clearest picture as to how effective this work has been. So the best of luck to SEOmoz with this update and hopefully (as they are based in Seattle) we'll see the results on Thursday Evening / Friday Morning!

Copyright Infringement or just plain greedy?

At what point will the Music and Film industry realize the Internet is a fantastic way for them to deliver their product on demand to their consumer?
Recently in the news an Irish Court ruled, quite rightly, that the Internet connections of people uploading copyrighted content could not be cut. We don't support Piracy at all, however the Music and Film industry chose in the early days of the Internet to fight the changing habits and wishes of their customers and have manufactured the situation.

As many have pointed out and as Apple proved with iTunes it would be easy, inexpensive and hugely popular for a Music Label to offer their entire catalog online paid for by subscription and/or per download.
Film Companies, especially these days, would enjoy an inexpensive way of delivering their content to customers on demand and world wide while cutting out the middle man.

Given the apparent stubborness of these two industries it would seem even when Google / Apple TV's are the norm the Music and Film industries will still be trying to use the Courts to have their way.

Personally though, I find it somewhat ironic that not only do Sony manufacture mp3 players, are about to reveal the first 'Google-powered TV' while at the same time backing legal action against Copyright infringment while doing nothing to offer an alternative!

Sandbox Part 3

We've talked before about the Google sanbox effect (here and here) and it's effect on the traffic you see from google. The older site which had been sandboxed upon being restored last week had started to show the first signs of leaving the sandbox and appearing in the appropriate SERPs. A few days later as Google's Webmaster Tools updated we saw as of the 27th of September (ironically the day we posted about the site exiting the sandbox!) the number of impressions virtually quadruple within two days.

Google's Webmaster tools, as you can see, now tells us that the site gets 9,900 impressions per month (which we expect will be around 22,000 once a full month of data has been collected) and rose to nearly 800 impressions per day within 2 days.

The graph above shows google's stats from 4/9/2010 to 4/10/2010 - a period where we had not made any changes to the site or done any SEO work. Nor had we worked on the site 2 weeks before the data shown!

Car Arena Updated and Launched

Car Arena, a website we've been building that allows you to get an offer for your car from dealers around the country and near by, has just been overhauled, uploaded and launched.
Craig, the designer, has gone for a much cleaner look to the website this time and included a few flash animations to greet new visitors to the site.
Code wise, the site was modified to allow people to start a valuation using only their registration and some of the forms that used to be presented to the user have been merged in with other sections of the valuation process to make things move faster.
Most of the changes made to the site have been in the 'members' area for the dealers to view cars but we've also included a referral program for other sites to use to earn money when directing valuations to the car arena website.

This is only the first part of the update a second part is expected to be complete by the end of next week which includes automatic valuations, information about past valuations made by a dealer and some refinements to existing features.

Trouble at Google AdWords?

One of our clients is in the enviable position to afford to spend enough with Google to not just be ignored like almost everyone else when they have a problem! Recently this client was about to launch their new website and refocus their online advertising budget on the site with Google AdWords.

However having setup the campaign and selected the keywords they found that every keyword was ranked with a quality score of 1/10 and Adverts where not being approved. We couldn't find any reason for AdWords to set a quality score so low nor a reason for the advert to be stuck in limbo so the client got in touch with their Account Manager at google who, like us, couldn't find any problem with the site or the campaign. So the problem was refered to Google's technical team and we waited, and waited, and ...
Eventually after a few calls and emails the client got an answer from their Account Manager - it seems that the giant is flooded with support requests for AdWords. A quick look on Googles forums and we found that a lot of people are having similar problems.

Google told us that they expect to have resolved the problems in a couple of weeks and be back up to speed.

On a side note we've also noticed some of Google's sites / tools do some rather unusual things of late, perhaps the update in May and the recent changes are proving to be a bit of a headache?

Review: Piwik

Piwik

Piwik is an Open Source web analytics project aiming to be an alternative to Google Analytics and provides some of the best information about who and what is happening on your website that we've seen. The recently added Live! Add in can tell you about visitors connecting to your website in real time and updates itself via AJAX. An SEO Rankings add-in gives you key stats about the site & easy access to a summary of Yahoo site explorer's stats on the dashboard.
There are lots of nice graphs to give you summary's of the data its gathering which can be viewed as tables if you need and more information on your visitors that you would normally get from a stats system analysing your sites logs. It monitors users using javascript and so it can much more accurately tell when users have left your site, what they did on a page, etc..

Piwik needs to be on a server with PHP and MySQL to collect information about your visitors but doesn't have to be on the same server as your website. It's very easy to download and install, compared to other systems and, much of the time, is able to update itself.
We've been running Piwik for a few months on some servers and have seen it handle traffic up to 600 hits an hour easily, However the Live! add-in did seem to get a little stressed out and was slightly difficult to use when the Visitor Log is spewing data out so fast we found the fine tuned reaction skills from years of online gaming where put to the test!

Piwik's project homepage can be found at http://piwik.org/

Review: Open Site Explorer

The Open Site Explorer is one of the finest Backlink Analysis Tools I've come across to date. Unlike other Back Link analysis tools this tool is based upon data collected a crawler dedicated to finding links and evaluating their authority. Linkscape spends the better part of a month indexing over 90 Million root domains and evaluating 9.2 Trillion links.
You can view and compare 3 URL reports per day using the tool without registering, unlimited if you register, with limited data or pay a subscription fee to view all the data. The free information on its own makes tool extremely useful for promoting a website and I imagine it is well worth subscribing to if you specialize in SEO.

Because this tool is collecting its own data from the Internet instead of using Yahoo like many other Backlink tools on the Internet it is able to provide unique information about the links to any site it has come across. Netcraft report that they have detected over 213.4 Million websites which would mean that Linkscape only crawls 42% of the websites at the moment, but then that is 213,399,999 more websites than your run of the mill backlink tool!

You can query the Linkscape database using the Open Site Explorer by going to

www.opensiteexplorer.org

Google Sandbox Update

It's been about a month since we posted some stats about the effects of the google sandbox (see here) and 'Website 6' & 'Website 7' have started to climb out of the sandbox, showing up in the SERP's where you would expect them to be.

Website 7 has gone from a mear 1,600 impressions per month to 3,600 impressions (225% increase).
Website 6 managed to climb from 2,400 impressions to 6,600 impressions (275% increase).

Website 7 has had quite a large amount of SEO work over the last month, but is still a very new website, whereas Website 6 has had none at all but is very old and did already have many back links which where restored when the site became active again.
Website 7 is also 3 and half months old, which puts it about right for an early exit from the google sandbox.

The Sandbox might be annoying for new websites but like or not it is their and in the beginning the chances are you will not see a lot of traffic from the search engines. No matter what you do. Keep working on your website and using White Hat SEO techniques and once the Sandbox period is over you will see your website start to rise rapidly through the SERP's.

Twitter's On Mouse Over worms

Recently a fairly simple security flaw was found in Twitter's tweeting system that allowed arbitrary Java Script to be executed in a users browser when the mouse cursor moved over the tweet. A number of people are trying to take credit for the discovery of the flaw and a number of worms that have sprung up with the earliest report being of a Japanese developer on the 14th August.
One of twitters users, known by his handle zzap, had been experimenting with the flaw to dynamically change style sheet, show alert dialogs containing cookie information & other messages and write temporary messages into the HTML of another users profile.
Within 2 hours of zzap's harmless tweets worms crafted to execute much larger scripts, as the flaw allowed for Cross Site Scripting (XSS), and started to make their way around twitter, mostly by retweeting themselves.

Twitter has since fixed the flaw by encoding the injected Java Script into harmless HTML when it finds keywords used to create the worms in the first place.

Kingston Communications Blackout

Around 3:30pm yesterday Karoo's ADSL services packed up and, as far as we can tell, the whole of Hull simply vanished from the Internet. Our own ADSL connection showed that it was able to sync with the DSLAM's but nothing responded on KC's side after that. Just before the whole lot shut down we where seeing routing through KC's network going haywire and packet loss / latency spikes. At the height of this blackout none of our online servers where able to connect with any of our clients in Hull.

Our own ADSL connection seems to be working as normal this morning but the towns and villages around Hull seem to be affected this morning.

Thankfully KC doesn't treat us to a complete blackout very often these days, averaging only 1 disaster every 6 months by my estimate, hopefully this does not mark the beginning of a return to the 'bad old days'.

For those who don't know, KC is OFCOM's little darling. They have an effective monopoly on the area North of the Humber, once one of the best telecommunications companies in the UK. Now just a former shadow of itself milking everyone trapped in its operating area and holding everyone back.

Google Dominance

We collated stats from sites a few good sized sites we maintain as of June 2010...

Search Engine		Hits
Google	87.87%	211,652
Yahoo!	3.34%	8,034
Ask	2.22%	5,339
Bing	1.50%	3,611
Conduit	1.42%	3,416
AOL	1.31%	3,159
My Web Search	0.60%	1,454
Others	1.75%	4,217
All		240,882

As you can see from the above Google IS the only search engine for these sites. Having a quick scan over other sites we see hits from other search engines but all show Google as the only one pulling in significant traffic.
The websites we took the stats from are all within the top 3 results for their key phrase SERP and have been indexed by Google and Yahoo for more than 3 years.

PHP DOC

My personal pet hate is lack of type strength in languages. I've worked with some languages in the past that consider all variables to be strings regardless of their types, an incredible waste of resources, but these languages are now popular and well supported so you find yourself having to work with them.

While PHP does have some weak type strength built in variables are quite easily converted from one type to another if you are not careful and as the type cannot be declared for the return value of functions you are left with a value of ambiguous type. Which can be a problem when working on complex sites like Car Arena.

PHP DOC however helps enforce type strength when it would normally be forgotten, at design time at least. IDE's can recognise the type of the return value from functions and save you time with the Intelisense, documentation, parameters, etc...
Based on Javadoc you only need add a few lines of comments to your declration and not only is your routine documented but IDE's such as NetBeans can now resolve types when it would not be too clear in PHP. Also variables declared within the __get magic method can be declared for classes, along with their read / write status so that the IDE can issue warnings if you attempt to write to a read only member and display the member in the Intelisense member list while editing your code.

For me PHP DOC changed my opinoin of PHP quite a lot. I used to view the language in quite a dim light before I started using it, now I would rather use PHP over any of the scripted languages we use today.

Check SMTP Launched

Check SMTP is a new diagnostic tool for SMTP mail servers. It can sometimes be difficult to resolve a problem with a mail system when email fails to arrive at its destination.
This website will check all the stages a mail server goes through and report back to you the results and, if your server should fail the test, information on how to resolve the fault.

Check SMTP will check your mail exchanger records (MX records), PTR Records (Reverse Lookup / rDNS), Gateway Status and any fault reported by your server when attempting to deliver mail to the recipient.
The tool itself does not actually send an email, only checks that it would be possible to send to the adderess by querying the appropraite services on the internet.

The tool should be useful to business which operate their own mail servers, support help desks and network administrators as it simply performs all the standard diagnostic tests run when a fault is suspected.
Simply goto the tool's home page and enter your email address to start the test.

Note: Your email address is stored but only to prevent abuse of the service. Your email address is stored internally in the database and is not accessible by tc software staff or visitors to the site.

You can start a report on your mail server by visiting:
http://checksmtp.tc-software.co.uk

Viral Content - Getting your visitors to do your link building

Vitral Content :- The buzzwords viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.[1] Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. [more]

When we're working on a website's SEO we generally try to avoid focusing our efforts into link building by only submitting to directories, blog posts, forum's, etc...
Recently for our own site we created and published this page dreamt up after a pretty dull afternoon at the office and submitted it to a few joke sites. Content such as this always has the potential to go 'Viral' but it can be a bit hit and miss.
After a few weeks we had forgotten about the page and figured it would spend the rest of its life in a dusty corner of our website... until Saturday when a Page Rank 8 humour website linked into the page from it's homepage. Within seconds traffic on our website rocketed up to a level we'd not seen before for a single page and by the end of the day the website traffic was 30,000% up on the previous week!

Now, 3 days later, we are still looking at heavy traffic for this one page as other humour websites have picked up on the page and linked in. All impressive but not really viral yet as we're just piggy backing traffic off these sites.
Deep in the stats though the first hints of the page 'going viral' can be seen. Web 2.0 sites sharing the link, Email's to friends, family and colleagues all indicating that once the traffic dies down the link will still be passed around.

All sounds good but of course it isn't making us any money so what's the point of it?
Well this is exactly the kind of content that people want to show to others and so will bookmark, email, stumble and post links on forums, blogs and other websites they have access to. Places where you yourself could not ordinarily post a link and will continue to generate links for a long time to come - Win Win all around.

Photoshop tricks

I've recently been thinking about creating a flash game and was looking around the internet for the bits and bob's I'd need when I came across two neat little methods for generating Grass and Clouds with brushes in Photoshop.

Realistic Grass Effect - Using Photoshop - Awesome video clips here

Note:Start with a standard airbrush for the cloud brush and the cloud texture can be found in the 'Texture Fill' pack (Click on the small arrow pointing right on the texture select dialog).

Playing in google's sandbox and the impact of your Page Rank

The SEO crowd often bleet on about the 'Google sandbox' effect for new or restored websites, but what does it actually mean for your website? And, once you're outside Google's playpen what are the effects of the page ranks?

Well let's get down to some stats first from Google's Webmaster tools:

Description	Page Rank	Impressions (per month)
Website 1	3	65,500
Website 2	2	49,300
Website 3	1	26,100
Website 4	0	14,800
Website 6 In Sandbox	0	2,400
Website 7 In Sandbox	0	1,600

All of these websites are virtually identical. They all target almost the same keywords, they're based on the same platform, use virtually identical data and have the same backlink profiles.

Except Website 6 & 7.
Website 7 is a new site only a couple of months old which targets keywords that are similar to the rest of the websites but it's using a new domain. Website 6 is an old domain which was pointing at an empty directory for a couple of years and has recently been restored but appears to have landed itself back in the sandbox for a while.

So What is Google's Sandbox?

Well no one outside of Google knows to be honest and publicly they have acknowledged that their is some kind of sandbox effect but claim its not a designed in feature.
Either way it is there and even sites which have never had any SEO work done to them eventually exit the sandbox and its traffic climbs up.

How do you get out?
You can just wait but the best thing you can do is keep working on your site. After 3-4 months you may find the number of impressions in Google's webmaster tools start to rise and your traffic starts to trickle in, however sometimes it can take up to 6 months.

Release of first software product

We're almost ready to launch our first 'off the shelf' product. The product itself is 'complete' - we just have to modify our website now so that people can actually buy and download the software.
The product itself is just a delivery label printer for shipping addresses which is based on an old project we worked on some time ago and had quite an impact on the business that commissioned the project.

The, imaginatively named, 'delivery label printer' prints shipping addresses on to label stationary such as the type manufactured by Avery. In fact the application ships with a database that holds over 1,700 records of different stationary including almost all Avery labels.
More info on the product can be found here.

While the project itself is considered to be completed we've decided to add a few extra things to it to add a little more value. For addresses in the USA we're going to add the POSTNET barcoding and we're looking at CASS certification but at the moment we are thinking of releasing the application and waiting to see if their is a call for certification.
We're also considering adding the ability to buy postage from the UK Postoffice via the application too and have the postage printed with the label. However at the moment we're still trying to contact the correct people within the post office to see if this is possible.

The extras should add some real value to the application but aside from the American bar codes it looks like at this time they will either be part of an update or revision of the current software.

However as this is our first application to be sold 'off the shelf' we are a little bit in the dark as to what will happen after release. Due to its nature we're not expecting an avalance of customers, but we are ... curious...

Crystal strikes back!

Back in the late 90's virtually every bespoke app and a huge number of off the shelf applications that needed to print used one system, Crystal Reports.
For its time Crystal was a god send, creating a report for printing wasn't the most straight forward task in a project and could take days - even weeks for complex reports.
Crystal, however, made the job easy and even the most complex reports to be printed on pre-printed stationary would only take a you a few hours. However while it was a gift from the heavens for developers like myself it did have one seriously annoying drawback, installing it on your users computer.
I don't think I ever spent the time to find out exactly what Crystal's issue was with installing and why it spat out a stream of errors during a standard install but generally it can be fixed with just a few simple commands:

First ignore the errors generated by crystal during the install and then open Command Prompt and type:

> cd %SYSTEMROOT%\System32
or
> cd %SYSTEMROOT%\SysWow64
On 64 Bit systems

> regsrv32 crystl32.ocx

If everything Cyrstal needs has been installed and the regsvr32 successfully registers the Crystal COM control most of the problems it had during install should be now fixed.

Script kiddies and their black hat SEO

For the last few days we've been watching what we believe to be a Chinese hacker group repetativly smashing their head against layer upon layer of security routines attempting to inject links back to their own website from a fairly popular website we maintain. It's all rather pointless given the form they have chosen to attack doesn't do anyting but post an enquiry that is only visible to the website owner!
But bless them, it hasn't stopped them trying...


I personally go that extra mile with the software I write to thwart these types of attacks, if you're looking for information on php security this is a good place to start.

Software based Used Car Valuations

Online Car buying companies have sprung up all over the Internet like a rash recently and we've had a fair bit of work thrown our way developing the odd Car valuation tool (Car Arena being our latest).
Much of the work with these websites is much the same as any other website with the exception to when it comes to automatically valuing a vehicle.

 There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to valuing a car as the value of the vehicle is more to do with the desirability of the vehicle than what the vehicle is worth in terms of materials, performance, etc... And so any automatic car valuation needs to be based on some data source. The two most commonly used in the UK are CAP and Glasses Guide, the former being most prominent (for automatic valuations at least).

But before we begin generating a value for a vehicle we need to accurately identify the vehicle in the database. CAP data has around 36,000 vehicles in its 'new vehicle database' and using the wrong vehicle identity, even if it is a close match, can throw the valuation out by a significant amount. Past experience has shown that even experienced users have difficulty 'Capping' a vehicle (selecting the correct identity) so very often the DVLA's data is used to match up a vehicle against the CAP database.
This also makes life easier for the owner of the vehicle as they only need provide the registration and, if the DVLA's data is correct, the CAP identity of the vehicle is easy to determine. Also most of the providers of the DVLA data will determine the CAP or Glasses identity of the vehicle for you, HPI and CarWeb are just two examples that provide this service. Once the identity of the vehicle has been determined, obtaining a basic value is a small matter of a few SQL queries.

 For any one car CAP data will generate 5 values:-

• Cap New
• Cap Retail
• Cap Clean
• Cap Average
• Cap Below

Cap New is the amount the vehicle was worth when it was registered
Cap Retail is the forecourt value of the vehicle now
Cap Clean is the value of the vehicle in almost impossibly good condition
Cap Average is the normal value of the car today
Cap Below is the value of the car if in poor condition

Almost every dealer uses Cap Average as the basic price for a vehicle and will often start with this value and knock amounts off for a number of reasons. A few car valuation websites running at the moment though do use Cap Below as a fail safe if the vehicle can not be reliably valued or if they wish to slow down the number of cars going through their organization.

At this point we would have a basic value for a vehicle which is often fairly accurate but only adjusted for mileage. Some Manufacturers and Models though do perform badly with automatic valuations (Mini for example) as when the car was ordered many expensive options would have been available which are not known when it comes to valuing the car now and CAP data will heavily undervalue the vehicle through no fault of its own. Some other cars tend to be worth less than the CAP data would suggest so often we build in modifiers that allow the dealer to adjust the basic valuation in an effort to correct the problem.

After this the manner as to how the rest of the valuation is done is down to the dealer. Many may increase / decrease values for specific body work colours, previous owners, options, condition, MOT status, etc...

If it's too good to be true...

Recently we've had a flurry of people trying to sell us everything from Outsourced bespoke programming to SEO (and yes the previous link is a blatant plug for our site!!). Many of the things these people have tried to sell us sound unbelievable - programmers for just $8 an hour, thousands of links from high page rank websites, hundreds of blog entries with links containing keywords, ...

We took an in depth look at one of these offers that passed us by and I have to say we did have a client in mind that may benefit a lot from the service. However after a while of picking through the labyrinth of information and promises thrown at us we eventually got down to the basics. The offered SEO campaign amounted to a banner advertising campaign and an entery in google maps!!

Which brings us back to the title of this post, if it's too good to be true it probably is.
Good quality software only comes from experienced skilled developers working at the pace the project demands and successful SEO takes a lot of time and effort.
Or to summerize if you want to be a millionaire it takes hard work and it won't happen over night, ... well unless you're currency hyperinflates!

Object Serialization

Some 15 years ago when I got my first job as a programmer my first task was to learn SQL. A language which had been around for a while but I'd never encountered before and was only just coming of age. I remember throughout the late 90's and early 00's the pain of writing some enormous SQL queries simply to load, save and delete business data from the data servers and the, sometimes, weeks wasted just because another field was added.
These days of course we've moved on and the situation has improved. Most databases allow for the use of UUID's/GUID's for row identities removing the need to query the database server after an insert to find out what value was assigned to the row and, now, many language's support Object Serialization.

Technically Serializing an object into a byte array / string has always been possible but without the appropriate language support, downright dangerous! And completely against the 'Safe Hex' practice which had been drilled into me from my very first line of code.
Today though, with languages like PHP and the .Net flavours, the risk of your code and your data source spawning a mutant object hell bent on turning your structured data into a garbled mess is practically impossible post-development and is a feature I really miss when going back to older projects.

When writing members to load, save or delete data today I find myself selecting the members which I want my users to be able to search on and leave everything else to be stored in the serialized object within a Binary object field of the table. Once the short amount of code needed to complete my 3 IO operations has been finished adding additional members to my object rearly means 6-7 other edits per member elsewhere.

For example, like most developers I try to keep all of my settings to one file and in PHP would often set the values within the globals array directly. However a major drawback of doing this is that unless you write some script to recreate the settings file the average user cannot modify the settings of their website.
To get around this we built a generic object which would serialize itself to a plain text file and use the member fields of the object to store settings, allowing us to store all of the settings in a way which was easy to modify and easy to maintain. The method for saving the websites settings is just:

 public function Save()
 {

  if(($user = User::getCurrentUser()) && $user->IsAdmin())
   return file_put_contents($this->SettingsFilePath,

    serialize($this))>0; 

  else 

   throw new SecurityException('Access Denied'); 

 }

Generally when storing data via SQL data is base 64 encoded to avoid binary data making a mess of the SQL statment and in PHP a modified version of base64_decode is used as PHP's built in function can only handle 4Kb of data.

 function base64_decode_long($value)

 {
   $result = '';
   for($i=0;$i<ceil(strlen($value)/256);$i++)
    $result .= base64_decode(substr($value,$i*256,256));
   return $result;
 }