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).