Karim Vaes

Personally I’ve always thought of myself as a listener. Not that I don’t like talking (in contrary), but the words of my father (on the matter) stuck with me:

What you saying, is something you already know. What the other people are telling, is something you might not know… So always pay attention when people are speaking!

With these words in mind, I came across the following article where it had a kind of checklist to see if you’re really listening: Read the rest of this entry »

There is a fun feature available within the sudo program. You’ll get an insult when you do the wrong thing such as enter your password incorrectly.

To turn the feature on you’ll need to use the following command:

sudo visudo

(always use visudo when you need to edit your sudoers file as it has a self-check system that won’t let you screw it up.)

Change the “Defaults”, by adding “,insults to the back
For example:

Defaults !lecture,tty_tickets,!fqdn,insults

Save, and enjoy the action!
(Note: use “sudo -K” to clear your sudo session)

Referenced original

Cutting straight to the point: Dashes are better than underscores.

# Google indexes on keywords in hyphenated urls but not on keywords in underscored or conjoined urls.
# Yahoo indexes on keywords in hyphenated and underscored urls but not keywords in conjoined urls.
# MSN indexes on some keywords in hyphenated, underscored and conjoined urls but the exact circumstances in which it does so are at the moment unclear.

With underscores, Google’s programmer roots are showing. Lots of computer programming languages have stuff like _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″.

References
Matt Cutt’s history lesson on the matter
SEO Blog’s experiment

When a website has been online for a while, and needs some maintenance, it’s sometimes a necessary evil to change the structure. The disadvantage of this is that this mostly influences the links to the indexed pages. The search engines (and thus also your visitors) will get a 404 (page not found), where your pagerank and such will be lost.

What can you do? Simply put a 301 redirect on it. This indicates towards search engines that the page has been moved permanently. In effect the bot will adjust the referenced link in it’s database, so that it’ll be correctly shown in the future. How to do this?

php

Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );

asp

Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.new-url.com/");

asp.net

private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.new-url.com");
}

Ruby on Rails

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.new-url.com/"
end

Every webmaster knows about the concepts of getting a decent Alexa rating or Google PageRank. One of the factors used for the PageRank is incoming links. So every webmaster started getting links to his/her website. This was mostly done by “LinkExchanging”. When doing a Link Exchange, two webmasters trade a link to each others website. Thus causing a kind of “win-win” situation.

So far so good? Yes, and no… Off course google changed their algorithm a bit, so that the weight of those exchanges decreased a bit. Action causes reaction, and webmasters found an alternative for this. This being 3 way linking. A technique also known as ABC linking, yet it’s a little more complicated way to setup link trades.

The benefits of doing this kind of trading is that it is harder for search engine robots to detect the link exchange. Instead a link from site A to site B, where site B does not link to site A, has more effect, even if site B has a link to site C. It is not that obvious that the owners of site A and B is trying to enhance the number of incoming links.

Addendum
If you’re looking for a good tool to automate your link-exchanges, try “linkex”, a real timesaver!