If you’re thinking of writing a website yourself, don’t fall into the trap of site generators and especially content generators.

It only takes a short Google search to see why these are a bad idea:

For example; this Google search:
Our firm’s reputation for providing quality service reflects the high standards we demand of ourselves. Our high standards, responsive service and specialized staff spell the difference between our firm and the rest

Generic text used this commonly is never going to perform well on search engines. Also, it’s accurate; but will your customers care to this style of writing? Having good copy on your site is as, if not more important than the design; and there’s a big difference between good copy and keyword-stuffing!

Remember, that the style of your site is only of important to your visitors. The content of your site, and how technically-sound it is, is important for your customers as well as search engines.

There will be an INTERNET BLACKOUT on many websites. Wikipedia, Reddit and many other sites may be unavailable.

These sites (along with ourselves) are campaigning against the US laws (Protect IP and SOPA) which can shut down international sites without a trial. Not only does this hurt free-speech for US citizens, it fundamentally breaks how the internet works, and could easily lead to sites that the US government disagree with being targeted.

We already have seen similar ‘firewalls’ in China, but this has already started to happen in other countries too. A Dutch ISP has been forced to block a popular search engine – however, due to some workarounds, the site still works. Due to the law that was passed down, it’s instead blocked a popular rights-defending site who work to defend free speech, the EFFI.

A similar court case has happened in the UK already, and BT Internet have been forced to block a site at their ‘own’ cost. i.e. Their customers will be paying not to be able to access specific sites.

Mostly these are being blocked by companies which have the power and money to control Governments. It sounds like exaggeration, but currently EMI are suing the Irish government for not implementing these same “piracy blocking provisions” fast enough.

The UK government have constantly tried to pass similar laws. While we don’t have a voice over the laws in the US, we cannot allow these laws to proceed, or they will soon be here too.

In related news, the head of the MPAA (the company which is pressuring the US Government to pass these laws), who is also a Former Senator, Chris Dodd has said:

“It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.”

He believes that Wikipedia and others are wrong to shut down their sites by their own option. Instead, he believes it to be fair that his company should be able to do remotely without any recompense or discussion.

The UK government have constantly tried to pass similar laws, under the same guise. Previously these were headed by the Conservative Lord, Peter Mandelson (completely co-incidentally after meeting with DreamWorks founder on his Yacht in Corfu) and it was tried to push these laws through before the previous change in Government in the hope it wouldn’t be noticed. Incidently, the US tried to push these similar laws last year near the very busy time of Christmas. People noticed. It’s clear that these companies know they do not have public support and are keen to push these laws ahead in private.

Not only could UK companies websites’ be blocked under these laws, as well as damaging the underlying infrastructure of how the internet functions, it’s clear that the UK will be likely to follow suit if these laws are passed in the US. While we don’t have a voice over the laws in the US, we must stop this happening; and Wikipedia, Google, Reddit – even the Whitehouse – and many other companies and people all agree.

Whatever your opinions on how to deal with piracy, it’s hard to admit there isn’t a problem. If you’re any kind of artist or publisher, your works will almost certainly still be pirated at some stage. However, these laws don’t mean that you can do anything about it – only those with money and power will be able to.

Perhaps these Governments only believe that piracy is only wrong if it’s stealing from the wealthy?

However, in the meantime; we’ve found a recent post of BoingBoing that may be of interest to our readers:

Eminent neuroscientist Moran Cerf got his start as an Israeli military hacker and then as a private security/penetration tester, robbing banks at their own behest over the net. In this hilarious anaecdote, he describes what happened when he and his pals decided to rob a bank in person.

Sadly it’s a bit quiet – so turn your volume up. Video can be found here.

Possibly one of the most important changes is a focus on fresh content; something that has been featured in the Official Google Blog;

As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.

There’s also changes to how duplicated boilerplate text is dealt with – something that should generally always be avoided.

While these changes are useful to note; there is no reason to make drastic changes to your site; these announcements should be taken as an indicator to improve and optimise especially where it can be a easy task and a quick win; and especially where it helps your visitors too.

The entire list can be found on Google’s Inside Search Blog

It was put together over a number of days, way in advance, and had so many features that could be added, and so much programming and mathematics, I’d found an excellent way to practice a variety of programming techniques, including memory management.

Originally written in GFA Basic (for the Atari ST), in the mid-1990s, it’s been rewritten in various languages, including QuickBasic in DOS soon after. Back then, many machines would struggle with many ‘particles’ of snow, and it was a skill to write something effective.

My previous attempt, in 2006, was written in Visual Basic 6 and used GDI for graphics. This uses the operating system to draw graphics, and did not make use of the latest hardware. This made it less than optimal and used a higher amount of CPU.

I’ve been using VB.net for some time, and since December is nearly upon us, it was time to rewrite with DirectX and newer tools. After some major headaches with Managed DirectX (it appears to be something else Microsoft have forgotten about); the results were astounding.

Using DirectX, it can have millions of particles (more than the screen itself can show) and uses little CPU; even on low-end computers. I’ve been able to add in a number of features, and had to limit some others. I hope to add in more features in future versions. Certainly, for next years’ version, I’m hoping for the ability to pile over the desktop windows and images.

frag.co.uk Snow 2011 screenshot

It is still currently in beta; but it’s only real issue is that it requires a Direct 3D capable card.

The latest version, Snow 2011 is still in beta but available to download from our software page; and we’d love to hear any feedback – good or bad!

Download frag.co.uk Snow 2011 Screensaver

Pixel Ovenmitts from JustMustard.com

We’ve been working with JustMustard.com on a very special project involving ZenCart eCommerce software. JustMustard is an online retailer and wholesaler of a variety of very strange and very awesome gifts and presents. We really enjoy working with them. Plus we really want some Pixel Oven-gloves.

However, ZenCart is viewed with both praise and disdain from programmers. It is an excellent off-the-shelf system for an online shopping experience, very secure, and very customisable. However, like most off-the-shelf systems, it does require a lot of work to give the results wanted.

As an aside, if you are looking for a new shopping system, we do recommend looking into both off-the-shelf systems such as osCommerce and Magento against having a custom solution being built. A custom solution can mean better SEO and should be more in needs with your business, and although the costs may appear high and a require a good long-term development team, on the other hand, a generic site needing custom changes later can be expensive or impossible, and is more likely to be attacked and spammed. In JustMustard’s case, we’re finding that ZenCart (after some work) is working very well; but in other sites using a generic site could be a costly mistake..

ZenCart, along with many other eCommerce sites are not set out for great SEO opportunities. ZenCart’s biggest mistake is having duplicate content, since a product can be accessed by many URLs (via the cPath); and often different URLs for the same product is used across the site. ZenCart also doesn’t make any use of the URL for keywords, often making the common mistake of using the querystring for page navigation.

We’ve been able to work with the ZenCart system and rewrite all the necessary URLs, and also automatically use the product title (and optional description) as part of the keywords in the URL. This is simply done using some fairly logical PHP techniques alongside some custom htaccess rules and regular expression matching.

It means a URL which previously looked like this:

/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_4&products_id=39

Is now redirected, alongside any similar-looking URL, to the much neater and unambiguous;

/product-39/cactooph-toothpick/

The same technique has been applied to product categories, and has been to static product pages too.

If the URL visited isn’t exactly the right one, the script tries to find the product, category or static page, and redirects the customer to the correct URL. The URL includes the latest keywords via the product title; ensuring customers have an informative URL, and search engines have valuable keywords and non-duplicate content.

Scripts like this can really clean up a working website, and really help to achieve both better keyword position and make it easier for your customers to navigate your site; without requiring a complete re-write. Our version will work just as easily for any future product; and doesn’t require any additional effort from product administration.

derp.co.uk: we love rewrite rules!

We’ve done this on every site we’ve set up, and found it helps bundles. Often this is just a few pages, but we’ve integrated this same system on far more advanced websites too – including a complex laptop, battery and power browser system on the laptopshop.co.uk website – a total of over 300,000 pages. We’ve also used rewrite rules to a ridiculous degree on the image site, derp.co.uk

Certainly ensuring non-duplicate content and keywords are important to SEO. Changing all the URLs on your site can be a lot of work to achieve, and it should never be taken lightly, it can sometimes be better to improve slowly and carefully. At the very least, it is essential to ensure all old URLs redirect to the new address and include a sitemap. For a number of reasons, this was a good time for JustMustard.com, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on it and tuning accordingly..

Despite our technique being relatively simple, it requires quite some work before it will automatically with all ZenCart installs, and static pages have had to be arranged using some of our other tools. JustMustard.com was a perfect candidate for this work, but every site we’ve seen has different needs and requirements.

For this reason, we’re not able to provide source code, though we may provide some of our techniques if there’s demand; and we’re always happy to help if you contact us. We hope this is useful and motivating to get those site issues fixed!

Instead, we are happy to discuss similar installations and assistance with SEO and eCommerce.

The wiki site, Dark Patterns, discusses the different techniques used in marketing – focusing on the bad, but also giving some great examples of good marketing strategies.

Most companies will be guilty of at least one of these poor marketing strategies, and it is a likely cause of low conversion. We’ve had clients that are guilty of some of these techniques, and seen the poor effect is has; however convincing those in charge that it could be a disaster can be a struggle.

Some of these are simple issues, such as long-winded registration processes – which may be a sign of poor navigation structure.

However, many of these tricks are ploys and scams – charging customers continuously after a ‘free period’, having content behind a pay-wall, or indelible products that cannot be removed from shopping baskets.

These can have a very strong negative impact on your brand that you may never recover from.

Of course, there are plenty of companies that have avoided these dark patterns too, and embraced honesty and clear marketing – such as Google and Play.com – and found it very successful.

The site can be found at darkpatterns.org, I highly recommend watching the 25 minute video/audio slideshow, as it has some fantastic examples and a brilliant style.

Don’t let your shopping experience turn into something like this.

Google have recently announced more support for previous/next pages, and have offered two options;

• Using the <link> tag in the <head> container, to ‘Canonicalise‘ the individual pages to a ‘View All’ page.
• Use the same <link> tag in <head>, with the ‘rel’ attribute to point to the previous and next pages.

The decision of which method to choose depends on your needs – if you’d prefer visitors to arrive at your ‘View All’ page, or perhaps you use a ‘Configurator’, such as one for choosing the make and model of your laptop; you may wish your customers to land there.

Although; you may prefer also customers to land on the page the search keywords the user arrived on; rather than having to look through tens of products.

However, there’s a few other points to consider. With a view-all page, particularly one with a simple list of all products; this may not be the best experience for your visitors. It may also mean a higher latency and page load time, causing visitors to get bored – and also isn’t best for search engine ranking.

But, if customers land on a particular page number, the spidered content may be outdated, and mean the customer lands on the wrong page; and has to search for their product. This commonly happens on forums, but may equally indicate slow spidering.

It should be noted that these only act as ‘hints’ to Google; but particularly if your site is struggling with many paginated pages, especially with outdated content, it may be worth considering these alternatives.

We’re always happy to help anyone who would like some assistance; and Google have also put together some information on both the ‘Rel=Next’ and ‘Rel=Prev’ attributes, and well as using a ‘View All’ page.

If not, you’re probably familiar with Google rewriting your query to try and help your results; most commonly this is seen with misspelling; but often a word or two may be dropped from your query to assist with search terms you may have meant.

As Eric Schmidt once said, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about”. They also know you can’t come up with the best search terms for the results you want.

Sometimes things go wrong – often, the wrong word is dropped. Previously, adding the + operator; e.g. [winlirc +audiocapture] would solve this, now it requires quote marks – e.g. [winlirc "audiocapture"] to give useful results.

If you make a search on Google using the + operator to ensure a word is used, you’ll now receive the following message;

Showing results for google +replaced plus with quotes
The + operator has been replaced.
To search for an exact word or phrase, use double quotation marks: google “replaced” plus with quotes

Here’s a screenshot:

Google have replaced the plus operator with quote marks

So what’s going on? Google are changing some of the operators; they’ve updated their documentation on their help page. The negation operator, ‘-’, still works as expected; as does the double-quote marks for both phrases, but now also for words too.

We’ve certainly noticed that over the last few weeks, for longer search queries some words are dropped that are seen as, in Googles own words; ‘evidence might come from language analysis that Google has done or many other sources’. However, in our experience, the search results have been mainly to give popular results, rather than more specific results that the search terms imply.

As an aside – as always, the underscore is treated as a special case – and is another reason why it should be avoided in URL structures, always use hyphens instead!

So what does the ‘+’ operator do now? For now, it seems very little.

Why has it been replaced? Nobody seems to know, although both the plus and quote operators were probably very similar in code.

What’s the problem? Well, it’s a minor gripe, but it now takes at least four key presses (and navigating both sides of the word or phrase); instead of just two. Google also seems to being less ‘choosey’ on keywords entered by the user; instead intending to match more popular results.

Of course, real expert users can continue to use the nfpr=1 querystring to disable most of Google’s corrections.

Since Google haven’t made an announcement, if anyone else has any more information about this change, please let us know in the comments.