• SEO tweaks for jobberbase
• Fixing 404 errors for jobberbase

Today a new small issue came up, where a client wanted to use a .INFO email address, but was being blocked for submitting it. The error returned by jobberbase said that it wasn’t a valid email address.

Poking around in the code I came across the file located in /_includes/function.validate_email.php the function contained here returns true if it’s a valid email address. The original version was a RegEx that said

if(preg_match("/^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,3})$/i", $string))

The 2,3 is the interesting part here at the end, it limits the number of expected characters. Generally email addresses have 2 or 3 characters at the end, for example .IE or .COM, but in the case of .INFO or other domains that are longer than 3 characters it will fail. This code can be fixed by increasing the number from 2,3 to something higher. If you only want to allow 4 character domain names then this will do the trick

if(preg_match("/^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,4})$/i", $string))

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

but you want

HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found

Code changes

This can quickly be fixed by changing one file, jobberbase_main_directory/index.php find
case 'job-unavailable':
$html_title = 'Unavailable job / ' . SITE_NAME;
$template = 'no-job.tpl';
$flag = 1;
break;

and replace it with

case 'job-unavailable':
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
header("Status: 404 Not Found");
$html_title = 'Unavailable job / ' . SITE_NAME;
$template = 'no-job.tpl';
$flag = 1;
break;

now when searchengines check

/job-unavailable/

they will get the correct HTTP status.

1 – Seeding on social networks

sharing buttons on jobsinireland.org

In most cases it helps if you have your own social presence, which will help share your new content and to get the ball rolling. With content like this, which has a particular time sensitivity, you want to get it seen as fast as possible, by as many people as possible, and using your own twitter, linkedin, facebook profiles will help. You simply don’t have the time for people to ‘organically discover’ your content.

Your followers on these networks are likely to be the first people to share this content to their networks. Having an existing and good relationship with your network will encourage people share your content with their networks. People are inherently lazy and want a one click solution to share things quickly, so the inclusion widgets from these social networks on the page is highly important. If it’s too difficult to share they will just click the back button, and go on with their day.#

I also found that posting about the attention it got also helped more and more people to see the post. So don’t just tweet or post once. I posted about the running numbers of likes and tweets, rather than repeating my self about the jobs post itself. If you are going to re-share the URL you should think of new ways to share it again, so people who haven’t checked it out yet may be pushed into visiting, e.g.

Already got 1 application to fill the position of the Pope here jobsinireland.org/job/3115/266th…I may post the funniest ones. #exBenedict

— Paul (@paulsavage) February 11, 2013

Job post for the @pontifex has almost 500 shares jobsinireland.org/job/3115/266th… not bad for 15 minutes work. If only the other jobs were as popular !

— Paul (@paulsavage) February 12, 2013

2- Advanced seeding steps with twitter

The main differences between discovery on Facebook and twitter, is the public nature of the timeline on twitter. You are not limited to finding things to read just by your friends if you use the twitter discover tool (or the search tool on hashtages). This serendipity along with #hashtags and @replies can help you get your content seen by more people. I found some of the more popular tweets (ones with the most favorites and re-tweets) about the topic, like this one from the former ABC news journalist Ryan Sheales @RyanSheales , and I replied to it directly

@ryansheales are you going to apply jobsinireland.org/job/3115/266th…

— Paul (@paulsavage) February 11, 2013

This was in an effort to jump on the number of people who would see this tweet, and possible check out the replies to it. Of course tracking the ROI for this type of action is a little bit difficult, but I’m sure it doesn’t hurt. Here is some more examples

@50shadesoftae perhaps a new career yourself ? jobsinireland.org/job/3115/266th…

— Paul (@paulsavage) February 12, 2013

@eric_ulrich Full job spec available here jobsinireland.org/job/3115/266th… in case you change your mind.

— Paul (@paulsavage) February 11, 2013

3- Contact blogs

Another way to get traffic, and new viewers is to see if you can get some coverage from popular news blogs. I contacted a few Irish ones that I thought would be interested in the post like, Joe.ie, Balls.ie, TheJournal.ie to see if they could be intrigued enough to write about it. Of the 6 emails I sent, 1 site picked up on it, thanks joe.ie, and was the also the reason for the 2nd surge in stats over the weekend (see next section).

4- Improve & revise the content

Over the course of the day I received a few comments and ideas about the job description. There was some imagery flying around facebook & twitter, which I added the best ones of these to the post to make it easier on the eyes. Tweaking your content, and expanding on it to give more value, once you know it’s working, can help increase the number of shares. Again this is hard to measure, but by increasing the value of the post, people are more likely to share it.

The stats

Over all the job has received around 4,000 unique views in the space of a week. I found that :

• twitter
  • had the potential to quickly deliver large numbers of readers (at one stage we had over 100 concurrent readers)
  • only a few readers re-tweeted or wrote their own tweets to share the story
  • 800 visitors came via t.co (twitter URL shortener) links
  • URL has been tweeted 84 times
• facebook 
  • delivered a steady stream of users
  • the average facebook user was much more likely to share or like the post
  • 712 visitors came via facebook.com, 531 came via m.facebook.com (facebook on mobile platform)
  • URL has been liked or shared 972 times
• google plus
  • wasn’t great for driving traffic with only 5 attributed visitors from that source
• blogs (joe.ie)
  • 470 visitors came via Joe.ie
  • a great way to get extra traffic from an audience that is open to this type of news#
  • resulted in 7 more tweets & 24 more likes
• direct (?)
  • in google analytics if there isn’t a referring URL present then it will group these together under  (direct) as source.
  • one theory on this could be people using 3rd party twitter clients.
  • 802 people visited directly
• email
  • a number of the referral URLs contains hints that the users may have visited via email
  • this is something that probably wasn’t used to it’s potential seeing as we didn’t have an easy way to share via the page email.
• other
  • other sources included various forums, reddit.com which were achieved organically

Checking social metrics

Here are three quick tools for checking the social stats of URLS

Basic Facebook stats

Checks : number of shares (cumulative likes, comments, shares)

Advanced Facebook stats

Checks : number of shares (individual likes, comments, shares)

Basic Twitter stats

Checks : number of tweets (cumulative tweets and retweets)

Other observations

As I was checking the facebook shares over the course of the day, I did see that the number sometimes would fluctuate down. I’m not entirely sure as to why this number would decrease over time, it could be attributed to people deleting the shared article from their wall, or removing their comments.

Visit & Share !

If you’ve found this article helpful, maybe you can visit the pope job description, and possibly share with your network.


<?php
// by BlackDog 20130129
$location = 'http://www.male.ie/'; // where to send bad people

$ip = ip2long($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
if ($ip >= $range_low && $ip <= $range_high) {
// what to do if in bad IP range
header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header ('Location: '.$location);
}
else {
// do something else or nothing at all
}
?>


nice image via http://instacode.linology.info

The code above will block anyone from IP ranges 100.100.100.100 through to 200.200.200.200, and will redirect them to another website .

Other ways

This is quite a quick and simple way of achieving the goal of block a range of IP addresses. Other ways would be to perhaps have a database table with a list of bad IPs, and do a query per page request to see if they are white-listed. There is also a good article about saving IP addresses to databases that’s worth reading. This code will probably have to be updated once IPv6 comes more and more popular, but for the moment only works for IPv4.

• reminding past customers with a follow up email that you’d like to hear their thoughts on your business
• asking for reviews at the bottom of your newsletter
• having a terminal near your hotel checkout and asking people to write a review while you check them out
• using a review widget on your website
• paying for reviews to a third party service
• creating your own fake accounts and posting reviews.
• incentivising customers for reviews

Rules on Reviews

In TripAdvisor’s Rules (typo their own) it states :

No reviews written by ownership or management; including current or past employees, or anyone associated with/related to employees of tthe property with which they are affiliated.

So that clears up employees posting reviews. But what about incentivising reviews, it’s not mentioned there, but I’m sure it’s frown upon. I found on a page not linked from their rules, it says

I was offered an incentive for a review – is that ok?
No. Property owners are welcome to encourage their guests to submit user reviews upon their return home, but they are not allowed to offer incentives, discounts, upgrades, or special treatment on current or future stays in exchange for reviews. If someone has offered you an incentive for a review, please tell us about it.

So there you have it, generally it is seems dodgy, leave it out.

Real reviews gone bad

Even if you manage to get a real review, as a business there are certain ways you should react to it and certain ways you shouldn’t react to them. This could have a more catastrophic effect on your business. It’s true that reviews can make or break a business, especially for hotels, bars, restaurants and other service industries where people use that type service infrequently or while on holiday.

But everyone is doing it

Sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, Qype and Google Places do take these issues seriously and have moved to try and bring them under control, all with varying amounts of success. According to Gartner they predict that 15% of online reviews will be fake by 2014. But according to the LATimes this number is closer to 40% right now.

It seems that’s there are less scrupulous businesses out their manipulating these review sites. I’m sure there are shill accounts from businesses that post positive reviews about them selves. Or even worse, they might even post less than positive reviews about their competitors.

Review Services

There are even review services, like the screenshot below, that you can pay for reviews, or if you are on a budget you can pay someone $5 on fiverr to do it.

fake tripadvisor example

Fake reviews on blogs

Here is an email that I got today, and it really is sad to see, but it should act as a reminder than any review you read, not just from the main review sites, could have an alternative motive for posting.

Hi there,
You’ve built a new app for iPhone. It’s ready; it’s what the market needs. You’ve done a great job! So what now?

The single MOST important thing you can do when you release a new app is obtain quality 5 star reviews. It will make the difference between actively growing and having an app that gets lost in the crowd.

What I do – I provide app reviews for apps in the following categories:

• - Education
• - Food & Drink
• - Health & Fitness
• - Lifestyle
• - Photography
• - Shopping
• - Social Networking apps

I have THE strongest blogger review network for these app categories.

*Important – I only submit reviews for apps that deserve 5 stars and your app is a strong candidate.

I have 2 services that I am offering at 50% for this week:

iTunes App Store Reviews – 20 new 5 star iTunes App Store reviews with comments. Price $99

Home Page Review – I will personally write a 200 word review of your app and post it to my blog home page lechateaudesfleurs.blogspot.com which has over 2800 Mommy Blogger followers. I will also post to my Facebook account, Pinterest account, Google + and my Twitter account. Price $79

In fact, I am so confident in these reviews that if they do not create significant momentum for your app I will refund the entire review cost. I look forward to hearing from you!!!

Sincerely,
Frenchy

My nickname is Frenchy. I am French, born and raised in Paris, France…Live in Utah with hubby and 4 Darling kids. Blogger, designer, photographer, fashionista, decorator, crafter, cook, gardener…

Visit my blog here: http://lechateaudesfleurs.blogspot.com

Fake followers, Fake likes, fake fakes

And it’s not just reviews that are actively being manipulated on the web, twitter followers, facebook likes, google plus votes, etc. Seeing the ‘facebook thumbs up’ for a few hundred people does add a certain level of confidence to a shopper. If hundreds of anonymous people like something, it has to be safe, right ? So you can see why business would chase these metrics. We’ve even seen cases where people have manipulated the like button to look like the like widget, but it’s actually just a static image, check http://likefake.com if you are curious.

Sites like Google & Facebook are aware that there are fake accounts, in their SEC filing Facebook said they have around 9% fake accounts. In numbers that’s about 80+ million accounts.

fake twitter account example

Don’t be tempted

Whether you are a blogger being offered to post a review, or a business tempted in gaming the social signals, be warned it’s likely you will be found out, possibly fined and at risk of being blacklisted by the services or penalised on google.

Linking directly to the individual sitemaps

Poking into the code I’ve found out that the links appear as

• Page www.youblog.com/index.php?sitemap=page&sitemap_n=1
• Posts www.youblog.com/index.php?sitemap=post&sitemap_n=1
• Category www.youblog.com/index.php?sitemap=category&sitemap_n=1
• Post Tags www.youblog.com/index.php?sitemap=post_tag&sitemap_n=1

Tracking with Google Analytics and HTACCESS

What we do is we use a different URL, like blackdog.ie/t/ & blackdog.ie/fb/ for our twitter and facebook profiles. Then we redirect this via a line on our htaccess file to push it to the home page while adding the extra tracking code for Google Analytics to know where these visitors came from.

RewriteEngine on

redirect 301 /t http://www.blackdog.ie/?utm_medium=social-media&utm_campaign=profile+blackdog&utm_source=twitter


Note : don’t forget to change your own domain name from our one & make sure this appears all on one line in your .htaccess file.

Custom Campaigns

This will add a custom campaign, which can be viewed under: Traffic Sources >> Sources >> Campaigns.

Google Analytics Social Tracking

Google Analytics does track social referrals, but these include other people posting links to your site, not just people viewing your profile and coming that way. To see your social media visitors on Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources >> Social >> Overview

Here is a typical thing you will see here

You can drill down further to see where exactly these sources are coming from.

Often companies will tell you are ranking for X number of new keywords, which in itself tells you nothing. These words are useless unless they are driving traffic (and converting) to your site. The actual improvement can be hard to see unless you specifically look at organic traffic in your statistical package.

In Google Analytics you can filter just for organic traffic, so paid, direct type-in and referral traffic isn’t counted. It’s a little hidden in the control panel, so to help you we’ve outlined the steps : Go to

Traffic Sources

>>> Sources
>>>>> Search
>>>>>>> Overview

This would be the first step. Then you need to compare it against a base level. Here we’ve compared the current month to the previous month.

Your Organic Traffic

Here we see that the number of organic traffic is up by over 70%. The next stage is to check to see how many keywords are delivering traffic to us. Generally it’s better to be ranking for more keywords.

How many keywords do I rank for ?

If you unclick compare to past in the dates field and select Organic under Overview on the left hand side menu.

At the bottom of the right of the table (highlighted in green) you will see the number of keywords that brought you traffic for that period of time.

Technically this shows you only the keywords that drive traffic to you. And a good starting point would be to look at where you are ranking for these to see if you can move up a further 1 or 2 places. In our case there are over 2000 different unique keywords delivering traffic so this should be a good starting point to work on in the next few months. You will also find that once you focus on these keywords, you will also start to get traffic from even more keywords, so it’s a cycle that will never end !

A sudden drop in the number of keywords you rank for is a good indicator of a google penalty being applied.

Thanks

A big thanks goes to my clients for allowing me to share these graphs, you guys rock !

Increase your newsletter subscriber count

Increasing your Newsletter signup rate

1. Make it easy, and painless, require the minimum information, a name & a email is the max details you need. If you can get away with just an email address, then do.
2. Offer something in return for ‘access to their inbox‘. Maybe you can offer a discount on their next purchase if they sign up, maybe there’s a e-book or other content they can get access too. By giving something in return people will place some value in the signing up. For example, you might give a prize every month to a subscriber, this might swing a person who previously didn’t want to sign up, into signing up.
3. Solve a problem, if your site sells black widgets for example, let your call to action be along the lines that you will send them news from the world of black widgets, and not just a listing of products you sell. And make it clear that it just won’t be a sales pitch in every email.
4. Following on from the previous point, everything doesn’t need to be a sales pitch, maybe make it fun, mysterious, exciting and say that with them being on the list their lives will be enriched by your content.
5. Plug it after they’ve bought from you. Either directly in a shopping cart, or a conversation on the phone. Ask if you can add them after they’ve bought or signed up. Catching them when they’ve had a positive experience will increase your sign up rate.
6. Personalise it, if you’re a the type of business that targets 2 distinct types of customers, say retail and customers, then offer a segmented newsletter for each segment. There maybe news you can send to both, but if over 25% of your emails are not for them, they probably won’t hang around after you’ve done the hard work to sign them up.
7. Have fun. Marketing to email customers is a little different, you are much more front and centre for these customers when you contact them. If the tone of your sign-up copy is quite serious or dry then people may elect not to have your serious email cluttering up their inbox. Keep things as light as possible.

Update :  one extra tip comes from NewsLetter.ie on twitter, where they talk about adding a signup on Facebook for your newsletter.  details about their implementation can be seen here and a live example on IrishWeatherApp

Good tips by email marketing consultant @paulsavage blackdog.ie/blog/7-newslet…+we suggest adding a signup form to your Facebook page

— Newsletter.co (@NEWSLETTERdotIE) June 29, 2012

Example of a penalty

Basically what happens, is that your website will notice a significant drop in traffic, see the example around the end of May of this year. Note that I am only looking at the Organic Search Traffic graph, I’ve excluded the statistics for type-in, PPC, referral traffic as sometimes these can hide or blur the effect.

Over night the search traffic dropped dramatically, and this can be confirmed by clicking on individual keywords in your Google Analytics Reports, and seeing that the number of visitors coming for the top keywords had completely fallen off. These changes happened at once for more than a few keywords. Rankings for these keywords were averaging between position #2 and #7, and after this date they dropped off to the 2nd or 3rd pages of results.

Reasons for Google could penalise your site

There could be multiple reasons for your penalty, and it can be a bit of a tricky tasks to identify them. If you’ve done anything shady like buying links, buying Google plus votes or Facebook likes then it’s likely that Google has noticed this. The best start is go back to basics and check everything, from issues in your Google Webmaster Console to reading Google’s starter guide Search Engine Optimisation.

And even once everything is looked at it could be possible that your competitors in the market have just blown you out of the water. Generally if this is the case the drops are more gradual, unless you are heavily depending on one keyword to deliver you a high percentage of your traffic.

SEO takes time

It’s not always the case that you can fix a penalty in such a quick manner, as in the example above, here’s one we are currently looking at.

Thanks

A big thanks goes to my clients for allowing me to share these graphs, you guys rock !

Messaging tells people when you read a message

One of the great things with emails, besides the attempted and largely non-functional implementation of read receipts, is that it can be a one way communication if you need it to be. People don’t know if you’ve read a message, and whether to expect a response based on that fact. This week Facebook released a messaging notification feature.
It’s been reported that younger people (15-25) are gravitating towards Facebook messaging rather than email. You can even email someone by sending a message to their username@facebook.com . The only problem is that’s not email, adding attachments for example simply doesn’t work. Messaging someone outside the system aslo won’t work. Facebook wants to be the internet of the future, and while it’s ambitious I really don’t see it happening.

Struggling to engage users

Facebook have been sharing more and more of your data with your friends’ friends. They are now sharing that you like or comment on a status update of a friend of a friend. As to why someone would want to know these tidbits I just don’t know. If I was interested in this data I would be connected to the friends’ friend, but I’m not, so stop shoving it down our throats !

Ads on mobile

Just wait until facebook find some way to start to put ads on your mobile. One potential idea they’ve been testing is that you can pay to push your own message to the top of people’s feed, a so called promoted status update. For $2 you can make sure someone sees your ‘all important update’.

Their ad system is indeed broken. We’re already heard this week about General Motors saying that they are pulling their $10 Million budget for Facebook ads. And it’s not just large organisation finding that having a successful campaign extremely difficult, even if you have help from a so called guru. Read about how a small pizza company experience more likes for their $240 spent on ads, but little or no return on that investment.

There are rumours that Facebook will start to offer a social ad platform. This would be something akin to AdSense, but only allowing publishers to target you on 3rd party web-sites. These ads could be based on such things as :

• personal information :
• age
• sex
• martial status
• family info
• location
• job
• job history
• phone network
• ISP
• email address
• where you’ve taken your photographs
• what type of camera / phone you own
• etc.
• social signals :
• your likes
• pages you’ve visit often
• places you’ve checked in
• your interests
• etc.

Facebook will break

In the end facebook will break. Either you’ll break if yourself by constantly being encouraged to add friends. How can you realistically connect with 500 people ? Perhaps if you start to add people to lists and groups, it might work, but it almost feels like a full-time job managing your relationships online.

Or facebook will break itself, possibly by :

• increasingly adding these inane features and alienating their users further
• selling our data and removing our privacy
• becoming the successful target of hackers or activist group like Anonymous

It is Facebook really worth $100 Billion ? Perhaps the amount of data they have on us 800+ million people is indeed worth it, but is it a business that you’d like to invest in ?

Let me turn off chat

One final word in case anyone at Facebook reads this, I don’t want to use it, I will never use it, it wastes, let me remove the feature completely, give me one more option !

Reporting a bug

These are the requirements I use when asking people to submit bugs to me. Even if it’s not my code, but they still want help putting together a report, I will send them these 6 points.

• Description :  details of what you think is wrong, or what you expect to happen when you do X.
• Screenshot : If it’s a web application make sure you include the full browser screen and the URL bar.
• Steps : What were the steps you did to get this error happen ? Does it happen every time you do the steps ?
• Frequency : How long have you been noticing this issue ? Has it always worked like this or is it only since the last release you’ve noticed it ?
• Importance : how critical is this issue, is this nice to have fixed or something that’s critical that’s stopping something major ?
• Environment :  have you tried it in more than one browser or OS ? Have you disabled browser plugins that might interfere with the pages’ code ?

In some cases you might need to have a field for business case impact for the change/fix. But this could be done in second round of analysis once the developer has investigated the issue. If a potential change has subsequent impacts on other parts of the system then these decisions are generally discussed with the product owner and the lead developer or even at a higher level.

Standardised reporting

This also introduces a lay person into the world of standarised reporting. Getting a report in a particular manner means that the extra steps they take will save you and the person reporting time. Avoiding this back and forth between, is one of the major benefits, but it’s also severs as a good way for categorising these issues. Is the bug report really one of the following :

• a bug report
• a feature request
• a change request
• a user operational issue
• rights / permissions based issue
• etc.

Do you have any other things you’d like to know  when people are submitting bug reports ?

Our Dropped Ranking Test

Here is a screenshot of our ranking test. The site was offline from September 2011 through to December 2012. On January 1st we re-enabled the site, and started to add some more content, and ping’d Google that the site was back. The traffic slowly came back, over 2 months, and then it started to increase significantly. During this time the site returned a 404 header code for all pages on the site. For this test we purposely didn’t send a 302 header code saying that the site temporarily was down.

The result, was that the site was dropped from the index completely, this took about 4 weeks, all the indexed pages were no longer being shown.

This keyword is one of the more competitive keywords the site ranks for, and it results in over 16% of total traffic to the site. It was comforting to see that being offline for over 3 months wasn’t a factor in the rankings. Which makes sense to us. If the site is available, and it ranks, then being down for a while shouldn’t change the ranking factor of the site. There wasn’t significant changes in the competitors sites during this time. So when the site was back, with the exact same content and URLs, it make sense that it should rank once more.

While I was mussing about a blog post. and checking into the SERPs I was happy to see that we were indeed at #4 & #6 on google.com & google.ie for [jobs in ireland]. But I was abruptly awoken and was in shock when I was trying to check our position visually. It wasn’t easy to see where what’s what, as Google has started to blend in paid ads in with the SERPs.

Where are the ads ?

Click for larger image

This is the picture that is showing up, and those distinctive yellow ads are no where to be seen ? How can a visitor discern the difference between paid and organic listings ? Just for the record these are the ads …

And the side bar ads

Why these ads ?

We doubt it’s for UI that Google is putting these ads in white, rather they are just simply trying to increase their click through ads. And the result will mean :

• More ads clicked
• More money for Google
• More traffic for advertisers
• Less traffic for organic rankers

A good day for Google ? I think not. Yet another reason to pick another search engine right now. I’m currently testing duckduckgo.com for the last few weeks and the results are pretty good so far. And they show you what are paid listings and what are organic listings.
Rant Over

Will,

1. Take me off your f’ing list.
2. I’ve reported you to SPAM COP http://www.spamcop.net/ who will send a report to your host RackSpace about the unsolicited email
3. Sending an email to 300 people on CC is just plain fucking stupid. What’s privacy these days ?
4. I don’t give a damn about your magazine. If I wanted a newsletter I would have signed up. Shoving it down my throat won’t make me any more likely to buy it. Perhaps your company should hire someone to do some in-house training about email etiquette. Besides the unsolicited email aka SPAM you didn’t include an un-subscribe option and you didn’t include any concrete contact details.
5. I did look at http://www.pokerpromedia.info/ (interesting that your .COM redirect to .INFO) 2004 called and they want their web design back.

P.S. for those on BCC (yes Will I used BCC to inform the other people on this list about my actions) , sorry about the extra email, but please do consider reporting Will’s email to SpamCop if you too didn’t subscribe to this type of email http://www.spamcop.net/
P.P.S. Comments welcomed on my blog post about this http://www.blackdog.ie/blog/dear-will-please-fuck-off/

Other thoughts

I just wonder why someone would think it’s a good idea to email people in such a manner. Judging from the number of bounced messages I got I think that this list is a rather old one. My guess is that someone copied a list of poker affiliates (I have a small poker forum that I run), and I probably got on some list by signing up somewhere. Still I never heard of ProPoker Media and certainly never subscribed to an email newsletter. So it’s still not right to use my email address for something that I might (but I’m not) interested in, plus I doubt you got my email address in a ‘legal’ manner.

Update : 13/03/2012 15:30 CET We seem to be linked to a ripoff report.
Update : 13/03/2012 16:00 CET Another ripoff report this time from someone calling themselves Will.

Author :  (IP:  , )
E-mail :
URL    :
Whois  : http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/
Comment:

Doing a bit more testing, I tried to post a comment myself, to see if it mattered if I was logged in or not. Sadly this didn’t make a difference. But I did notice that the URL that it was posting to was strange

/comment-page-/#comment-

After a bit of poking, and looking at the error log it was an issue with a corrupt table. The simple fix was that the wp_commentmeta had crashed, and you’ll need to run the repair procedure on the table.  Maybe you’ve just had this issue and you are lost for answers on how to fix it. Hopefully you’ll find this helpful.

Looking through my comment queue this morning I spotted something that caught my eye, it’s yet another Irish SEO “company” spamming. I use company in quotes because it’s not possible to get any clear information about SEOIreland.net from their website, so I’m not really sure if it’s a super secret organisation or it’s its some 13 year old kid working from his bedroom. There isn’t any information their website as to a RBN or even a name, an address or phone number. Here’s a look at their WHOIS for their domain, which has it’s information set to private.

There are very little reason as to why a legitimate business would hide themselves from being researched. Setting their WHOIS to private raises suspicion for us. Not being able to put a face to the business really doesn’t put our fears at ease.

SEOIreland.net Comment

So here’s the comment we got submitted to us, which got passed Akismet.

As the language of the post seems to be none native English, I was surprised to see that this comment was sent from inside Ireland, with an Irish IP.

For looking at where the comment comes from geographically, we use a free service at MaxMind.com.

Researching your SEO company

If you plan to hire a SEO company, you should do a background check. Find out :

• Who they are
• How many people work for them (ask about outsourced partners)
• What projects have they worked on recently
• Verify these projects and results with their clients

To hire a good SEO consultant you are talking about spending multiple thousands of Euros to work over a longer period of time. A bit of research will save you some heartache in the long run.

Prefix String with RegEx

Search for [(^)] Replace with [Pre: $1] , this will add Pre: to the start all your stings.
E.g.

• String : Blackdog.ie raises first round of VC
• Search : (^)
• Replacement : CNN : $1
• Result : CNN : Blackdog.ie raises first round of VC

Postfix a string with RegEx

Search for [($)] Replace with [$1 : Post], this will add : Post to the end of all your strings

• String : Blackdog.ie raises first round of VC
• Search : ($)
• Replacement : $1 : CNN
• Result : Blackdog.ie raises first round of VC : CNN

I use this for http://pipes.yahoo.com/ which is a handy tool for mashing RSS feeds together. I did want to attribute where the feeds were coming from, and putting the source in the title really improve the feed.

From the first impressions of the website I was a little surprised that there isn’t much of that magic ingredient that search engines love, namely text. In all the homepage has 142 words and only 120 when you remove navigation. This doesn’t give the search engines much to work with. Another aspect to keep in mind is that not every visitor will be be able to read English when they visit. Using tools like Google Translate, visitors would be translate the text on the page into their own language, but sadly most of the information is presented with images.

With regards to the language of the website, I was surprised in was the fact that the website isn’t available in Irish. Seeing as the Irish government is the sole owner of CIE, I would expect that this website would also fall under the Official Languages Act, 2003.

The Official Languages Act 2003 (section 9(3)) requires public bodies to ensure that where they are communicating for the purposes of providing information to the general public or to a class of the general public – in writing or by electronic mail – the communication shall be in the Irish language only or in the Irish and English languages.

But apparently it doesn’t (see end). As this is a website that is also used extensively by toursits having a German / French / Spanish would only help to improve conversions. For example the German train operator Deutsche Bahn offers their site in 10 languages.

HTTP Redirects

Every site should really check that the headers they are sending are the correct ones. This means sending the right HTTP header status, see here for a list of HTTP header statuses. Some potential issues I noticed :

• Main domain : www.irishrail.ie , returns HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved, which is more for when you move something temporarily. If it’s the case that the main page always redirects to /home/ then it should be a 301, a Moved Permanently status.
• Missing pages : www.irishrail.ie/home/help.html returns an error page, saying that the page can’t be found. But the page’s header is saying HTTP/1.1 200 OK, which means that it was indeed found. In this case a 404 Not Found status should be returned. Doing this will help error pages finding this way into the index. It can also have more serious implications like for your robots.txt, where search engines are expecting files in a certain format, and they something radically different while still being told that it’s a valid file.

VIP : Visually Impaired site

I was really pleased to see that they had a section for the visually impaired.

This is a high contrast, low graphic version of their website, as I was expecting.

On further inspection I was a little surprised when not all the links worked. The links to “Your Journey” , “Projects” & “Opportunities” all brought me back to the main website. Also the clicking for the full version of the Breaking News returned me to the home page. While I commend the effort in doing such a website, things like the timetable search works perfectly, I do think that a when doing such a site it should either be done properly or not at all. Doing it properly could involve not having every page available on the VIP version. But if you do include links to resources then they should really be consistent with the ‘expected experience’.

A quick look at the HTML code

Looking closer at the HTML code, there is plenty of room for optimisation. My quick run down would include :

• Moving the 700+ lines of CSS code in the header into it’s own CSS file. This will allow the browser to cache the file, so the 2nd, 3rd and subsequent pages will load faster.
• Moving the 1200+ lines of Javascript code which is placed inline into included javascript files. This will allow the browser to cache these files, so the 2nd, 3rd and subsequent pages will also load faster.
• Moving included files CSS & JS into the header of the file, this will allow these files to be processed before the page is rendered. The one main exception would be the JS include for Google Analytics.
• Remove redundant code, commenting out code sections is great while you are testing, or about to launch. But it also unnecessarily bloats code.
• Use Tables for tabular data, otherwise use DIVs. This websites code uses tables extensively for laying out objects in a grid format, this wasn’t the intended use case for tables in HTML.
• In-line style should be avoided as much as possible, better to use CSS.

The total size of the homepage is 0.45 MB and required in total 50 HTTP requests. This could definitely be reduced to make the page load faster with the suggestions above.

Using AdSense

As the benefit of using AdSense on a sales website can be debated back and forward, I’m not going to go into that here. I really feel that the implementation here is suboptimal. In the screenshot above the top ads do blend in with the site, the right hand side and bottom banners are rich image/rich media ads which don’t blend as easily. One option here would be to turn off the image/rich media ads option. This would result in a uniform look to your page, while also keeping the ads intact. As with most large companies I’m sure they would prefer to have their website inline with their corporate visual identity. It should be considered are 3 ad units really necessary ? Why are they using the maximum number of ads ? Do the all really convert ?

Here we have the AdSense banners highlighted in green with the play button, and the internal banners highlighted in yellow and green marked with an X. While the 3rd party ads are outside the main content, the can be distraction, and potentially annoying for customers. These ads are above the fold, which results in that little bit of extra scrolling to see the pages’ content.

Also I’m not sure as to why you would include AdSense in an IFRAME as this will only skew your AdSense targeting. Also in this case this would be a 4th AdSense Banner, which won’t be displayed (happens automatically), as you are only allowed to use up to 3 AdSense banners on 1 page.

As IrishRail are fans of using AdSense, one tip would be to introduce some Link Units, blended in with some navigational items. These convert quite well, we use them extensively on our Irish Jobs site.

Trying the search function

I tested out the search function, and got a little bit confused. I did a search for the word [contact] and the first result appeared to be the contact page, but it’s located under an obscure URL http://search.irishrail.ie/highlight.aspx?aid=2901210&pckid=147268114&rn=1&sp_id=147267858&lid=113272535&highlight=contact#firsthighlight rather than the expected URL http://www.irishrail.ie/contact_us/ . It searches via a sub-domain search.irishrail.ie , which thankfully blocks indexing via their robots.txt, so this will avoid the duplicate content issue. I did some further looking around to try to see if I could search via http://search.irishrail.ie/ directly, but it comes up with a Danish language search page, and returns results for the domain http://blog.siteimprove.co.uk/ & not IrishRail.ie.

All in all this website gives the appears that it was either half heartily done, or has grown out out control by adding on bits and pieces along the way. Either way this leaves to a diminished user experience and a damaged SEO potential.

A message from IrishRail

I did reach out to Irish Rail before I published this post and they offer the following comments:

• They are planning on relaunching a brand new website in September 2011.
• The website has become over grown and disorganised as they’ve progressed, and the new website will address this.
• They don’t fall under the Official Languages Act, as they are not a governmental institution. Update : Websites don’t fall under the OLA, rather written publications and electronic mail do.
• The new website will have the facility to be multi-lingual, but they are not yet decided as to whether it will be available in multiple languages on launch.
• And yes the AdSense wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t pulling it’s own weight, and it’s quite a helpful source of income.