Apr
30
Back from blog burnout.
Filed Under Marcia Personal | Comments Off
It’s been a long hiatus from blogging (all of 2008 so far, as a matter of fact), but sometimes life can reach the point of burnout so that there’s no choice but to chill out and focus efforts and attention on other things. It hasn’t been all about blogging either; it’s all of the website work in general, although some things get attention out of sheer necessity.
Not that everything stopped altogether, but discretionary time and attention has been more focused on what’s not the usual and with personal interests: delving into some books and study for new or updated skills and techniques, and keeping up with latest search developments. Boy, haved there been plenty of those, especially the MSN/Yahoo drama, which has seemed like more of a TV miniseries on corporate high drama than real life.
And news stories - lots of those have been literally riveting, especially the ones involving women in roles and life situations unfamiliar to the great majority of us in the world. First that unfortunate Pickton trial in Canada, after years of devastation to so many, a few public and political scandals, and now there’s that FLDS legal mess in Texas. And lots more in between, but it’s an eye opener to take a prolonged glimpse into people’s lives and lifestyles that are so alien to us who live in the “normal” world.
Anyway, it’s about time to get back into balance and get back on track with what’s been neglected - and get rolling on some new projects, but not in the same old, same old way.
Dec
26
Top social marketing sites & applications for 2007
Filed Under Social Marketing | Comments Off
Here’s one party’s list of which ones the top 100 are for 2007, thanks to Scott for pointing it out:
Top Web Apps and Sites for 2007
I’ve been very resistant to the whole concept of “social marketing,” and Web 2.0 but it’s started to become more interesting lately, overcoming a persistent stubborn streak. I think it might be the thought of having to deal with blog comments (spam) that’s made it seem distateful.
Dec
14
Google duplicate content penalty for identical page titles and meta descriptions?
Filed Under Google | Comments Off
There’s been a lot of concern over this for quite a while, with the recommendation being that each page on a site should have a unique page title and meta description that relevant to that particular page. However, with what happens when they’re identical, I don’t think I’d call it a penalty, but a filter in operation.
Other than one (sometimes two slip through), when doing a site: search they’ll get filtered with what I call the “similarity filter” so you’ll see one (occasionally two) but have to click on that link they provide to see additional pages that have been excluded because they’ve been omitted for being very similar to the one shown.
I tested this on a site this summer, with pretty fast results. The web designer had run identical page titles and meta tags throughout the site, and put in a drop-down navigation list at the page top that was parsed as plain text, plus a “byline slogan” also across the entire site on the top of pages.
One page by one page, I removed the drop-down list, replaced the “motto” text with a graphic, and gave each page a unique page title and meta description.
One by one, as this was done to pages, they popped out from behind that “similar pages” link and showed up with a site: search.
It was a short term gig to fix a serious indexing issue that needed a difficult mod_rewrite solution, that was fixed, and just a few site pages were worked on by me, so there are still plenty of pages on that site that still have that similarity problem and did not, do not, and will not rank for the search terms relevant to the still_unfixed pages.
That’s all you can do is tell people what they need to do, but it’s up to them to actually do it. Way too cliche, but you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
I’ve got a page up with a list of links to white papers and patents on duplicate content. One of these days I’ll go through them and condense down and write up what seem to be the more important parts.
Dec
10
PHP Title and Meta Tag Generator
Filed Under Technical | Comments Off
Many thanks go to Hawkee.com for putting up the code for a php meta tag and title generator per request. I’ve been trying to figure out how to generate page titles and meta description tags without having to edit individual pages in an editor one at a time and then upload by FTP, and this will simplify the process (once I get it down how to use it).