Frustrating. I use the Sedo Domain Auctions regularly to find new domain names. I’ve bought several domain names from there down the years and the auction feed used to be real quick and easy to browse. Then they made it all whizzy and now it runs like a dog on my laptop and slooooow on my iMac. It can take a whole minute to load 50 domains and sometimes it crashes the browser. So I stopped using it and have probably missed some decent domain names. BUT…
…I have found a solution!
I created a Sedo “partner” account and set up some PHP in a subdirectory of my TV Smash website to grab the feed, do an hourly refresh and feed the re-formatted content out to Yahoo Pipes. It includes the domain name on auction, the time left to bid, the current high bid and by clicking the domain name, you get taken to the page to bid on the domain name!
I love Yahoo Pipes! I have created a load of them actually, mainly using gaming feeds but this domain auction pipe is now top of the pile in terms if usefulness (for me, anyway!).
One of the great things about Pipes is that you (or any user!) can filter the feed to only show what you want. So, if you only want to see domain names with a .com or .net extension that include the word “amazon” in the name, you can take my feed above and add filters.
In fact, you have several ways of viewing or using this domain name auction feed: you can either simply view the list on that page linked above, or it will let you take it as a RSS feed, a JSON feed or add it direct to homepages at MyYahoo etc. With RSS or JSON it’s pretty easy to incorporate this auction feed into a blog or website too if you are a webmaster and want some interesting and regularly updated data, hence why I used Pipes.
Now to go spend some money again 
One of the things about running a blog is getting regular content. I came across a good way of getting new content onto a poker blog the other day – basically each day the blog is set up to import a list of all that day’s poker freeroll tournaments at several of the top online poker rooms as seperate posts.
To do this, you need two things. Firstly you need a Wordpress plugin that allows automation of imports for given RSS feeds. Secondly, you need the URL of an RSS feed that has the poker tournaments.
The plugin I use is called wp-o-matic. It’s simple to set up on a Wordpress blog – took about 5 minutes. Once done, it has an admin panel where you can specify an RSS feed for import and set a time or times to interrogate the feed. WP-o-matic then brings in the latest RSS items and sets each one up as a new post. Voila! Automated content that gets Google spidering your blog on a daily basis – all good for SEO too.
As for the poker freeroll feeds, you can grab one from www.freerollpokertournaments.net or there is a good selection of poker feeds at Yahoo Pipes (there are also some gambling newsfeeds there you can import too). Grab the URL of any feed, give it to wp-o-matic and it will do the rest.
For those of you, like me, who spend a good deal of time learning and implementing SEO techniques, the time might be coming when you can focus on other things. The evidence is mounting that SEO is something that may not be required for too much longer.
To qualify that – “too much longer” might still be years, but it might be months. Let’s face it, if Google et al could eradicate the need for it then it makes sense. The mere name “Search Engine Optimisation” goes against what search engines want to achieve and that is a set of search results that gives the user what they want based on the information on the site.
Update: August 2010: This article was written in December 2008 and recently I have seen a lot of discussion that substantiates the fact that nofollow is no longer a good method for PR sculpting so the content of thsi article that relates to that topic should probably be re-researched!
I’ve seen a fair bit of discussion about the effects of internal linking on a website and it’s effects on SEO recently. Some refer to this as “Link sculpting” which is a techie way of saying getting clever with your site navigation. Whatever you call it, there are some interesting theories that have supposedly been put to the test and delivered results for people. The one that interested me the most was the use of the “nofollow” tag on HREF anchors to “sculpt” PageRank. Let me explain. Read the rest of this entry »
Quite often I’ve seen questions on SEO forums asking which is better from an SEO perspective – using a subdomain or using a directory for a specific category of content. Up until now I’d have always said a directory is easier to rank and from my experience, it seems Google wants a subdomain to bed in before it shows it any love. Possibly a trust factor, although it struck me as odd if a domain was already ranking.
Anyway, I’ve revised my opinion a little recently. I still reckon a directory is better for most content, however Read the rest of this entry »
If you run a website, you’re probably keeping an eye on where you rank in Google. A frustrating task made even harder by the fact that Google now use a lot of geo-targetting to determine search results. The upshot being a search from the UK on google.com will show a different set of results to one from the USA on google.com. Grrr.
For example, I have a non-commercial package holiday website that I host over the pond in the USA and obviously I am targetting the term “package holiday” or “package holidays”. It’s relatively new and I’ve been keeping an eye on Google to see Read the rest of this entry »
As a webmaster, something’s been bugging me for a long time. The concept of SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. Why is it, why should it, be necessary? I follow SEO closely because I have to, not necessarily because I want to although I do find it interesting. But I wonder why Google, Yahoo and MSN (as examples) put so much ranking weight on factors that can clearly be manipulated.
We’re in the 21st century, and I’d have thought technology would be at a stage now where it would be possible to determine relevance based on behaviour, if not entirely, certainly predominantly. Yes yes, I know a lot of people have this privacy issue and count me among them, but anonymous tracking of my online search habits – anonymous being the key word here – doesn’t unduly worry me. And targetting advertising to my tastes? I’m fine with that – advertising is part of everyday life Read the rest of this entry »
moreA lot of sites are designed with the navigation menus either on the left hand side or at the top of the page. While this has logic from a user perspective, it’s not great from an SEO perspective as the search engine “spiders” dump all your HTML and read the text. That text includes link anchors, alt tags on images and title tags etc etc. So clearly if your links come before the page content itself, chances are it’s going to mark down your content relevance a little.
However there are a couple of tricks that allow you to keep your site navigation at the top or to the left, yet make sure it appears to the search engines after all your much more relevant text.
Let’s assume that you want to keep your navigation where it is, and deal firstly with links at the top of the page. The trick here is to use “absolute positioning”. This is slightly easier if you use a fixed-width site but can be achieved with fluid designs. More often than not, you will be able to easily work out how far from the top of the screen your links should be, so that’s one problem made easier. For “left positioning”, this will depend on your design. The key is to put your links Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve played with a few SEO plugins for Wordpress, and up until I installed Wordpess 2.61 I was using “SEO Title Tag” and “SEO Post Link” to do my dirty work, and they did it pretty well. These plugins added fields to each post, allowed you to reword the slugs to be more search engine friendly, and redefine the META tags for posts and pages, but stopped short of doing categories and archives.
However, when I installed 2.61, I discovered a plugin called “Headspace” which not only did what SEO Title Tag does, but provided a much better GUI in so much as that apart from including the extra fields in each post, it also provides a “quick edit” function for categories, archives, tags, the homepage and the generic parts of the blog. And it’s superb.
There are a couple of minor drawbacks to this Headspace plugin however. Firstly, the quick edit GUI Read the rest of this entry »
One of the things you have to be careful about with Wordpress is picking a theme that doesn’t damage your search engine rankings. There’s a couple of things in particular to watch for.
Firstly, many free themes are provided with the condition that you leave the footer links intact. Trouble is, a lot of these link to sites in “bad neighbourhoods” – that is, sites that Google has banned, penalise or regard as junk. If you want to rank well and quickly, you don’t want a theme with shite links all over it. It’s worth paying for a premium theme or offering to pay the author for removal of the links. Some themes have “malicious” code embedded that add links or do stuff you don’t want. Be careful!
The second thing that is a problem is the way the header is constructed. Quite often developers embed an H1 and H2 tag in the header which is quite legitimate – usually for Read the rest of this entry »