CodeSucker Barks SEO

Fluffy pillows and warm blankets

2010-11-15T06:02:00.000-08:00

That's absolutely correct! I'm back. New content is in the pipelines, stay tuned. We've got a lot of catching up to do - Google broke out some cool AJAX code where it tries to guess what you're going to type and automatically runs the queries without you hitting enter. We are going to talk about why 99% of the time this is useless and a waste of resources. The other 1% of the time, it's nice to save a second or two on searches, but is it really worth it? In a time when people are more conscious of their carbon footprint than ever, Google slaps in Al Gore in the face.

We already don't get up anymore to change the channel on the TV.. have we really grown too lazy to hit the enter key?

There's a lot more, we haven't covered Google and Verizons proposal to basically put up toll booths all over the internet, we also need to talk about Diggs poweryank, Bings betrayal and the downfall of propeller. Better late than never.

Lions and Tigers and Bears! Oh My!

2009-07-01T21:29:00.001-07:00

Valued readers - I have been quite busy lately. This post is to let you know that I in fact did NOT fall off the face of the planet and that new posts will be coming soon!

A note of interest: Gmail now requires a cell phone number to be associated with all new accounts! How do I know about this before they make the offical announcement? Sue me, I have lots of emails ;P

I'm upset over the passing of Michael - I grew up with his music, like you all did I'm sure. I can actually moonwalk, it's not as easy for dogs. My favorites were billie jean, thriller, smooth criminal and somebodys watching me.. I wish they would leave him alone and let him rest. I really don't care if he was pumped full of drugs or not.. it's no ones business but his own.

This is fun.. just blogging about nothing instead of my usual tutorials and serious SEO talks.

I'll have some fresh posts to you very soon. Please don't leave me, you're all I have!

No, don't share this ;P

I Call Shenanigans on Matt Cutts!

2009-06-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

It's this particular question that boiled my blood today. It's from Matt Cutts' personal blog mattcutts.com/blog <-- (This is a link omission by the way. See how it's plain text but I'm treating it like a link.. this way it doesn't drain rank)

Matt is answering a question about the recent Google algorithm change (read about that on onecoolsite if you haven't yet) concerning nofollow links.

Doesn’t (the recent change) encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?

Matts Answer: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

from MattCutts.com/blog

The no-nonsense answer: Yes! Turn off the comments on your blog and you will see an improvement in the SERPs, moreso now that we can't nofollow but this is how it's always been.. even though it makes your blog suck.

No one said anything about 'hoarding' rank, Mr. Cutts - this guy is simply asking if his comments are going to suck pagerank out of his site since he can no longer label them 'nofollow' to redistribute juice. The answer to that is yes.

"parts of our system encourage links to good sites." This has nothing to do with anything. If you are linking to authoritive sites, it shouldn't be in the comment section. Most of the comment backlinks come from other bloggers..

Are these webmasters from the authoritive sites really commenting on anyones blog?? No.

To a well-linked internet - this recent algorithm change is practically assault with a deadly weapon. If there is a bonus for non-reciprocated outlinks to authoritive sites like Cutts suggests above I assure you it's a small one.. small enough for me not to have ever noticed in my time as an optimizer.

Either way, the whole Web 2.0 movement is about the users controlling the content. What if there is some uber-great content that I want to link to.. but it's not on an authoritive site? If we have everyone linking to the 5 top sites for their niche, the SERPs are just going to get regimented and stagnant, with the authoritive sites staying on top and the new comers somewhere around the 15th or 16th page. Sure, it's less work for Google to administer and remove spam, but it comprimises freshness for the end user and sticks a middle finger up at webmasters everywhere.

But Codesucker, you shouldn't even be thinking about SEO.. just write good content.

Nope. I'm one of those so called SEOs gaming the system and guess what - The brains behind every single one of those authoritive sites has someone like the dog barking exactly how to optimize at them.

Guess what I'm telling clients?

Link out less.

They pay dogs good money(not really) for consultation.. I need to back up every claim I make with authoritive resources - you want me to tell real people to link to 'good' sites for a google bonus of some sort? Leave blog comments on and hope for commenters from 'good' sites? I can't back that up at all - In fact it's downright silly from where I stand, there is no evidence to support such dangerous nonsense.

Since hearing about the change I am treating every outlink as a Google penalty.

Should I be worried about dropping in rank due to said 'changes'?

No, they have already been implemented.

Final words on the issue.

I'm not peeved about the rule change it's the above statement I have 'beef' with and I am sure I'm not the only one who will attack it. I have zero sympathy. Heavy lies the crown, Mr. Cutts.

Link Sculpting 2.0 - How to do it NOW

2009-06-15T20:44:00.000-07:00

Scuplting isn't dead.

Nofollow isn't dead either, but the combination of the two certainly are.

You can read about the recent Google algorithm change in a guest post I did for onecoolsite. For details about the actual change see the post Matt Cutts tells SEOs 'nomore' link scuplting via nofollow.

The truth is that the more outbound links a page has, the less each link is worth. If you aren't familiar with this concept please brush up on the linkjuice algorithm.

So if we wanted to add a link, but didn't want it to draw juice, we used to just make the link nofollow. This practice is over.

The best of the new options contributes to a less well-linked internet. To avoid decreased ranking from these algorithm changes, some experts are advising the removal of all these links. They have a good point, this way the rest of the links will still be worth the same amount. But, are you really going to get rid of all the tags, categories and comments?

Link Sculpting 2.0

The new link sculptors will find success by manipulating link orders and, now, by omitting links.

Link Order

Link order is the position the link holds on a page. If it's the first link a webcrawler will run into, it's got the highest order. The last links to be traversed have the lowest order.

I described how to sculpt via link orders in an older post: Carving via nofollow and link orders, this strategy is still valid today.

To take advantage of the strategy, the highest ordered links on your page should link to other pages where you want the most linkjuice to flow. Consequently, thos pages will end up with the highest pagerank. and end up with the highest pagerank). once overlooked pawns of this strategy, link orders are the new key to sculpting.

Link Omissions

The days of long blogrolls and newsfeeds are over. Long lists of links are out, even if they are part of an aggregation and pump 'freshness' into your site. SEOs will now think twice before adding any links, especially outbound ones (referrals) to another website.

Not only referrals are in Danger

So are the links that go to another page even in your own site. For bloggers, these are the tag links, recent comments, and, I hate to say it, even the archive in some cases. (The archive is the backbone of your site. I've alway recommended displaying an archive on every page).

Blogger automatically lists the tags for a post. Each of these tags links to its own tag page with all the posts using it. To redistribute the juice, Blogger makes these links nofollow. Nowadays it doesn't matter, and the juice is getting spilled either way. Tags are ordered higher than comments. We will be seeing a lot less of them (displayed on the post page, at least) in the future.

What about blog comments?

This recent change endangers blog comments. Big Time.

Blog comments are the most interactive part of the blogging experience, posts have hundreds of comments. Each one of the comments comes with a link that is sucking up juice.

Now SEOs are trying to say that, since we can't nofollow the blog comment links in order to redistribute juice, we might as well not even have them. This is a sad day for the internet. What's going to happen eventually is that SEOs will change the code so instead of linking back to the commenters site, it will just display the URL in text. Bleh.

and on a much lighter note..

DoFollow comments finally approved by Codesucker!

Until now, I saw doFollow comments as a great way to suck the juice directly off a blog page and spill it throughout the community. Good for the community, bad for the blogger. The number one rule for link sculpting used to be to make all your comments nofollow, no matter what. Now, comments either dofollow or they don’t get get counted at all in the sum of outbound links. So, it's as if we will be losing the juice anyway, but without benefiting the community of commenters!

The only thing you have to watch out for with dofollow is administration. Always approve comments before showing them on a dofollow blog. Google will hit you with penalties for spam links left by malicious commenters if they are dofollow.

Keep in mind that the comments of a blog are the lowest ordered links of the page. They don't really give out too much juice anyway... but every little bit helps, right? Eh.

Happy Sculpting.

Bing SEO Part 2: Some answers. What is DEO?

2009-06-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

It's been a few days playing with Bing and keeping my ears open. I'm loving a few things, especially the expandable content boxes, which ultimately lowers our traffic as webmasters. I hold no grudge for I'm an internet surfer first, webmaster second.

The only conclusive result offered is that Bing is substantially harsher about domain age. From a Bing vs Google SEO test on seowizz.net, Tim Grice suggests the title tag may have a slightly stronger influence on Bing than it does on Google - but domain age is a definite.

Tim also suggest another difference in that Google seems to award less then Bing for backlinks. Bing seems to favor backlinks rather than a well optimized page based on results from the second Bing vs Google SEO test of the series. The test shows a well optimized page that holds the #1 Position for Google is far lower ranked in Bing - because it doesn't have as many quality backlinks as it's competitors. For the test keywords, the Pagerank 2 site is ranked higher on Bing than a well optimized PageRank 5 competitor. These are some interesting results considering the differences of both search engines.

How do I optimize specifically for Bing?
You don't. The reasons for the differences between Bing and Google SEO come from situations you can't control. Domain age and backlinks are out of our hands, there is no difference in on-site SEO for Google and Bing.

Bings pretty much using the same Microsoft results we've seen with msn and live but with a cute Googly interface and a couple cool features. My belief is that it will get much more cash orientated in the future. I'll keep my eyes open, but I'm pretty sure DEO is going to be the same as SEO

What is DEO?
Decision Engine Optimization - Well it's a 'Decision' engine isn't it? Grow up, Microsoft.

Have you seen the Bing TV ads? They are ridiculous, they make it seem like they are curing cancer. It's Google with some pepper, not everyone likes pepper - calm down, Bing.

Guest Posts + Bing and Wave!

2009-06-01T13:47:00.000-07:00

Valued Readers - Please bear with me the next couple of days I will be stupid busy working out some issues with my design business. I will be unable to write or answer long emails - if you desperately need my attention please send me a DM on twitter I will be back to my overactive social self shortly and I've got some great posts on the backburner.

Did a guest post SEO and Social Media on Kikolani.com - this revisits the concepts in my earlier post social media linkbacks and nofollow.. also writing a couple more guest posts this week which I will feature as they get published.

Bing is live! So far I'm impressed and there ARE differences in the rankings of Bing and Google, the reasons for which will be discussed and answered within the SEO community. I don't suggest making efforts to optimize for Bing until we realize exactly why some sites rank higher than their competitors on Bing but not Google, I have some theories. Why are they eerily similar to MSN SERPs? I'll back back after more research.

You heard about Google Wave, right? It's revolutionary - two people can type on the same wave and both can see each others text before hitting 'send'. Waves can also be embedded into HTML, this is good for blog comments because follow-ups can be seen and answered without the commenter having to actually load the blog page.

Check out Bing and get excited about Wave!

Bing SEO! Do I have to optimize for Bing now?

2009-05-28T22:24:00.000-07:00

(EDIT: This series is updated here: Part 2: some answers, Google vs Bing SEO which was written after Bings launch)

Relax, it's not even out yet and don't touch your code in public. I'm full of questions that will soon be discussed and answered within the SEO community, I do predict a shakeup of sorts however.

Bing will be much more strict than Google, hardly operating based on linkbacks and on-site SEO at all, but rather research and only ranking authoritive sites, or passing linkjuice only from authoritive sites and their pages. This is something the Google Monster will not do and in a sense is why I believe Bing is set for failure. If my batsenses are working right, bloggers particularly are not going to do well on Bing results.

These are some Bing concerns and questions when thinking about how the community will be effected by Bing in terms of SEO, especially bloggers.

Bing can sort by location

So am I going to see more search traffic (from Bing! OMG yay!) if I type 'new york' into some of my blog posts because that's where I am and where my internet footprints come from?

Bing can sort in favor of jobs

So will having the JobThread advertisement widget provoke more Bing visits? Or is this just open to Monster.com Careerbuilder.com Hotjobs and a couple other ones?

Product reviews, health keywords, travel decisions Oh my!

Is Bing going to send more (search?) traffic to my blog if I sell something in the sidebar with great product reviews? Or is this strictly voted on by users.. kinda like Digg??

Does Bing respond to nofollow? What about PageRank, what's my BingRank?

LoL, relax. I'm going to assume they implement nofollow and even stricter ranking rules then the Google Monster.

Are you excited?

I'm thrilled. Ask.com actually tried this and failed back in 2007 - here's a blog post from back then about it on SearchEngineLand.com* Turns out that it has almost the same features as Bing and what's eerie is they put out a similiar promotional video, like the one you can see now on Bing.com - there was also some babble about it competing with Google at the time.. deja vu?

Bing was originally named Kumo apparently, it was internally tested among Microsoft employees recently according to SearchEngineLand, you can read the memo sent to the employees via the link.

I pulled this little tidbit of hard earned and spent Microsoft research dollars out of the article for you, my readers attention:

"In spite of the progress made by search engines, 40% of queries go unanswered; half of queries are about searchers returning to previous tasks; and 46% of search sessions are longer than 20 minutes." -SearchEngineLand

Interesting. So let's see if Microsoft can do anything about that. I'll be watching, so will the black hats - I don't think Microsoft knows what it just got itself into.

Biff and the Perfect Backlink

2009-05-27T13:23:00.000-07:00

CodeSucker 3:14 " Acknowledge the Google Monster and offer Him glorious backlinks when He sends His minion search spiders to inspect and index our humble pages. Oh Lord, let my backlinks be relevant and my content be fresh! "

The story of Biff

Biff writes some unique, great content!

Biff promotes the page with this content in hopes that someone reads it and references the content somehow on a webpage. The way we say 'Hey, thanks for the content!' on the internet nowadays is a backlink - At least that's what Google thinks.

It happens.

Great, there is a willing webmaster looking to reference Biff's content on one or maybe more of their own pages! But Biff forgot to optimize his content properly with named anchor tags - so this webmaster is forced to reference Biffs entire page instead of the specific content via an achor. What's worse is that the page referencing Biffs content has none of the keywords that Biff wrote in his content, in fact it's totally unrelated.

What just happend here?

Well, Biff got some backlinks and will be awarded PageRank, but the webmaster could've passed alot more linkjuice and relevancy to Biffs page if the content was referenced directly, instead of just being a small part of the entire page. Also, the backlink doesn't come from a page with any of Biffs keywords. Biff is going to see an increase in PageRank from the Google Monster, but he shalt not be rewarded for 'relevancy' the real Holy Grail of SEO. It's a combination of relevancy and PageRank that dictates the order in which pages come up in the search results.

Biff properly optimized his content with named anchors and promoted it through more niche specific networks.

Another webmaster referenced Biffs content, on a page with even higher pagerank than the first! The only problem is, they referenced the article by writing 'I read this article here' and there was no relevant surrounding text with any of the same keywords in Biffs article - the minion search spiders couldn't really understand what was going on and thus passed little relevancy to Biffs article in the eyes of Lord Google who still awarded plenty of PageRank to Biff for the backlink. It looks like Biff just can't get a break today in terms of relevancy.

Finally - Biff gets a properly anchored linkback from a webmaster with relevant surrounding and achor text! The backlink was also from a page on the same subject that Biffs content was about, they had more than 3 common keywords! The backlink was also the first link referenced in the article so it had great link order!

Then the Google Monster came to Biff and awarded his page with some relevancy for his keywords. Amen.

Blogger Doesn't Validate

2009-05-25T12:02:00.000-07:00

It doesn't even come close.. not out of the box, at least. First of all, everything about the navbar is invalid and there is no way to remove it while remaining within the terms of the Blogger.com TOS agreement other than switching to paid hosting.

There are very few Blogger.com sites that do validate, they are usually very minimalistic layouts. However, Wordpress.com pages seem to validate like cake right out of the box.

I casually checked out my homepage for this blog at validator.w3.org, I wasn't asking for any trouble but all of a sudden things got ugly:

676 Errors, 145 warning(s)

It's not important to have 0 errors, but 600+ is pushing it. I'll also point out that many successfull sites like Ebay.com and Amazon.com don't come close to validating either. It's not a kiss of death to have tons of validation errors, but search engines respond much friendlier and quicker to pages that don't.

My next couple of points reference Blogger or Wordpress? Which is more SEO compatible from seowizz.net

Tim from seowizz.net points out that Blogger jacks control of your h1 tags on every page, so while everyone else is getting help ranking for their keywords in h1 tags, Blogspot bloggers are forced to start with h2 headings to help rank the keywords in their posts. The h1 heading on Blogger blogs pages all belong to the blogs title and there is no way around it. Tim shows us why this is a problem -

"The H1 tag is the main description of your on page content after your title tag, therefore it is important to make it diverse throughout your pages." From seowizz.net

Also, in the same post Tim points out that Blogger didn't get the memo about 'code to content' ratio and how storing CSS on the page dramatically increases the amount of code the spiders have to sift through to get to the content.

"This becomes an issue on blogger as all your CSS elements are on your pages, this seriously increases your code to content ratio " From seowizz.net

There seems to be alot of SEO issues with Blogger, I truely believe new search concious bloggers looking for a blogging platform should choose Wordpress. Alot of people seem to think Google gives a little ranking boost to Blogger blogs since Blogger is owned by Google - this is dangerous nonsense and no SEO has provided any evidence to validate such a theory.

Social Media Linkbacks, Rankings, Nofollow and a Reality Check

2009-05-23T15:17:00.001-07:00

Promoting via Social Media has many benefits, one of the pluses thats been getting attention recently are the backlinks these social media sites generate and how they effect a pages rankings.

Lets start by first understanding that these backlinks are on dynamic pages, they aren't permanent by any means and will most likely be assigned a nofollow attribute value. This doesn't mean the links aren't valuable, however.

Some social media sites create more backlinks than others - Particularly Digg and StumbleUpon seem to generate the fewest backlinks of all online communities in my experience.

I want to particularly point out Mixx, I have been using many different social media platforms to promote this very blog and have seen more backlinks from Mixx than anywhere else. When you submit to these sites it doesn't just backlink it once, it creates a backlink every time someone favorites it, votes it, shares or even comments. Every Mixx group that you submit it to makes multiple backlinks as well. For instance, the recently posted nofollow post linked above immediately saw 226 backlinks from Mixx alone a week after I submitted it.

Lets also call out FriendFeed to share some of the glory here. FriendFeed, if you have been living under a rock, is one of the easiest ways to juice your social media presence. It automatically scans your feeds from various social media sites and shares your actions with subscribers while creating an ideal satellite presence for any blog.. In other words - I created an account a month ago and never logged in, sure enough every time I Dugg, Stumbled, Mixxed and blogged, FriendFeed knew about it and created backlinks to the pages I promoted.

I got into FriendFeed because I noticed the backlinks in site explorer from my friends sharing and commenting on my blog. Don't forget the most important part - it gets shared with their subscribers.

But wait a minute - CodeSucker, some of these links you are praising are nofollow and dynamic, FriendFeed backlinks are lost quickly in the vast archives of shares and comments on any 'friends' feed. What's the deal?

Awesome question, like I stated above: These links aren't permanent and while they will help with your optimization on search engines, they all respond differently to the nofollow attribute. Google, for instance, still peeks at the nofollow links destination and is believed to consider it with the surrounding text for relevancy, but not pagerank. Ask.com ignores nofollow and Yahoo will still index the nofollow link target, but not pass trust.

Also, these links are still links on the internet, nofollow or not. Let's have a quick reality check and realize that a link is a link. The internet is built on links, it's how we've transitioned between pages since it's inception. Free inward links are great, especially if they are automatic like these on FriendFeed. Remember the whole point is to get people to notice your site - most link building webmasters and bloggers do keep an eye on their backlinks and will notice your satellite presence if you give them Diggs, Stumbles, Votes, etc. regardless if the link is nofollow.

This is true that traditional social media backlinks don't last very long, in fact if you follow your dynamic links with site explorer, you will notice they diminish over time as the linking page loses significance. Keep in mind that search engines aren't rewarding for the number of backlinks as much as they are rewarding for link velocity. The key here is to not let down your guard and stop working on your site, keep yielding fresh new backlinks often by creating new content and promoting.

What in the web is going on? Google battles Black Hats

2009-05-20T17:18:00.000-07:00

Image Credit: TechArena

Googles recent changes have the internet in a huff. Right now a war is going on around us between Googles webspam department and Black Hat SEOs. Why now? It's sort of like a perfect storm situation:

Google made recent changes to the way they rank websites, not so much dealing with pagerank, but more with search rank. If you haven't been reading this blog please see the post on the April Black Hat SEO attack on Ford\Nissan. The problem here is that the black hats have caught up with Googles algorithm and understand it too well. They manipulated the results for many popular Ford\Nissan terms, this caused the public to trust these sites and ultimately thousands of computers were infected with adware\malware. One of the infected sites had over 1 million linkbacks.

So what did Google switch? This is obviously very tabu, we're never going to get a straight answer out of Matt Cutts, he's more of a politican than a webspam department head in my opinion. I believe and have seen evidence to support that sites less than a year old (no, not pages.. I mean the second level domain, the whole site) are being penalized. This is certainly a way to control spam, giving a site a full year to live on the internet and not raise any red flags is a clue that it's trustworthy, but it's certainly not a given.

Another factor playing a large role in the war is the collapse of Geocities. Most of these pages had substantial rank, they were very old and well linked - Google just stopped indexing them recently, this creates a large hole in the internet and rankings are shifting like crazy. We won't be able to see the PageRank changes for a few more weeks but anyone paying attention to their search rank on their favorite keywords should be pleasantly suprised by an increase in rankings.

There are alot of factors at play right now, some of them are good for new sites and some bad, but the truth is that Google unrolled a plether of new options (One of the coolest being Slice and Dice which you can read about on onecoolsite) for their search (most that have existed for some time now) they are trying to release these publicly in coordination with their algorithm changes in order to put webmasters minds at ease, when people hear of 'Google changes' maybe they will chalk it up to the interface? Nice try Google, but you're not getting that bull past this bulldog.

But what is Google supposed to do?? Can you think of a better solution? I have been trying for a while, as a web developer and blogger I would benefit from coming up with a decent way to control spam on a site as scalable as Google.com, I've racked my brain and seriously can't think of anything better than penalizing new sites and ranking based on backlinks. Sometimes we have to eat a mud sandwich and this modern era of search is one of those times.

In all seriousness, now is a great time to create new content and market for backlinks, Google is trying to make up this rank that was lost through the Geocities collapse. Keep in mind that the PageRank formula matches a page against all other pages on the internet - now there are less pages. Also keep in mind that PageRank influences SearchRank, but SearchRank can't influence PageRank.

Have you seen Reddit today??

2009-05-16T00:29:00.000-07:00

The better question is have you seen Reddit with IE today? It's down because they are switching servers or something. Here's a screenshot of what Reddit looks like today if you are looking at it via IE:

I don't use IE, I vote democrat and love puppies; this picture was sent in by a reader - if you can't see the message it says 'We see that you are using Internet Explorer. This would be a great time to upgrade to a safer and more standards-compliant browser, such as' and then they give options starting with Firefox and the not-so-ready Chrome browser from Google.

I think it's hilarious they also have a live streaming video of their goldfish on the bottom of the site. Not a big fan of Reddit but they scored some points with me here, for the fish and the ultra-public IE dis.

Why does Codesucker care? Because IE doesn't really work according to standards, Microsoft likes to set their own. My particular beef with IE is that it adds a margin to all blank templates, that's why tables always look a little more seperated in IE than Firefox. The way to get around this is to add the CSS code 'margin:0px;' to your outermost div wrapper.

From a browsing standpoint: There are also many other inconsistancies. I am not an expert on security, but from what I hear and have come to see myself from browsing is IE makes it alot easier for adware and spyware to get a hold on your computer.

On the other hand, the author of this browser wars article comparing the three big guys, IE safari and firefox brings up a great point: "The simple fact that the Firefox source code is "out there" means that hackers and crackers have already got the chance to sniff out vulnerabilities"

The bottom line is that as developers we will have to build and account for every horrid browser that becomes somewhat mainstream. We will never have to stop worrying about how a site looks in IE.. or even IE6!!

More than you need to know about nofollow

2009-05-09T21:55:00.000-07:00

What is a nofollow link?

It's just a way to tell search engines that you don't vouch for the link target and the link itself should not influence the way search engines rank the link target in their index.

Q: How do I make a link nofollow?
A: Add rel="nofollow" to the attribute list of the link

          Dofollow: <a href="http://go.com"> Go!</a>
          Nofollow: <a href="http://go.com" rel="nofollow"> Go!</a>

Q: How do I make a whole page nofollow?
A: Add this HTML to the <HEAD> element.

          <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOFOLLOW">

What kind of links should be nofollow?

Sounds like it's bad stuff if you don't want search engines to know about it!

Not the case. Dynamic(changing) elements of a page that are written by users other than the webmaster, these links should be nofollow - like blog comments.. or anything that can possibly be spammed. Keep in mind that if your blog comments aren't nofollow and they link to naughty pages or 'bad neighborhoods' Google is going to hit YOU with the penalty.

Not so recently, the Google Monster has tried to 'repurpose' the use of nofollow to also account for paid links as they should not effect search engines rankings as well.

Nofollow fact:
In 2005, Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen came up with the nofollow HTML attribute value!

All Search engines respond differently to nofollow

Google and Yahoo do not pass trust/pagerank to link targets of nofollow links.Google does not index the link target of nofollow links, however, Yahoo does.

Nofollow fact:
Ask.com completely ignores the nofollow attribute value!

SEOs argue that when spiders encounter nofollow links the search engine still awards the link target 'relevancy' for the anchor keywords and surrounding text which is important for search ranking - in fact, more important than PageRank. I think the recent SEO attack on Ford shows that Google actually does pass some kind of juice through nofollow links. A bunch of spammers simply pasted links and relevant surrounding text all over dead forums on the net using spam software.. most of these forums were low on PageRank and used nofollow - still the malware sites dominated the listings.

The jury is still out on this one, I can't say for certain what the Google Monster is doing concerning relevancy with nofollow links.

Carving Inner-PageRank via link ordering and nofollow

2009-05-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

Today I hope you brought your number 2 pencils and grey hats as we will be treading a thin line between White and Black Hat SEO.

The in the recent post True Confessions of a Link Hoarder, we discussed how limiting the number of outlinks on a page can dramatically increase the value of each link.

Q: But these are outlinks, how can they help my site?
A: You have many outlinks that go to pages within your own site! What about your header? Contact, About, Recent posts etc.. You want the links to these pages to have more value, so they pass more value back.. hence the title 'Carving' PageRank.

Any link that goes to another page on the internet passes that page some value. Running with the example of a blog - all of the archived posts, label pages, popular search result pages have some value, in this article we learn how to harness that value to promote the PageRank of your favorite pages.

Carving PageRank with Link Ordering

Link Order (n) - Literally the position of the link on a webpage, links with a higher order pass more value.

The highest ordered link on this page is the link on top which says 'Web Development'. Then the CodeSuckers Best posts have the next three highest orders. More on Link Ordering.

That means if trying to promote a particular post, make sure links to those posts appear as the highest ordered links on many pages of the site. This is easy for a site with static elements such as headers and sidebars, like this one.

Due to high positioning of the popular posts section on most blogs - high ordered links on every page pass a significant amount of that pages value to these posts. This is a smart way to use link orders to carve your sites inner PageRank.

Carving PageRank with rel='nofollow'

June 2, 2009 EDIT: Bleh, we just got bad news. Matt Cutts is leading a war against link scuplters - claims carving via nofollow is no longer benefical. I suggest not implementing the below technique - consider it obsolete.

Another way to go about things is to make most of your links nofollow. These links pass no value to the destination page, so the couple of links on every page that aren't labeled nofollow will pass a large amount of value.

If trying to promote the homepage of a site, a usual tactic is making all the links on that site rel='nofollow' if they don't lead to the homepage. This is considered Grey Hat SEO and is sure to raise red flags if it's done all at once. Nofollow was introduced to reduce comment spam and offer a solution for paid links that doesn't violate the ranking system.

CodeSuckers Last Word - This doesn't mean run off and make everything nofollow and only link to one page. Just keep in mind what link orders are, when to use and when not to use nofollow and make sure that you're not passing all of your sites pagerank to the mailing list page because it's the highest ordered link everywhere on your site. Nofollow is not considered Black Hat SEO, but its only supposed to be used for paid links or comments.

Colors, Web Design and Creativity

2009-05-02T15:22:00.000-07:00

A wise man once said, "You can't teach creativty, just inspire the uninspired." Well, consider me the 'uninspired' as I am no good with colors, art or being creative in anyway.. that's actually a big reason on why this blog is tagged Web Development, instead of Web Design. However, there are a few simple issues concerning aesethics and colors that developers need to consider.

Here are some CRAs (CodeSucker Recommended Articles) to help you out with choosing the correct color and design schemes for your pages:

Which colors do you use and why? by Time Thief
Colors on different monitors, websafe colors by Roentarre
Choosing a color scheme using the crayon method by Roentarre

My advice on design is to keep it simple, I mean visually and functionally - don't add unimportant features or crowd your pages with feeds and other nonsense. Load time is important, but visitor satisfaction is key - if they feel cluttered or lost in your site they won't be coming back.

True Confessions of a Link Hoarder

2009-04-30T20:13:00.000-07:00

Smashing Magazine has a nasty equation for PageRank on their site. I've taken the meat out of it, lets clean it up and try to demystify -

PageRank Equation
PR(A) = (1-d) + d((PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)))

The modifier 'd' is a dampening factor, usually set to 0.85 (PageRank is actually on a floating point scale from 0.0 to 1.0 we just see it multiplied by 10 and rounded down to an integer)
LinkJuice Equation
LinkJuice(A) = (PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))
This is the sum of values for all the links pointing to page A.

Lets define some of these values -

PR(X) - PageRank of a particular page X
LinkJuice(X) - Total value of all inlinks on page X
C(X) - The number of outlinks on a particular page X
t1 - the first inlink
tn - the last inlink

Now let's see that nasty summation again, and pretend we have a webpage with 5 inlinks, all from PageRank 4 pages, with varying outlink counts.

The inlink A is from a page with Pagerank 4 and 231 outlinks.
The inlink B is from a page with Pagerank 4 and 636 outlinks.
The inlink C is from a page with Pagerank 4 and 3 outlinks.
The inlink D is from a page with Pagerank 4 and 19 outlinks.
The inlink E is from a page with Pagerank 4 and 43 outlinks.

PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))
(A) + (B) + (C) + (D) + (E)
(4)/(231) + (4)/(636) + (4)/(3) + (4)/(19) + (4)/(43)
(0.0173) + (0.006) + (1.333) + (0.210) + (0.093)

So, this page would calculate PageRank from a total inlink value of 1.626 theoretically.. (We've left out crucial parts of the equation for simplicity)

The importance of all this: Notice how much more inlink C is than all the others, it adds a value of 1.333 to the equation, making up most of PageRank for our theoretical page. That's because it comes from a page that has only 3 outlinks.. Knowing this, some webmasters became Link Hoarders.

Link Hoarder (n) - Any SEO conscious webmaster who is 'cheap' with their outlinks from considering PageRank algorithms.

Question: Hey smart guy, why not just use nofollow on all your outlinks?

Answer: Because that's not what nofollow was intended for, large amounts of nofollow links on static pages shoot red flags at Google especially if you change them all at once. By the way - this exact tactic is considered 'Grey Hat SEO' since it's not exactly unethical but it's not the intent of the nofollow tag, which was introduced to control comment spam.

Codesuckers Last Word: Control your outlinks, keep an eye on them and don't obsessively link to useless stuff especially on any static elements of your site, like sidebars. Link to your fellow bloggers and forums you support but not to every directory that tells you to. Instead of having a blogroll displaying links irrelevant to your keywords on every one of your pages, start deep linking to your fellow bloggers relevant posts instead.. Deep links are worth more anyway, Google responds better to content links rather than site referrals.

Black Hat SEO Attack on Ford\Nissan April 09

2009-04-25T14:33:00.000-07:00

Uh oh, this whole ranking thing is becoming a problem. A group of Black Hat SEOs have been manipulating the Google search results for over a hundred Ford and Nissan search terms, that list is below. When Google users search these terms, webpages infected with adware/malware show up as the top results.

Let me stress, this isn't hacking. It's not a group of code-crackers manipulating the database or even using primitive sql injections. This is a group of unethical SEOs, what they are doing is completely legal, just very unethical - they are manipulating the search results based on what they know about Googles algorithm. One of the 'Optimized' websites had over one million linkbacks. If anyone has been living under a rock - the biggest factor in establishing PageRank, which is a factor in search result rankings, is linkbacks.

As for infecting computers with adware, that's another story, the owners of the websites will probably have to answer for that, if caught..

Here's a partial list of the compromised terms:

Diagram Of A 1998 Nissan Pathfinder Blower Motor
1989 Nissan Pickup Voltage Regulator
2006 Nissan Skyline Gtr Vs 2005 Mustang Gt Cobra Youtube
Where Is The Horn Relay On A 2002 Nissan Sentra
1992 Rear Bumper Nissan Pickup Truck
17 Gold Rims Wheels Nissan Honda Ford Toyota Hyundai
Ford Dealership Car Dealership Beside Iee Nissan Wilson N.c.
We Love rocky ford kansas!
Mustang Gt Or Nissan 350z
Dash Cover Nissan Pickup
1992 Rear Bumper Nissan Pickup Truck
Bumper For 1993 Nissan Pickup
Relay Box On 1991 Nissan Pickup Truck
1997 Nissan Maxima Trunk Emblem
1993 Nissan Truck Door Panels
2007 Nissan Versa Gauges Glow
Nissan Sentra 2004 Horn Location
1994 Nissan Extended Cab Truck Seat
Pic Of 1983 Nissan Truck
1989 Nissan Pickup Truck Engine Check Light Troubleshooting
Fuel Tank Capacity On 1992 Sentra On 1992 Nissan Sentra
How To Install A 1991 Nissan Pathfinder Windshield
Auto Wheel Bearing Replace 1997 Nissan Sentra
Nissan Micra 1.3 Metallic Green
Dimensions And 1998 Nissan Pathfinder
2005 Nissan Frontier Modesto
87 Nissan Pathfinder Nuetral Starter Safety Switch
1990 Nissan Pickup 2400 Motor Recalls
Used Nissan Frontier 2006
Frontier Titan 2006
Ford Ranger
Parkway Ford
Ford Uk
Ford Finance
Mustang Ford
Evergreen Ford
Kayser Ford
Ford Anchorage
Walker Ford
2009 Ford
Rochester Ford
6 Ford Speed Transmission
Ford Scamatic
Sheehy Ford
Ford Commercial
Parr Ford
Ford F8tz3504abrm
1993 Ford Taurus
1993 Ford Tauru
Titan Ford
Luther Ford Fargo
Ford Freestar Problems
Ford Crate Engine
Ford Aftermarket Distributor
Ford Ranger 2008
Ford Falcon Sale
1941 Ford Truck
F150 Ford 2001
Ford Window Guards
1960 Ford Sunliner
Ford Ironman Wisconsin
Ford Window Guards
1960 Ford Sunliner
1960 Ford Sunline
Ford Ironman Wisconsin

This is a partial list of terms provided by pandasecurity.com, you can read their full list of terms and also some details about the type of spyware/malware associated with this attack on their post here: Targeted Blackhat SEO Attack against Ford Motor Co.

This is obviously going to make Google change their algorithm. Read about that on their take of the attack here: Black hat SEO may force Google to change algorithm on Brafton.com. Google changes their algorithms for pagerank and search result ranking alot, but I have a feeling these changes will still leave open vulnerabilities in their ranking systems.

Fords offical statement regarding recent black hat attacks

"Ford Motor Company was made aware of a black hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) attack using the Ford Motor Company name as bait to distribute malware on the Internet. Ford is collaborating with Google and other search engine companies to mitigate the impact."

The full statement can be read on Ford.com under Ford warns against malware attack

Google Me. New service from Google. Fail.

2009-04-21T18:57:00.000-07:00

Today Google released a new product - Google Me. It's aim is to give users control over their online identities. Too bad it's not what users asked for, I'll explain.

Some folks Google themselves only to find negative information, they would like to remove this information and since it's their names they feel they should be allowed to. Google responds with their 'Google Me' service -> Now, anyone can make an online profile. If someone enters their name into Google, their profile will pop up.. or should I say down.. the profile displays at the bottom of the search results, under all the search results users were hoping to get rid of.

Instead of allowing users to control the search results with their names as queries - Google is trying to promote their own social networkish 'Google Profiles' system.

Thanks Google, for a minute there we forgot who you were.

Separating Content from Design

2009-04-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

Have everything all bunched up in one .html file? Don't.

Q. Why shouldn't I use the 'style' attribute in my divs?

A. First of all, you are making it incredibly difficult to modify the document. Not only will you have to search through code to find the correct div to modify, but you will have to change more code to make site-wide changes.

Second, search spiders aren't going to take forever and parse through your code. Want to please the Google Monster? Make sure your code validates and search spiders can find what they are looking for without jumping through hoops.

Q. Why shouldn't I put my Javascript declarations in my HTML code?

A. First of all, you are making it incredibly difficult to modify the document. Sound familiar? Same reasons as above. Also, you may want the same javascript functions to work throughout your site, are you really going to rewrite them in each .html file? Edit them in 15 places each time you modify something?

Since we are talking about javascript - New wordpress.com bloggers are always annoyed to find that javascript is tripped by the programming there for security reasons. They don't understand how javascript functions. Consequently, they don't get the fact that wordpress.com is a wpMU (multi-user) blogging platform and what that means. Check out TimeThief's post on Why javascript is a security risk on her blogging tips site onecoolsite.wordpress.com

Q. Where can I find more about separating Content from design for SEO purposes?

A. I'd like you to read an article about code to content ratio from seowizz.net, the author, Tim Grice is a well learned SEO consultant from the UK Should you worry about your code to content ratio?

Q. What about separating my php functions into some kind of function-only file?

A. Do it for the sake of object orientation, but it will have no effect on how spiders see your site as the HTML that is post-parsed doesn't show your php code.

How to lose visitors and lower your pagerank

2009-04-07T16:27:00.000-07:00

People are always complaining to me "I have too much traffic and general interest in my website. Worst of all - I am making way too much from ad revenue. How can I get people to stop visiting my website?" This is tricky, but follow these 10 steps and you are sure to drive your website into the ground. This list is in no particular order.

1. Have all your content displayed in iFrames, this is perfect for dropping pagerank as other websites can't link directly to your content.

2. If you use images, make sure not to define their alt and title tags so search engines have no idea what they are and how to index them.

3. Make sure your website is absolutely oozing with useless widgets. This will make it take so long to load your site that users will hopefully just close out the window in anger.

4. If people do make it to your website, convince them they have made a bad decision by frequently using poor grammar and misspelled words.

5. Make sure you have tons of useless outbound links. This will make it so each of your links carries less and less pagerank flow(linkjuice!) so webmasters avoid linking to your site in hopes of a linkback. News feeds are excellent for this.

6. Link to websites that have nothing to do with your website. This at least lets Google know you're hoping for a lower pagerank.

7. Have a complicated code structure and make sure it doesn't validate.

8. Set up your website in a ridiculous manner and don't submit a sitemap. This will work wonders. For instance, create a new folder for every page and create folders for the content in the page folders (You're using iFrames, right?). You can use your imagination here, just make sure the search engines have no way of finding your content.

9. Have an audio clip play as soon as the page loads. This will also help destroy your load time but best of all it will annoy your visitors and encourage them not to come back.

10. Make sure not to update your links.. ever. Hopefully your visitors will end up with a 404 error after clicking somewhere. This will also work wonders for lowering pagerank.

Should I use iFrames for content?

2009-04-05T20:50:00.000-07:00

Blasphemy! This is a maintenance nightmare, not to mention an SEO natural disaster. C'mon hasn't anybody been listening - I don't want to make a new page everytime I need to add some content.

PHP Maintenance: You might think you're cute by putting everything in iframes, it's easier to scroll and the frames can even be dynamically loaded with their own meta tags. This is like soo last year. Ever heard of object orientation? How about taking 15 minutes and putting a database behind it so content can be entered by the administrators and I don't have to bring up your lack of ingenuity and blindness to search engines. There are standards now, we can't be running around coding like it's the 1500's and fisting cobras. Also - why's everyone using running to a CMS everytime they need a database.

SEO Natural Disaster: This is what the picture is about, you've made Mary cry. You may as well draw your content in Flash and display it as a .swf file because Google sees Flash and iFrames the same way. It doesn't. You can add meta tags to your html or php file source and that's what people do. You may as well throw a rock at the Google Monster as it's not listening to anything in iFrames.

Entrecard, Web Dev Basics, Article Submission vs Duplicate content and Link jargon

2009-04-04T13:23:00.000-07:00

This post will be in question answer format as it's mostly in response to some recent questions I've gotten through email and comments.

Q. You got rid of your Entrecard widget? Should I get rid of mine?

A. I tossed EC because it's silly. The traffic it draws does nothing but increase the bounce rate of my blog, since Entrecard awards 'droppers' for clicking the drop button and leaving the site, they aren't reading the blog at all. If you trust my judgement you will also lose your Entrecard widget.

Furthermore, I fail to see the reasoning behind why these are not paid links.. they certainly are paid and I bet Google will eventually react. Entrecard uses a system of it's own currency (ec) - Users can earn ec by letting others place their advertisement on their site.. I don't care if you call it dollars, ec or bananas it's still compensation and these are paid links.

No-follow my ass, Google doesn't want this kind of ungovernable content/linkage on the first page of their organic results.

Q. Where can I learn basics of Web Dev, I'm uninterested in your ramblings.

A. Check out w3schools.org - this is the place to start if you are learning any web development scripting or mark-up language. It's completely free although recently they have been getting a little scammy with the ads. I highly recommend this site for learning the basics of internet programming, start with HTML and work your way up to javascript and php. Forums are also an amazing resource for specific questions. Don't get a book, save trees.

My biggest tip to new developers is to get real familiar with Google. You would be suprised how many of your programming questions can be answered by a quick google search.

Q. In your black hat seo article you say duplicate content is bad. But you've told me to submit my posts to article submission sites.. Isn't that duplicate content? What gives?

A. Brace yourself. This can be duplicate content, but it's not going to throw flags at Google unless you over-syndicated. Article submission is grand for SEO as it's a proven and effective way of building non-reciprocal links.. however there is software that will submit your article to hundreds of submission sites - this is an example of over-syndication. Submit your articles to reputable, clean sites as to not anger the Google Monster

Make sure when you submit your content to other sites you are including a link to it's orginal source on your website. Don't just link to your site, link to the exact page of the content you are submitting. Use anchors if applicable.

Content that is the same but comes with a link to it's source is not considered duplicate content and will not anger the Google Monster.

Q.What's a Deep Link? No-follow, huh?

A.Linkage, the holy grail of SEO can get confusing when they start throwing jargon at you.

Deep Links - these are links to a page or some other browser readable content which is not the index(default start page) of a site. Deep linking let's the search engines know you are referencing content instead of referring another site.

Reciprocal Links - an exchange of links between two sites, not necessarily planned. The best reciprocal links are deep ones, the blogger blogroll comes default with a homepage link and a deep for each blog followed. Kick Ass.

Non-Reciprocal Links - links that are not answered, if you will. One-way linking is actually the most effective way for pagerank to flow from one to the other.. If you think about it, answered links give each other pagerank (greatly diluting the value of both links) - a one way link is one site giving pagerank to another, that's linkjuice, baby.

No Follow Links - this is a way of webmasters telling search engines not to INDEX the destination of the link. For instance, a webmaster may use no-follow for links to the advertisers on their site, especially if the ads have nothing to do with their site.

What is Black Hat SEO?

2009-03-24T18:11:00.000-07:00

Unethical search engine optimization strategies. Most of the time these unethical practices are used to boost the rankings of a particular site and sometimes used to drop the rankings of a competing site.

The term originates from old cowboy movies where the good guys would wear white hats and the bad guys would wear black. Let's discuss a few black hat strategies and see how they can effect a websites rankings.

Keyword Stuffing - Filling a page with popular keywords so search engines will think the site is relevant to those keywords. Search engines like Google use spiders(robots) to crawl the internet.. A spider can't tell you what is interesting or relevant but can certainly tell you how many times a keyword is referenced.

How can this help rankings?

Spiders will crawl your site and see popular keywords - alot of them! The dumber spiders love to index this kinda stuff and see where your links are going, to the primitive spider this site looks like a jackpot hit. Nowadays this kind of activity sets off a red flag (it will still index, however) and will get inspected later by a human.. this human will mark the site as spam and most likely remove it from the search engine listings for that particular company (eg: Google, Yahoo).

Keyword Hiding - The practice of using the same color for the background and text in an effort to make keywords viewable by spiders and not humans. This tactic is a little more subtle, unlike keyword stuffing the page appears to be legit to a human.

How can this help rankings?

Spiders crawl to the site and index it for keywords that have nothing to do with the content. So next time someone searches those keywords they may get served a site that has nothing to do with the keyword.. bringing undeserved traffic.

Nowadays spiders are smart enough to check the foreground and background colors and determine if there are in fact hidden keywords. However, using a slightly different color is still widely practiced and hardly viewable to humans. This is a more subtle black hat technique since you can do this in moderation with a slightly different color and not set off any red flags.

Content Duplication - Some folks are too lazy to create their own content. That's ok, there is plenty of content on the net up for grabs and some people will help themselves. This is unethical and considered a black hat tactic, now search engines check indexed content to see if it's exactly the same as content on some other page.

How can this help me? It can't. Not anymore.

However, content duplication brought up a new trend in black hat practices. It's possible to actually drop a pages pagerank by taking their content and posting it all over the internet. Black hatters will find dead forums\blogs\networks etc and set up robots to post content from the victim site. The victim sites content can be on thousands of sites in a matter of minutes. Eventually the spiders notice and start flagging all the content as duplicate content. This is a major wrench on search engine management as there is no way to declare whos content was written when in most situations.

Who does this? Where can I get more info?

Fine. Here are a couple of links to black hat forums, I don't condone what they do and highly recommend not using unethical practices to boost search engine rankings.

(April 03) EDIT: I've decided to remove these links as I am getting negative feedback about them. If interested in these forums please Google "Black hat seo forum" and you will find what you're looking for.

Misunderstanding over meaning of Web 2.0

2009-03-13T01:28:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 is a term thats been getting thrown around a lot recently, let's take a minute to relax and clear a few things up.

CSS, Jquery and especially rounded corners have nothing to do with Web 2.0 thats just stuff for organizing and displaying content.

Web 2.0 is Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Blogger etc.. It's when users control the content.

That's a huge movement in itself, the content is less bias and more expressive. I believe in the open exchange of information for the purpose of a better internet - Web 2.0 is a step forward, more and more people have their own websites/blogs or some means of internet presence, even my fiance has a Facebook account.

Here's a quote from the Wiki Article on Web 2.0:

The term "Web 2.0" refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design, that aims to facilitate communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.

Now I don't know what a folksonomy is and don't think I want to, I also don't agree with the words 'and design' before the first comma, but it's Wiki give them credit - they got the main idea right, anyway.

Rock on Web 2.0!

Getting Information about your traffic using PHP

2009-03-10T21:28:00.000-07:00

Today I spent way too long going through reference links on the webernet looking for the SERVER variable for the referring site. Hopefully this will help some folks out:

Keep in mind this is for versions of PHP after and including 4.10

$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; //This will tell you the URL from which your visitor came from
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; //This will tell you which one of your pages the visitor is at

Wondering how to use this information?

Well lets say you want to see where you are getting most of your traffic from -

Create a table called Referrers with one field, URL
Add this php code to the top of every page

---
$sql = "INSERT INTO Referrers (URL) VALUES( " . $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] . ")";
$result = mysql_query($sql, $link);
--

Want to track which pages are getting the most traffic? Thats easy too, just add this code to the bottom of the last bit, and create another table called Hits, with one field URL.

---
$sql = "INSERT INTO Hits (URL) VALUES( " . $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] . ")";
$result = mysql_query($sql, $link);
---

NOTE: As in all my examples, $link is the actual database link from your mysql_connect call.

Thats it, to view your information if you are using PHPAdmin then navigate to your table and click Browse. If you are using pure SQL, you probably don't need me to tell you this but here are the queries to access the above info:

SELECT * FROM Referrers
SELECT * FROM Hits

Happy Coding!

Making a Loading Message in Flash

2009-03-05T20:38:00.000-08:00

First you have to normalize your movie. This means putting it in a form where the main scene has only 1 frame, and usually contains a movie symbol with your movie in it.

Add a keyframe before the only frame of your scene and design what the loading screen should look like.. if you want animation you need to first normalize and place the symbol in that frame.

Now enter this actionscript code anywhere if you are using CS, if you are using MX place this code in the intended loading frame - in fact, I'm not sure if this will work with MX.

//code-snippet

loadedBytes = _root.getBytesLoaded();
totalBytes = _root.getBytesTotal();

if (loadedBytes < totalBytes)
gotoAndPlay("preload_loop");
else
gotoAndPlay("begin_movie");

//code-snippet

The key here is that we can compare how many bytes have loaded(root.getBytesLoaded()) with the total number of bytes (root.getBytesTotal())
if (loaded < total) then we still have some movie left to load!

Cool Web Based Image Editing Tool

2009-03-01T20:47:00.001-08:00

Ah, here's a cool Photoshop-like tool that can be used on the fly.

Pixlr.com's Image Editor

Check it out, it was built in Flash an all around good job. This is usefull if you aren't at your main computer and need to do some work to an image really quick.

It lets you open .jpg .gif and .bmp files from your computer. It has your classic image editting features such as layers and filters - it also lets you save images to your computer as .gif .jpg .bmp and .png! Maybe I'm behind the curve but this is the first time I've seen such a tool on a web based platform.

Alright, let's not get carried away!

This is certainly no replacement for your primary Image editing software as it doesn't let you save in a layer-readable format (ex: Photoshops .psd). Furthermore I've been playing with the tool for a few days now (I needed to make sure it worked well before I blogged this) and it does have a few bugs. I am sure the developers are working it out, I've let them know about the minor bugs I found.

A few people commented to me that they like using this because it runs on the net and not their computer, so it will be less of a burden to their machine. This is not true since its a Flash application - which runs on the client side (Your computer)

I suggest giving it a look, I will be using it as an emergency image editor when I am away from my primary enviroments.

Boonex Dolphin CMS

2009-02-28T12:39:00.000-08:00

Heres a group of guys that can't figure out if they want their software to be free or not. First of all, a word of advice from someone in this field: If you MUST use a CMS please make sure its under a GPU(General Public Use) License! If its GPU then you can edit it as much as you want, take out their footers and linkbacks etc.. You can then proceed to make money off of your modified software without paying any fees to the CMS developers (You really should donate to the developers if you end up using any software solution, this helps promote the free exchange of information between us)

OK my point here is that if you go to the Boonex website they try to convince you the software is free. The only inkling of license fees they give is when you finally set up the CMS on your website, the last bit of info they need is your License #.. I looked twice, sure enough, they were asking for a license number.

Boonex gets a big double thumbs down for not making it clear that the software is in fact not free. They want you to download and install it on your webserver, then pay for a license (unlimited use for only $1000!) and furthermore, the system is half-done as it stands, you need to buy a bunch of MODs for it to do anything meaninful.

What Boonex has done with Dolphin (and Orca, Ray etc..) makes us all look bad as developers, further widens the gap between free exchange of ideas and the reality of the Web Development field.

Boonex, go to hell.

PHP Hypertext Preprocessor?

2009-02-28T00:33:00.001-08:00

This is one reason I can't sleep.

PHP literally stands for Hypertext PreProcessor.
PHP claims to be an acronym yet its not, it doesn't follow any means of naming logic - it should be HPP.

Rather then starting a justified movement to remedy this, I'm going to leave it alone, for your sake and mine.

UPDATE March, 08 2009: Peter S. has cleared this up for us. Check out his comment below

This should help you sleep:
PHP is actually a recursive acronym for
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
just like GNU = GNU's Not UNIX

Still not convinced? Wiki Article on Recursive Acronyms

PHP is actually named in the article.

It seems eariler developers had a running joke with naming conventions(Programming must have been fun before this whole 'standards' fad), here is an excerpt from the above wiki article:

"In computing, an early tradition in the hacker community (especially at MIT) was to choose acronyms and abbreviations that referred humorously to themselves or to other abbreviations."

Thanks Peter, I can sleep now!

Automatic Zipcode mapping

2009-02-27T22:50:00.001-08:00

Ever wonder how some sites ask you for your zip code and then automatically fill in your city and state? Probably not, but if you did, you would think this is a simple database task.. and you would be right.

First we have to search the internet for a CSV file containing all the zipcodes and their city-state counterparts. I will post a link to this eventually, but there are plenty if you do a quick google search.

Now we have this CSV file, this can be imported right into our sql database! First make a table called ZipMap with 3 columns Zip, City and State. Now import it, if you are using phpAdmin remember to select CSV as the import type, SQL is selected by default.

OK, now we have our database. In the first HTML form we will use a simple input to get the zip from the user, when its posted over to the next page we will map it to a city and state using this query and code:

-----

$sql = "SELECT City,State FROM ZipMap where Zip = $_POST['Zip']";
$result = mysql_query($sql,$link);
$row = mysql_fetch_row($result);

echo "City: $row[0]";
echo "State: $row[1]";

-----

$link is your actual database connection from your mysql_connect call

GoDaddy Quick Shopping Cart

2009-02-27T18:42:00.000-08:00

Excuse me, I just threw up a little in my mouth.

This is the worst shopping cart system I have ever seen. Not only is it overpriced for what it does, but it completely hijacks the look of the website. This is not a shopping cart as the name implies, but more of an e-commerce system - and a bad one at that.

The actual system works like this - you register a domain, get an SSL Cert(I will address this in a minute) and a merchant account, you can then get the shopping cart.

The cart like I said hijacks the look and feel of the whole site, this is why its not a shopping cart at all. Furthermore, It insists that you use catagories for your stock.. What if I'm selling only 10 products and they are all in the same catagory? It doesn't matter, the system will insist the customer click on the catagory first, even if there is only one.

This is my first bad review, if you notice I usually only blog about what I like, but today I wanted to help the world a little by letting everyone know the Quick Shopping Cart from GoDaddy is horrid, look for a better solution with MonsterCommerce. Or even better, hire a developer and make a custom site.

The SSL certificate seem scammy to me too, because it seems the transactions don't even take place on your domain.. I can't be sure though I didn't go to SSL school and if you did, I don't really want to hear about it.

Blogger

2009-02-27T00:29:00.001-08:00

Since I'm on a review kick, why not take a gutshot at Google!

Well, truth is that I'm quite happy with the Blogger system, its quick and easy to set up. I use gmail as well, so I'm automatically logged into blogger, this is convenient as I don't have to enter a username and password simply to blog.

I'm a lover of anything that makes it easy for the average American to add content to the internet, in this new Web 2.0 movement we are noticing alot more people who claim they are 'computer illiterate' using facebook, myspace even blogger then ever before. How can you be computer illerate if you have a blog?

The only thing that boils my blood about blogger is that they don't allow you to write your own pages. For instance, I want to have tutorials on this site - I can do that by entering them as regular blog posts and carefully labeling only the tutorial posts as tutorials.. but how is my grandmother supposed to know that?

All in all I give Blogger a big thumbs up!

CuteFTP 8.3 Professional

2009-02-23T00:22:00.001-08:00

When I see good software I blog about it and today I'm thrilled with GlobeSCAPE's new ftp client. Let's look at a couple things that make it different than most.

1. Find/Replace in all open documents feature
If you have to do something like rename a file or dbhost in all of your webdocs(.html,.php etc.) you can easily open all files and use the find/replace feature on all those open documents! I haven't seen this before in an FTP client.

2. It has a minimal Scripting IDE built in. For instance, it knows HTML and even PHP commands and uses unique colors for certain expressions.

That's pretty much it.
What I don't like is that it's not free. You can try it for 30 days (Good enough to complete your current project!) by going to cuteftp.com

It comes in Home, Professional and something else, I suggest getting the professional version as this is the one I'm talking about, I don't know if the Home version has the IDE features.

MonsterCommerce

2009-02-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

In a perfect world, I would only have to work on code i have written, or have yet to write. Instead of all that, I usually am called upon to rework aspects of some other programmers code.

By 'some other programmer' In this case I mean whoever wrote Network Solutions' e-commerce machine 'MonsterCommerce'.

I suggest using MonsterCommerce if you want to do things yourself (Not hire a developer) and you are not looking for a custom looking site. The e-commerce aspect is solid.. takes credit cards quantity discounts etc..

Problem is.. My client wants something that looks kind of custom.. and insists on the MonsterCommerce platform.

How MonsterCommerce is set up:

Everything is in tables. Each column is referred to in the stylesheet by a name like 'centercolumn'. Since each column is not a div, but merely a table cell, we can't do cool CSS things like overflow:auto for scrollbars. Take a look
at the source (Right-Click/'View Source') and note the use of tables. Obviously, MonsterCommerce doesn't actually let us edit ASP code, and thus we cant access/change the way these pages are formed. We can however, change the stylesheet

How to change the MonsterCommerce stylesheet:

First, disable the default stylesheet on whichever migration you have selected. This is done by going into design->fonts or something->disable default stylesheet

Now open file manager somewhere near the top navigation and select the css directory, you should see styles.css, rightclick->edit

Edit the body tags width for instance to make the page appear more together, here you can change the background and even assign borders to your tables(boo!).

Easily add javascript menus and rollovers by adding script declarations to the top of the BODY instead of in the HEAD. The HEAD section of your MonsterCommerce site is written in stone (actually ASP), unable to be editted.

To edit the very top of the BODY section of all pages, you'll have to go back to the MonsterCommerce e-commere management tab, and click design on the top nav. Goto header/footers and edit the HTML code in the header.. keep in mind this is not actually the HEAD section but the very top of the BODY.

Changing the number of columns in the product list

This bugged me at first! My first instinct was to grab and pull at the table widths/heights using CSS, don't try that :P

In the e-commerce control panel..
Click Operations -> Settings -> Products.
Look for "Number of columns in product lists" This is how you change it.

Some templates you can choose (the one I ended up with!) comes out of the box with 1 column, making the page scroll if more then 3 products show up.. so I know this will prove useful.

Google Maps API

2009-02-20T22:06:00.001-08:00

Wow! Kudos to google on this one big time.

A client of mine needed a google map to show up on each one of their members profiles (its a chamber of commerce website) with a marker automatically placed at their address. I jumped all over the Google Maps API on this one.

Primer -

Geocoding is the process of mapping an address to a longitude and latitude.
Google maps are blind to addresses, they must all be geocoded to work. The first
thing google does when you enter an address on their map site is geocode it.
You need to apply for an API key to use their Maps API, its quick and painless.

Project -

The task was really easy I ended up modifing one of the geocoding examples, I'll post that link in a sec but heres how it works - I pull the address from the database evertime a members page is looked at, and using php I write it into a small javascript which first geocodes the address, then maps it using longitude and latitude. I'd love to post the code but that would violate my clients interests, please see this example in Googles API documentation. It's a little different then whats defined. Like I said, I had to modify it.

Summary -

Google rocks. Not only is the code simple to figure out, but the documentation is vast.

Search Engine Optimization

2009-02-12T20:50:00.000-08:00

It's pretty much all about coming up higher in search engines. There are no stone cold secrets about SEO like some companies would like you to think. SEO is pretty much internet public relations. There are two different aspects of SEO

1. On Site SEO -> Writing the sites code based on what search engines like.
2. Off Site SEO -> Getting people to link to you.

Heres a few quick steps for #1 -

1. Make sure all your images have ALT tags, spiders can't see images so give it a description.
2. Make sure your meta tags are properly defined.
3. Give your links meaningful names. Dont name something Click here, spiders like when your links are relevant to your content.
4. Have meaningful original content! Spiders love indexing new content.

and OMG - Have your nav bar in text links instead of images. Your nav bar is the most important part of the site since its consistant on all pages (Well, it should be.) It's also the meat of your links. Think about it, a five page site has 25 links just from the nav bar on all pages, wouldn't we like these links to be read and indexed by the spiders instead of disregarded as images.

Believe it or not, the most important part of SEO has nothing to do with the code of your site. It's really about who's linking to you. Google, for instance uses a system called pagerank. Every page that is indexed has one, and it's the prime factor in how many points Google will give you for a link from that page. In laymans terms, if Amazon.com linked to me on their homepage, Google would make this blog appear higher on search engine rankings.

Google rates your links kinda like this
A = whats your pagerank
B = how many pages are you linking to?

A site you link to would get something like A/B points. So if the site you are linking is your own site (Like in the nav bar!) then you would get these points as well (in a smaller dose)

Yeah, there are some tricks but Google doesn't really like when you try em. For instance you can 'Carve' pagerank by using the rel=nofollow attribute on the links from your page so google will consider you linking to one page instead of ten, which makes a big difference.

Flash

2009-02-12T20:32:00.000-08:00

Flash earns a spot in the blog because of its frequency of use. I particularly don't care for Flash due to its lack of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) capabilities. Search engines don't see flash, in fact my next post will be about SEO lets stick with flash here.

Flash is mostly used to make visually appealing, yet not so functional applications. Let's not be so quick to say you can't do interesting things in Flash, like make games, Interactive ads, even database powered applications.

In Flash everything is a Movie. The cooler Movies have Movies inside of them and so on. Flash lets the developer literally 'paint' the Movies like in photoshop, with layers and such. Everything can be based on frames or ActionScript.

WTF is ActionScript?
It's a java vbish class based scripting language. In other words you can access elements within your Flash movie with fun lines like ' Movie1.xpos++ ' to move it right etc.. with all of that Macromedia capability as well.

You ramble.
No I don't.

So whats so bad about Flash anyway?
It's Invisible to search engines and browsers hate it. It's also taxing on bandwith if your entire site is in flash.

AJAX

2009-02-12T14:18:00.000-08:00

AJAX is the most misunderstood of the programming concepts. Lets straighten a couple things out right now. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. It simply means running client-side script in conjunction with a server-side script. Here's the kicker, your HTTPresponse object doesn't even have to return XML! You can use straight text (ie ResponseText instead of ResponseXML).

Heres how google maps works: First they use javascript to display a window with a map and probably a marker or something and some functions like zoom.

Common questions people ask me about google maps -

Q> Where does the map come from?
A> From the database, they have a map in computer readable form stored on the google super-servers(lol).

Q> Hey, why doesn't this window reload the whole page?
A> Because its using the HTTPresponse object silly, and using javascript it draws the new map with the new co-ords from the database all by refering to the original window!

Q> Why isn't everything in AJAX then?
A> It's costly on speed. Keep in mind there is a server-side script on the other end of all this, its job is to pluck the map pictures from the co-ords that javascript tells it to (based on the users click and drag selection and where the map started) Server-side scripts run slowly in terms of on-computer stuff (Client-side.. like Javascript)

Q> How can you make a chat room in AJAX?
A> Easily. You will have a javascript that runs on a timer, every second it activates a script where it sends an HTTPrequest to a php script. This php script looks at the database of users and sees if anyone has entered new text since the last update, if so, display the new text, if not, then do nothing.

OK The chat room example is a little trickier then I make it sound, maybe this is a good example for a future code-along entry.

Database

2009-02-12T12:34:00.000-08:00

One of the questions I get asked the most is "How can I make a site with users accounts like myspace etc.."

Well, whats really being asked is "How can I store & retrieve information on my website?"

The answer is a database. Databases use schemas to represent how they store data, for instance if I wanted usernames and passwords my schema would be something like this

Table: Users
Field 1: Username
Field 2: Password

And I could insert information into this database in the form of rows. Every row will have a value for Username and Password - Enter SQL

Server Query Language - This is how most databases communicate and a definite neccessity to any web programmer. All you need to know is how to make simple querys to the database like SELECT INSERT and UPDATE.

If I wanted to add a user named CodeSucker I would make the SQL Query

INSERT INTO Users (Username,Password) VALUES ('CodeSucker','SuckThisCode')

This would create a row for the user, in my php script I would say something like this, where $LogUserAttempt is what was typed into the form.

$sql = "SELECT Password FROM Users where Username = '$LogUserAttempt'"

Databases are hot.

Primer

2009-02-11T23:03:00.000-08:00

An HTML document is essentially an XML document with predefined\required fields, such as head, body, title etc. Browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox look for tags they know how to handle (unfortunately, differently) parse them and display the content to a user.. thats exactly whats going on right now actually (more specifically when the page was loaded), as you are reading this blog.

You should already know about this, but if you right-click any page and select 'View Source' you can see the HTML code of the website. HTML is simple and comprised of few commands, the key to being an HTML guru is practice building sites. Start here at w3schools.org HTML is all about how something looks. Once you have mastered HTML, check out CSS at w3schools.org. CSS is a recent improvement to the web development world, we can set styles for our pages.. This isn't neccessary but it cleans up the HTML code on complicated websites, and also allows site-wide changes by editing one file.

If you're gonna hang around and listen to me talk you're also gonna want to get familiar with PHP, this is Linuxs excuse for server-side scripting. We can talk with databases, play with sessions (cookies and actual sessions,) make sense of POST and GET methods on forms(See -> HTML again).

In fact, the entire purpose of most server-side scripts is to do one of two things
1) Do something, and redirect to another page, or
2) Write dynamic HTML

Dynamic HTML is kinda like when a website says "Hi CodeSucker!" It knows your name, so it writes it to the page, each person has a different username so the page has to be dynamic. When someone says 'Dynamic Page' they most likely mean its a script of some sort that picks information from a database and responds with HTML, in this case.. the username.

Introduction

2009-02-11T22:00:00.000-08:00

Hi, I am CodeSucker. Welcome to my blog, I'll be posting various rants and raves about stuff related to the Web Programming field. I'm taking a more educational approach rather than a news orientated blog. I will start with basic HTML, then we will move on to client side scripting and eventually server side scripting (using PHP).