Recent Posts

876

Living Room / Re: Is SEO worth the trouble?

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 27, 2011, 07:58 AM »

I knew there had to be some connection with you and the frameworks, heh. Can always tell. Why not promote your self and link to your site or company?

That is because i'm freelancer on that side and work with many theme frameworks. (Genesis, thesis, hybrid, thematic etc but i do small projects using thematic for clients because it's free and if not me then any other developer can pick up from where i left). I'm planning to promote my work with donation model and not in terms of subscription or upfront payment :-)

what does mahesh2k think? Is it a danger to your job? Semi-framework with ease of use. Such plug&play production thingys exist already but future will bring more.

Artisteer, ithemes theme builder, themeframe and many other tools exist for making themes. But still people pay for designer because they want custom design which these tools can't create effectively (as of now). Like writers job even designers will keep their work ticking even if any bot starts to do work of content writing or designing. *Hint* - many small and big businesses are using developers who can code using X/Y/Z frameworks, don't you think they can use artisteer or themeframe to do that ? They can, but they don't. For now i don't have answer about what stops people from using bots instead of humans ? be it design or written content.But my personal observation is that when you do stuff automated way then you create a pattern to which humans respond with less interest. On the other hand when you involve humans into task, they take interest into it. It's similar to automated backlinks to page or organic link to page. Just my view, not sure i'm right with that.

877

Living Room / Re: Is SEO worth the trouble?

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 27, 2011, 05:01 AM »

  I like theme frameworks because i'm a theme developer and i find working with frameworks fun. I do agree that not all sites are made for the frameworks for example, personal blogs, small static sites and squeeze pages.

But once blog becomes too big to manage or with multiple authors, too many plugins, ads and other tracking fuss, it's better to put all those eggs in framework basket. That's the point when framework performs better with modular approach.

Agree there are no standards because that's what keeps themes different else it'll be again like single framework and multiple childs within WP, which we already have and we're just reinventing the wheels by creating forks. So that's the reason, they try to detach from the core and create small tribe around their own framework or shrotcodes etc.

878

Living Room / Re: Is SEO worth the trouble?

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 27, 2011, 04:16 AM »

They can set up own rules as they please.

No. If they do that then they'll branch out of wordpress policies and will get sued. WP foundation keeps eye on who is locking people on framework. Chris pearson attempted that with thesis theme and got sued by wordpress foundation. Framework based shortcodes are allowed and are not annoying and with themes like genesis, hybrid and thematic it's very easy to switch themes with minor modifications in shortcodes.

Kind of the idea with a framework.

Almost every wordpress theme these days can have child-parent relationship, so in turn a theme framework. Nothing wrong with that.  Framework locking and shortcodes documentation is usually restricted to make business, hybrid theme is already into this and i'm sure like me even you'll find it annoying to offer something free then locking people for getting things done.

but is whatever you use supported?, migration tools always work perfectly? Today?, in 1 year?

For thesis and genesis, answer is YES. Themes like thesis and genesis have no issues for migration, even after 1 year. Obviously small sites and blog benefit from plugins instead of theme framework because that way they can change the design going out of routes of frameworks or on their own.

879

Living Room / Re: Is pranking Josh unfair?

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 27, 2011, 03:39 AM »

Also, how long is he going to see that? Grin

 

880

Living Room / Re: Is SEO worth the trouble?

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 27, 2011, 03:11 AM »

Does not really matter if theme is SEO ready or not because it can be dumb to use theme for this. If you later change theme all info is most likely gone, seo content is in themes datatables.

Not true. I guess you're yet to play with themes like thesis and genesis. They use framework feature so using child-parent structure you can keep all the SEO tweaks to framework and do the design changes to child. This way you don't lose any SEO-settings of parent framework. Thesis and genesis also come up with setting of SEO which can be exported and imported to multiple blogs. Do take a look at these themes, it's way above joost's plugin or anyone's plugin on SEO.

881

Living Room / Re: Show us a photo of your mutt or other creatures..

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 25, 2011, 01:20 PM »

My last bird left me for good. So here are new members in the family. 

882

Developer's Corner / Re: GarageGames: $99 Game Engines (with Source!)

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 25, 2011, 11:37 AM »

If you were really interested you could just buy it and then download it in the future when you were somewhere with a better internet connection.

Last one and half year, i'm trying to download two softwares purchased online. so there... 

883

Living Room / Re: Is SEO worth the trouble?

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 25, 2011, 10:57 AM »

What does SEO actually mean, without the corporate jargon?!

Search engine optimization means you're making your content noticeable to search engine by following search queries (keywords optimization), relevant content(to the keyword), high quality(no spun or robot content,spam). SEO is done to site in order to let it go higher in the search engine results.

Is SEO worth the trouble?

Yes and NO.

For YES - If you want to make money online (and don't want to listen to crap of your boss) then do whatever SEO methods out there to make money. It's against ethics and character stuff but things do pay off. To be honest Superboy, i'm against black hat SEO and i'm starving to make money, whereas any newbie kid who learns B-SEO (black hat) after me is making hundreds of dollars. So it's upto you to judge what's right and wrong in SEO.

For No - You're adding a lot of junk and garbage, rehash content on the web if you choose black hat SEO. You're not adding any value to user search queries and their time.

Few things to clarify - Meta-tags are dead and are ignored by almost every modern SE. Links from relevant sites matters a lot in order to take you at higher position in SERPs. Keep quoting(quotes tag) to limited amount.

Okay, keeping the rant aside. My suggestions are - install wordpress, get a good theme like thesis, genesis or headway which are SEO optimized (on-page SEO) with tags and ability to dofollow and nofollow links in themes. If you're on white-hat SEO side then just use a good SEO optimized theme and forget about rest of the SEO stuff, just write natural content with keywords as you go. If you're not in this for money then don't bother about SEO. Just care about traffic, feedback and social media which you can do with on-page SE optimized themes, twitter, Facebook widgets. Your content will be noticed by search engine with social signals or backlinks factor.

884

Site/Forum Features / Re: For what it's worth, DC Homepage is now google PageRank 6

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 25, 2011, 02:53 AM »

There seems to be something wrong about traffic analysis sites because all are showing inability for results after apr-may 2010. But atleast for US traffic estimated graph looks good to me.

http://www.quantcast...om/donationcoder.com

885

Site/Forum Features / Re: For what it's worth, DC Homepage is now google PageRank 6

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 25, 2011, 02:35 AM »

I think it falls below the threshold of the google trends so they stopped it from showing the results. I have only 100 posts on onecore but with monthly views of 10,200 to 10,700 and still not in the threshold of google trends. 

One suggestion : sign-up to google webmaster and add meta tag at header.php of smf. Once they confirm the key from that tag, they'll show you the indexed pages in google, keywords and REAL traffic that is coming from the search engines.

I'll get back to this after checking compete and quantserve results.

886

Site/Forum Features / Re: For what it's worth, DC Homepage is now google PageRank 6

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 25, 2011, 02:25 AM »

Check results of these two queries:

site:donationcoder.com

site:donationcoder.com/forum/

1. 5,880 results

2. 2,680 results

Many pages are not yet re-indexed by the spider. I guess have to wait till they re-index/recrawl those pages. By the way is forum using redirection ? for redirecting from old URL format to new ? if not then many old links from other sites are dead and also lost the linkvalue from google.

887

Site/Forum Features / Re: For what it's worth, DC Homepage is now google PageRank 6

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 25, 2011, 01:55 AM »

By the way, do see why the data to google is not available after april 2010.

http://trends.google...date=2010&sort=0

I guess traffic started falling from search after April. My observation is that forums with human-readable URL's (/forum/topic-name.html etc) are likely to get crawled and sorted easily by google. Take example of Vbulletin and IPB forums compared to SMF/PhpBB.

888

Site/Forum Features / Re: For what it's worth, DC Homepage is now google PageRank 6

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 25, 2011, 01:37 AM »

Google pagerank (fake) changes every 3, 4,6,9 months every time on toolbar or any random site. Last pagerank update few weeks ago was made after 9 months of hibernation. Don't bother with this fake pagerank, google has it's own trustrank (internal and not published) that should be important for search results. Have you checked compete and google trends to see how much search traffic is coming to forums or front page ?

By the way search results in google are not affected by pagerank. I can have pagerank 0 for years and hold no 1 or any position in page 1. SEO is changed a lot last 2-3 years.

889

General Software Discussion / Re: Outlining software recommendations?

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 24, 2011, 11:29 AM »

Software link: http://treesheets.com/

  Thanks for the link, paul. 

890

Developer's Corner / Re: DC needs a fun game project that multiple people can contribute to

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 24, 2011, 09:05 AM »

I like the idea of platformer game, i'll see if there is any good engine that is good for this job. I've one in mind panda3D- free, C++ and python based engine but let's see if there is any other available.

891

Developer's Corner / Re: DC needs a fun game project that multiple people can contribute to

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 23, 2011, 11:04 AM »

If this really takes off

I just wish this takes off... Currently we're stuck at who's going to lead or how to distribute the load, game type etc. But i don't know.... if i get too angry with thinking deep on this then chances are there that i'll throw some crappy mockup game plan that i have in mind.   

I'm not good at visualizing games like 'logic machines' but i do think games like 'prof layton' will be fun if we add some graphic elements (code and the gang).

892

Living Room / Re: Google? Spam? Ads? No... No Conflict of Interest Here...

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 23, 2011, 04:38 AM »

are you stating the obvious by saying it is waste of time?

Yes. From where we're looking at things and the way we get reactions in return from the system. Is it known fact ? How can i say it for sure ? Because there are likely to be some cases where it works. For example, people like micheal gray, seth godin if posted about X/Y/Z site being autoblog crap or why it's on page 1 for such crap, then things can be fixed in minutes. So can't say it's known fact or if google takes action or not, confidently.

Matt cutts and team is quite mysterious at combating spam. Don't be surprised if many good sites like our member blogs, doco forum gets slapped in next google update, google is likely to fail 2-3 algorithm updates before getting any good result. And chances are there that some good sites will suffer in these future updates.

P:S- You just linked to that spam blog in your reply. Make it text instead of hyperlink so that they don't get linkjuice from doco for being scrappy

893

Living Room / Re: Google? Spam? Ads? No... No Conflict of Interest Here...

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 23, 2011, 02:25 AM »

Hmm, well so this page https://www.google.c...port?hl=en&pli=1 which is identical to what the better security companies have will not trigger a reply?

Try it. Find one autoblog like (birdcagesforsale. net) which copies content from other sites and report it. For more accurate deceptive techniques of that blog you can let them know about this page (birdcagesforsale. net/where-can-i-find-a-good-bird-cage - where they just copied comments from other site as content)

Let me know if google takes down this 1st result term site.

894

Living Room / Re: Google? Spam? Ads? No... No Conflict of Interest Here...

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 23, 2011, 01:57 AM »

How long does it take to get a reply?, is it worth anything?

Google webmaster team organizes 'webmaster chat' atleast once every year. That is the only place where it is worth to get answer. Otherwise rest of the answers are either posted by elites in forum or by some people who make their opinion by reading in-between google's guidelines.

895

Living Room / Re: Perils and Pitfalls of Online Community Management

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 23, 2011, 01:48 AM »

Doco is developer+users community. Browse through all the topics with more than 10 replies, you'll find discussions of productivity softwares, buying suggestions, personal growth issues, life and etc. Doco is niche community and programs like coding snack, NANY keeps developers and users in loop of development and creativity. Never noticed any elite-signals here in any threads. Community is about what members can do with it, not what community fails to do for them. Trying to be everything to everyone is surefire way of killing community. It's not easy to grow community, sometimes it naturally grows or turns into dust, be it for any reason.

896

General Software Discussion / Re: Checking for available domain name = giving it away?

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 23, 2011, 01:23 AM »

instantdomainsearch.com - is one bad site that does this regularly. For example, i'm in process to release short story website so i searched 'storystack.com' and in next 2 hours it was registered by someone.    Don't tell me a site name which i was checking for last 6 month got registered in 2 hours ? Even my friend confirmed it when he wanted to register a domain with android name in it.

897

Living Room / Re: Google? Spam? Ads? No... No Conflict of Interest Here...

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 22, 2011, 12:35 PM »

but when arrangement is so automated it stinks.

Exactly. 

By the way do check out tools like XRummer, scrapebox and similar tools that build backlinks for users at cost of 50$ or so. These tools are adding garbage to any random blog or forum. And there are affiliate networks or brands that support those methods (indirectly).

898

Living Room / Re: Google? Spam? Ads? No... No Conflict of Interest Here...

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 22, 2011, 11:38 AM »

Would also help if those companies who encourage affiliate deals started to police their rules for being accepted as member of that club.

I do agree there are some poor affiliate products, networks and marketers which are misguiding the traffic. But hey, that's what business is and it is taken from offline world tactics now to online. Nothing new about it.

affiliate marketing drops in gray area of online/offline marketing. No matter how much rule you impose there will be a way out. Take case of amazon for example, it makes more money as marketers are literally spamming amazon links on personal blogs and sites/forum. If amazon starts to decline affiliates for quality or some random rules of marketing way, then they'll not profit from it. Want example ? target.com is good example of this case. Many non-US affiliates promote products which are purchased by US customers on amazon, if target.com denies non-us affiliates then they risk for less profit. If you add affiliate marketing to equation, things become gray hat, PPC which is also a gray hat technique gets added into it. As per rule you can't use amazon url or direct merchant URL in PPC but many do that and are profiting from it.

What we want today is - any site with quality content, enough social vote (backlinks,tweets) and fair amount of ads or affiliate links on that site(to let that site pay bills). These type of sites have no threat to quality of search rankings. But if you start to automate content with spinner, backlinks with spam and profile creation, slap affiliate only pages and if this type of site ranks higher over the previous one then we have a garbage in google search result. 

899

Living Room / Re: Google? Spam? Ads? No... No Conflict of Interest Here...

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 22, 2011, 10:44 AM »

Simple make sure that only signed in and verified users see the voting system and take well publicised action against abusers of the system.

Again this can be gamed, see the result of DMOZ. Many editors added sites of their friends or their own or by taking money from seo firms.

Google don't rank official content over other content found on the web. For example, google plays fair by letting all rank for the first page. You can beat adobe's tutorial as per current google's algorithm. Google need to give more preference to official site to filter rehashed content.

Why my this post makes sense is because i see the result with networks like about.com or infobarrel or hubpages doing the same.

PayPal have an effective way of verifying users so I can't really understand why Google can't do it properly.

Because of such privacy invasion methods paypal has conflict with many governments. It is also not acceptable in or do business with many countries. If google follows similar approach then google will lose a lot of business instead of getting some good result. For example, some people created ID just to surf on orkut network or to check mail. Why should they verify mobile or landline and then if get hacked drop in trouble ? Gmail ID's are usually get easily hacked by wanna-be hackers on orkut network. So this is very serious issue if anyone verifies their personal detail and gets hacked.

900

Developer's Corner / Re: GarageGames: $99 Game Engines (with Source!)

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 22, 2011, 09:06 AM »

:/ Whenever i get posted at place with low internet connection speed, such offers pop-up.