SEO Prank “How to kill Anthony Shapley”
Posted by David WhitehouseApparently this was nothing new, as people had been searching for “Kean Richmond is gay” before I came up with this idea:
Basically I got a load of people to click through to anthonyshapley.co.uk after visiting this page, so that it got into his Analytics:
Anthony Shapley's Analytics
Anyone else heard of any other good SEO pranks? I guess Google Suggest is probably a popular one…
htaccess redirects with regular expressions
Posted by David WhitehouseThe Problem
Ok so I hit a bit of a snag tonight, I had ended up with the following predicament.
I had a url: http://www.david-whitehouse.org/blog/ which I wanted to redirect to http://www.david-whitehouse.org/ but when I used the following code:
redirect 301 /blog/ http://www.david-whitehouse.org/
I ended up redirecting pages such as http://www.david-whitehouse.org/blog/blogging-voice-recognition/ to http://www.david-whitehouse.org/blogging-voice-recognition/ – but I wanted to keep it where it was (plus this created a redirect loop, which I could have fixed).
Twitter Friends to the Rescue!
So I asked for help on Twitter – offering a free link for the right answer (at first a site wide, then I chickened out and said “just a post”). Thankfully I found the answer – so they can all settle for a nice link in this post (see below).
Many things were suggested, some would have worked but I felt they were workarounds and I wanted to solve this particular issue in this way. I had tried some regular expressions, others passed me some more and people were passing me mod_rewrite code too. Unfortunately none of it seemed to work, some gave 500 errors, where as others resulted in the page sitting their, not moving – laughing at me, mocking at me, whispering…
Anyways!
The Solution
RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/$ http://www.david-whitehouse.org/
redirect doesn’t let you use regular expressions – RedirectMatch does (perhaps this is common knowledge, but I couldn’t find it anywhere and it wasn’t in the code anyone gave me). I found the fix here.
Thanks guys
For those that participated in helping me, I would like to thank (in no particular order):
Malcolm Coles
David Elstob
Will Critchlow
David Cumbor
Teifion Jordan
Jaamit Durrani
Blogging with voice recognition
Posted by David WhitehouseBecause of spending years suffering with terrible arm pain caused by a mix of accidents and spending too much time on the computer I have decided to try out some software I bought a few years ago.
I’m blogging this using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.5, it seems to be doing pretty well although I have had to make quite a few corrections already. It would be a good idea to get to grips with this piece of software to see if I can blog a lot quicker than I normally do.
Overall I’m pretty pleased I can sit at my desk and talk and it writes for me and I don’t have to risk aggravating my arm pain although my girlfriend will be getting pretty sick of my loud voice.
Google Affiliate Network Begins Integration with AdSense and AdWords?
Posted by David WhitehouseI just got an email tonight, stating how the lesser known Google Affiliate Network is integrating payments with Google AdSense. What does this mean? Well basically your affiliate revenue will be paid through AdSense, but lets look at the bigger picture, shall we?
Firstly, for those with a large AdWords budget, Google AdWords now offers “CPA” bids – this is based on data and is similar to you doing calculations based on CPC and conversion rates. I believe they have been doing this for a while.
What I can see happening is that AdWords will integrate with Google Affiliate Network (Connect Commerce) allowing advertisers to literally pay per acquisition. Then I believe the offerings will come through to publishers in AdSense, where they will be able to reap greater rewards for monetizing their blog.
So who better to bring affiliates to the mainstream? Ask many small businesses and they probably won’t have heard of affiliate programs, but I bet you within 3 years they all have…
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