SEO flavor by country - a definitive list

American SEO

Create a website containing words 'searchengine' in its name. Talk about SEO until everybody considers you an expert. Afterwards, demand 5-digit prices for your 'add alt tags to images' advices.

Russian SEO

Create a hundred of doorways leading to fifty illegal mp3/cracks/erotic sites. Stuff them with endless popups leading to a dozen of half-legal erotic/mp3 sites. Redirect some clicks to lead to half a dozen perfectly legal online stores - either for referral bonus, or run the stores on your own.

Turkish SEO

Pick a niche. Subscribe to 30-40 middle-popularity blogs in that niche. Every day republish one of the posts you read in your blog, removing all the credentials. However, forget to check all the links in the post, accidentally linking back to the author and creating a backling.

Vietnamese SEO

Find a blog template/widget/picture. Modify the backlink to point to you instead of original author. Redistribute.

Ukrainian SEO

Create a website, claiming that you are a success story, and everybody else are losers. Offer others to visit your trainings to learn to become a success story themselves. While doing this, look pathetic, so others in attempt to say 'just look at this idiot' will generate a bunch of links to you.

Indian SEO

Write a howto article, describing a trivial action (How to properly switch off your computer, for example). Repeat for every possible Google query.

Did I miss any? :)

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Funny/Geeky/Weird/Grim pages in Wikipedia

Stumbling through Wikipedia, I've found some pages I like to revisit from time to time. The list of the pages grew bigger, until I decided to share it. What are yours favorite pages from Wikipedia? :)

Real-time statistics

Want to figure out what's hot now on Wikipedia? This page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Popular_pages has it :)

Grim statistics

Pages like these give me creeps under my skin. Watch deaths as they occur in real time - htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_in_2009

Users

I find this user page funny: htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jesus_Lover

Bots

Love the design of control panel of this bot (by the way, he's also the most active bot on Wikipedia): htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SmackBot
The big red button is just amazing:)

Wikipedia's "official fun pages"

htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_humor
htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Department_of_Fun

Wikipedia's "official weird pages"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles

Gambling

Wikipedians gamble by making bets on the day something will happen. Like, 666,666th article - htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:666,666th_pool
All wikipedia pools: htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pools
htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Last_topic_pool

Wikipedia also has a feeling of self-importance

htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Awareness_statistics
htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Most_referenced_articles
htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_charts

As well as wikipedians

List of wikipedians by number of edits - htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits

And even their bots :)

List of wikipedia bots by number of edits - htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_bots_by_number_of_edits

Web-comics

Want to know which webcomics are recognized and cool?
htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-sufficient_webcomics

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

"Just as many hotels have no thirteenth floor (to the great dismay of several late bungee jumpers), Wikipedia will skip the 666,666th article out of systematically biased prejudice. Or threat of lawsuits from extreme religionists. Radiant 12:50, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)"

The fear of number six hundred sixty six is called Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia, and also has it's page on Wikipedia: htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

Vandalism

Vandalism in Wikipedia happens quite often (hence so many anti-vandal bots exist). However, it's not always performed because of evil intent. Sometimes it is made for lulz :)
Funny Wikipedia Vandalism - htpp://www.imserba.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-94521.html
Funny Wikipedia Vandalism about government: htpp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Government&diff=118335356&oldid=118335061

Extras

While writing the article, I also found some other nice leads which I would also like to share.
Meet Fucking, a village in Austria: htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*******,_Austria/
What makes it even more fun, is that this village is only half an hour away from Kissing and Petting :)

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Duplicate title tags, part 2

Hello everyone,

I'm still experimenting on Duplicate title tags/duplicate meta descriptions issue in Blogger.

I've roughly described it in my Tweets:

Eterniel:Just did some changes to my website template. Hopefully they will resolve most of the Duplicate Title Tags issues.

Eterniel:The biggest problem in this issue, of course, is blogger

Eterniel:It generates unneeded '?showcomment=' urls, which are then interpreted by Google Webmaster Tools as distinct pages

Eterniel:Furthermore, Blogger exports these links in /feeds/comments/default feed

Eterniel:So you have to throw away 'all-head-content' includable and replace it with your own.

I'm quite sure this will resolve all the issues. However, it takes quite some time while Google re-crawls the whole site.

I'm quite impatient, so I will use one trick. Don't pay attention to the following lines, that's just some too complicated robot SEO magic:

<!-- **robots -->
<script xmlns='http://www.googlebot.com/1999/gsa-crawler' xmlns:meta='http://www.googlebot.com/1999/gsa-crawler/meta' >
<user-agent name="Mediapartners-Google">
<page>
<uri>http://cranked.me/2008/04/but-i-figure-if-it-isnt-little-scary.html</uri>
<index>1</index>
<follow>0</follow>
</page>
<page>
<uri>http://cranked.me/2008/04/reason-i-dont-shop-online.html</uri>
<index>1</index>
<follow>0</follow>
</page>
</user-agent>

</gsa:script>
<!-- /**robots -->

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Direct traffic from Montara - yet another search engine launch? :)

Today I have experienced a spike in direct traffic coming from one particular city: Montara, California (website)

Montara

is a small city in California, with less than 3,000 inhabitants. A hundred visits a day from city that big was suspicious.

It seems not only I have experienced this.

'The visitor' reports Internet Explorer with resolutions 1024x768 and 800x600, Flash version 10 and Java support.

Do we experience a rise of yet another web crawler? :)

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Netvibes.com - the worst first impression I ever had

— You never have a second chance to make a good first impression.

Today I have visited Netvibes



I havent seen so much fail in quite some time.

1. The page is composed from modules that use _three_ different languages at the same time - English, German and French. This is simply incredible. Different languages are even within the same widgets (see "Liste de tâches. Nothing to do")
2. Every service I've seen so far properly identifies my IP as Swiss. Netvibes shows me weather report for Paris, France. Even more, it shows me news from Switzerland and offers me to use german Google Site (google.de).
3. Too much spam in the first few seconds of our acquaintance ("Set netvibes as my default homepage", "Sign up now, it's free"). I want to see first what you can give me, not what I can do for you.
4. Inconsistent interface - three different types of "close" buttons on the same page.
5. Set netvibes as my default homepage image gets cut badly on lower resolution (not seen properly on screenshot)
6. Duplicate search boxes. Why would I need two google searchboxes on the same page? Oh, I forgot, one is german Google search, even though I am in Switzerland.
7. What the hell will happen when I press "close" button near "Remind me later" and "Don't show this again"? "Remind me later" or "Don't show this again"? One out of these three ("Remind me later", "Don't show this again" and Close Button) is clearly redundant and even brings confusion.This is overall poor design - and on the page that is supposed to make the first impression on the user, in the most important part of screen real estate - header (see Fitt's law).
8. Wtf does that check box does near search field in "Recherche Web" multilingual failwidget? You'll have no idea until you click it when you already have some search results to display
   

Google-bomb "failure" should point to http://netvibes.com/ , not G.W. Bush's profile. I wouild rather set my browser's homepage to about:robots - it is as much informative as default Netvibes page, however less irritating. The only real use of Netvibes was, probably, this.

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Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - tags on last.fm

I like how "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley is tagged "brutal death metal" on last.fm :)

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Firefox is slow - how to make it faster?

Firefox was quite slow and had the following symptoms:

• A delay when resolving host names
• A couple-second delay when switching between tabs
• Slow scrolling inside the page

I did some research and tweaking, and now it runs blazingly fast. This post is here as a reference if I ever have to do it again.

My current setup:

• Sony VAIO notebook
• Nvidia videocard
• Linux Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron
• Firefox 3.06 - 3.1 beta - both were lagging about the same

What I did:

Disable IPv6

(this helps with DNS responses from sites)

1. Type about:config in Firefox address-bar
2. If needed, press I'll be careful, I promise button :)
3. Type network.dns in the Filter field, find network.dns.disableIPv6 value in the list below and double-click on it to make it change to True
   

Speed-up page loading times by increasing the amount of http request Firefox issues simulataneously

1. On the same about:config page 
2. Type network.http.p in the Filter field
   
3. Set network.http.pipelining to True
   
4. Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to True
5. Increase network.http.pipelining.maxrequests value to about 16-20 from the default 4. 
   

 

Tell Firefox to start drawing page immediately after it receives some part of it from the server

1. Right-click somewhere in about:config window
2. Choose New->Integer from the context menu
   
3. Name it nglayout.initialpaint.delay
4. Set it to "0"
   

If you are an Ubuntu user with Emerald

update your Nvidia driver (this can give drastic performance boost)

Even if you have automatic updates on, you might still have old Nvidia drivers. There is a known interoperability issue between Nvidia drivers and Emerald, so you can either switch to another window decorator, or update drivers.
The easiest way to do it is to use EnvyNG:

1. Install envyng-gtk if you use Ubuntu/Gnome, envyng-qt if you use Kubuntu/KDE:
   sudo apt-get install envyng-gtk
   or
   sudo apt-get install envyng-qt
   for KDE
   
2. Launch Applications->System tools->EnvyNG
3. Choose NVIDIA->Install the NVIDIA driver (Automatic Hardware Detection)
4. Press Apply and then restart your computer when asked.

Firefox should be now faster than lightning.

References:

• http://techxplorer.com/2007/02/22/slow-browsing-using-firefox-on-ubuntu/
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/144216
• EnvyNG homepage
  

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