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Return to Google search says ‘I’m somebody!’ again

A delisting from Google equals death, or at least the loss of a limb or two for major sites that depend on search-driven Web traffic. For NickGehring.com, it meant an inconvenience and a bit of embarrassment. It was like the 1970s version of me disappeared from the phone book.

I can’t say what I did or didn’t do that caused my site to disappear from Google search, but it has been fixed.

Most other sites I’ve created hit Google’s search within days. Me.com, however, took eight months. I finally remedied this oversight when I took it off my project backburner late last month. Before finding the solution, I made a few half-hearted attempts to find out why I wasn’t being listed.

I first tried adding my site to Google’s Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools show users what Googlebot is encountering as it scans their Web sites and provides other useful information. I figured giving Google permission to collect all it wanted about my online affairs would help. It did not. However, after performing a keyword scan on my site, Google spit out a strange list of keywords that were definitely not mine.

I then skimmed my site for hidden bits of code or those weird words from the list, perhaps from an sql injection attack. WordPress blogs are particularly susceptible to these and other security problems. Because of this, I did a few things to harden my install but found nothing wrong.

Back to Google. Sitemaps Generator, a WordPress plugin, is an easy way to submit your sitemap to the three major search engines. After you create a new post, the plugin generates a new sitemap and notifies Google, Live and Yahoo about the changes via ping. Does it help your site achieve a higher ranking? The plugin’s maker says it doesn’t know but “it can help Google to index and crawl your page better which may result in a more complete index of your page.” Even with the extra effort, no luck.

Meanwhile, Yahoo and Live both indexed my site, but no Google. Searches for help, including a couple of SEO companies’ forums, didn’t help either.

Finally, a random search yielded a great suggestion: Submit my site to Google for reconsideration. The Official Google Webmaster blog outlines how to do it. A couple weeks after submitting my site, it appeared.

You can only imagine my excitement. Much like Navin Johnson (aka Steve Martin in “The Jerk”), I knew I was “somebody” again. I am somebody!

Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!
Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.
Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 – Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

One of these colors is not like the other

How can two Web browsers display the same graphic in different colors? They can’t — at least not until recently.

Color management, a term familiar to photographer and print graphic designers, is a forgotten art for many Web designers. Primitive low-resolution monitors limited early Web artists to a palette of 216 colors. Now, aside mobile devices, most users have high resolution monitors capable of handling millions of colors. A limited palette should no longer be an issue, but another issue emerges: The color profile you used to so lovingly turn out that graphic or photo won’t be recognized by most browsers.

Getting your perfectly tweaked photo to appear the same way on your Web site is challenging. I didn’t think about this until I began mocking a Web site for a friend’s wedding. A background image kept appearing a different shade in Safari versus Firefox and Internet Explorer. Imagine — a Web design problem not linked to IE.

Safari, as it turns out, has included color management since version 2.0. Firefox has it now, but you have to go through some trickery to get it to work right or download a plugin. A proposed future version of CSS will include the ability to specify color profiles.

Even with a profile specified for your graphic or photo, good luck matching it with the browser’s default implementation of CSS colors.

How did I solve my problem? I re-exported my graphics file from Photoshop with the ICC profile option unchecked. This turned my colors just the way I wanted to match the surrounding CSS colors — or at least I hope so. Even with the Web being able to display millions of colors, it still has a long way to go to display them right.

Three pseudo classes beyond LOVE/HATE

I thought I knew all I needed to know about CSS, at least as far as modern browsers allow me, after reading a string of books about it over the past two years. (CSS Zen Garden is the best.) Somewhere along my studying, I blocked out certain rules, in most cases because Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t support them.

With Internet Explorer 7 more than two years old, used more than IE 6 and IE 8 coming soon, it’s time for designers to adopt more advanced CSS features. (IE seems to be losing market share as well.) The Microsoft developers’ site outlines IE’s support of CSS. Today we’ll look at pseudo classes.

LoVe/HAte is a handy way of remembering which way to order your link styling in CSS by :link, :visited, :hover and :active. (Not following this order will screw up things. Really. Trust me.) These familiar pseudo classes specify the look of your hyperlinks.

But wait — there’s more — and they don’t even have to be used for links!

:focus is a way to add focus to an element, like a form, and works now in Firefox and will supposedly work in IE 8. This is fantastically useful and a great way to make your site’s forms user friendly. Example.

:lang, again, not in Internet Explorer until version 8, but allows you to specify language of an element, like a quote box, and supply custom quotation marks. You can also use it in combination with XHTML to declare the language attributes of text in a document.

:first-child, now a part of IE 7, matches a style to the first child element of any element. For example, this selector could specify that the first paragraph of a document turn blue, but the rest of the paragraphs remain the default paragraph color.

Mixed feelings about Kindle, bookstores’ inevitable demise

I have to be the only guy alive who finds holding an Amazon Kindle for the first time a little emotional.

I’ve always been a voracious reader, sometimes going through several novels at once. I love to kill time at a bookstore, especially ones with tons of used books. There’s nothing like going on a treasure hunt through some attic full of dusty old paperbacks.

I blame my mom. She read to me religiously when I was little. Together, we went through quite a few books during my tender years.

The Kindle is Amazon’s electronic tablet for reading books. I missed that bandwagon by about a year. In fact, the Kindle I held wasn’t even mine; it was a colleague’s. Holding that liquid-crystal-powered reader for the first time was a mixed experience for me because I am fascinated with the promise it holds, but morn what toll it will take.

I love books and exploring book stores.

Yes, good ole, tree-derived, Gutenberg-inspired, pulpy-white-page-filled, books. I almost feel curmudgeonly about it.

But I’m not a curmudgeon. I just have don’t know what to think about the coming digital conversion. Whereas newspapers going from print to digital doesn’t bother me at all, the venerable book’s changeover makes me a little sad. My inner-gadget-geekness stands in conflict with my inner-printed-book-lovingness.

I like the escape. So much of my day is spent in front of something electronic. Although I wouldn’t call a stack of dead tree-derived pages organic, leafing through a book does seem a little more relaxed and natural. Here’s some irony: I prefer teaching myself about Web design through printed books.

As this recession wrecks havoc on many businesses, bookstores are equally being punished. Borders Books and Music is particularly vulnerable. The mega book seller is sitting on a mountain of debt and declining sales. (Barnes & Noble appears to be in better shape.) Even its late return to selling books online doesn’t seem to be helping. After seven years of using Amazon as its online bookshelf, Borders relaunched its own .com last year. Much like newspapers, Borders watched the Web revolution fly by and reacted too late.

I feel some attachment to Borders — it was the first really large book store outside of a library that I had ever been in. My 10-year-old mind nearly exploded the first time I stepped into one.

I’ve used electronic readers before. What makes Kindle different, though, is its ease of use and backing from Amazon. Some hail it as the printed book’s version of an iPod. I found it easy to read, fairly resistant to glare, but lacking a back light. Graphically, again, the text is crisp but all pictures and text are just in black and white. The screen isn’t green, but it did remind of  Nintendo’s original Game Boy. You can access the Kindle bookstore without a wireless connection via Sprint’s mobile network. Authors can even self-publish their works in the online store.

I’ll tell you one thing — my sore back, which lugged at least 18 pounds of books in college, would have loved one of these babies. Who needs sentimentality when you’re walking around campus like a pack mule?

TechDirt asks: Is the physical bookstore a thing of the past? Revolution, in whatever form it takes, won’t happen overnight. Still, I fear my beloved brick-and-mortar booksellers and printed books are writing their last chapters.

Nofollow? Yes, fix! Bring some link love to your commenters

WordPress may be blocking your thoughts from the world.

The blogging software automatically inserts a rel=”nofollow” after hyperlinks in the comment section of its blogs. Google, Yahoo and other search engines do not follow links tagged this way. But what if you are legitimately including URLs in comments on WP blogs? Don’t your brilliant comments/links that contribute to the value of the Web deserve a little link love from search engines?

You can’t do much for the comments you submit on other sites, but you can help out your fellow bloggers by:

1. Manually editing the “nofollow” out of your blog’s WordPress source code, or
2. Using a plugin.

Which option should you use?

Manual edit

You are a control freak, aren’t you? Hacking your WP source code isn’t hard, but it can be tedious, especially as updates become available. This means keeping track of your changes and making sure they aren’t erased when you copy over the upgrade files.

I don’t do this to the WordPress sites I manage because it’s too much of a bother to keep track of the edits. Laziness certainly plays a role, too.

Online marketing guru Douglass Karr said he had troubles with the Do Follow plugin and developed his own hands-on solution. In his blog, he gives some tips on how to manually pluck the nofollows out of your comment section.

Plugins

Perishable Press provides a comprehensive list of dofollow plugins. I picked the DoFollow plugin due to its very simple options. Others allow you to specify how many comments a commenter must make, or what length of time must pass, before his or her nofollow is removed.

No spam

I already use WP-reCAPTCHA to prevent comment spam and have Akismet, which comes with WordPress, turned on. Between the two, and moderating my own comments, spam *knock on my wood desk* isn’t much of a problem. Because I “trust” the comments I approve on my own blog, I’m not worried about blog spam, either.

Why nofollow?

Philosophically, the automatic inclusion of nofollow in WP comments makes some sense, especially for bloggers who lack tech savvy or install a blog and forget about it. But moderating your comments and installing basic anti-spam plugins is all a blogger really needs to fight evil spam. Having nofollows around blog comments hurts legitimate efforts to illuminate discourse and drive link love to useful sites.

Discussions about nofollow continue. Here SEOmoz talks with Google’s Matt Cutts, who helped develop the tag in 2005.

5 WordPress pet peeves

WordPress 2.7 came out last week. With any software update, I wait until most of the public offers itself as a guinea pig before I upgrade. Sometimes so-called patches or upgrades just cause more misery. I haven’t installed it yet — although the list of new features and interface improvements seem to make 2.7 worth the  upgrade.

Researching other WordPress-powered blogs for major problems with 2.7 reminded me of some of my WordPress pet peeves, here addressed to news Web site and regular site operators.

1. A “Meta” section — Every install of WordPress comes with two default themes, both with a sidebar section called meta. This area contains links for users to login or register. Although probably useful as a WP newbie creates his or her first blog, these links need to go. Why would you provide access to the “secret” backend of your site? Yes, any seasoned user knows how to find the WP login without those links, but leaving them in your design makes it look tacky, almost like an untucked shirt or a piece of toilet paper dangling from your shoe. Seriously, delete this.
2. Disjointed WP installs — Your organization’s content management system will make or break you online. Eight years ago if you bought a crappy, proprietary CMS, you did so because you had no other options, and all that annoying hand coding of html you once did could be replaced by automation. But with that time-saver, came a great time-drainer: You now spend even more trying to work around the restraints of the proprietary CMS. Want to rearrange the front page? Ha! Add a blog? Double ha-ha! Out of this problem grew the disjointed WP install, a theme that looks nothing like the Web site it came from. This can be a jarring and disorientating experience for the user. A look that isn’t cohesive mars your brand and its impact. The public doesn’t go through your Web site with a checklist, but a client might, even if it’s just a mental one.
3. “Admin” — Change your default user name! Many WP security exploits are based on the widespread use of “admin” as the default login name. Besides security, using “admin” as your name makes your blog less personal.
4. “I have a blog … ?” — Remember that blog or new feature your company started a few months ago? When’s the last time you updated it? You cannot grow a community or audience if you don’t nurture it. Just as your body sometimes gets needs eight hours of sleep, a good diet and amphetamines exercise, so does your Web presence. Help it flourish by giving it regular updates. (Looking for help? See these seven good blogging tips.)
5. Coming soon — Promotion means building excitement, and no anticipation is built with a “coming soon” or “under construction” sign. Promote that new feature or section properly, or just drop the notice. If it’s any consolation, this gives you an out when things don’t roll out on time. The Web 2.0 version is “beta” — aka most services on Google.

Pop a squat on your online identity

Owning your identity online — whether you are an organization or individual — is very important. Although I am not a fan of domain squatting, I do think you should squat on your “brand.”

Why should you care?

Simply because, right or wrong, just about everything done online with your name will be associated with you. Owning your name across multiple domains and spaces keeps those with malicious intents from inflicting damage to your brand. (Or, if you’re someone like John Smith, you’re pretty much already screwed.) There’s a reason why many companies own a version of their domain with a sucks.com at the end.

Brand can mean a lot of things, from simply your name (Nick Gehring) to your identity (mine1044, my longtime AIM name and otherwise being online pseudonym.) It’s a daunting task to keep track of the many, many places where “you” could exist. Usernamecheck helps a little by scanning to see if your name has been registered with a laundry list of sites.

But there are other places to check. How well do you rank in a basic Yahoo or Google search? Sounds like you need to register yourname.com, if you haven’t already, and get to some search engine optimization. If you’re any kind of serious Web professional, or an overprotective parent, getting your name is a no-brainer.

Creating a basic Wikipedia entry for your company is also a no-brainer, assuming, well, that your company is big enough or important enough to be worthy of a Wikipedia entry. Oh, and don’t forget to check back on the page! You can never be sure what some miscreant will edit into it.

Seven good blogging tips

Lost Remote provides a good list of things bloggers should/shouldn’t do. Among them, with comments from me:

1. Have a voice - To think in newspaper terms, a professional blog comes somewhere between a story and a well-reported column. Don’t be boring!
2. Don’t just post wire stories – Or regurgitate press releases. Ugh! I’ve seen this done word-for-word in a local newspaper’s entertainment blog. That’s lazy reporting and journalism.
3. Engage with your readers - A colleague once snorted (yes, snorted) at my suggestion that reporters should act more like blog writers and actually police/engage in the conversations that bloom out of their stories. Many news Web sites treat their story comments like ghettos, where just about any racist or mean-spirited, off-topic comment goes, especially those hosted on Topix.com. That’s only part of the solution, of course.
4. If you don’t enjoy it, you shouldn’t be doing it
5. Create content that’s easy to read on the fly – What a great idea …
6. Make sure you post the entire feed

I will add a No. 7: Update, update, update! Now certainly for me this is a case of do as I say, not as I do. If you want to have any sort of following for your blog, you have to update it. How do you expect to build an audience if your last update was in February? I’ve seen many businesses and trade associations do this. They’ll kick off a blog, make a big deal out of it, then just stop posting.

For a Web developer starting, then forgetting is stupid. Your blog is a vital part of your “brand” and shows  your expertise. Not only can you give back to your field in terms of tips and inside information, you build crediblity in that community and with future customers.

Similar opportunities abound for news sources online. Build some credibility through regular, thoughout, kickbutt posts.

Evolutionary step for open social networking

Gawker redesigned its comment system recently and seeded the ability to leave comments via a Facebook profile. It’s not active yet, but I think this new capability is amazing and evolutionary.

Gawker’s network of sites aren’t the only ones experimenting with using an open(ing) architecture. Social-network-for-professionals LinkedIn will provide CNBC its user profiles. Users will be able to recommend articles, see who is connected to companies mentioned in the stories and the whole thing will have some crossover onto the cable channel. (I hope someone gives CNBC an MSNBC-like makeover. Yikes, is it loud!)

Like I said, none of this is revolutionary; it’s just evolutionary. Gawker and CNBC’s moves further realize the social/sharing/geektopia nature of the Internet and break down walls. No longer will contrived barriers hold your online “identity” within the bounds of a .com.
Continue reading »

Top 10 Web sites 10 years later

SitePoint recently took a look at the top 10 Web sites from ten years ago. They did not post screen shots so I jumped over to the Wayback Machine to see what the sites looked like back then. Continue reading »