Google Experts WordPress Gurus SEO Professionals
Lately, I’ve noticed that there are actually far fewer experts out there than we are led to believe.
There are numerous blogs, websites, and people who hold themselves out as experts on WordPress, or SEO gurus, or professional online designers, and so on. However, a collection of recent updates to the core platforms that these experts give advice about has exposed an unpleasant truth. Most of those SEO experts, WordPress gurus, and online traffic masters out there are really nothing more than parrots rewriting what they have read elsewhere.
Google MayDay Update Exposes Fakes
Google updated it search ranking algorithm recently, much to the dismay of several SEO experts and legions of qualified SEO consultants. It seems that Google’s rankings had been lacking in the area of search known as long-tail keywords.
The definition of long-tail keywords is keywords that are searched for less frequently than typical short-tail or main keywords, but that still provide a lot of traffic to websites savvy enough to use them. For example, something like best Denver hotels, might be a short-tail keyword (or key phrase), while something like nice denver motel or best downtown denver luxury hotels would be a long-tail keyword. The idea is that if you can optimize a webpage to target the long-tail keyword, there will be much less competition, and therefore ranking highly for that phrase will be easier. Doing this just once is not very profitable, however, dedicated website publishers can earn lots of money by creating and optimizing numerous webpages or websites for multiple long-tail keywords.
To take the example further, the owner of a Denver hotels website might create an SEO optimized page for numerous long-tail phrases like, best family friendly denver hotels, or best denver hotels downtown with mountain views, or even best value hotels for business travelers in denver, and so on. Because, each individual page is optimized around that long-tail key-phrase, they can all rank high in Google search results for their own searches. Meanwhile, a website for a major chain of hotels, like Hilton or Marriott, might not rank well for any of those specific searches because they have neither the time nor inclination to try and rank for every search phrase someone might use to find a hotel in Denver.
Instead, these websites rely upon the carefully crafted public image Google has created whereby the best content always rises to the top of search rankings. Before Google updated its searches with the so-called May Day update, this was largely untrue. The only way a webpage would rank highly for a long-tail keyword search was if no one else had actually targeted it yet.
Unofficial Google spokesman Matt Cutts emphasized that the MayDay update to Google searches was targeted primarily at these long-tail searches and the websites that profit from undeserved high rankings in search results by focusing big SEO efforts on underused key phrases.
There has been much speculation about what exactly was changed by Google. What is interesting is where this speculation is coming from. Legitimate Google watchers have been postulating theories and ideas since day one. Furthermore, they are reporting what they hear from other webmasters, Google insiders, and official Google announcements and forum postings. Meanwhile, the fake Google experts have gone quiet about the whole matter, resorting to rewriting about the same old things that they have written about in the past, and waiting for someone else to discover what is going on and what to do about it so that they can finally find out themselves. Of course, then, they’ll be pontificating as though they have worked it all out themselves as soon as they have read enough material from others to use as a crutch springboard.
WordPress 3.0 Reveals Experts Are Not
A similar update to the WordPress blogging platform has left numerous WordPress websites stalled out writing and rewriting about the same eight or ten new features updated in WordPress 3.0 and explained completely on wordpress.org. What is missing is all of that advice about the intricacies of WordPress 3.0. Of course, it should take a little bit of time. WordPress is big and advanced, so digging through everything new in WordPress 3 takes a while, but there are insights along the way.
Most telling is the dearth of WordPress 3.0 themes. Most pre-WordPress 3 themes have been updated, and their creators are quick to point out that their premium WordPress themes are fully compatible with WordPress 3.0. Unfortunately, compatible, and designed for WordPress 3.0 are two very different things.
We’ll keep an eye out for good new WordPress 3.0 themes which should be arriving from the top WordPress developers shortly. In the meantime, if you are a professional writer, you can read the continuing series about the best WordPress themes for writers and the upcoming reviews of writer WordPress themes.
Web Hosting Company Review Features and Limitations
Shared Web Host Companies and Fantasy Limitations Or No Limit Fantasies
Once upon a time, all web hosting companies sold hosting plans with a cap or limit on how much bandwidth you could use and how much disk space you were allowed to have. Then, a web hosting arms race of sorts began and web host companies competed against one another by offering more bandwidth or disk space for the same, or even less money, than competitors. This was a good thing.
Eventually, however, someone decided to be an unethical weasel and make a bald-faced lie. They did it in such a way that technically, if you were a lawyer and you pulled you usual find print shenanigans out of the bag, it wasn’t a lie per se.
The lie was an offer of unlimited traffic. Infinite bandwidth available for a rock-bottom price. It was slimy and I sincerely hope that whoever came up with it feels even a shred of the shame they deserve.
It was, of course, all a fantasy of marketing, and it made finding unbiased fact-based shared web hosting provider feature comparisons even harder to find.
Terms of Service Limitations
Every web host provider has a Terms of Service agreement which govern the relationship between the webhosting company and the webmaster or customer. Much of the typical terms of service from any webhosting company is boilerplate legal wording used in one form or another not only by web hosts, but by numerous other types of companies as well. It includes things like disclaiming implied warranties, and the like.
Where is gets unpleasant (or worse, depending upon your point of view) is somewhere in the middle of a shared hosting agreement where the web host reserves the right to limit how much of the server’s resources a single user account can use.
What makes this so unseemly is that many webhosting providers make a very big deal out of features like unlimited bandwidth, unlimited traffic, unlimited disk space, and the like, while making only a tiny fine print mention of the limitations that the account will be subject to due to the terms of service. When, the whole truth is that no site can use unlimited traffic, because there will be a point where the memory or CPU usage is too high and the account will be limited in that manner.
To their credit, Dreamhost makes this clear if you click the More Info link under the offer of unlimited disk space and bandwidth. However, even then, they make it sound like triggering these limits is something that is hard to do and rarely happens.
However, there a numerous users who have small, low traffic, blogs or other websites that get limited or taken offline because they use “too many” resources. The worst part is that no one will tell you what too much is.
What is really hard to stomach is that the TOS does not tell the user what exactly is “too much” usage or “too many” resources. Ironically, Comcast and other cable companies were recently taken to task over a similar policy in which they reserved the right to limit the bandwidth or otherwise “shape the traffic” of users who used an ambiguous “too much” bandwidth. These companies were eventually pressured into revealing an actual number for the limit to their customers.
Unfortunately, no such pressure has been placed upon the various webhosting providers as they simply decide when and how to limit hosted account based whatever they feel like.
See for yourself:
- Dreamhost Terms of Service (10-09-2010): Servers are shared with other customers, and as such IRC-related activities or severely CPU intensive CGI scripts (e.g. chat scripts, scripts which have bugs causing them to not close properly after being run, etc.) are not encouraged. Any application that listens for inbound network connections (even if the application would otherwise be allowed) are not permitted. BitTorrent clients, proxy servers/scripts, IRC bots and bouncers (BNC) specifically may not be run on any DreamHost Web Hosting server. If your processes are adversely affecting server performance disproportionately DreamHost Web Hosting reserves the right to negotiate additional charges with the Customer and/or the discontinuation of the offending processes.
Not exactly clear about what limits there are on your account. In fact, this sounds very much like you won’t have any trouble unless you are using these IRC, CGI, BitTorrent, or proxy things. Unfortunately, that isn’t true. Poke around their “documentation” wiki long enough and you’ll see that WordPress blogs often use too many resources. Apparently that is doubly true for certain plug-ins, including one of the most popular WordPress plug-ins, and one of the most recommended.
If you have a WordPress blog chances are you have heard of All-in-One-SEO. In fact, there is a pretty good chance you use it on your blog. But, guess what?
8. Customer agrees to not engage in activities pertaining to Black Hat SEO, Spamdexing, and so-called “Scraper sites.” These can all have a severely detrimental effect on server performance and are not permitted. Pursuant to this policy, the poorly-written WordPress plugin “All in One SEO Pack” is expressly prohibited on DreamHost shared hosting servers and may only be installed on DreamHost Private Servers (VPS).
That’s funny. I don’t remember seeing that on any of the webpages telling me how Dreamhost is a great host for WordPress blogs.
While you are at it, search the Dreamhost support wiki for popular WordPress caching plugin WP-SuperCache. It seems Dreamhost doesn’t run so well with it either. If they can’t make two of the most popular WordPress plugins on the planet work, then exactly how well do you think they work with WordPress in general?
Compare Dreamhost’s whenever we decide hosting your account is too much of a burden, we can limit you TOS to this one from competitor Host Gator. (Host Gator is one of the other web hosts I’ve been trying out.)
- Host Gator Terms of Service – 7. Resource Usage User may not:
a) Use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc.
Does that make Dreamhost a bad web hosting provider?
Not really.
- WestHost Shared Web Hosting accounts TOS — Server Resources: The use of your account must be reasonable, you may not place excessive burdens on our servers. If you use a high amount of server resources (such as, but not limited to, CPU Time, Memory Usage, and Network Resources) at our election, you will be given an option of either upgrading the service level or reducing the resource usage to an acceptable level, or your use of our servers may be limited.
- 1&1 Web Hosting Shared accounts Terms & Conditions — 7.16 …Should your use of the 1&1 Services result in an overly high load on the 1&1 Equipment, in 1&1′s sole discretion, 1&1 may suspend your account until the cause of any such overload is determined and resolved.
- Go Daddy Universal Terms of Service – Go Daddy reserves the right to terminate Your access to the Services at any time, without notice, for any reason whatsoever….Go Daddy may review every account for excessive space and bandwidth utilization and to terminate or apply additional fees to those accounts that exceed allowed levels.
In other words, there is a lot of variation out there in the actual amount of service provided by each hosting company. Remember, the key in this whole thing is how many users, using how many resources, are put on each server. That makes the number at which the usage becomes “excessive” very different depending upon the initial load.
A shared hosting company whose servers have a lighter load are probably willing to allow higher individual usage by customers, especially when that usage is only for short periods of time. But, a web hosting provider that loads their servers right up the maximum will have to suspend your activity quickly to keep you from crashing the server.
How Much RAM and CPU Usage Allowed
Leave a comment about how much memory or CPU usage you have been able to use with your current webhost, or let us know how much you used before getting limited or banned.
Don’t leave a “I’m happy with” or a “So and so sucks” comment. I will just delete those. There is plenty of that unhelpful junk out there. If you want to tell us who you host with, what your sites are like, and specifically what is good / bad, we’d love to hear it.
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A Question of Greatness
Ok, the title is overstated, but I’m tired of writing boring titles to get better search results.
Today, I have questions rattling around in my brain, some of which are more important than others, some of which could change the way do things or handle my workflow, and some of which are nothing more than minor concerns that an inquiring mind wants to know about.
- Is it really worthwhile / doable / smart to use WordPress to manage a normal "static" website? The truth is that static websites generally aren’t really all that static, but they do have a more set structure, unlike a blog. Often, the changes and tweaks made to a page are relatively minor and it seems like overkill to fire up Dreamweaver CS4 just to add a link to a freelance writing samples page, for example. On the other hand, I get more flexibility and understand more of what is going on from a non-WordPress angle. (My HTML / XHTML / CSS is stronger than my PHP / mySQL.)
- Why can’t I find a non-complicated way to make lists on a website with explanation text? Take the list you are looking at. Ideally, there would be a number followed by the question. Then, underneath that there would be this explanatory text instead of having to rely on the bold to separate the question from the text. I know it can be done, but it’s just so much effort to click all the buttons to make it happen or keep all of the <ol> <ul> <li> code straight.
- Is Technorati (or any others) really that important? Unfortunately, the worlds of web design, search engines, SEO, and social networking are all dominated by techie types. That means that when it comes to things like Technorati, Digg, Twitter, or whatever, the volume tends to be disproportionately loud. Is getting indexed, listed, or whatever on these sites worth the time and effort? Or, more specifically…
- Is It Better To Add Technorati Specific Tags to Posts, or Will WordPress’ Ping Take Care of It? Considering that I have no real interest in trying to force my way to the top of Technorati or any other site by any means other than writing good stuff, do I get any benefit from taking the extra time to "tag" my posts with Technorati tags?
- Do All Those Incoming Yahoo Glue Links Count for Anything? My incoming links for some of my sites are filled with links that come from Yahoo Glue. Do I get anything out of those?
- What If Google Knows What It Is Doing? Pretty much all SEO techniques both on-page SEO tactics, and off-site SEO linking, assume that Google needs a lot of help getting its index and search rankings results right. In other words, that Google isn’t a very good search engine. That doesn’t seem right does it? I mean, it’s the #1 Search Engine in the world for a reason. Microsoft has tried 3 times to create something that even comes close and couldn’t. Does it really make sense then that Google’s search results are so delicate that they can be heavily influenced by something as simple as changing a few HTML tags?
- If Google Knows What It Is Doing, Then Why Do So Many Search Results Suck? As a corollary to the above, why are some search results so terrible? Is it that Google’s famed reliance on incoming links, or links pointing to a webpage or website, makes it too vulnerable to being conned into ranking lesser sites above better ones? This seems especially true when it comes to authoritative websites. Consider this search for california school rankings
The obvious authoritative source is the actual rankings published by California. In fact, both of the sites that rank higher are nothing more than interfaces tacked onto the data provided by the third link. A search for california school ratings produces a similar result except that the #4 result becomes the #2 result.
There are much worse examples, this is just the one I came up with off the top of my head for a quick blog post. Fortunately, the other sites listed above the official one aren’t scam sites or obvious web spam. They are both trying to milk free publicly available information to show advertising and get people to sign up (get email addresses) and perhaps even pay for "premium" information.
The fact that the official California API results ranks so high, however, is a testament to Question #3. Look at the Academic Performance Index (API) page from the California Department of Education, and you will see a website that has no redeemable SEO qualities whatsoever – in the traditional sense, at least. And, yet, there it is at #3.
Like most "official" websites, they have better things to do than keyword research, emailing other websites to beg for links, and so on. On more competitive keywords, this is often much worse, with scam sites or obvious web spam ranking above the official resources.
The worst examples are often those where the higher ranking sites offer biased or otherwise slanted information, while the official, unbiased, sites rank much lower. This is because of a combination of using every SEO trick in the book, and then the fact that like minded supporters will link to the websites that promote their point of view, rather than the straight factual websites which might include information that they don’t like.
Search your favorite, financial, political, governmental, or judicial topic to find examples.
Back to Work
Ok, I’ve spent too much time writing this today already. Off to make money freelance writing. Don’t worry, I’ll be back later.
Fix for WP-DBManager Error Warning: Your backup folder MIGHT be visible to the public
Recently, an upgrade to the WP-DBManager plug-in for WordPress started giving an error message on my sites. The error message is, "Error Warning: Your backup folder MIGHT be visible to the public". The plug-in goes on to recommend that you copy the .htaccess file from one folder to another.
There are two glitches with the WP-DBManager WordPress plug-in.
The first is that there is no .htaccess file where WP-DBManager says to look. It is an easy solution, on the support forums, the author notes that there are some difficulties distributing the plug-in with a real .htaccess file in it. To get around the issue, there is a htaccess.txt file instead. Just copy it to the new directory and then rename it .htaccess. All of which is easily done with Filezilla or another FTP utility.
The second glitch is a little trickier.
Even after you have copied the .htaccess file where you are supposed to, the plug-in might show the error message anyway. In other words, you still keep getting the error even if you have the right .htaccess file in the correct directory.
On the support forums, there is information to make the Warning message go away. It involves how to tweak the plug-in’s PHP code, but all this does is stop the check. It doesn’t fix the problem. That is bad news, because if the error message is broken your backups might be broken too.
What gives?
WP-DBManager Error and Dreamhost Hosting
For whatever reason, Dreamhost hosts their accounts for WordPress and other sites with a full directory path that includes a ".something" directory. WP-DBManager requires a path to mysquldump and mysql, but also the FULL directory path structure to work properly.
As a Dreamhost user, that means that you will input a Path to Backup containing a ".".
For example, /home/.swami/domain.com/wp-content/backup-db
Whether it is a Dreamhost thing or a WordPress thing, I don’t have any idea, but for whatever reason, when the WP-DBManager plugin code tries to read the Path to Backup field it uses the /.swami/ part correctly in one section, but then does NOT use it correctly in the next section.
The result?
Keep getting the Warning: Your backup folder MIGHT be visible to the public error message even though you have the right .htaccess file because the check the plug-in makes fails due to have the "wrong" path.
Even worse is that your backups are failing! The same path error that causes the warning to falsely display causes a directory write error when it tries to run the backups!
How To Fix WP-DBManager WordPress Plug-in Error Message
Fortunately, the fix is pretty easy.
Go into the DB Options under Database in your WordPress control panel and change the Path to Backup to NOT include the .directory whatever it is.
In the example above, delete the /.swami/ part of the path.
That leaves /home/domain.com/wp-content/backup-db.
Save the changes and then click on a different plug-in or control panel option and then back on the Database (to get it to re-try and read the file). The error message should disappear, and more importantly, your backups should be working again.
You can test if WP-DBManager backups are working by clicking Backup DB which runs a manual backup.
By the way, Dreamhost already backs up your mysql databases for you, so if you are in a pinch you can use those. But, WP-DBManager still provides more robust, automated backups, that are not overwritten by default and are easier to restore, so you still need the plugin.
