Avinashsing Sunkur

I’ve been playing around with wp_hive plugin for a while a day or two now and I wanted to see how I can import my other blogs into it. The reason is that I want to have a central point where I can manage all the blogs instead of having to update and upgrade at different places all the time. My other blogs that I wanted to import run on wordpress but they were an older version though. I had a look at the number of tables and they were 10 while the new wordpress 2.9.1 had 11. So the first thing that I did was to update wordpress on the other blogs. If your blogs run on some other platform, then you will need to get it into wordpress format before you can import the blogs to use with WP Hive.

Once you’ve installed wordpress on your primary domain eg DomainA.com (the place where you want central management), you just need to copy the wp_hive plugin contents into the plugins folder in wordpress. Next make sure the wp_content is writable otherwise you wouldn’t be able to activate the plugin. Once that is done, you can start adding other domains into WP Hive. You do that by inputting the new domain name eg DomainB.com and then put “/” as the subfolder because you want it to point to the main installation directory which in this case is DomainA.com. Use a unique table prefix for this new domain eg dmb_ as all the tables for the hives will be created in the same database and the table names are important to load the files specific to a particular domain.

The above paragraph is really for adding new domains (blogs) but for existing blogs you will need to export a copy of the database (through PHPMyAdmin) and find and replace table names (wp_) with another prefix. You do that only for table names – it takes about 1 min and all you have to do is make sure that you’re replacing the prefix only for create and insert statements and not actual input values. Once this is done, you go back to the main domain to import this database (for your existing blog) in your main database (the main database you’ll be using for wp hive). You then proceed to add a new site by going to the options in wp hive on your main wordpress installation. You will need at this point to add the domain name as a parked domain. Don’t try to make it an addon domain! Just park the domain on top of your main one. If you have the default theme, everything should work fine now.

However if you have another theme, you will see a blank page at this point because wordpress is not able to load the theme specified in the wp_options table. You just need to copy the theme from your previous blog into your main one and voila, everything is back!

Remember that DNS propagation takes time and sometimes you will get DNS errors or 404s because nameservers changes haven’t completed. Just be patient!

Blogging is a great way to create content and bulk up a website. However if you run a couple of blogs, you’ll soon realise that it becomes a nightmare to upgrade them as soon as a new version becomes available. I’m really talking about wordpress here because installing wordpress is really easy and there are millions of themes available for you to change the look and feel of your website.

So in an attempt to have multiple domains powered through just one software installation, I had a go with WordPress MU (multi user). I didn’t know what I was getting into and I now regret it because I’ve spent a whole day trying to make it work. Let me talk about my requirements first:

1. I want to be able to create different blogs (different topics) easily
2. I want to be able to upgrade them easily as well
3. Something which is free (open source)
4. Ability to map multiple domains on a single software installation
5. Ability to have different look and feel for all those websites
6. Ability to use shared hosting to perform the tasks

WordPress MU (WPMU) can do all these things but if you’re on shared hosting, then it becomes a problem because you will need to be able to do wildcard mapping for all subdomains, that is, mapping “*” to the main website. Most shared hosting companies do not allow this and you also need access to modify the VirtualHost component as well (httpd.conf). Although my hosting company did the subdomain wildcard mapping for me so that each new blog is created as a subdomain which forwards to the main script (index.php) to retrieve the relevant data for that blog, I still had to use a plugin to enable multiple domain mapping onto the installation. I couldn’t get it work and it was just too much work considering the drawbacks of wordpress mu which are mainly incompatibility of certain plugins, being a few versions back from the main wordpress software and the difficulty in setting it up in the first place.

To be honest, WordPress MU is too complicated to set up and you’ll probably get so frustrated before you get it to run that you’ll think it’s just not worth the effort (just like me). So I came across this plugin (wp hive) which you can activated and get multiple domains run from one single installation of the normal wordpress software. You don’t need to add wildcard subdomain mapping or do anything complicated. You just install wordpress as normal and install the wp hive plugin. Once activated, you can start adding new domains to your existing wordpress installation. One thing to remember though is that you need to have wp_content writeable before you activate the plugin, otherwise it’s not going to work.

You need to park the additional domains on the same host for it to work as well. Just normal domain parking works and as soon as dns propagation has completed, you will be able to log in to the new domain as if wordpress was install on that domain. Sweet, eh?

So if you want multi domain, multi user, multi blogs, then i recommend wp hive over wordpress mu because of the ease of installation and use.

Yahoo Answers is good for driving targetted traffic to your website. If people see that you’re an expert in your field, they will usually click on the link to your website for more information (provided you’ve included a link in your report). However, you need to be at least a Level 2 account holder to be able to insert clickable links, otherwise the links will be plain text and people will have to copy and paste the url in their browser and the chances of that happening are very slim.

So i decided to become Level 2 in yahoo answers and i had to accumulate 250 points. You get 100 points by signing up to yahoo answers, 1 point for logging in everyday and 2 point for each answer provided. Asking questions cost you 10 points and receiving violation incurs you points as well. If you’re voted the best answer, you get 10 points for that but i didn’t really focus on that one and concentrated my efforts on answering questions as 75 answers will get me to Level 2. Since you are only allowed to provide 20 answers a day for Level 1 accounts, it took me 3 days to reach Level 2 because I answered my daily limits and a couple of my answers were chosen as best answers.

All the links that i provided when i was Level 1 became active and clickable and so were any subsequent links. I wanted to see how long it was going to take me to answer 20 questions. So i decided to do a little promotion for this guy for his SEO website. All my answers were really great and helpful and it took me 1 and half hours to complete the task. That was not worth my time at all but i got a surprise email the next day informing me that my yahoo answer account was suspended. I quickly appealed against it because i held this yahoo account since the year 2000 and wanted to keep it clean but the response i got was that i violated the rules and it’s been banned now. I emailed them lot once more asking them to check the quality of my answers and not go by the links i provided (well i know i got suspended for including too many links) but they never replied back.

I later found out that you need to keep all your questions and answers on yahoo private because other users will try to get you banned. Like i said, i wasn’t just inserting links but was providing helpful answers but once your yahoo answers is suspended, there is no way to get it back. The second thing i learned was that you need to keep a balance on how many answers you will include links and how many answers you won’t. Put it this way, if you include a link in all your answers, it doesn’t look good and will get you banned sooner or later. Best thing to do is keep a low profile and promote your website by putting the URL in the source section when you answer a question occasionally.

I’m  a bit upset about this specific yahoo answer account being banned but i’ve got someone to open 5 new accounts for me now and they are all promoting my sites and because the answers and questions are private (so nobody can view the activity on these accounts), they are all doing fine. If you haven’t tried uahoo answers as a method of traffic, it’s not late to start now and this could be one of the finest SEO strategies that you can employ.

If you are a one-man team, it’s very difficult to cope with the demands of maintaining, updating and marketing a website. Even big websites can sometimes get really exhausting and the need for outsourcing work arises. Getting somebody else to do your job has many implications depending on what type of work that person will be doing. For content-writing, you can always check the content before you upload it to your site but even if you haven’t done that, you can later on get it removed from your site quite easily. However for things like off-page optimisation, things can get very nasty.

In an effort to market a website of mine, I recently hired someone to do forum posting for me in a particular niche. The outcome was not very disappointing. If I had done it myself, I would have saved more time and money. I had to constantly chase up the guy for the work because I paid him in advance and did not deliver when it was supposed to and kept on dragging the job. When it was finally completed, the posts were done on forums which has nothing to do with my site. This means that any links to my site will look spammy. Here’s the scenario, you’re browsing a technology forum and you find herbal remedies links. Now this looks weird right because they are not even closely related. The second problem I had was that even on related niche forums, you cannot just drop a link so that you can have a backlink because it’s spamming at the end of the day and what I noticed is that people on the forums have started to get frustrated seeing this new guy on the forum dropping links to a site which does not have any connection with what is being discussed. You can only drop a link when it makes sense in the discussion!

Now the main problem with that is that it hurts your brand name. People who see these links will automatically think that your site is a spammy one and you start losing credibility online. Word can spread like fire and in no time you can see that your website is losing traffic and becomes blacklisted. Any major drawback with off-page optimisation is that you do not have control over the backlinks created and hence cannot get them removed. If it was your own site, you can do that easily but when you have thousands of links spread on thousands websites, you cannot contact all the webmaster asking them to remove your links (well you can but it will take an enormous amount of time and you’re not guaranteed that all links will be removed). Google is a clever search engine and when it sees that links to your site are being dropped all over the place, it will soon penalise you.

It’s always better to do things yourself but in some circumstances, you can’t always do it. You should always try to protect your brand and find someone who will do a good job for you and not a crap work just to get your money. You can lose more than you bargained for if you get the wrong SEO guy to promote your site, so be careful.

Since the beginning or mid October 2009, i’ve noticed that the number of indexed pages on one of my site has been decreasing dramatically. Just before that happened, i had around 600+ pages in Google index. I started losing 5-10 pages in the index everyday and i’m not really thrilled about it. As of today, i have roughly 450+ pages in the index. So i’ve lost nearly 150 webpages. The problem is that losing pages in the index means losing traffic and losing traffic is very bad.

It might have something to do with the Caffeine update and that Google is trying to get rid of unimportant pages or duplicate content. There are some pages on my site which don’t have a lot of content not because i wanted them to be short but because they are designed to be short. Now because there are a lot of pages on the site, i cannot link them all from the homepage. This means that some pages will somehow be very far from the homepage requiring quite a few clicks before you can actually see them.

There are a few things which i can do though. I can try to increase the content on these pages by displaying a list of related articles with a short description. Another way to overcome the problem is to acquire a few links to those pages which are not indexed. This will definitely make it appear as important in the eyes of google.

Once i’ve made the changes i’m thinking, i’m 90% sure that they’ll come back in the index.

Twitter is the new buzz these days. Everyone is talking about it and if you don’t know what i’m talking about, then you’re probably not too up-to-date with what’s happening on the Internet. The same thing happened couple of years ago when Digg came out. Personally i think that you can only maximise Twitter’s potential if your business is big, a brand that people already know. For small businesses, I don’t think it will work that well unless of course you spend a lot of time and money in advertisements.

Twitter is a clever idea about staying up-to-date with simple and short messages. However if you’re a small busniness owner, do you think anybody cares about your little updates? Truth is nobody will be interested. To get the full benefit, you will have to attract an audience who wants to know about your products or services. If you don’t have any followers, then there’s no point in wasting your time on Twitter. You are better off using that time doing something else.

For the past few days, I’ve noticed that adsense data are not appearing in analytics. There’s like an 8 hour lag for the adsense stats to become available. This means that I have to check today’s adsense data tomorrow (or yesterday’s adsense data today) because of the time difference between US and UK.

Integrated adsense data in analytics gives you insights into what webpages are converting the most for you. You see how many people have clicked on the ads by each url and how much money you’ve made as well. This should be used along with channels provided by adsense itself. Channels wil enable you to see stats for a group of webpages (for example by category) to see the overall performance of each category.

The new default adsense fonts will not necessarily increase your CTR. For my website, as soon as the new fonts were implemented, I saw a decrease in CTR and earnings. The reason for that is that if your ads don’t blend nicely with the theme of your website, people will not click on the ads. On my website, I use Arial with 12px font size. However the adsense ads were in Verdana at 14px font size. So they were sticking out like a sore thumb and looked more like ads than blend in with the content of the website. Result – decreased CTR and earnings. I’ve changed it back to what it was before – Arial at 12px and I’m hoping everything will get back to normal now.

Beginning of August (1st or 2nd), I decided to change the text content on my of my webpage because it was not ranking at all for its keywords (I checked the first 2o result pages of google and it was not there!). I had a read through the body of the article and I wasn’t quite pleased with the text, so I made considerable changes to the article and I would say at least 50% of the content was changed. Now this is a risk that you don’t really want to take because when Google crawls your webpage again, it will find that the content differs significantly from what it was before and this could get you removed completely from the index and unranked for an unknown amount of time.

I took the risk because I couldn’t be worst off (c’mon not ranked among the 1st 20 pages!) and I speculated that my rankings will come back within at least 2 weeks. I checked rankings for the keywords for that page nearly everyday after making the change and today (after nearly 2 weeks), I’m listed on Page 4 of the search results at Position 38.

If Google has already crawled and indexed your website and its webpages, then you shouldn’t really change your title tags because the webpage will be sandboxed for some time (can be weeks or months). Therefore you will see a drop (could be massive) in rankings. The only excuse you have for changing your title tags is if they were really bad in the first place!

I have changed the title tags on the question part of my site so that the first letter of each word is capitalised. This is not really a big change as the title tag will be exactly the same it was before but will be just more pleasant to the eyes. I found that when searching on google, title tags which have the first letter of each word capitalised are more easy to read, which means that it could draw in more visitors for me. Hence I’m making this change today and if the effects are positive, I will implement it to the rest of the site.