I finally got around to getting the statistics for September 2007 for the Google Webmaster Help Groups (archive.org) finished up. I have to admit the numbers for September aren’t the best, especially the counts for the posts by Googlers. Getting started at Google took quite some time and a lot of learning :) . And wow - look at the Googlers post in October (great work, everyone!). On a slightly sader note, I don’t think I can continue to provide these statistics here.
Being #1 with "Untitled Document" and Flash
Untitled Document We’ve all seen it - “untitled document (archive.org)” is a popular page name, probably the most popular one out there. I wonder who decided that “untitled document” was better than no title at all? There are a lot of those pages out there, do they even know that a good title can do wonders? Being “untitled” doesn’t make your pages uncrawlable though. If you wanted to go all out, you could make sure that your page has no indexable content at all and heck, just use Flash to display the whole homepage while we’re at it.
Opportunities in Search
So I went to visit Google in Mountain View … … and learned that every second sentence has to be prefixed with “so”. Wait, that’s not all. I’m sure you’re all just reading this to hear about the secret information they’ve been feeding me, heh. Sorry, you’ll have to join Google yourself to find out more about that part. It’s been really interesting so far, so many documents to read and digest, so many neat people to meet and chat with, so much good food to eat (good thing I’m only here for a week).
Interview with Richard Hearne ("Red Cardinal")
Hi Richard, welcome to my blog! When I look through the top posters in the Google Webmaster Help groups, you’re almost always in there - it’s great to have you there and your posts bring in a lot of background knowledge that I’m sure many site owners appreciate. It’s interesting that you are - as far as I can tell - the only one of the top posters who is professionally active (archive.
Google Webmaster Groups statistics for August 2007
Another month goes by, here are the statistics for August (and some comparisons to July in brackets) 2007. The numbers Number of new threads = 1329 [+5.3%] Number of new posts = 7676 [-1.0%] Average number posts/new thread = 5.48 [-4.5%] Number of posts by new users = 1061 (13.8%) [+30.0%] Number of threads by new users = 813 (61.2%) [+13.4%] Average number of posts in threads by new users = 4.
A set of command-line Windows website tools
If you have to do things over and over again, it’s a good idea to use a tool to make things easier. Windows is a bit limited (or very - when compared to Linux) when it comes to batch file scripts and “wget” is limited to what it can do right out the box, so I sat down and wrote a few command line tools to help me with some of the website checks that I like to do.
Interview with Craig "cass-hacks"
Hi Craig, welcome to my blog :-) ! Craig is, for those that haven’t noticed, an alien from some solar system far away. At least that’s the conclusion I came to after reading his introduction (archive.org), the overview page (archive.org) on his site and his “my first computer (archive.org)” posts. I’m pretty sure that he’s either alien or very, very creative (as in creative writing), I mean seriously, “I built my own computer when I was 12.
The website hack you'd never find
Warning: do not try the URLs here unless your system is locked down properly. I suggest using a “virual machine” (I use VMware) to test things like this. The hack itself is complicated, the system is simple - skip the complicated part if you’re in a hurry. It all started with a posting (archive.org) like this: When I do a google search for [Jonathan Wentworth Associates] the first result is: _Jonathan Wentworth Associates, LTD Welcome to Jonathan Wentworth Associates, a respected resource for world-class orchestral soloists, conductors, opera, chamber music, chamber orchestras, .
Interview with Matt / "Dockarl"
Hi “Doc”, it’s cool to have you here! It’s great that the web removes barriers like the physical distance from here in Switzerland to Australia. Matt has been one of the regular contributors to the Google Webmaster Help Groups since January 2007. He has a diverse background: Agriculture and Computers, an interesting mixture, or how he puts it in his profile (archive.org): “I know about cows and computers” :-).
Moving to a new office in September
The last couple years I’ve spent a lot of time in the Google Webmaster Help groups (archive.org). Most of that time I’ve tried to help people with problems with their websites and Google. Together with the webmaster (every site is unique) and the other active members in the groups we’ve tried to work out where things are going wrong, what needs to be changed and often we’ve been able to fix things so that the website is back in the index, the content is getting found and hopefully, the webmaster has learned a thing or two.