SEO Emperor

One of my blogs was really down on traffic the last couple of weeks. Most of the traffic normally comes from google. I have written some good unique content in my native language on this blog and it ranks well for some keywords. I couldn’t really figure out what the problem was and my search engine ranking (SERP’s) hadn’t changed. While browsing digital point I came across a post about a Wordpress hack. Some code is injected to the wp-blog-header.php file, this code redirects search engine traffic to another site. I started checking all my blogs, and yes the blog that I have been working so hard on had some encrypted javascript code in that file. It’s the first time I had a security problem with one of my sites. It’s no fun working hard on a site doing your best to rank well with google and then having someone steal your search engine traffic…

To fix the problem I just deleted the whole blog (not the database of course) and installed a new wordpress, the latest version 2.5.1. I hope that does the trick. To be honest I should have updated this blog a long time ago. But I had some trouble with a plugin that didn’t work under the new 2.5 version. Lucklily I found a fix for that so I could upgrade without trouble.

Just found the ultimate ping list. The biggest list of ping services I have seen so far. So it’s not a bad idea to copy paste this list. For a Wordpress 2.5 blog just go to settings and then select writing, at the bottom you will see a box that you can fill in called update services. Just copy paste the list there and you’re done. Every time you update your blog all these services will be notified of the changes to your blog. More information about the Wordpress update services van be found at the Wordpress codex site.
Click here for The ultimate ping list

Zangocash is a pay per install program, that claims big payouts. You put some code on your website and visitors can then download some software to view videos or play games and so on. Doesn’t sound bad? Zango is formerly known as 180solutions, 180solutions is an adware provider with a very bad name. The software you install will pull in ads related to the websites you visit and install other programs that behave like spyware. Uninstalling it is quite difficult for non computer savvy people. I have seen more and more sites with zango in the last couple of months. A lot of webmasters are reporting big payouts from zango on webmaster forums. I think it’s a very dirty way of making money, and really dont want anything to do with these kind of programs. I have also read reports of webmasters that had there sites deindexed by google after putting Zango code on their sites.

When buying a website there is always a lot of risk involved. The owner can claim all he wants and show you all sorts of screenshots. But you will never know how real they are, it’s to easy these days to photoshop a couple of screenshots. So we have to guess how much traffic the site really gets. Luckily there are a couple of sites that can give you an idea what kind of traffic a website receives. The most famous one is Alexa, Alexa will give you a graph showing the percentage of global internet users that your site receives, and a traffic rank. This traffic rank is what it’s all about. The lower this rank the more traffic your site gets. How Alexa gets this statistics? Well they count traffic from people using the Alexa toolbar. This is why you have to look at the Alexa rank with a grain of salt, a big grain of salt. Not so many people have this toolbar installed. From my experience the Alexa rank is only accurate for sites with lot’s of traffic. Not for small sites with only a couple of hundred visitors a day.
There is an alternative for Alexa, Compete. Compete claims to give more accurate traffic statistics. They not only use data from a toolbar but also logs from ISP’s. I check them both regularly, the only accurate results I have been getting are for my biggest site. A site that does 5000 unique visitors a day. I have lot of other smaller sites, blogs like this one for which the data is meaningless. So don’t put to much trust in statistics from Alex and Compete.

Also having problems finding the right wordpress theme for your blog? There are thousands of free wordpress themes on the net. Searching for wordpress themes on google gives more then 10 million results. Still I can’t find a theme that I like, that’s why this blog still runs on the default wordpress theme.
I have a photo site that currently runs on static html. I never put much time in the design of the site, I regularly put up new photo galleries and that’s about it. I want to write some content for the site, and don’t want to spent a lot of time writing html. With a blog you can concentrate on the content and not have to worry to much about webdesign. So I have decided to make a wordpress theme myself. Nothing fancy, I already searched for some wordpress themes which I can use and modify to my liking. Why start from scratch if someone else has already done the hard work Sometime ago I made a simple wordpress theme for another site, I just modified the default wordpress theme to my liking. It is a simple 3 column theme, it took me about 3 hours to make. Not bad for the first time, I had never really looked into how wordpress really worked so it was all new to me. Actually modifying a wordpress theme is not that hard. You don’t need to be a skilled coder, basic knowledge of CSS and some html is enough. PHP skills will be needed if you want to make an advanced theme with a non standard layout.
Some of the resources I have used to make my own wordpress themes:
How to make your own wordpress theme.
How to create a wordpress theme.