It is now possible to hit the publish button on your latest blog post and see the result within 30 seconds on Google. I am not exaggerating, I’ve just done it. I hit the publish button, copied the headline, fired up Google and pasted in the query. Hit search (yes, I know you can type enter to save time) and there’s my blog post in the number one spot (and number two indented which means they actually indexed one page and updated another). In 30 seconds flat, probably faster because I wasn’t rushing. Now how the hell do they do that and just how fast is Google?

The fact I took the headline and first two paragraphs from a news site and the original was ranked at number three is a bit embarrassing (for them), but of course I gave them a read more link to funnel the traffic their way.

I’ve been noticing the speed pick-up all month but now it’s just crazy fast. Think about it, an obscure little web site in the arsehole of nowhere coughs up a post and somewhere out there ravenous Google beasts instantly detect movement and pounce. They race the prey at light speed back to the Google hive, stash it in just the right spot and then bolt away to find the next catch. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365.25 days per year, for millions of web sites all over the planet.

You can’t help being impressed (or make that depressed if you are Yahoo or Bing).

Of course you can’t achieve this turnaround with just any web site. You need to work to prime the Google beasts so they notice when you twitch. If you hardly ever move then you eventually get ignored even if you resort to jumping up and down and waving your arms around.

Yes I know Google has been indexing pages faster and faster for a while now but something has definitely changed, something has picked up a gear. I’m aware I could run over to the face-slappingly smug blog run by that famous Google guy and get all the details but, as it happens, I’m not a fan boy by nature.

The “activity” thing must be for real then, because why else would they go to such lengths to provide performance this impressive? If you don’t know what the “activity” thing is, SEO bods and rebel (i.e. new product launch imminent) marketers are saying that Google is about to pay a whole lot more attention to freshness and social “buzz” at the expense of traditional on page SEO and link building.

Put another way, pull SENuke back to second gear and get yourself a blog and a Twitter account. Plus get yourself a cat, you’ll need something inane to talk about in the land of social media. Love it or not that’s where we’re going because that’s where Google is taking us – fast!

Okay… I’m hitting the publish button… NOW!

TwentyTen is a very clean and practical theme and, unlike the previous default, is perfectly acceptable as a production theme. I’ve created a child theme 95% based on TwentyTen as a rapid deployment template and it works really well apart from one niggle with the page titles.

TwentyTen tries to pick up some of the title rewriting capability found in plugins like All in One SEO pack but I prefer the latter and would rather WordPress leave my titles alone. There’s also an error whereby the site name is jammed up against the page name without any spacing and this looks ugly and could have implications for SEO.

WordPress does the rewriting using the function twentyten_filter_wp_title() found in the theme’s functions.php file. It hooks wp_title to achieve the end result. An easy way to undo the rewrite would be to disable the filter in the parent theme but on the next upgrade the filter would be restored.

So I’ve applied remove_filter in my child theme’s header.php file and that should do the trick no matter how many times TwentyTen is upgraded.

Getting to the point, here’s the relevant section in my child header.php, the code you need to add is in red:


<title><?php

?></title>


Obviously this only applies if you are using a child theme based on TwentyTen. If you are hacking the parent directly then comment out the following in the main theme functions.php file to achieve the same result:


// add_filter( 'wp_title', 'twentyten_filter_wp_title', 10, 2 );


In fact just pay a visit so you can re-live the experience of what the web used to be. No pop-ups, pop-unders, exit splashes, little men walking onto the screen – just calm, static, quality, content. Oh boy, those were the good old days.

In the near future web developers (fingers crossed) will finally be able to design once in the knowledge their code will be compatible with all the browser choices out there. Of course we have the mobile market to consider which is a whole different ball game. But let’s just hope the painful lessons of the past have been learned and this new medium is rolled neatly into place. Utopia beckons. Well it will seem like utopia by comparison to what has gone before.

The main trouble developers face now is the number of legacy IE installations out there, especially in the corporate world. IE6 still has a frighteningly high user base, dwindling fast but still significant because it was so dominant.

Add in the folks who managed to make it to IE7 but, inexplicably, have missed out on IE8 and you are left with three distinct versions of non-standards compliant browsers to account for. What makes it even worse, these version of IE aren’t even compatible with each other and you can’t reliably install them on the same computer so you can test your web site.

Despite the surge in competition, Internet Explorer remains the most popular browser so ensuring your sites are compatible with it (and all its active versions) is a necessary task and a major headache.

You could install three machines running the different IE versions and test locally, I guess. Or there are a few online services available that will load your site and return a screen shot. This is okay for testing visual output but tells you nothing about interactivity.

Paid services exist that allow you to remotely connect to servers running installations of most of the active browser brands and versions. I’ve never used these myself because having to pay for Microsoft’s mistakes is something I won’t do.

Which is why I was delighted when I stumbled upon a free resource that is simply superb. Have a look at this: Spoon.net Browser Sandbox

This is a free virtual service that allows you to fire up a remote copy of any of the major browsers and run it just as if it were installed on your local machine. All you have to do is download the Spoon Plugin and you’re good to go.

It actually works and works very well. I downloaded the plugin, it downloaded fine but didn’t give any confirmation message when complete which prompted me to think, of course, “There is no Spoon!” But it runs silently in the background and then all you do is visit their site, click on the application you want to run and within a few seconds you have the app running on your desktop. This is not some hobbled version, it’s the real deal so go ahead and test as if you’d just installed from CD.

Great stuff, browser cross compatibility testing SOLVED! This changes the game.

There’s a whole bunch of other stuff you can load up also, including the GIMP, a version of Navicat (try it if you are bored with MySQLAdmin), games, utilities, tons of stuff.

I’ve no idea how long this service has been running but I just found it and I’m chuffed to bits. Check it out for yourself, you’ll be impressed.

My last few site launches are still sitting around waiting on Google to grace them with its presence. Oh sure, the crawler popped by after about 20 minutes. But can I get anything indexed? Not on your life.

Okay, so the Internet is becoming a busier place. But can things have changed that much from a few months ago? And I know I don’t have a God given right to get indexed. But neither does Google have a similar right to maintain its monopoly, which is what it undoubtedly has given the ongoing farces at Yahoo and Microsoft.

Not being able to get indexed, despite following the Google bible, is becoming a serious impediment to building a business. Especially time sensitive ventures like product launches.

I know this problem doesn’t affect the big boys because I work that end of the game too and it’s still no problem to flash a few links at Google and be indexed in minutes. So are we still on a level playing field? Are my observations purely coincidental?

I could try going to the Google forums and asking directly. I wonder, has there ever been a bigger collection of self-satisfied and smug sycophants gathered in one place before? To these guys the fact that Google owns the Internet is a good thing. Many of these people are Americans, you know – the land of competition where the free market is free? They allow a pass for Google though.

Yes, I’m ranting. But I’m wondering how it has come to pass that one company can have such a degree of control over what is touted as the one truly democratic and open resource on the planet, the Internet. Can it possibly be healthy? Particularly if Google is applying hugely unbalanced criteria that favours big over small and established over new. Now I can’t prove it but it sure looks that way to me.

I also hear Google has been shutting down the accounts of thousands of online marketers. Not just the spammers, who I’m sure nobody has any sympathy for. But also legitimate marketers for (I’ve heard but cannot confirm) not providing the sort of content Google thinks is useful to its users. Say what? Who are they to decide? Just index the Internet already and let the users decide what is useful and what isn’t. This isn’t China yet.

Besides, who exactly made Google what it is today? That’s right, marketers whether they were large businesses or one man operations. A lot of money has flowed into Google’s coffers in the biggest continuity program known to man. Now Google wants to be fussy about the type of business it once happily grabbed in days when doing no evil still seemed to mean something.

What depresses me even more is we never seem to learn that letting these corporations take control always ends in tears. So this adoration of Facebook as a rival to Google is ill founded. I guarantee, you give Facebook the power and it will abuse it just as quickly.

Anyway, I can’t change any of this and just have to accept it. But I can have a moan. If Google insists on running the whole show then at least run it properly and give everyone a fair shake.

Google – get on with it, I have a business to run and I’m a user too!

I’ve settled on WordPress for all my new sites. The idea of reinventing the wheel by going back to static sites makes no sense. Even site design is easily taken care or by picking one of the thousands of free themes out there and simply plugging it in.

Previously web site design was a bit of an ordeal. I would create my static templates, mess around with CSS until everything was the way I wanted it, battle with the usual cross browser issues and sometimes many days later admire the finished article. Then I’d run the site through the obligatory XHTML and CSS validators, fix whatever was broken and finally launch it. I was never one for DreamWeaver, I tried but it always seemed to restrict rather than enhance my options.

Since I’ve moved from collaborating in large projects to producing many, much simpler sites for my own business WordPress works for me because it saves me time. Install, pick my theme, add my plugins and start producing content. This procedure takes me around 30 minutes tops. It’s just too easy. So easy in fact you can be lulled into a false sense of security and become lazy in the process.

For instance, today I ran one of my new WordPress sites through the XHTML validator. I was shocked at what I found.

In total there were 193 errors! That’s the most I have ever encountered on a page I’ve produced, by a large margin. Horrified I started checking down the list of problems.

I was finding closing paragraph tags where I didn’t expect them, the validator was showing nothing at all for my document outline, it was even telling me my closing body and html elements were faulty! What the hell?

WordPress users will know there are two methods for adding content to a new post or page. You either use the visual editor or go straight to HTML markup. I prefer the latter as I believe (believed) it gives me more precise control.

So I checked out my source content in the HTML editor. All appeared fine with none of the spurious paragraph tags in evidence and, according to what I was seeing in the edit box, clean and valid markup.

A check of the rendered page source code gave me my answer. Not only was WordPress modifying my content by sticking in seemingly random paragraph and break tags, the theme I was using had a broken structure. The only reason my pages were displaying in the browser as intended was because the browser itself was compensating for my horribly broken markup.

Immediately I searched my admin panel for a way to turn this content rewriting off. No luck, it seems this “feature” is hard-wired into the application source code. I could have changed that to get rid of this unwanted helper but what about the next time I upgrade? I would come right back.

I understand why this feature exists, it’s to allow users who don’t know anything about HTML and have no desire to learn to produce content in much the same way as they would do so in the word processors and email clients they are used to. Fair enough, but what about me and anyone else who wants to control their output?

Also, what about that theme with the fundamentally broken structure? Now I’m not talking about some freebie theme I downloaded from a dubious source. I’m talking about a very well known and expensive theme that makes the claim of producing valid XHTML.

Some might wonder, if the page looks okay in the browser who cares what the underlying code is like? To those people I would ask them to try visiting any Google forum and asking any sort of question about your web site – why hasn’t it been indexed, why has its ranking dropped off, anything really.

The “helpful” folks in those forums, smug know-it-alls to a man it appears, will always shoot back, “Your code is rubbish, you should start by fixing this, that, the other!” On the Google forums, at least, valid markup is the minimum requirement for getting any form of civilised assistance.

Does this, therefore, imply Google places weight on the quality of your markup when ranking your pages or deciding whether to even index them? Like most things with Google, your guess is as good as mine but it sure seems that way if you listen to the sighs and groans of the Google forum dwellers when they discover you (or rather your template designer) hasn’t attached a type declaration to a style element. Perhaps they get house points for sucking up to Google?

And if they are right, is your theme and even WordPress itself harming your rankings? If any reader with a desire to share knowledge (without the attitude problem prevalent in the Google forums) would like to clue me in here I’d be most grateful. It’s worth remembering that nobody is an expert in every discipline, except for Google forum junkies.

There are ways around these problems which I’ll cover in another posting. After much work the pages on my new site are all valid. I guess I’d better check the pages on this blog next.

Clean and semantic markup is not just about avoiding scorn in the Google forums. Don’t forget about screen readers or the increasing number of ways sites can interact or extract information based on markup structure. Plus I’m betting browsers render valid markup more quickly than broken code and hints abound that Google will be taking page load speed into consideration as part of its ranking algorithm.

Why not head across to W3C now and check out your own sites. You might be in for a surprise.

I’m not bogged down in technical issues or spending ages touching up graphics, it’s more trying to build something that I can leverage in the future.

Should I go with direct links out to affiliate sites, should I use an Amazon aStore, maybe a combination of both?

To be honest, I haven’t found a good solution anywhere, and I’ve looked hard and tried a large number of permutations. I’m not claiming the solutions don’t exist, I just haven’t discovered them yet.

I want something genuinely useful for the customer. Some type of added value (as per my mission statement) that makes it worth the while of the customer to use my site rather than go direct.

Once I have my process these mini-sites will only take a couple of days, or less, to launch. My first has taken a couple of weeks but it’s worth it if I get the process right.

Of course for every day I delay in pushing out the site I lose a day of potential earnings. Put another way, I’m aware of the costs attached to dithering, polishing, tweaking. I’ll afford myself this luxury just this one time.

The site will be running on WordPress using a custom theme I’ve knocked together from various super helpful resources on the Internet.

Later this week I’ll document everything I did to get the site built and launched. The first one was always going to be the hardest but it should get easier from here.

Meanwhile I’m also trying to hold down a regular job. Busy times, taking action, it’s all good.

Still, as you can see, it’s going to take patience to get the wheel rolling.

Startup site statistics for marketplex.net

Not sure what happened on the 7th January, maybe all the search engines and robots coming to call.

For whatever reason, maybe WordPress updated something or maybe I wrote over the file, .htaccess was reset to its initial state thereby breaking every affiliate link on my site.

I can’t claim it has affected my sales because I don’t have any, but I can imagine what it might be like if the same thing happened to a frequent seller. Mind you, I’m sure such a person would notice quicker than I did given the varying amounts at stake.

Moral of the story is to check that .htaccess file after any significant change you make to the site and also following any WordPress upgrade. Common sense really but I’d hate to be the cause of anybody losing revenue.

Also, as per Google’s request, I have made all my affiliate links “nofollow” and added an exclusion to the virtual /route/ folder in robots.txt just in case I ever forget the manual process.

Each day is a learning day.