The Magic of Life » Internet

A Gotcha of the Canonical Tag

Merlin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:26:03 +0000

One of the money-making enterprises on the web is our Tie-Dye Clothing web site. We had a very nice run after a bigger women’s magazine featured our shoulder and buddha bags. Sales went down two weeks after the buzz caused by that article ended and I thought that was to be expected. But when sales went away totally, I knew something was wrong and I started to investigate.

A Google search of ‘tie-dye clothing’ had shown us on the first page of the search engine results pretty consistently. But when I looked yesterday we were nowhere to be seen.

Did I make a Google-Boo-Boo that I was punished and sent to the end of the line?

Sure looked like it. But I could not imagine what I might have done there – always tried to be a good Google citizen. Sure, I had to do some more investigation.

Next thing to try was the search term that always showed us very much at the top of the SERPs – ‘tie-dye bags’. Yeah, we were still there but it was not right either:

First of all it did not say anything about tie-dye bags in the title and then look at the URL at the bottom – there is an extra .com tagged to the end of the correct URL, and that, obviously did net get a user to the right web page. Made sense now that we had not sold any bags lately.

Then I wanted to know when the main page had been indexed last. Firefox has the Google toolbar installed and next to the page rank indicator there is a drop down, one of which is ‘Cached snapshot of page’ which I often use to inspect how Google sees my pages and to find the date of the last cached version, which should be about the time when Google came visiting the last time.

To my great surprise, when I clicked that link, I got to the error page that indicated that the link pointed to – again -

www.thaidye.com.com

Now it was clear that Google had a bug and it was costing me money!

Next stop of my investigation was the webmaster tools – could not find anything wrong here, and then I was off to the webmaster forum, where I described the bug, Google has, and asked for help.

The answer was quick to come. Bob Gladstein set me straight, real quick – not Google’s fault but all mine. Here is what I realized after seeing Bob’s observation:

When I had learned about the canonical tag a while ago, I thought that this was a great idea and I found a plugin for my blogs quickly to utilize it. On the ThaiDye web site, which is completely hand crafted, I thought that I implement that as well and I added this line in the header section of the main page

proud as can be about how smart I am, not noticing that in copy and pasting I got that extra .com in there. I actually don’t know how long ago I did that, but it finally bit me in the butt. I found out that the product page, which might be hit by quite a few different URL – with parameters, etc. – also had the double com canonical link command but is now back in it’s old beauty as

http://www.thaidye.com/products.php to show all our amazing tie-dye in the right way

I just wish there was something in the Google webmaster tools to correct the boo-boo I made, like the URL removal tool, but it does not appear to be the case. So I just sit tight and wait for Google to come by and read my corrected web pages.

Chat – or ‘Nurph’ with me

Merlin — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 03:20:13 +0000

The guy with the big sombrero told me about Nurph – or nur.ph – but without telling me what it actually is.

He made me try it!

And the mystery he created did indeed work and it caused the link up there on the left side of the page.

I will continue his course of action and also not tell you what it is but send you on a quest to find out.

Breast Smilies

Merlin — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:21:21 +0000

In the beginning of the World Wide Web transferring data was slow and costly so methods were devised to minimize the amount of data transmitted and still convey the message.

One of the results was the ‘Smiley’ – an icon consisting of only a few characters and thus very cheap and fast to transmit. The added advantage was that with just three characters you could indicate that you were smiling or frowning instead of writing a little novel to express that this was your emotion when writing an email or quick instant message.

Since then bandwidth has become a lot cheaper and the reason to reduce the amount of data is not relevant any more. But in our illiterate times it is still necessary for many people to have the means to simply express if they are saying something humorous or threatening…

I’m going to kill you
I’m going to kill you

Obviously, specialized areas of the www thought that they require such symbology as well, and today we show you one area where such iconography was very successfully implemented – in the description of the female breast – a never-ending interest of the male population.

Without further ado, here are the your breast smileys…

Perfect breasts

Fake silicone breasts

Perky breasts

Big nipple breasts

A cups

D cups

Wonder bra breasts

Cold breasts

Lopsided breasts

Pierced Breasts

Hanging Tassels Breasts

Grandma’s Breasts

Against The Shower Door Breasts

Android Breasts

Martha Stewart’s Breasts

UPDATE: I am totally surprised how many of you have found this post – it is totally amazing! WSo, I thought that, if you got here in search for enhancing somebodies breasts – maybe your own, you should check out the pastic surgeon who really makes beautiful breasts. (Full disclosure: I run Dr. Orloff’s web site.)

Discrepancies on the Web

Merlin — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:04:49 +0000

Not all things on the internet are as they appear. You might have guess that already, but today I will bring you proof – hard evidence.

Stumbling along I ran into one campanion stumbler who could my eye – wonder if there is any male on this planet who’s eye this person would not have caught. Take a look…

If your eye get caught what can you do? The rest of the body, including arms and finger that are usually operating keyboard and mouse have to follow. You can’t just detach them, can you?

So, following the eyes, the keyboard and mouse fingers operated the browser controls in a way that the eyes ended up at the web site belonging to this stumble-upon member with the name of FNA.

And what a great website that is! I really must recommend to every designer to take a look. It certainly appeals to me based upon its clear and minimalistic design.

A site like this invites you to explore and so I did. The eyes still commanding the rest of my body to look for more pictures – and then I found it – the email address…

It starts with Frank!

Frank??

No related posts.

This Blog does not use rel=”nofollow”

Merlin — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:16:55 +0000

I just installed a plugin to this blog to remove the default behavior to add the nofollow tag to all URLs that a commenter writes.

The nofollow tag was intended to reduce SPAM comments on blogs because it removes the incentive to post these spam comments. Google rates a page largely by the number of links from other web pages to it. The nofollow tag, that is added to a link as rel=”nofollow,” indicated to Google, not to count this link. After this, why would a blackhat SEO add a spam comment to a blog if that link would not help him to reach his objective to rank higher?

In theory that worked, but it had a side effect. Real commenters, who would have added value to a blog by commenting good comments, also stayed away because they also had lost the benefit to get link popularity. They went away to other methods of getting in-bound links. Or they went to blogs that did not have that nofollow tag set on their commenter’s contributions.

I use the plugin Nofollow Free to remove nofollow tags from comment links. It is configurable in that you can choose to remove each and every nofollow tag, or only those of registered users, and you can create a blacklist of words that would trigger to add the nofollow tag again – the male enhancer pill with a V is probably a good member for that field.

Searching for the Most Intelligent Guy on the Web

Merlin Silk — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:22:00 +0000

About a year ago I made this experiment in SEO to see how with a – admittedly – not very often used search term I can dominate the search engines. So I posted this blog post about the most intelligent guy on the whole web and got it to rank #1 on Google quickly.

But today, when checking out something at Google’s webmaster tools I noticed that the link to this post generated a 404 error – oops! It took me a while to notice what was different in the URL that worked and the one that did not. A little sub-directory /blog/ – I had moved WordPress from it’s directory /blog/ down to the root of the web site.

The whole thing turned out to be a false alarm because Google had also indexed the later version of the site without the /blog/ and the page was found just fine. But as I was already looking into this I thought why not revisit the issue and strengthen my position as the most important guy on the internet and everywhere else.

So, yes, if you ended up here on this page then you probably – for whatever sick reason – searched for the this one totally smart guy on the web. I suppose you were hoping to find your name – sorry – but that position is taken by your’s truly Merlin G. Silk!

So, I would suggest you get a life and do something constructive.

C Ya!

Scientology, Hackers and Controversy

Merlin Silk — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:44:05 +0000

A few days ago the Hackers Anonymous declared war on the Church of Scientology, and today the internet is in a buzz about an apparent Google bombing. If you don’t know what Google bombing is: it’s ganging up of many – mostly bloggers – to all link to a specific page with the same text. For example a while ago a Google bomb was launched on George Bush’s bio page with the words “total failure,” but since then Google patched that hole and Google bombs became at least difficult. For reaching a top ranking now Google required the words that link to the site to appear within that site. So as long as George’s bio page did not contain the words ‘total ‘and ‘failure,’ he would not be a total failure (my wording was intended.)

But today when you search for ‘dangerous cult’ the top result was the Scientology main site www.Scientology.org.

Search Engine Land was not sure if that really was a Google bomb as the Scientology front page does not – certainly – contain the word ‘cult’ even though it does contain the word ‘dangerous.’ Another fact that supported that doubt was, that only some three hundred sites could be found that pointed to the Scientology site with the text ‘dangerous cult.’

And here is where the real power of the internet comes in. When I did the search on Yahoo

linkdomain:scientology.org “dangerous cult”

I got over 1400 hits. In other words, since that article on Search Engine Land was written, which might have been a few hours before I read it, more than 1000 other people picked up this story and wrote/blogged about it. If it has not been a Google bomb so far, it was now. And I am certainly proud to participate by supplying a link to a dangerous cult as well.

I know the Cof$ from the inside but I have to admit that I just love this power of the ‘Don’t mess with us!’ There are just more and more sites like this about the Delphi Academy of Los Angeles as a recruiting base springing up that it can’t be stopped centrally. It’s guerrilla warfare the Cof$ is involved in now and history has shown that such a war can not be won.