Green Complex » Web Stuff

Some Insight into Google Page Rank

Jason Green — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 06:33:56 +0000

Often I hear the question, how do you increase your page rank? So here’s the skinny on what Page Rank is, why you need it, and how to get it. First thing I’ll tell you is that anyone who says they know how it works, (Google aside of course), is fibbing. That is, it’s true nature is a secret, but what I can tell you is that from experimentation of fellow webmasters in the community, is that there are things you can do to help and to hurt your rank. Now, bear in mind, this is an authority rank, NOT the position in the SERPS. The position in serps is even more complicated (If you hovered over the Page Rank link for Wikipedia you’ll see just how complicated I mean!) But it is widely believed that your standings in serps are stronger if you have a good page rank.

Page rank is calculated on a PER PAGE basis. Is used to be for your entire site, but those days are long gone. Deep Linking is where the future of link building is at, and it’s all about relevancy.

So to build up your PR, you’ll need a link back to your page, from a page that is about the same topic. Gone are the days of buying a link from a PR7 website and enjoying the link juice (Unless your site was also the same kind of site).

The next question I get is, how many backlinks do I need to get a PR of X…

Well after some digging I found these old charts, that may help give you an idea…

Now each one may be a little different, but the consensus is the same, and when you see the emerging pattern, you’ll begin to see what I’m talking about. But remember, if you get a link back from a root page like http://domain.com then it’s worth a little more than http://domain.com/links.html and if it’s on every single page, then worth a LOT more.

Uploading images without a file extension to WP

Jason Green — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:14:16 +0000

WP Core hacking

I used this code recently to hack wordpress’s core to allow image uploads that have no file extension.

I was getting a invalid file type security error and had tried all sorts of httaccess trickery to get it to work when I finally resorted to hacking the core of WordPress MU 3.0. This is pretty easy as I found out and only required me to add one line of code. Some of the issues I’m having are that the file size isn’t reported and neither is the dimensions. Any advice or a way for me to make this into a plugin would be very nice, as I’ve never made a wordpress plugin before.

In wp-includes/functions.php find line #2359 and look for this code, and make it look like the code below.

function wp_check_filetype( $filename, $mimes = null ) {
	if ( empty($mimes) )
		$mimes = get_allowed_mime_types();
	$type = false;
	$ext = false;

	foreach ( $mimes as $ext_preg => $mime_match ) {
		$ext_preg = '!\.(' . $ext_preg . ')$!i';
		if ( preg_match( $ext_preg, $filename, $ext_matches ) ) {
			$type = $mime_match;
			$ext = $ext_matches[1];
			break;
		}
	}
// http://Green.cx (Allow Uploading of Images without Extension )
if ($ext==''){$ext='jpg'; $type='image/jpg';}
// End WordPress Core Hack
	return compact( 'ext', 'type' );
}

Effectively block Comment Link spam

Jason Green — Thu, 13 May 2010 22:33:34 +0000

Effectively blocking Comment Link spam in WordPress

A simple little wordpress setting can save you a lot of headachs in regards to WordPress Spam Comments…

So I noticed about 330 Spam Comments that needed moderation in my WordPress the other day and that’s when I hit my limit. I hate spammers, and link spammers are the worst. They spam links in comments trying to “Steal” your page rank, or piggy back off of it or whatever. To boost their sites rank in Google. That is the dumbest thing they could do however, because if Google sees 1,000′s of blog comments linking back to your site overnight, Google will ban you. So what’s the point? Why do they do this?

They buy spamming software for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, with the promises that Google will love their website and they will make ten times what the app cost. LOL If that were true, why would they DARE to sell their own software? Why wouldn’t they just dominate Google and rule the world? Because they already have! They used the software back when it worked, after the big “G” stopped them, they needed a new source of income. So they go fishing for suckers. It’s those poor dumb sheep that listen to what these “Black Hat SEO Elite” preach and buy into their crappy comment link spamming software.

So if it’s so rampant how do we fight back? Easy, NO links in comments. Period. Not this No Follow crap either. How easy is it to do this? In word press admin go to your Settings section in the lower left. Then scroll down to the black list text box, and copy paste this in to it.

.a
.b
.c
.d
.e
.f
.g
.h
.i
.j
.k
.l
.m
.n
.o
.p
.q
.r
.s
.t
.u
.v
.w
.x
. y
.z

(One per line) And finally save your settings. This will block any comment that has a .com .cx .ru . anything

Yes, if someone types a sentence and doesn’t space between them it will block it, but IMO that’s worth the effort to effectively eliminate comment link spam. Can they still spam you? Yes, absolutely, but plain words aren’t as bad as them dragging your Page Rank down and making an association from your site to theirs.

How to add FB Like to every post

Jason Green — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 05:29:08 +0000

How to add the Facebook “Like” button on every post in any theme.

It’s quite simple actually, I’ll guide you through the whole process after the jump…

Getting Started adding a FB Like button to all posts in your theme:

Open one of the template files for your theme where you would like the button to be. Let’s say we want a button after the title in every post, so we would need to edit single.php

Where ever you want the code to appear, just drop in the following line of code: (Remove all the line breaks, this is a one liner.)

&layout=standard&show_faces=false&width=300&
action=like&font=segoe+ui&colorscheme=evil"
scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" 
style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:300px; height:30px">

Valid options for show_faces is true or false. True Shows faces and False doesn’t. Pretty simple.

Colorscheme is light, dark or evil. I choose evil, but I’m not sure what’s evil about it. Looks just the same as light does to me.

Obviously the width and height need to be adjusted to your theme and the placement in your theme to suit it best.

*In the code above, anything marked in this color is what you can change to customize it, or use the customization wizard located at: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like If you make your own using the wizard, don’t forget for the to add the Pink code after you generate your button, for the URL just put in blank.com and customize like you want. Then replace blank.com with for using in your wordpress theme.

WordPress is leaving Blogging behind

Jason Green — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 07:47:11 +0000

WordPress leaving behind blogging?

WordPress after over 5 years of being the perferred blogging tool of choice of professional bloggers and recognized worldwide, hosting over 4.5 Million Blogs on WordPress.com, Automatic the company behind WordPress has announced the Beta of version 3 of their popular Blogging platform will no longer be simply a blogging platform. The new WordPress version 3 sports many new features borrowed from its sister product WordPress-MU. In fact WordPress 3 marks a convergence between the two platforms into one very different and new WordPress we’ve never seen before. The Biggest Difference? Blog posts and Pages and now itemized as new objects that are definable.

WordPress 3.0

To explain it better, I’ll give you an example: You had Posts and Pages. You could get plugins to make Video blogs and plugins to make galleries. But now, Posts are defined as well as pages as “Types” and new “Types” can be defined. You can make a Post type for Podcasts, Videos, Photos and anything you can imagine. WordPress has grown beyond a blogging platform into a full fledged CMS. No, not wordpress AS a CMS WordPress IS a CMS. With content types definable, you could make a website that had a blog, static pages, videos, (for VLogs) PODcasts, download archives, flash pages, anything you can imagine. This ment a complete overhaul of the Page Navigation system in WordPress, and they sought out the Developers at WooThemes to apply their Page Navigation Editing system to the WP Core, and it looks awesome!

Other tidbits about WordPress 3:

Specific author templates. The function get_author_template() has been expanded in wp-includes/theme.php.
Background settings configuration
Custom Post Types

Some preview screenies for those interested:

WordPress 3 Menu Editor

WP3 Menu Editor

WordPress 3.0 Background settings

Background Editor

WordPress 3.0 Custom Post Types

Custome Post Type Creation

Speedup WordPress Tip#5

Jason Green — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:30:45 +0000

Looking back...

WordPress Speed Tip#5: Common Sense goes a long way…

A few things that are not-so-common sense would be to try to use your judgement and think about the following:

Less is more; and content is King Kong; we all like Google Analytics, Quantserv, mint, blogroll, Flash based Tag Clouds, and the whole moon. But Too much content at once can be overwhelming, for both your reader, and your server.
Go easy on plugins; you don’t have to be a minimalist but try to find that balance between too much and not enough.
Combine and reduce, from your categories, tags, plugins, css, javascript, etc. Yes you can get plugins to do this, but your adding a plugin, to do something over and over, that you could do once, and it wound’t need to be done again. Unless your milling out sites, this shouldn’t be too hard of a task.
Look at each widget on your site, is it really useful? How many tag clouds have you clicked on? I truly wonder about their importance. After each post, showing the tags is great, because they are relevant. A cloud does give one an instance impression about your site, but I don’t think alot of people have realized that. If your audience isn’t the least bit tech savvy, I kinda doubt they’d even know what it means.
Don’t ignore the point about widgets above. I know for a fact that the Google analytics widget that shows a page count, adds 15 seconds to the loading time, per widget. YES, two widgets == 28 Seconds load time. Widgets matter.
Avoid too many ads. Don’t get greedy, more ads usually means less $$ anyway. Esp Google Ads, the more ads you have a click value is divided by the number of ads on a page (Ok not exactly but the click value is negatively effected. This is exactly why google tells you to put ads everywhere, as click costs don’t change.) That’s a larger spread for google, but I digress, don’t smear ads everywhere unless you know exactly what you are doing.
Avoid “spammy” ads. I quite using ad brite a long time ago, some of their advertisers sneak code through the ads and a bad user experience on your site drives away traffic like the plague. These weird ad scripts can also slow your page down, like the ones that underline links everywhere. Those are the worst! I hate waiting on a page to load while it’s slowly loading ads all over it. I’m sure I’m not alone!
K.I.S.S. Keep it Simple Stupid, Don’t over complicate things by installing the first plugin you see. Look for alternative plugins that are better written or have better functionality, chances are If your not happy with it, then someone else isn’t either, and maybe they made a better one.

Speedup WordPress Tip#4

Jason Green — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:30:43 +0000

Beep!! Beep!!

Tip#4: Housekeeping is important!

Some common tips you see all over the internet is to remove deactivated plugins. DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! If you deactivated it once, don’t hang on to it. You didn’t like it once, you are not likely to want it the next day either! WordPress goes through all plugins, active or not, every page load. That’s alot of wasted cpu cycles per person accessing your site, and it adds up. What may not seem like a big deal late at night maybe a different story during peak times. The short of the point is to delete unused plugins.

Database maintenance: You’ll notice a common theme here, and that is the database speed is a major factor in determining how fast your page will load on the screen. There’s actually a few things you can do to help.

Turn off Post Revisions: I rarely use them, and when I go back to edit an old post it always says there is a newer version of the post, that’s because it auto-saved a copy of the post, after I saved it. Ok, this is just plain wasteful, turn that off, and to do so, simply add this to your wp-config.php:define(‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 500 ); // seconds
define(‘wp_1_POST_REVISIONS’, false );
SQL Command to delete all the revisions in the WordPress Database DELETE FROM wp_1_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”; (Run that line in MySql Manager)
Keep all your plugins up to date. That should be simple enough, the authors release updates to fix problems, and only occasionally create new ones. (You are backing up right?)
Keep WORDPRESS up to date, ok this may be more important than the plugins, being out of date on wordpress can be like getting caught with your pants down. WordPress updates make wordpress faster, fix security issues, and sometimes break stuff. (Remember to Backup, floss, yada yada yada…, you get my point right?)
Optimizing your MySQL Database. To do it you need to go to phpMyAdmin and select your database. Then towards the bottom, click check all to select all tables and then towards the center of the screen, there is a drop down menu, click optimize tables there, and then repair. (Backups are really important..)

If you remember to do these once a month, like a check list, (You can always bookmark this page and refer back) your WordPress site will be in top notch shape!

Speedup WordPress Tip#3

Jason Green — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:30:01 +0000

Reduce Dynamic PHP Calls in your Theme

WordPress Speed Tip #3 – Remove Database calls from your theme.

Database calls make WordPress so dynamic, but sometimes you can live without it. By replacing simple text, you will be able to increase your WordPress speed.

To give an example look at your header.php code which looks something similar:

This code above is calling useless database queries which you can simply put in as text. Like in the example below:

By making it slightly less dynamic, you have saved yourself some load time. If you get a custom theme designed for a specific WordPress site then there is nothing wrong with removing these because it will only be used by you. But don’t stop at the header! Word you way all the way down to the footer. My site for example had 118 Database calls just to render the front page! I hope to clean it up better, but I’ve currently got my load time down to less than a second!

You can also reduce database calls by doing the following:

make your stylesheet URL’s static
make your pingback URL static (which I would Remove anyway, they are all but useless)
make your feed URL’s static
I always recommend you remove the WordPress version

This is from Tip #18 http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/18-useful-tricks-to-speed-up-wordpress-boost-performance/

I don’t agree with some of the other tips posted there, so I didn’t just direct everyone over there. Like the Database Caching, that tip actually made my site slower! These 5 tips I’m providing are time tested, and I’m not including everything in the book. I think these are all you really need, none of the fluff.

OpenDNS and Neustar bring Real Time DNS

Jason Green — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:00:41 +0000

OpenDNS The Largest DNS Provider

OpenDNS is the largest recursive DNS provider and Neustar is the largest authoritative DNS provider. These two are now working together on a new joint project called DNS Real-Time Directory that allows the updating of the DNS in near real time. The concept was born when they identified the need for a better process for updating the DNS. The old process limits businesses that maintain their own DNS records with the “time to live” delays encountered before DNS records cached at ISPs are updated. For us DNS Real-Time Directory means OpenDNS is now not only the largest DNS provider, but also the most up-to-date. Yet more reinforcement to use OpenDNS for your business. I use it, and I’m totally pumped about this new advancement. This means we could literally go from registering a new website, to launch in a matter of minuets, or move to new servers with little to no trouble.

Speedup WordPress Tip#2

Jason Green — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:30:37 +0000

WordPress Speedup Tip#2

WordPress Speed Tip #2 Cache in now to save later…

WordPress is end the end, just a PHP script. With the dynamic nature of PHP, every time a page is loaded, WordPress must execute a series of queries to the database server, to generate the page.This can make your site load slow and even crash due to the server load if you experience high traffic.(See Digg Effect) The best way to avoid this problem is by using a caching Plugin. There are Database Caches and HTML Caches, I’ve have the best results with the HTML caching. WP Super Cache can cache complete generated pages and serve those instead of processing the heavy dynamic queries. Once you have installed this plugin, you will see BIG decrease in your site load time and your site will be very noticeably faster.

Once you install the plugin, it self configures and you can turn it on and off in the plugin’s settings page, which looks like this:

WP SuperCache Settings Page

Typically this will make any wordpress page load in less than a second, however, combined with speed tip #1, These two tips along will send your site flying! Tips 1&2 are aimed at the non dynamic, and dynamic content respectively. The other tips in the series are the icing on the cake, that will finish off a complete and mature WordPress website.