With the release of Penguin 2.0, seems that search results are falling more and more onto the big name sites. Over the years with Panda, Penguin 1 and now with Penguin 2.o, Google’s search results are getting convoluted with brand name websites. I’ve noticed when I am searching for a product or a service, the first page is packed with Amazon.com, Ebay.com, Walmart.com, CVS.com, Walgreens.com, Facebook.com. Why on earth would I want these websites in my search results? First  a lot of these are brick and mortar companies, I can find a CVS, Walmart, or Walgreens in a 5 mile radius of each other if I am in a well populated city. Plus if I wanted to shop at Walmart, Amazon, or Ebay I would just type in their URL and search their site, not Google! Everyone knows the URL to any of these sites so why is the first page filled with big name companies or extremely well known websites? Is this really benefiting me as a consumer or website surfer, no NOT at all!

Google is only good for finding information

Don’t get me wrong, Google is great for finding information about subject matters. It really is information at your finger tips. Packed full of relative sites for finding out answers for a variety of subjects. And I think the new updates have indeed filtered out the duplicate websites, the scraper sites, and the affiliate spammers. But it is a double sided sword, in turn it is killing the small businesses selling products or services and killing the nature of the internet as a entrepreneur dream. If most of the search results are from big name brands, and big well known domains, there is no room for the little man. The beauty of the internet is that anyone can come up with a  service, or product and use the internet for building up that product or service and distributing it at a low cost level via the internet. Creating a successful business without all the overhead of a brick and mortar company, and without the traditional advertising expenses. With the new updates it is becoming more expensive and seems that only if you have deep pockets can you really achieve such a task. Google Adwords are a prime example, forcing small business owners to spend advertising money to get on the first page of Google, while the big companies that make millions or billions of dollars of revenue a year, get the first page of Google at no cost!

Why is Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Yelp in my search result?

Since Facebook has opened up its website to be public access it pops up everywhere in my search results. Why in the hell would I want a Facebook page in my search results? Facebook at this point, is probably just as, if not bigger than Google. So if I wanted to find something on Facebook, wouldn’t I go to Facebook and search their site? YES, the answer is YES! Let’s really think about this, let’s say I am searching for a service in my area. I type in my keyword and find a Facebook page, I click the link and once on the page I see some information about the company and then I find their website link, I click on their link to read more about the company. What just happen? I had to click twice to get to someone’s website! What’s the point? Can’t Google just serve up that company’s domain to me and let me by pass Facebook all together? Same rings true for the other social websites.

I have to manually filter Google Results now

Google search results and all the new updates have been forcing me to manually filter the results. This means Google search results are becoming a bad user experience. In case you didn’t know you can add a minus sign to remove keywords or even full domains form your search result.
An example would be :  user computers -ebay.com -amazon.com -yelp.com

So I am finding myself adding a minus sign for a lot of convoluted domain names and usually not just one, now I am having to do like 2 or 3. Ultimately I will be looking for a different Search Engine (if anyone has a suggestion leave a comment) or get really geeky and just hack my Google Search on my computer and figure out how to remove a handful of websites from my personal search results.

Conclusion

Big brand name companies and websites have become their own internet space. Broken off from the normal, “no one knows the URL or domian”,  so users DON”T need Google’s help to find the website. They are well known and no one really searches for Facebook, Linkedin, Yelp, Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, Amazon, Ebay on Google!  They go directly to their website for searching what they want on their site, NOT Google!  So Google, how about you tweak your algorithm to not give these sites the first page? You would be helping us web surfers out a bit. It is great you are fighting spam, but you are also killing the internet for small business owners or enthusiastic entrepreneurs. And quite frankly I think you are steering away from the idea of being the best search engine provider out there with the intention of creating a free market and now are just promoting big name brands and charging the small business owner money to advertise on your search engine to get any real traffic.

Penguin 2.0, 5-22-2013

There are quite a few sites out there giving Wix.com good reviews but take a closer look and you will see most are just affiliate sites trying to make money off you, and giving out bad information. Some are pretty obvious, others are quite sneaky! The sneaky ones will setup a URL that looks legitimate, like www.reviewerwebsiteurl.com/wix, but if you notice the landing page after you click on the link, a redirect to Wix.com, has a long string of text and includes “campaign=af_reviewerswebsiteurl.com”. This is an affiliate marketer cashing in on writing a long article raving how good Wix is to get on the first page of Google and cash in on it’s misguided information.

You should notice any url redirects or any RAW url displayed at the bottom of your browser when you hover a link. If any of these include “campaign=af_reviewerswebsiteurl.com”, you can pretty much deem that site or article as invalid.

Is Wix really SEO friendly?

I decided to look a little closer under the hood of Wix.com and look at their so called SEO friendliness they claim they have. I pulled a site that was advertised on their site as one of the “designs” you easily create yourself aka one of their client showcases, it was an actual company’s site. And the site was in the industry of SEO and Web Design, obviously using Wix as their platform. The site description and meta data for this site was “Advertising, branding, marketing, SEO and web design.”

We will be analyzing the code of an HTML5 Wix.com developed website. I have compiled a list of things that were in my opinion and by most SEO standards, not something that is SEO optimized or friendly. If you want to skip to the overall status, Wix.com is not SEO friendly or a platform that I would use for any SEO purposes. Not to say you can’t rank with Wix but there are way better options out there for an SEO friendly platform. The king being WordPress!

I would first like to point out the wording that is commented out for the actual HTML code that you have to copy and paste to see the “real” HTML code of the site is very misleading.

<!-- Looking for this page's SEO Code?
You can find it at http://www.{hiddenurl}.com/?_escaped_fragment_
Wix.com's brand new HTML5 editor supports the latest SEO technologies 
including AJAX Crawling For more information about AJAX Crawling visit http://bit.ly/ajaxcrawling -->
<!-- META DATA -->

You should know that HTML code is not SEO code. SEO has many layers and HTML alone does not dictate Search Engine Optimization.

First is the URLs
Despite popular belief the URL below is not a friendly URL. There is no need for #! and why do they need random letters at the end, the only readable text is crammed in between gibberish.

www.{hiddenurl}.com/#!products/cnuo

Non Friendly Image URLs/Naming conventions
Images should have somewhat of a relative name to the actual file name, doing so is not only user friendly but does help your images rank in Google Images.

media/6d2987_0993e3551490d470d5bd039021a5e67e
.png_srz_263_83_85_22_0.50_1.20_0.00_png_srzImages

H3 Tag starts Headers and repeats on all headers.
No Header Conventions and no H1 tag! The first H tag I found was H3 and it was repeated throughout the site. This is SEO basics, you put the important “titles” in header tags, and H1 has the biggest power! If you are just repeating styles, go ahead and create a css style class and don’t repeat a crucial HTML element that could help rank your site.

<h3>{Hidden Site Header Tex}</h3>

No Image Alt text
Every image should contain an alt text describing the image, in this case this is a facebook icon, and should have alt text of the company name and facebook, or something similar. Adding alt helps adding content for the images and adding company info or even keywords helps rankings. SEO 101! Not to mention the URL for this image isn’t even the website owner’s URL but a media folder on Wix.com.

<img src="http://static.wix.com/media/da00086a27cc2c52ec7a11ec468c4d29.wix_mp" 
itemprop="contentURL" width="205" height="205"/>

Empty Title Text
As with the alt text there should be some title text describing the image or link. In this case it was there but empty a empty code takes up space and bogs down load time.  Not that it will put that much load time on, but it’s just not clean code and if the tag is there shouldn’t it be filled in.

title="" itemprop="contentURL" width="331" height="200"

Scattered empty HTML tags
Clean code is important, I found a lot of random empty div tags and comments throughout the site.

<div id="cpua">
<h3></h3>
<h3>Title text was here.</h3>

<span id="HtmlCmpnnt0">
<!-- placeholder for component of data type=HtmlComponent -->
</span>
<span id="HtmlCmpnnt2">
<!-- placeholder for component of data type=HtmlComponent -->
</span>
<span id="FvGrdLn3">
<!-- placeholder for component of data type=None -->
</span>

Series of Blank Pages
I found 50 pages of blank content when I search Google’s index of the website!  That’s a huge amount. Normally having pages indexed is a good thing but not if they are blank! And there is word you can even get penalized from Google for having bunch of random pages that really don’t link anywhere or have no content, not to mention not very user friendly.

#!blank/{series of random numbers and letters}
#!untitled/zoom/{series of random numbers and letters} (50 pages!)

Wix and SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

<?php if ($stock == 0){
echo '<span style="color:red;">'.$stock.'</span>';
}else{echo $stock;} ?>

<?php if ($stock == "Sold Out"){
echo '<span style="color:red;">'.$stock.'</span>';
}else{echo $stock;} ?>

Stock Status aka $stock in OpenCart – How to stylize Stock Status

YouTube is a great resource. Outside of YouTube you can checkout these websites.

newthinktank.com Top Choice - (Videos)
This guys is amazing! He is super fast and crams alot of information into all his videos, but you can learn alot. I like the fast style as it by passes alot of videos out there where they talk too much and usually eat up alot of time doing the simple stuff they should of prepared before making the video.

net.tutsplus.com – Wide rang of web languages as well as other software. Mixture of videos and written tutorials.

codeacademy.com – Nice site for a few different languages, but has real world coding on their site, and practical tests. More of a test or request you to type certain code for getting a certain result. Learning style.

railsforzombies.org – Similar to codeacademy with the real world coding on the site only with Ruby on Rails. You get a prize if you finish the whole course.

webdesignerwall.com – An assortment of article tutorials on CSS, HTML, WordPress, jquery and more.

phpacademy.org – Small series of video tutorials, you can also find them on YouTube.

Lynda.com – If you are looking for more, and a little more organized video series and don’t mind paying a small fee.

Where to learn web design and programming on the web for free!

Over the years I have used limit login attempts plugin for blocking IP addresses that get your login credientials wrong in certain number of tries. This works well for bruteforce attacks.  And the settings are very customizable as far as the tightness of the time frame someone gets blocked.

Other methods involve moving your login and admin to  a different directory. I believe there is a plugin for that, the manual way of implementing this is a pain. A simpler way is to block all IP address except your own from accessing the login page. This method is ideal from someone who only blogs or edits their site from an office or home computer. Not the best method if you are a traveling blogger. None the less, probably the most secure method out there and simple to implement.

Just paste this code into your htaccess file, change the “allow from” with your IP address and you are good to go. Make sure you add a 403 redirect to either your homepage, or a custom 403 file. 403 is the access denied error that gets triggered when someone blocked is trying to access your login page. Ive found by default it times out in an infinite loop, but probably depends on your hosting company and how they handle 403 errors.

<Files wp-login.php>
order deny,allow
    deny from all
    allow from 00.000.00.000
</Files>

ErrorDocument 403 http://www.redirecturl.com/

WordPress Security through htaccess

With the added LinkedIn groups, seems to be more and more shameless business promotions. Will LinkedIn groups eventually turn into Yahoo Groups? Yahoo groups used to be a nice spot to find like minded conversations on topics at hand. Grant it this was way before meetup.com and it had more of a forum style, but it was a GREAT resource at the time, and I am even still part of a few moderated Yahoo groups. But if you look at 90% of the groups it is nothing but spam, mostly because there is no moderation going on.

With so many automated tools out there to post your blog post to the LinkedIn groups, it could easily turn into the spam that Yahoo experienced. Especially if a company owns multiple domains and is posting blogs daily or a few times a week. Then the groups start getting posts from the same person over and over again and doesn’t leave any space for other posts. It’s a thin line between promoting your blog posts that you feel will contribute to the group, and just setting up your automated WordPress plugin to blast all the groups you are a part of with 2 or 3 domains. It will probably take longer for people to realize or even say something since the content is relative to the group. But even though you aren’t posting about viagra doesn’t mean you aren’t spamming the group. Spam consist of automation, and saturation.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it is great there are tools out there that help with task that would normally take up our time for other business related things. But the key is moderation. I mean chocolate cake tastes good, but without moderation, you will more than likely end of with health issues if you eat it for every meal. Branding your company is no different, without moderation, you will more than likely find your business’ health (reputation) at risk.

Will LinkedIn Groups be the next Yahoo Groups?

So I wrote a quick fix code in the functions file to add 2 links.

*Note I am hiding the site description from the admin bar (cleaner and no need for dropdown simple front end text works great).

// Remove Admin Bar Elements
function remove_admin_bar_links() {
global $wp_admin_bar;
$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('wp-logo');
$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('new-link');
$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('updates');
$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('themes');
$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('customize');
$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('site-name');// Remove the site name menu
}
add_action( 'wp_before_admin_bar_render', 'remove_admin_bar_links' );

//Add to Admin Bar
function add_to_admin_bar () {
global $wp_admin_bar;
$wp_admin_bar->add_menu(array(
   'title' => "Front End",
   'href' => site_url(),
   'meta' => array('target' => '_blank'),
));
$wp_admin_bar->add_menu(array(
   'title' => "Admin",
   'href' => admin_url(),
   'meta' => array('target' => '_blank'),
));
}
add_action('admin_bar_menu', 'add_to_admin_bar', 1);

Open New Window for Frontend of your Website in WordPress

Lately I have noticed that some so called web design companies who use WordPress as their framework or code of choice are duplicating their own business website for their clients. Using the same layout, same type of graphics ect. From the non technical people, what they are doing is copying the same theme or even template that they used to for their own website.

First off, why would your client want a website that looks like yours? Sure they might of been impressed with your site, but duplicating it or copying it to another, well that is killing  two brands with one stone! Not only are you not giving your client an original look, and feel, you are killing the brand that you have created for yourself.  But then again if you used a template for your own site then you didn’t really have branding in mind did you?

Branding isn’t Imitating Someone Else

Remove a Whole Menu in WordPress

For instance Appearance, sometimes you don’t want to give them access to editing the custom theme you developed. Just paste this code into your functions file and add // before any menu you might want to keep or you can just keep the ones you want to delete/hide from the sidebar.

// Remove Admin menus
function delete_menu_items() {
		remove_menu_page('index.php'); // Dashboard
		remove_menu_page('edit.php'); // Posts
		remove_menu_page('upload.php'); // Media
		remove_menu_page('link-manager.php'); // Links
		remove_menu_page('edit.php?post_type=page'); // Pages
		remove_menu_page('edit-comments.php'); // Comments
		remove_menu_page('themes.php'); // Appearance
		remove_menu_page('plugins.php'); // Plugins
		remove_menu_page('users.php'); // Users
		remove_menu_page('tools.php'); // Tools
		remove_menu_page('options-general.php'); // Settings
}
     add_action( 'admin_init', 'delete_menu_items' );

Remove a Sub Menu from WordPress

Just need to remove a submenu, for instance if you remove the whole appearance tab then there is nowhere to click to get to the widgets section, which is probably important. Here are a few submenus you might want to remove. If you want to add others to remove, the first parameter is the main tab (hover the tab and look at the bottom of your browser to see the url path to use, i.e filename.php) Second parameter is the sub page to remove, again use the hover link trick to figure out the .php name to add.

// Remove Admin sub menus       
function delete_sub_menu() {
     $page = remove_submenu_page( 'index.php', 'index.php' ); //Home
	     remove_submenu_page( 'index.php', 'update-core.php' ); //WordPress updates
	     remove_submenu_page( 'themes.php', 'themes.php' ); //Themes
	     remove_submenu_page( 'themes.php', 'theme-editor.php' ); //Theme Editor
}
    add_action( 'admin_menu', 'delete_sub_menu', 999 );

Removing Sidebar Menus in WordPress

// Admin Side Bar Order Change 
    function custom_menu_order($menu_ord) {  
        if (!$menu_ord) return true;  

        return array(  
            'index.php', // Dashboard  
            'separator1', // First separator
	    'edit.php?post_type=page', // Pages
            'upload.php', // Media  
            'link-manager.php', // Links     
            'separator2', // Second separator  
            'themes.php', // Appearance  
            'plugins.php', // Plugins  
            'users.php', // Users  
            'tools.php', // Tools  
            'options-general.php', // Settings  
            'separator-last', // Last separator
	    'edit.php', // Posts
	    'edit-comments.php', // Comments 
        );  
    }  
    add_filter('custom_menu_order', 'custom_menu_order'); // Activate custom_menu_order  
    add_filter('menu_order', 'custom_menu_order');

Customizing WordPress Admin Side bar