Wow… Google’s new update the last couple of weeks has certainly been the most retarded thing I have ever witnessed come out of this company. What did they just do?! Almost every major site I know about has just had their site’s Page Rank reduced to ashes! As of right now, Pixel2life.com has just went from a 6 to a 4! This means that P2L has a lower PR than my blog, and any of my hobby sites. Are these guys out of their minds?? Check out my PR status on their various Google DCs:

This was generated at livepr.raketforskning.com

Now I’ve been reading all kinds of topics and articles on this and I can honestly say that the webmaster community in general is in complete shock over this, not to mentioned completely baffled. We’ve been seeing word that sites with heavy paid links have been penalized, but that’s a load of crapola… Of the 3 main tutorial portals out there, I am the only one that lost PR and the other 2 all have link exchanges and paid text links so I’m not buying that excuse for a minute. Then we have sites with absolutely NO text links of any kind that were hammered. 9Rules.com has been reduced to a PR 4 and these guys were a 7 or 8 at least!

Check out some of these articles for more information and comments on this utter bullsh*t:

First, you can read about what exactly PR is at smashingmagazine.com (The ironic part is that these guys went from a PR 7 to a 4!).

And now articles about this worthless update:

Sitepoint.com Here’s a snippet but go here to read the rest.

Boing Boing: Was 9, now 7.
Engadget: Was 7, now 5.
Forbes.com: Was 7, now 5.
New Scientist: Was 7, now 5.

There is a MASSIVE article with tons of updates and comments going at andybeard.eu (Give the page a bit to load, it hammered) Here’s a snippet but go here to read the rest.

Slapped By Google

For a company such as Google with a stock price based extensively on anticipated growth and public sentiment, it doesn’t take a huge swing in goodwill to have a dramatic effect on valuation. Google has just slapped their biggest fans.

After the very controversial hit many sites took just 2 weeks ago for various degrees of selling PageRank or linking to clients, you might have thought Google would take a breather, but Google it seems hadn’t even started its crackdown.

A number of sites have been hit yet again, including this one, but there is also a new element that has been introduced.

Here are some unusual penalties for trusted sources of good content

http://www.autoblog.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.engadget.com/ PR7 PR5
http://www.problogger.net/ PR6 PR4
http://www.copyblogger.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.joystiq.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.tuaw.com/ PR6 PR4

A few search and money related sites as examples

http://www.searchengineguide.com PR7 PR4
http://www.searchenginejournal.com PR7 PR4
http://www.johnchow.com PR6 PR4
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/ PR6 PR3
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/ PR6 PR4
http://andybeard.eu PR5 PR3
Vlad PR4 PR2

Here’s more at andybeard.eu (Give the page a bit to load, it hammered) Here’s a snippet but go here to read the rest.

Real or Fake PageRank Update In Progress (round 3)

Courtney stopped by to let me know about what appears to be a real PageRank update that is in progress, if there can ever be a real update again.

Many of the blogs highlighted in the update just a couple of days ago seem to have reverted to their previous position.

Now for anyone who might be thinking otherwise, there are still some obvious penalties in place for a few sites, but it is less obvious for the more vocal networks.

Some sites and networks still have a penalty, as do some sites.

Some of those penalties seem to be a carry over from the first Google slap 2 weeks ago, and some seem to be much newer.

The changes could easily be written off as changes in total linkage compared to the remainder of the blogosphere, but it seems like Google have given a penalty to those they could get away with.

Is this off the hook or what?! So I guess the best we can too is get in the fetal position and rock back and forth mumbling how PR doesn’t affect traffic and hope it all looks better in the morning. Here’s more discussions you can check out:

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=507987

There’s a ton of forum discussions going on right now on Sitepoint… just hop on over to the Google topic area of the forums.

You can also find a bunch on Digitalpoint’s Google forum area located here.

And finally, check out this post on www.dailyblogtips.com

Special thanks to Donna for sharing all these links with me… I was actually ignoring this issue because so much has been going wrong for me lately that I just didn’t need a Google disaster, but looks like I have to deal with this shit storm now too… YAY! Best I can do is keep an eye on traffic and see what happens I guess. If you have some feedback or a comment, please click the comment button and use the form to share your thoughts.

It’s been longtime said that PR is “just a number” and has no bearing on your actual traffic, so I guess we’ll see a true test now. I noticed that we had this PR 4 going early last week, and so far, our traffic completely unaffected. Here’s a graph of our traffic for this month so far, and you can see last week was completely normal:

So to be quite honest, I suppose your bragging rights are taken away, but as long as my trafic continues to be solid and unaffected, I couldn’t care a less what Google did with their PR. So time to make some wait-and-see pudding!

Best of luck to you other webmasters!

Dan

Hey gang!

Well it has been a CRAZY few weeks and I am well and truly exhausted but having some fun as well. My wife has recently returned to the work force, so I am back on full-time dad duty and won’t be around the PC as much until Corina is back in school. I’ll still be doing my P2L duties and running my shop at www.predatorstuff.com so no worries, I’m definitely around and up to no good!

Mira Foundation Update:

As you may have read previously, we recently became a sponsor family for a Mira puppy, which we keep for a year before he is given back to the foundation for formal training and finally, given to a blind or disabled person.

It’s been 3 weeks and the dog is quite clearly extremely intelligent, it took only 2 weeks to housebreak him and this is with zero crate training or paper/pad technique. So at 2 months old, Simba goes to the door when he needs to “leave presents”, obeys sit and lay down consistently and now we’re working on stay. It’s really quite remarkable how quickly he picks up on these training concepts and we’ve been practising some basic lead work with no choker and even that is already pretty advanced compared to other pups I’ve raised.

The most amusing thing with this guy is that he sleeps… CONSTANTLY! I know very young pups can sleep a good bit, but my last puppy, which was a German Shepherd, didn’t stop moving 24/7. Simba basically sleeps any time he can. In fact, when we go shopping at the mall and stop in a store to quickly browse a clothing rack, he’ll take the 10 seconds to lay down and promptly fall asleep. We took him to his first vaccination an group session yesterday and I had a chance to speak to some of the other owners and this seems to be consistent with all the other owners. Only 1 person said their dog was up constantly.

So at this point I am really happy with Simba, he’s an awesome dog and I’m having a blast! Corina is also getting over her huge fear of dogs and she doesn’t seem to be exhibiting any allergy symptoms so this is all working out quite well. For you single guys, you will be AMAZED at this four legged “babe magnet”. Seriously, I am swarmed by TONS of girls (and kids, senior citizens, adults etc etc) that want a chance to pet him, it’s a riot. Not that I’m saying you should do this for the sake of meeting people, but it’s just CRAZY the attention you get. We have to take him everywhere with us and all you hear are oohs and ahhs and cooing as you walk through the mall, it gets to the point that it’s almost embarrassing because you know everyone is looking at you and your dog. God help you if the dog has an accident in the mall, because you know all eyes are on your when it happens! But so far so good, and we’re having fun. Mira is very well known here in Montreal, so many people recognize the emblem he wears on his scarf and I’ve even had people shake my hand congratulating me on what we’re doing. It’s a great feeling and this is the stuff I will remember when it comes time to giving him back *dread* *dread*

So overall this has been a very pleasing experience so far and I truly love this dog and it’s really amazing to have a puppy around again. My daughter is just so proud of her “baby brother”, it’s awesome. We try to remind her that he’ll have to go next year, but I can already tell this will be a nightmare. Luckily we’ll be going to Disney World right after he goes back, so you can imagine that Disney + 5 year old = bliss. After maybe we’ll get our own dog to keep, although my wife isn’t very keen on having a dog permanently… we’ll have to work on her on that one

Techtuts Launch

Just a heads up that Techtuts is back with a new upgrade and it looks great! This is a tutorial site coded by P2L staff member Adam and hes really quite proud of his new site, so wanted to share with everyone.

There’s a whole bunch of new features, including a new User Control Panel, new Tutorial system and a whole bunch more. You can read the official release notice here on their forums. Congrats Adam, it looks awesome!

Pixel2life v4 Follow-Up:

Well it’s been almost a week since we launched the new version of Pixel2life and it has been a huge success and people definitely love the new changes. There are of course some folks that don’t like certain elements, but that’s to be expected as you can’t lease everyone, especially when you have 30,000 people visiting your site daily. The majority seem pleased, so that’s all you can really hope for. Heck if I listened to the haters, we’d still be on v1 lol! But on a serious note, I still read all the comments be it good or bad and I will address any of the negative points if possible. Obviously things like “Wah everything sucks, where mommy?” type comments can’t really be acted upon as they’re completely useless, but things like people asking that ads be more distinctive so they can be more easily identified among the content will definitely be looked at. We’ve also had some people mentions issues with the dropdown category browser dropping too far off the page, so we’ll be addressing these issues.

Trust me, I value EVERYONE’S opinions, as long as they are constructive and not idiotic ramblings that are from people complaining for the sake of complaining. If there’s anything I’ve learned both from running a large site and working in corporate environments, it’s that people detest change. This is natural and even people that claim they love change really don’t… it’s like saying “I think out of the box”, when you clearly don’t and just do your job and want your pay check at the end of the day. So it’s natural for most people to not like something fairly different, so I tend to get the better comments after folks have had a couple of weeks to use the new system and can offer their thoughts without a gag reflex getting in the way from change-up overload.

Either way, I am REALLY pleased and proud of this release, and Nick, Jamie and Adam all did a kick ass job of putting this together from my design mockups and worked with me all hours to finish this up. Nice going guys, hats off to your hard work! For the the rest of the community, I hope you enjoy the new changes and enjoy what we have coming up in the near future.

Thanks for reading and remember you can post comments using the form below!

Dan

If you spend any significant time on the internet, you’ve probably seen phishing email scams like fake login requests from Paypal, eBay or some banking institution. You probably also know what 419 fraud emails are, also known and Nigerian Scam mails. Well now, we’ve got worms!

This is actually nothing new, but proliferation of this email has been spreading like crazy in the last week and I am starting to get TONS of these lately on a few of my email accounts:

From: Abuse Team [mailto:sgxh@cantv.net]
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 12:31 AM
To: changed@sympatico.ca
Subject: Warning!

Dear Customer,

Our robot has detected an abnormal activity from your IP address
on sending e-mails. Probably it is connected with the last epidemic
of a worm which does not have official patches at the moment.

We recommend you to install this patch to remove worm files
and stop email sending, otherwise your account will be blocked.

Abuse Team

Now I know many of you seasoned folks will know exactly what this is, but in an age where everyone and their monkey can start a website or surf the net, I can see tons of people falling for this and clicking the link that downloads God-knows-what. So guys, this is a warning to all that this is a bull-crap scam email! They make it appear as a friendly email from a concerned ISP or Web-Host has detected an internet worm sending out bucket-loads of emails from your IP. So ignore it and delete the email or report it to spamcop.

Be safe and flee the worms of the intarweb!

Dan

It’s finally happened… Yahoo and Google have no choice but to address the click-fraud issue, because it’s costing them millions and the cash-cow is starting to keel over. Bogus clicks and conversion are a MAJOR issue in the advertising network community, and Google’s AdSense is especially in trouble. You see, Google basically let everyone and their monkey run AdSense on their websites, and there are absolute GARBAGE sites out there that are blatant Google Ad turn-key style websites looking to make a quick buck without doing any real significant work. Yahoo has been much tighter in their US exclusive beta program, but both major networks are closing the net up because it’s either that, or they become a complete waste of money to their advertisers and die a painful death.

Now most of you have heard the horror stories about people getting their adsense accounts suspended because of “invalid clicks” or some other form of “click fraud”. 99% of the stories I get from such webmasters portray them as completely innocent and ignorant as to why they were suspended. I’m sure that a few were suspended for reasons known only to Google (They don’t provide any real details as to why you were cut off), but a good chunk of you were really busted red handed and you just don’t want to admit it. That’s fine, that’s not what this is about anyhow.

Now the new trend with Google and Yahoo… you don’t have to be doing anything specifically against the terms to get cut off, you just have to have non-converting traffic. Yes folks, not only do the big boys track clicks, impressions, and pricing, but they also track if your clicks are in fact converting into sales. In other words, when people click your ads, are they buying anything? Well, you’d better hope so or you might find yourself on the end of a nasty email from Google or Yahoo.

Next up, we have the publisher trend that I am seeing quite a bit off: MySpace content sites, and tutorial sites. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean quality tutorial content sites like www.13dots.com, I mean those generic tutorial sites that are specifically created to be surrounded in ads and the tutorials are the same old “scanlines” and “shiny buttons” deals you see all over the net as though that’s all you can do in Photoshop. Same deal with the MySpace sites… you have some great content providers, then you have others than runs a 90/10 ad to content ratio. It’s not hard to get a ton of traffic to these sites and score lots of clicks, but what’s become apparent to Yahoo and Google is that this traffic is, for the most part, completely worthless and non-buying users. Deep down inside, the creators of this site know it and they simply want to milk the system for what it’s worth, but we’re all going to get nailed for it.

Care for an example? A month and a half ago, Yahoo basically did a search on their search engine and Google and found the top 10 or 20 MySpace content sites that ran their Yahoo YPN ads. And then, they removed them from the YPN program citing poor conversion on clickthru traffic. Man, you should have seen the MySpace sites flying up for sale on the Sitepoint marketplace so that webmasters could get top dollar before having to show that they had lost the YPN ads and thus their revenues had plummeted.

The same deal happened with tutorial sites about 3 weeks ago with Google AdSense. Overnight, over a dozen webmasters I know received notices that they were no longer allowed to run AdSense ads on their tutorial sites. Mind you, this is an interesting and positive move by Google… they didn’t ban any accounts, they simply banned the ads from running on a specific URL. If a webmaster happen to own several other sites that were not red-listed, then they could continue to run ads on those sites as usual. As for the reason this was done? Emails cited poor conversion on incoming clickthru traffic once again.

Starting to feel sick yet? So now publishers have 3 major concerns:

1. Click Fraud – We have to make sure we run a smooth program
2. Ad Placement – We have to make sure that our ads are placed strategically for maximum visual impact and CTR.
3. CTR Conversion – Is your CTR traffic actually converting an ROI for the advertiser?

As far as I am concerned, the time has never been more right to look for direct internal revenue streams such as product and service sales and internal advertising systems. Google and Yahoo have no choice, they have to crack down on the markets and avenues they advertise on in order to maintain the integrity of the program and maintain a proven ROI to it’s clients. This makes things more than a little nervous for publishers like myself, and I will be looking to diversifying my income streams in case one day I get tagged. Of course, a lot of this could have been avoided if Google had been a tad more selective when approving publishers to run their ads instead of giving it out like candy at Halloween, but I suppose that’s a moot point.

So watch your butts guys and gals and remember not to place all your eggs in one basket!

Dan

I refuse to concede defeat against the evil server goblin that has been stalking me around cyberspace, using my server as a cudgel aimed directly at my un-offending (keep the guffaws to a minimum) skull. That green little bastard is GOING DOWN!

What green server goblin you ask? THIS ONE:

What’s that you say? It’s merely a Photoshopped (Photopainted actually) photo of my daughter’s latest McD’s Happy Meal toy? NONSENSE! What you are looking at is a 100% pure mean green server piss off machine, and it’s out to get me.

All I have to say is thank God for my brother-in-law Elvio (owner of coolcommands.com and probably one of the smartest, no-nonsense grep-heads you could ever meet), and for the quick turn around times from the P2L coding talents of Nick and Jamie.

Here’s the latest scoop on what’s been happening… I left Server Seed awhile back due to another disappearing act and I have been through a rather spectacular list of service providers looking for someone to simply give me what Server Seed had in terms of performance, but with some degree to available support when things go wrong. Well up until recently, it seems like I just can’t get those two together in a single package unless I want to bend over and let Media Temple be my daddy. (MT has great shared hosting prices, but their true dedicated hardware pricing is nothing short of laughable). My latest setup is a box I purchases directly with Softlayer and I bought some management from a third-party provider.

Since then, I am getting great service, but loads on the box are VERY high compared to what I’m used to and performance, in my opinion, sucks. So I’ve been chasing this new management company about it and I’m basically getting nowhere. In a recent request, I asked that SSL be disabled along with imap and some other ports/services I didn’t need and were open for nothing. I won’t get too deep into the response, but I was told that Apache would have to be recompiled in order to shut off SSL. Ummm… no.

So, I asked Elvio, master of all things Unix, to snoop around on my box and check out the settings and see what’s what… I think it was the whole Apache recompile thing to shut off SSL that had him seriously worried about what my server looked like from the inside. Well needless to say, it was a dog’s breakfast, so my tutelage in Unix command prompt began. He basically had to rebuild the config, recompiled Apache and upgraded it to version 2 (yeah, Linux 1.3 on a multicore, multiprocessor box… that wasn’t a great idea) and upgrade PHP, plus clean out a bunch of other crap. That was finally done tonight actually.

Next up was to basically study the server’s performance and resource usage… and to accomplish this, he installed an AWESOME package called Cacti. This is a freeware based network graphing solution with a sweet user interface that even I can figure out in under 5 seconds. Check it out at www.cacti.net

By studying cacti’s reports and staring at the regular top processes and MySQL top processes, we started to identify coding related areas that could be improved to run more efficiently. Once again Elvio made some suggestions based on his analysis on the logs and Nick and Jamie went right to work kicking CPU ass! In fact, load was shaved right down by improving the caching system, combining includes into single files and tonight, Nick re-worked the Boolean search query as per Elvio’s search method and has cut down search times BIG TIME! For those of you with fast connection’s, you may remember the average search time for a tutorial was about 5 seconds or longer you were searching during a peak time. Well I’ve been search this evening with the box on an average load at results were coming back pretty much instantly!

So, things are definitely improving in terms of server performance and we hope people are enjoying the site as we look to speed things up and get the server back to being reliable and stable. That damn green goblin is GOING DOWN!

In summary, here’s what I’ve learned lately:

- Be wary of server management companies… they seem to go to pieces when things go beyond simply restart Apache.
- You don’t have to recompile Apache to disable SSL (Actually I knew this… I just can’t believe that’s what my management company tried to tell me)
- Disabling imap doesn’t affect POP (See previous note about management company)
- You don’t have to run DNS Server services to run your email properly (See previous note again)
- Top and MyTop are your friends
- Nagios is for monitoring, Cacti is for reporting (both rock)
- Multithreading is a feature added to Linux in version 2+
- Natural Boolean results already return results sorted with correct scoring… if you get query results back with 0 scores, your query is screwed. You should not have to re-sort them for correct score values. (Hey, I’m not a programmer, how the hell would I know?!)
- Elvio, Nick and Jamie are EXTREMELY patient… to the point of impossibility even.

That’s it for now guys! 1AM and I’m tired. Battling green server goblins is tough work… gnite!

Dan