“404 Not Found” Page Kills Spiders
Filed under: Tips & Tricks - Sites, Software, Shortcuts
Free Links to Your Site
I can’t believe a new feature from Google isn’t getting more notice, because it converts already-existing links to your site into much higher quality links, for free. The Google webmaster blog just announced that you can find the pages that link to 404 pages on your site. Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google and SEO
When someone comes to your site from a broken link, like KDandCompany.com/seiwi, the server generally returns the dreadful error code – 404 Page Not Found. Unless you have created a custom page, you might be driving visitors away.
Let’s talk about spiders for a second. You know, the same technology that the search engines use to index your pages. When’s the last time you ran one on your own site? Did you know that your custom “404 not found” error page could be driving them away?
You’ll want to sic a spider on your own site, before letting MSN, Google or Yahoo get at it. Why? To make sure its spiderable, that’s why! Huh??? Didn’t think about validating your linking structure, did you?
There are many page whackers available that download a whole site to your hard drive, but who knows what kind of “forgiving” spidering technology they’re using. The best one, the one that replicates the crawling spiders like Google and Yahoo the closest, is a tool like OptiSpider.
Here’s a tip, if OptiSpider can’t spider your site… neither can Google. That’s right, it’s probably just about the best reason to get and use a tool like OptiSpider, just so you can see the same stuff the spiders see.
If you manage multiple sites for clients, it’s a great weapon in your toolbox! I can’t count how many times I’ve done coaching sessions for clients who claim search engines are not finding all their pages. A few seconds later – using OptiSpider – I can tell them… dude!!! You didn’t link to the pages properly, or your custom 404 not found page is killing the search engine spiders.
No Google, Yahoo or MSN spider is going to find all your pages, when you put the crawler in an endless feedback loop. You’re lucky if the spiders ever come back.
Stop doing whatever it is (even if it’s reading this article 
and go look at your custom 404 page. Everyone loves to use them. Unfortunately, many people use them badly. The biggest sin of all – even I was guilty of this – is using a relative link on the 404 page. It’s so common that relative linking should be banned altogether.
Imagine the spider is several directories down in your site and encounters a missing page or broken link, up comes your custom 404 error page. Too bad sucker! You used a relative link instead of an absolute one. The spider is totally miffed at your site and resets, leaving all the rest of your pages behind… unspidered, unindexed and unfound.
Stop whatever it is you’re doing and go do it now. Put an absolute link on your 404 page, one that includes the http://www. and your full .com web address to your home page. That way, when your custom 404 error page comes up, the spider won’t choke. Instead, it finds your home page from the custom 404 page and continues spidering like normal.
If you want to make spiders happy and be sure they can crawl your entire site, then use a spidering tool like OptiSpider to test your internal linking structure. Just don’t be surprised if you end up getting a whole lot more pages indexed by the search engines. What’s on your 404 page?
by Michael Campbell
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How to Install WordPress Using Fantastico
Filed under: Tips & Tricks - Sites, Software, Shortcuts
WordPress is incredibly flexible, quick to install using Fantastico, and easy to change the look of your site. In fact, I’d say it was almost effortless to use!
And it is FREE! Every penny you make from your WordPress site is pure profit!
For many folks, WordPress can be confusing and overwhelming. There are over 2,700 different plugins available and thousands of themes.
You can sit there and wonder…
Or, learn from our weeks of combing forums, installing plugins, tweaking settings and working out the best possible way of setting up WordPress and squeaking out those neat little functions that makes a blog look incredible.
Introducing WordPress video tutorial series
The comprehensive WordPress video tutorial series will guide you through, step by step, everything you need to know in order to set up a successful and profitable WordPress site.
Video 1 – Installation Of WordPress (8 minutes 16 seconds)
- Look over our shoulder as we show you how to install WordPress
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Nothing compares to ease of use, versatility, and power of WordPress!
How to Find and Use Free Photo Images with Flickr
Filed under: Tips & Tricks - Sites, Software, Shortcuts
One of the best pieces of advice I received early in my blogging: Use photos to attract reader attention to posts.
Photo by nattu
The images used in posts capture the reader. And, we all want to capture reader attention, right?
So, where do you find great photo images to use freely?
In this post I’ll tell you how to find the best free images on Flickr to use in your blog posts, eBooks, brochures or anything else.
Flickr hosts millions of photos taken by professional and amateur photographers. The best images are richly detailed, vibrant, and inspirational. Images on Flickr fall under a traditional copyright or a Creative Commons license.
Find images on Flickr to freely use
You are not allowed to use copyrighted images without express permission. Who has time for that? If you are like me, the need for a perfect image to use in a post is when I’m writing the post. So, let me tell you about the Creative Commons license to freely use Flickr images.
Non-copyright images on Flickr are available under a different kind of license called Creative Commons. Each image is available under one of six different licenses. For our purposes, we’ll focus on one license.
Attribution License
The images I use come under the Attribution License. You are free to modify the images — crop or caption, for example — as long as you credit the original source with a link back to their Flickr profile.
Find best images on Flickr to freely use
The starting point to find the best free photo images on Flickr is the Attibution License page. Clicking the Flickr Attribution License link navigates to a new window or tab depending on your browser settings.
- Search the keyword appropriate to your needs. To test, search the keyword ‘orange’. Flickr will search the image tags and return the 27,500+ ‘most relevant’ images. But, don’t stop here.
- Look for the ‘most interesting’ link below the displayed number of images. Click ‘most interesting’ to change the display. Most often you will see images of a much higher quality.
- Right click the image to copy or save.
- Copy the link location to credit the original source profile.
- Within seconds you have a targeted image to use in your blog post — or whatever suits your needs.
UPDATE: Be sure to check out the Multicolr Search Lab Flickr Set. Using visual similarity technology you can search Flickr images by color (colour).
Photo by Kyle May
