If you get the above error when trying to start a daemon, chances are you forgot to add a shebang to the top of your script:

I’ve toyed with Ruby (Rails) and played with Python (django) but I always come back to the fundamental issues of having to re-invent the wheel. I’ve mentioned many times that I consider myself a ‘duct tape coder’ and that means I try to simply Get Things Done. PHP is the only language that allows me to do just that - if you need some specific functionality, chances are that somebody has already coded it for you - and if I’m being honest with myself, I actually enjoy coding PHP.

It’s probably also worth noting that pretty code is not high on my list of features in an app for all the PHP boo-boys.

So, that brings me back round to the topic of this blog post. It turns out that Nate and gwoo haven’t abandoned Cake altogether, in fact they’ve forked the PHP 5.3-only rewrite of Cake (Cake3 to those in the know) into the Lithium framework. You can follow the #li3 hashtag on Twitter to see what I’m talking about.

Unfortunately, the Lithium website is behind lock and key right now (well, http auth) and is due to be relesed to the world sometime tomorrow. I don’t know what direction they plan to take the project, but I only really have two items on my wishlist:

• Super minimal core. Everything over and above basic functionality should be a plugin/add-on.
• Central repo for plugins. Something like apt-get or ruby gems would be awesome - I build a lot of small concept apps and so setup speed is critical to me. Being able to install a bunch of plugins from the cmd line would be amazing.
• Plugin wishlist: file uploads, image manipulation, media handling (video), Sphinx search, CouchDB.

Every now and then the SEO industry as a whole comes under attack from certain individuals, often times due to sheer ignorance, but also occasionally as a means to attract publicity for themselves. The individuals that instigate these attacks are generally so called ‘rock stars’ in their own industries and as such, tend to develop over inflated egos and start to exhibit diva-like tendancies - the perfect ingredients for a grand-scale keyboard fight.

This week it was the turn of some guy called Derek Powazek, who posted an entirely unsavoury and derogative post on his blog entitled Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists.

Dereks diatribe begins by comparing those practicing SEO to “goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen” and continues in it’s inane name-calling by branding us all as “cockroaches”, “bastards” and “jerkwads”.

Isn’t that awesome? I couldn’t have advised him better myself. A perfect execution of the classic attack hook straight out of the link baiting playbook. Bravo, Derek.

I posted a comment on his blog calling out his post as linkbait but he decided not to approve it - although he did acknowledge accusations of linkbait in his followup “SEO FAQ” post.

Why am I convinced that it was a blatant piece of linkbait? Simple - Derek is a clever guy. I don’t buy for one second that he truly believes his “build it and they will come” bullshit. Fact is, you need a marketing mentality to push good content and what is a core part of an online marketers toolset?

You guessed it - SEO.

Afterall, SEO isn’t the only industry with a contingent of evil scumbags out for all they can grab. A national UK home furnishing company I work with on a daily basis recently got charged 500GBP (800USD) by their web development agency to FTP five robots.txt files to various domains they owned. It must have taken those bastard cockroaches all of what? 2 minutes?

Dereks mental seed for the post could, perhaps, also have stemmed from his own past failures. You can bet your ass that at some point in his career, Derek has launched some great new site with all the bells and whistles of a ‘design led’ project - only to find it was utterly beaten in the SERPs by an SEO’d competitor with a shitty looking website. That kind of thing has a habit of pissing you off when you’re on the losing team.

Anyway, moving on - in his followup post he claims that it can’t be linkbait because a) he doesn’t need any work and b) he makes no money from his blog. Hey Derek, news flash! the best time to market yourself is when you’re doing well and sitting high and dry - if you wait until the bad times then you’ve left it too late. But hey, you already know that, right?

It also never hurts to promote your industry while dissing a competitor industry where you feel money is being syphoned away to - and constantly mentioning that you’re an “expert” in your chosen field with over a decade of experience can’t hurt either, right?

I could go on, but let’s instead just recap on the finer takeaway points of this whole saga:

1. You picked your hook now stick with it, do not divert from your angle no matter what the cost.
2. Start as you mean to go on, ie: start your attack in your title.
3. Pick a large target audience - in order to get traction you need to offend a lot of people very quickly. An entire industry works well.
4. Litter your post with intentional innacuracies, generalisations and downright lies. Your target audience will pick up on them and feel compelled to shoot you down.
5. Intentionally fail to approve key comments from your target audience. This will piss them off even more and they’ll probably write an entire blog post about you just to get their opinion heard. Extra marks if they’re a ‘rock star’ of your target industry.
6. Quickly followup your linkbait with a second post incorporating the high volume generic keywords of your target industry - you may pick up some residual long-tail traffic as well as pull in some extra links.

The real question though is: is Caffeine the reason the UK SERPs are broken?

In my opinion, there’s a reasonably strong case to assume as much. Caffeine is labelled as “a next-generation architecture” and Google are asking for feedback in the results returned. In other words, this is most likely a dual update:

1. to how Google stores the data in its infrastructure (perhaps an update to BigTable?)
2. to the ranking algorithm itself

Now, the current mess in the UK SERPs is clearly not just an algorthmic one - there also seems to be some funky crawl/index issues going on.

If that wasn’t the case, then we simply wouldn’t be seeing such a large influx of .nz/.au etc URLs. I think this is probably an issue that the GOOG have been aware of for some time, whereby the crawl/index routines are not sufficiantly separating foreign domains from country-specific indexes. I believe it was further compounded by an algorithmic error whereby foreign domains were not devalued to the extent they should be. Sure, ‘international english’ domains have ranked in UK SERPs before, but never to this extent - and to see amazon.com ranking above amazon.co.uk for example is a clear indicator of error IMO.

Caffeine is a good reason why the broken SERP issue has not been acknowledged by any of the powers that be at Google. They knew they had a team of engineers frantically beavering away on the new system and simply couldn’t tackle, what they considered to be, a temporary problem.

Let’s hope they can fully beta test and rollout Caffeine sooner rather than later. You can help by hitting the sandbox and providing feedback in the usual place.

So where does this leave the SEO industry as a whole? Google is still the dominant force, and I can’t see that changing any time soon, but this deal certainly earmarks the intention by both MS and Yahoo! to make a play on that dominance once and for all.

SearchEngineLand has a pretty good article explaining the key facts, but for me the only one I really need to pay attention to is:

Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.

Just in case you didn’t clock the gravity of that statement - Yahoo! will no longer power it’s own SERPs, instead Bing will provide the backend algorithmic sorting of all results returned. Sunnyvale has officially conceded with search.

For SEO though, this has a few big implications:

• We’ve been keeping an eye on Bing lately just like everyone else, but this news goes to show we need to spend a LOT more time on it.
• It’s going to be harder to report on search metrics. Up until now, we’ve tended to use Yahoo! as the true source of backlink counts - without Yahoo! Site Explorer, where will we get this data in the future? I guess our only real option is a proprietory app.
• We may lose APIs like BOSS. With MS providing the data, I can’t see these APIs being publically available like they are now. Again, we use these for reporting and internal apps.

I guess we won’t know the full extent of the deal and it’s effect on the worlds search habits for a while yet, but one things for sure - it’s going to be interesting to see how things pan out.

I aim to find out.

I have no illusions of grandeur myself but it would be nice to make enough passive income a month to pay for some bills, or maybe even my mortgage payment one day. With a bit of effort I think aiming for something like that is more than achievable and so thats where I’m setting my goal for my affiliate experiment - I aim to make around 650GBP a month by this time next year.

It’s not hard to see that talking about making money online seems to be the real cash spinner here, but you dont get to settle into that niche until you become a god-like guru to the minions and thats why only a few people ever manage to kick back and make mad wedge off of their blogs and e-books. For me, it’s going to be a bit of effort and a bit of savvy that will pull off any successes I have - any and all of which I’ll be reporting on once a month right here on my blog.

I have around 200 domains that I’ve picked up over the years, many of which have been in my portfolio for 4-5 years or more so, as any SEO knows, thats a great start for the foundations of any kind of content rich site. I don’t really want to pump much money into this experiment so I’ll be working in my downtime (evenings & weekends) and maybe paying for a bit of content to be written. My main goal is to achieve free organic traffic to convert. Further down the line, when I have a bit of profit built up, I may dabble in some PPC but that’s not something I’ll be utilising straight off the bat.

So, that’s the plan - wish me luck!

Seeing some really weird use of dates in google snippets lately. Anyone have insight into the parsing algo being used?

Now, it’s no secret that the GOOG has been using dates in the SERP snippets for some time, in fact it has been mentioned as far back as early 2008 but I’m pretty sure there has been a recent algo change that has made them show up far more consistently. Not sure what I’m talking about? have a look at the image below:

Using a date, in itself is no bad thing and I can think of several good reasons to do so (blogs, news articles etc). The thing that is very strange about this example especially is not only the fact this is a homepage result, but also where in the page content this date has been pulled from:

This is pulled from my sister Leala’s website and as you can see, the date in question appears well into the content and there are several dates present in the source long before this one. In fact, the H1 tag contains two specific dates - those being my sisters date of birth and date of passing.

It’s likely that this can be supressed by utilising a full META description (current one is only 135 characters), but that still doesn’t change the fact that the date being pulled into the SERP snippet is highly irrelevant to the overall page content.

1. You had an idea and jumped into the build

   But at what point did you canvass your target market, or stop to see who was already in the marketplace? Often if there’s no competitors to your app then you’ve got it monumentally wrong. Granted, you may have just found an untapped goldmine but those moments are few and far between, often being eternally elusive. Before you build your app, make sure there are people that will genuinly use it - and that means asking people you don’t know.

2. You looked at an existing product and improved it

   Which is great, but you forgot one very important factor: market share. You can create the best email client the world has ever seen tomorrow, but do you think you’ll take users from Gmail or Hotmail anytime soon? Of course you won’t.

3. UI was secondary to the code build

   Just because your app is great, doesn’t make it usable. UI should be one of your top priorities right from the beginning of the project - there’s nothing worse than getting frustrated trying to perform a task that on the face of it looks simple to action. Sometimes it’s easier to find that cancel button.

4. You don’t offer a free/trial plan

   Sorry, but screenshots and your own opinions won’t convince me of how fantastic your product is. Let me get in without a credit card and see for myself.

5. Your plans cost too much

   You produced a great app, marketed it well and have a nice design - but guess what? it’s not worth what you think it is. You need to split test signups with different pricing and see which is more sticky. Would you rather 10 customers paying $50/mo or 500 paying $10/mo?

6. Your featurelist sucks

   Unless you’re 37signals, you’ll be hard pushed to convince anyone that the reason your app is the best is because it does the least. Sure feature bloat is just as bad, but you still need to ramp up your core features to satisfy 90% of the people 100% of the time.

7. You still have a beta label on your logo

   You launched 6 months ago, but you still claim to be in beta? I think I’d rather wait and start paying for your app when you let me know its production ready, kthx.

8. You planned to have massive viral growth

   Oops, maybe you should have planned for normal growth and hoped for virality instead, huh? Unless you’re doing something totally awesome, I’m not going to hound my buddies with links to your web app I’m afraid.

9. You were too slow

   You saw an untapped niche, bought a great domain and started building your app. Little did you know that so did 3 other teams, and while you launched within six months, they launched in three. Sorry my friend, but you missed the boat… time to get back to the drawing board.

10. You found a problem that doesn’t exist

    Probably the most common faux par of them all. You built an app that solved a problem you didn’t have. Not only that, but you didn’t know anyone else that had the problem either, you simply assumed that the problem was wide-spread. Remember, to assume make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and… well, just you really.

As you’d expect, the link is what would appear in position #1 of the query suggestion at the top of the pile but I do wonder how this affects rank tracking tools that rely on Google’s ranking data in referrer strings.

Google have recently trialled having Adwords displayed in Suggest too so is this an overall attempt to streamline the user experience and cut out the SERPs altogether? Only time will tell.

A guy called Gary logs onto Google Webmaster Help to ask for assistance with a website that he’s “been presented with to find a solution”. The site has suddenly, after 7 years, dropped out of a top search position for the term “diy”. He’s spotted some issues but wants to know what others can find.

He lets everyone know the domain is diydoctor.org.uk and then states “I personally don’t think this will get them their rankings back”.

Meanwhile Mike Edwards, the MD of DIY Doctor, logs onto Google Webmaster Help and starts a thread of his own asking for assistance as revenues are dropping sharply. He gets told to stop cross-posting and to stick to his original thread… has a short lived “WTF?” moment and then proceeds to follow the link.

Hilarity ensues.

It turns out Gary works for Just Search and they just quoted the guy up to £5000 for an audit…. for the full Just Search debacle, check out this post.