March 13, 2008

Google AdWords University in Bulgaria - Impressions





Despite of the PR gaffe with invitations I decided to visit the event held on March, 12th in Hilton Hotel, Sofia. I arrived at about 11.30 when the substantial part of the lectures had begun. To my surprise 99% of the invited were people with a strong experience with Google AdWords. In other words (the words of internet marketing) the target wan not very suitable.

There were lots of technical questions like: “Why aren’t my sales tracked, though I placed conversion tracking code?”, “Where do I put the code? At the beginning or at the end of the page?”, etc. The most interesting were the answers you can’t hear or read anywhere.

Trademarks can be used in a campaign as long as they are not used in ad title or ad description i.e. they can be used only as keywords. If you have a registered trademark in the European Union, you can send an application to Google to include your trademark(s) in a list with keywords that cannot be used as keywords (this can never happen if the registered trademark is in USA). The process can take a month or so and you have to give a lots of documentation.
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March 10, 2008

phpBB 2 - 10 steps for optimization





Although third version of phpBB Olympus was released, there are many webmasters that use the second version. Whith the help mod(ifications) and some help of myself, the second version remains the best free bulletin board systems (IMHO even best than paid forum softwares). Here are the steps that have to be maid, to have fully optimized phpBB forum:

1. We apply the advises from Avoiding Duplicate Content on Index/Home Page article

2. We apply the advises from Avoiding Duplicate Content on Inner Pages article

3. We install Guest Sessions Mod . This mod is not validated by phpBB team but I never experienced problem using it. [read more...]

March 2, 2008

Avoiding Duplicate Content on Inner Pages





We are going to talk about NOT how to avoid duplicate content on already existing pages but how to avoid it, if for example we have bought old (expired) domain that has many indexed pages that would result in 404 error onaour site.

Some webmasters place the following code in .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 403 index.php
ErrorDocument 404 index.php

which creates the problem with duplicate content, as these directives redirect all users that visited forbidden and not found pages to the home page but keeping the URL unchanged. Another method used is to redirect the users to specially designed 403 and 404 pages by placing that code:
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February 26, 2008

Avoiding Duplicate Content on Index/Home Page

A you might know, or not know, www.site.com, www.site.com/index.php, site.com and site.com/index.php are 4 different pages for search engines, although you see the same page.

To avoid the problem with duplicate content you have to have: Apache server running and mod_rewrite module installed. Now, somewhere in your .htaccess file include this code:

Options +FollowSymlinks -Indexes
RewriteEngine On

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February 21, 2008

YouTube and Google API in Help of Google optimization

We all know that some of the most visited sites are those offering free video clips. The good news is that many of them allow their content to be shown on other sites. YouTube is not an exclusion. The average user likes sites containing different types of media and webmasters like much more using free content. In this article we want tell you how to implement a video clip in your site using the code given by YouTube. We will tell you how to implement many clips relevant to your content.

Every child knows that Mountain View guys offer free widgets and one of them is Google API for searching multimedia, part of the results are provided by YouTube. You don’t have to be a software engineer to use the code. The page that offer the code wee need is Video Bar Wizard:
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