The Gospel According To Rhys - Colwyn Bay North Wales Web blog About Sport, Wrestling, PHP, SEO, Social Media & Networking

Recently, I was asked what I thought about reciprocal links. My answer: I’m not keen on it for SEO, but I do like useful link exchanges. Unfortunately, shonky SEO guys & gals often use reciprocal linking to push their wares with emails such as this (hat tip to @clairecarlile). If you get an email like this, run a mile.

Dear Webmaster,

My name is Mark. I recently came across your website through search engine and found it is informative for our website’s visitors.

I would like to exchange link with our websites spammydomain.com.

As you are probably aware, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising the search engine rankings and generating more traffic to both of our websites.

If you would like to do the link exchange with us, please place our link on your website with the following details.

Title : We’re Spammers
Desc : We spam you like mad!
Url : http://spammydomain.com/

Then, please inform me by replying to this email with your details (title and description) or use the following links to post your details. Your links will be shown once we approve them within a few days.

http://spammydomain.com/link-to-us

Look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
Mark Spamboy

What To Watch Out For

• They don’t address you by name - Okay, not a deal breaker, but often they will address you as a webmaster, or the site owner, not your name or your site name.
• They try to create confidence - The link spammer will explain why you should link exchange with them, but also doesn’t really give any sort of examples, other than “it increases your ranking in search”.
• They give your specific details to link to - The spammer will not give any sort of leeway for linking to you, giving you a defined anchor text, an anchor URL (sometimes internal) and a line of text with it.
• They will put your link on an internal page, buried where nobody can see it…. - Link Spammers live in the hope you’ll get a page within a site that’s actually quite well placed, rather than on a links page. Will you get one in return? Of course not. You’re more likely included in a directory which is linked to from the footer of the terms of conditions.
• ….and the link won’t be up for long…. - Often as soon as they place a link to your site they will remove yours. Again, this doesn’t always happen, but it can.
• ….or unindexable - Again, if your link is within a directory, it’s fairly easy to block the indexing of this area of the site using robots.txt or the Robots meta tag.
  
• They use a pseudonym – The thing that cause the most amusement? They use names such as “Rudy Rogers”, rather than their standard Asian sounding name. Like that’s an issue?

What’s a Good Link Exchange?

There are great link exchanges out there, here’s a few ways on how to identify them:-

• They Benefit You & Your Readers - Problogger said it best, great link exchanges are a win/win/win situation. You get a link, they get a link, and your readers have access to another resource.
• They are familiar to you - If I approached you out of the blue, I’d expect you to ignore me. If however I leave a few comments & get a few responses, I expect you to give me a little more time of day. Have they been commenting on your blog? Are you familiar with their work? That’s always a great start.
• They’re Not Technically Link Exchanges - As I mentioned in my blog newsletter a few months a go, often I am a lot more open to linking to people if I get a link back first. It’s subtle but it shows that they link to me because they think I’m a great resource, not because they want something back in return.
• There’d Be Link Freedom - I would link to a post, or a page I like, rather than necessarily the home page. Furthermore, I’d also link how I want it. If the person has problem linking to me, I’d suggest a format (this would include my keywords usually!).

My Perfect Link Exchange Email

If I was writing a “link exchange” email, it’d be more of a “raise awareness in exchange for a link” email. Here’s what I would write.

Dear Mr Wynne,

I am a big fan of your blog and your recent posts (such as: xyz.com).

I especially liked this post (abc.com) and as a result I wrote a post stemming from this on my own blog (def.com). As you can see I’ve linked you from this post.

I’d love to know your thoughts on my posts, and if we could set up some sort of partnership (be it a link exchange, content exchange or anything else) I would be receptive to this.

Do let me know your thoughts.

Cheers

Rhys

def.com

That’s how I would approach this (and I’ve also told you guys the best way to get links from this stunning PR4 blog ;P), what would be your approach? Do share your thoughts in the comments.

I’m a huge WordPress fan. If I’m building a website it’s usually the first thing that I stick on the webspace, the power of the CMS features in WordPress’ means that it’s my programming choice.

However, despite all it’s brilliance, it does have one fault, the WordPress Official Support forum is terrible. Questions get unanswered, and moderators work behind the scenes, so even if there is a problem, you’re not sure where to go.

I’m not the first to notice this – Devon Dudgeon in a guest post on Robert Bravery’s Blog said the following:-

“This is probably the most popular blogging service but without technical help it can cause a few tears (or was that just me?). “

There are places to look though. Here’s three places I look.

Sitepoint Forums

I’m a huge fan of the Sitepoint Forums, although they’re not specifically about WordPress, they do have great CSS & PHP forums. There is also a WordPress subforum which is far more useful than the parent “Blogging” forum, who’s posts are all “how to make money blogging?”. It’s not great for plugin support, or more specialised WordPress help, but for general PHP & CSS help, it’s great.

WordPress Tavern

One forum that pops up time & again for specialist queries is WordPress Tavern, which seems to be a community of developers with in depth knowledge of WordPress. Seems to me that the discussions are a lot more specialised than both on the Sitepoint forums & the official forums.

Paid Support

Other than that, there are plenty of places to go to for paid support. There’s sites such as Odesk & elance for freelancers, as well as the WordPress Pro Mailing List. I’ve never used these though.

These are the solutions I use, how about you? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

It’s officially kicked off in Twitter. It was between two parties. On one side it was Chris Pearson (@pearsonified), producer of the Thesis WordPress theme. On the other it was Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt), creator of WordPress.

I don’t really understand the ins and outs, but it seemed to all stem from two tweets.

1. The first was that pearsonified tweeted that a developer Bill Erickson, was taken off the WordPress Consultants list because he promoted Thesis.
2. The second was a tweet where an exposure in Thesis’ was shown. This was retweeted by Matt Mullenweg with an (admittedly very sarcastic comment on Thesis). From then it went onto a discussion about the GPL.

What Is The GPL?

The GPL, or the GNU General Public Licence is the licence that WordPress is under. The licence is simple, you’re free to do what ever you want with it, make money with it, go nuts. However derivative works need to be under GPL.

What Is The Problem?

Of course, what counts as a derivative work? WordPress says that premium themes & plugins are included in this. Of course, by having effectively open sourced themes, it will allow other people to propetier from your work. For free software, this isn’t much of an issue. I’ve used code before that people have made within WP Email Capture. It’s made the software better. Of course, when I finish WP Email Caputre Premium, I’d like to think that I can make a little bit of cash out of it, and not have it ripped off.

Am I Breaking The Law?

A lot of software I use on this blog such as OIO Publisher & Maxblogpress Ninja Affiliate aren’t in the GPL. I use them because they’re useful. Technically though, they’re breaking the law. Am I breaking the law for not only using them but promoting them (I am not a big fan of Thesis, hence why I don’t promote it)? Developers are rightfully a little up in arms over this, as they believe it hampers their right to make an income (see Why The GPL Doesn’t Apply To Premium Themes).

I’ve been advised by experienced members of the WordPress community when I do finish my plugin whether I should release it or not under the GPL. I’m not sure whether I should or not. What I do know is that the GPL needs some sort of clarification, because I cannot make head nor tail over it.

One thing people ask me is “Rhys? How did you create the pages on Retro Garden such as the Arcade Game Reviews page on your site?”. The answer is simple, all you need to do is do some simple php & template editing. Today I’ll show you how:-

Copy page.php file & rename it to something else.

Very simple, go to your theme folder in your wp-content file & copy your page.php file. Rename it to the category you wish to target (such as 1.php or more useful web-tips.php for your “Web Tips” category).

Add The Following Lines to the page

Open the page within your web design software & add the following to the top of the file:-

<?php
/*
Template Name: Web Tips
*/
?>

Replace “Web Tips” with the name of your category.

Also, find the line that looks something like this:-

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

And replace it with this:-

<?php query_posts('category_name=catname&showposts=-1&orderby=title&order=ASC'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

An explanation of the “query_posts” Line

Within the brackets of the query_posts(”) command, is where all the posts are retrieved. You may need to make a few changes. Here’s what each command (the bits between the “&”) do:-

• category_name – The name of the category you want to show posts from. Change this to your category name you want to list on your page.
• showposts – The amount of posts to show on the page. -1 means all posts will show.
• orderby - How you want to order the posts, “date” is default, for this we will use the word “title”.
• order – Can be one of two things. ASC (which means posts go from A to Z), and DESC (which means it goes from Z to A).

For this tutorial, you need to change the category_name to the name of the category. Other than that you can leave the rest.

Create a New Page With This Template

You then need to create a page with this template. To do this, click on “Page > Add New” in the sidebar, give the page a title, change the page template in the “Additional Attributes” box in the sidebar to the name of the template given in the previous step, and click “publish”. You now have a page which can be linked to from throughout the site.

On June 30th it was Social Media Day, a day organised by Mashable to celebrate Twitter, Facebook & all of the other ways in which social & internet media has grown recently. Meetups happened throughout the UK and I headed to the Social Media meetup in Manchester, which had a range of speakers, each one explaining how they use social to grow their respective businesses.

First up was John Greenway of Manchester Airport, (@manairport on twitter). John explained how they used social media & they originally started like we all do, spam monkeys pimping deal after deal. After a while, they found that people wanted information rather than being sold too. This eventually got people through the door & interested in their deals, as some of the information was for a commercial nature (“where’s the best place to have a pint at the airport”, for example). This really came to the front with the Volcanic Ash Cloud, where they added added 4,000 followers. Whilst people within the terminal buildings both in Manchester & elsewhere weren’t telling information – or that information was slow coming, Manchester Airport kept it’s followers updated (which ballooned as people all over the world were using it for information).

As you can expect with a fairly big company they are using the Twitter API to it’s full potential & have integrated with live flight changes through DM. So if you DM your flight number to them they’ll keep you updated with any changes. Very clever.

The second talk was by Martine Alexander (@YourStylist on twitter), who was completely different operation from Manchester Aiport. Martine was a fashion stylist (which if you know me, you’d know that it’s a subject I know the grand sum of sod all about), but used twitter to help grow her business throughout the UK & stateside effectively. Again she doesn’t have as many followers as even yours truly, but the overall quality of the followers is a lot better. Builds up trust & PR contacts by giving away free fashion tips – not just general tips but also tips directed at people. She also mentions that any sort of retweet by a celebrity (she has a few celebrity clients), did result in a massive jump of followers. Despite not being in a favourite subject area of mine, I must admit it was a very engaging talk, although I forgot to ask the question of “So what does a slightly overweight, brunette Welshman wear in the summer to look good?”.

The third talk was by Panda Licorace representative (who’s name escapes me now, but it’s @pandalicoriceuk), who was looking to grow their brand to two groups of people – teenage girls & over 45 women – they did this by driving traffic using social media to two different sites. They connected to authoritative bloggers in their niche – but before actually connecting they listened to the chatter. For 6 weeks they didn’t write a single tweet, post an update or send an email. Instead they made  a list of authoritative individuals in their target markets & made contact, originally offering a 39 pence bag of licorice to each individual. They say that even with this small bag, it got a lot of response & buzz out there.

There were two other talks, but by then the beer was taking an effect. The first talk was from 7 Wonders in 7 Days (@7wondersin7days), who is coming up with a plan to visit the New 7 Wonders of the World in a week. I wasn’t sold on the idea at first but towards the end it did seem possible. Plud they’re planning to raise a huge amount of money for 7 charities, and give away a few holidays. Check that out.

The final talk was from Dominic Hodgson (@thehodge), whose talk was surrounding how to stop making an idiot of yourself on Social Media. A bit of light hearted, Dave Gorman esque relief towards the end, but it was fun, and he pushed his conference Think Visibility, a conference I will be attending.

Segmented between the talkers were a couple of live linkups over Skype. The first was to the Social Media Day in Porto, Portugal. The second was to Sacremento California. It was impressive but sharing stories about how Twitter has benefitted the local community was a bit morbid. The twitter community in & around Manchester managed to raise money for comedian Chris Sievey’s funeral, whereas Sacremento’s twitter community help recover a guy’s stolen dad’s ashes! We tried not laughing. Honest.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable evening. I’m a big believer in offline networking, so it was good to see a few familiar faces & new faces. Definitely check out next Social Media Day – on the 30th June – in your local area.