There have been a great number of submissions in the month of September. Some odd German spam has been a lot of it, but many quality websites have been added as well.
Work continues on adding better text-based descriptions to all of the category pages, in the interest of making Sootle not just your average link directory. With the web directory business getting tougher all the time, it’s important to work hard to have some sort of advantage.
We’ve written a webmaster tool to check your competition in Google. This is our first real use of the Google API, and it’s very easy to use.
Check your competition in Google. This will run a simultaneous search for your search phrase and it will perform a backlink check. We’ve estimated the competitive nature of the SERP terms and come up with a quantitative assessment.
This seems to be a big part of what I’m hearing that optimizers are doing these days. Actually, they’re using RSS feeds in all sorts of…err, interesting ideas.
The tendency to abuse RSS feeds as “changing content” seems problematic, though. Google’s algo has gotten better at finding duplicate content, so it will be put to the test.
I’m most interested in finding out if RSS can bring targeted, directed visitors to a site. I’m not interested in traffic for the sake of traffic, but rather I’m only interested in traffic that converts..either for me, or someone who’s paying me.
Today we did a bit more work on automation of link checking, and performing various administrative tasks. Let’s face it, the more you can automate any task, the less of a strain it is, and the more productive you can be. Intuitive tools are always a great joy if they can help reduce the time task completion takes.
We’ll continue in this vein for the next few weeks, by attempting to make additional infrastructure improvements.
I completed the user authentication system for the Sootle platform today.
It’s based on MySQL storage of course. So far it looks good. I need to bug test and add a lost password function. I think sending the password via SMTP may be the easiest and probably safe enough for the application.
An obviously simple tool, yet Find your ip address can come in handy on certain occasions.
I didn’t get too involved with proxies and forwarding. I assume people using proxy servers have a good idea what IP they’re giving off.
