Steve’s Blog

Fair Play Response From SerrBizSEF Developers

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a new SEF extension called SerrBizSEF from Serr.biz.

I pointed out some holes I saw in their component and business model. They were kind enough to answer, replying several times in the comments section. Today they posted an extra long and detailed response including several juicy tidbits of news about their new component.

Especially after yesterdays post about bad news ranking well and good news disappearing, I felt it was fair to post their response as prominently as the initial criticisms. Here it is in full:

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New York Times

Fascinating Article About Embarrassing Search Results

New York TimesSo much is written about SEO nowadays that its easy for great articles to slip by unnoticed. That happened this weekend with an article called "When Bad News Follows You" in the New York Times.

The article outlines how the Times has been opening up its archives – and at the same time uncovering a myriad of shameful or just wrong information that people want to stay hidden. Apparently:

"People are coming forward at the rate of roughly one a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing or not getting jobs, or may be losing customers because of the sudden prominence of old news articles that contain errors or were never followed up. "

All of this is the "unhappy byproduct of something called search engine optimization, which The Times has been using to make money by driving traffic to its Web site."

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Are You Selling Fear or Solutions?

We received an email this morning from Phil-Taylor.com listing security holes in various Joomla components.

I have an awful lot of respect for Phil and his work developing Mambo and now his components. However, I think the tone of the latest email could have been improved. People are understandably jumpy when it comes to security and I think he could have done a better job of pointing people towards freely available solutions rather than to his new security site.

There have always been third-party components with vulnerabilities and I’ve not seen any evidence that security exploits are increasing. What may be increasing is the number of hacker attacks. Some major Joomla sites are being attacked every 60-90 seconds. However, thats not much different from a computer plugged in to the internet.

Its not that difficult to secure your site. Here’s how…

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In Defense of Search Engine Friendly URLs

Earlier this week I was tagged by Barrie North over at Compassdesigns.net.

He was talking about SEO improvements to Joomla and mentioned that:

“You?ll see much of the discussion about SEO revolving around various SEF components. These components allow for advanced manipulation of URL?s and meta tags. Neither of these was identified as a major factor in … SEO analysis. Turn on the default Joomla SEF, but I am not sure there is much evidence that its very influential after that.”

Barrie pointed to a long discussion we had about SEF URLs in the comments section at the end of our final Joomla URL Week post. I guess I’d better defend my viewpoint 😉 …..

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Joomla South East

Joomla South East Meets Wednesday in Atlanta

Joomla South EastWednesday night should a lot of fun because its the first meeting of Joomla South East, one of a growing number of Joomla User Groups around the world.

We’re meeting from 7.00  to 9.00 pm at the 5 Seasons Brewing Company in Alpharetta. Their website is 5SeasonsBrewing.com and you can get a link to the site here. We have a conference room reserved over the brewery. It has an overhead project, wireless internet, plenty of power sockets for laptops and great food and beer.
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Domain Name Values

Domains Names as Real Estate? Don’t Make me Laugh

Domain Name ValuesSometimes a comparison can confuse more than it can explain.

One of most common is domain names are "21st century real estate". A quick search of Google reveals nearly 2 million results for the phrase, coming from companies as big as Yahoo, USA Today and Fox News.

That the phrase was just plain wrong hit me while reading Tropical SEO’s recent claim that there’s a slump in the domain market … just about the same time as old-fashioned real estate sinks in the United States.

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Ludhiana.net.in Menu

How to Make a 2 Level Menu with Extended Menu

Ludhiana.net.in MenuYesterday we talked about how to create a professional-looking tree menu using Extended Menu.

Today we have a quick tutorial on how to connect two copies of Extended Menu to make a menu thats twice as good. Well, maybe not that good, but will allow you to create a neat parent-child menu. You can see an example of this menu working on Ludhiana.net.in.

This way to doing this things has one major advantage and disadvantage compared to the more common child-parent setup that you can see on site such as AJC.com.

  • Advantage: The child menu links area only appears if any are published. Otherwise the menu area will neatly hide.
  • Disadvantage: This menu isn’t so dynamic. Users need to click through to see the children.

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How to Create a Vertical, Expanding Menu

In today’s post we’ll show you how to get add a clean and SEO-friendly menu to your Joomla site. This tutorial was inspired by several recent site audits we’ve done that revealed serious problems with dropdowns menus.

Four Frequent Problems With Dropdown Menus

  • Menu sprawl. People think that because they can have 100 menus links, they should. More menu links are counterproductive. They only confuse visitors.
  • Visual sprawl. Dropdowns tend to hide items underneath and often conflict with other scripts/
  • Bad SEO. This isn’t true for some dropdowns but if I often do SEO audits for large sites that only have 5 or 6 pages indexed. Why? They built a flashy Javascript or Flash dropdown menu.
  • Unclear. When someone has clicked on a dropdown option, they need to hover over the menu to see them again.

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We All Mess Up – Just Not As Badly As This

Admit it – you’ve been making changes to a live site and something went wrong. You screwed up the site and spent an hour or more fixing it while visitors kept coming and kept wondering what on earth was going on.

However, you don’t run one of the 40 most popular sites in the world…

For about an hour this morning, some poor staffer at the BBC posted an unedited photo of England cricket captain Michael Vaughan. The photo was so large that it made a complete mess of the BBC’s frontpage. 3000 pixels high and 2158 pixels wide? Woops, should have been 66×49…

The image was so big that the frontpage was pretty much unusable while it was posted. Check out the original photo and the correct one.

Click Below for Snapshots of the Mess

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The Eighty – Twenty Percent Rule

First up, apologies in advance but posting will be light this week. I’ve managed to write every workday this year, but my family are visiting from England and I’ll concentrate on spending time with them for a few days.

I thought I’d share with you a quick rule-of-thumb that I’ve stated to use to help clients who are new to the Open Source World. I call it the 80% / 20% Rule.

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