Rudy Dallal | SEO – Web Design – Tel Aviv – Baltimore

Google Search - Are You Logged In?

This was the most wasted hour I had today; from time to time I like checking back on old clients to see how they are doing with their desired keywords. Way before I did some SEO in Baltimore, I was leaving in New York. Over there I had a client that was pinging from #13 (page 2) to #8 for his key phrase. I managed to get him to #3 and it stayed on #4. Every time I that I checked it since then it moved from #4 to #8, but today it appeared #1. I was surprised. This client got tons of gurus after me that couldn’t help bringing it higher on the ranking scale- who was this genius that manged to do it?!?

I tried searching for anyone that stating that they are doing SEO to that client but I couldn’t find anything. Finally after an hour I notice that I was logged in… I didn’t know that I will get different search results(!) I thought that Google just keep tracking your behavior when you’re logged in. so I logged out and at that very second the ranking went down to #4.

Now that was a waste of time.

New English School Website in Israel

I just finish putting up a site for an Israeli client call Mind the Gap. This is an English School concentrates on the Israeli professionals and their integration in the global market. it specializes on teaching business English and conversational English.

This site is my first pure hand coded CSS. The site is in Hebrew so I had to get use to the RTL <-> LTR thing. Since the site is in Israel and one can buy israeli domain only in Israel, I added a .com fw domain. I’m not sure that it will have any effect but that is my new experiment. The second URL for Mind the Gap English School is http://www.business-english-school.com, good luck!

Avoid Yahoo hosting

It took me couple of days to understand why any of the refer-a-friend script didn’t work on my client’s Yahoo store. Yahoo small business hosting server is limiting the functionality of PHP scripting. One of the limitation is that an email cannot be send, using mail(), if the From address is not specified as from the web site domain name (that is the referral cannot be sent as from the one referring). This was done to prevent spamming but it limits the functionality of refer-a-friend type script.

Looking at a script and forum by Michael Bloch lead me to create a modification of that script in order to troubleshoot that Yahoo Store issue. I’ve seen in the forum that other Yahoo Store owner had the same issue but Michael stopped the Q&A and their issue was never resolved.

The fix is simple: all the instances where From is a variable are changed to constant. you can download the Zip file yahoo_store_refer_a_friend_rdezine_com.zip containing

recommend.htm

refer.php

thankyou.htm

send me a note if you’re having problem

Here is a transparency class for all browsers:

.transparent_class {
	filter:alpha(opacity=60);
	-moz-opacity:0.6;
	-khtml-opacity: 0.6;
	opacity: 0.6;
}

Here is a email I just received:

Psst…

You asked us to tell you about µTorrent Mac developments.

µTorrent for Mac

The beta is out. It’s Leopard and Intel only right now, but we’re working
to expand support soon.

Get it here: mac.utorrent.com/beta

Remember it’s beta software, so there may be bugs and annoyances. Please
help us make it better by contributing to the conversation in the forums
(forum.utorrent.com).

- The µTorrent Mac Team

Here is a fact: Go Daddy doesn’t advertise its godaddy toll free number on the godaddy.com contact page. But they do have one. it is not 1-800 number but 1-866 number : 1-866-GO-DADDY or 1-866-463-2339. Save yourselves  a long distance call

Back to GoDaddy.com –>

Google Up - Yahoo Down

It seems like I’m out of Google’s Sandbox- yey! Google placed me at #30 having http://www.rdezine.com/blog/ as the landing page, MSN have me at #27 but Yahoo dropped me to #6…and what about Ask you ask? More than a month passed and they still didn’t update the listing….

I didn’t build any links since the 20th as I said I’ll do but I’ll add them now. The time is passing, the winter is already here and I really hope I’ll have the chance to meet the Baltimore SEO Meet group again.

Sandbox

Here is an update:

2 days after Google included / updated its indexing and placed RDezine.com on the 12th page, Google change the indexed page to this blog and place it on page 8th. The main domain, the index page, disappeared….

Ask.com did not updated its indexing yet and it is almost a month (it will be in 2 days). Yahoo.com and MSN.com are with no change.

My next stage will be to build 5 links every other day, without changing the content of RDezine.com main index. The only dynamic part will be this blog.

By the time I reach to the holy grail I’ll be in Israel , far away from Baltimore. Perhaps I should focus on “Tel Aviv SEO” instead of “baltimore seo”…

RDzine.com

Last week I started the RDezine.com experiment. Until now I worked on other companies’ websites and never actually took the time to work on my own. In mid October I decided to optimized my site’s meta tags and keywords and to fix few links that didn’t work. I also added some “nofollow”s to the portfolio section but I did not work on sculpting because most of my pages were not crawled. My website is out there for about 5 years and has been changed once a year. It is listed on DMOZ and few other directories that copies DMOZ or WHOIS information but no other websites. So here are some of my changes:

• change of title
• change of pages file name
• add link navigation separated from my Flash one
• created meta tags for each page
• change in content (“New York City”==>”Baltimore”)
• applied for editorial changes on DMOZ
• creating this blog as a folder (soon I’ll add it as a sub domain)
• move domain registrar from yahoo business to godaddy

Here is what happened when i use “seo baltimore” search phrase:

• On Google, I spent almost a month in Google’s Sandbox until last night: page 12
• On MSN I started on the 4th page from the posting date and move to the 3rd couple of days after
• On Yahoo I started on the 3rd position on the 1st page just couple of days from posting
• On Ask it is still outdated (almost a month…)

to be continued….

Right Click?

It is really helpful and productive to use Windows XP on your Mac. I installed Windows XP on my MacBook OS X 10.5.5 using Parallels and Boot Camp – I love it (performance a bit slow, so if anyone have any idea…). Anyway, I wasted about 20 minutes to figure out how to right click in Windows XP running on Mac OS X using Parallels. Finally i found it: well you know that Ctrl + click on OS X = right click on Windows, so when running Windows in Parallels use Shift + Ctrl + click .