sensu lato

Yes, we are! After more than six months silence and much to the gleeful consternation of an ever patient readership we return to fill these pages with yards more of ex tempore twaddle.

Day twenty-eight. Since the last post on the subject, there has been some organic linking to the site which is always a great sign. The main on-site optimisation over the last week was the addition of Arne Brachhold’s Sitemap Generator.

Google continues to show an increasing number of links to the site, however Yahoo! seem to be slower in exposing external sites that link here (it shows many internal links.) The Microsoft offering at search.live.com also reports several external domains linking here.

Day sixteen. The domain had been dormant for close on a year and I was beginning to think Google had dropped it. However, yesterday the Sitemaps section of the Google Webmaster Tools informed me that Googlebot had indexed the site on January 8th!

In the last few days, the only active step taken in relation to promoting the site was installing Apostolos Dountsis’s highly commendable Social Bookmarks plug-in. This recommended plug-in appends a series of buttons to each post (see below) allowing visitors to submit blog entries to (currently) 26 popular social bookmarking sites (such as del.icio.us)

Day thirteen. The last week or so has afforded little opportunity to work on this project. However, I was able to do some unplanned, opportunistic site promotion over the last week.

First, it appears the sitemap submission to Yahoo! paid a small dividend in that all the site’s pages promptly appeared in the Yahoo! index. I’ve yet to be spidered by Google which is of some concern since it has been more than a week since an XML sitemap was submitted to their Webmaster Tools (previous experience indicates that they usually visit sooner.)

The first two directory submissions were approved, so I submitted to another. I remain a little cautious about directory submissions until I build a little more content although I wanted to try to gain some presence to help feed the spider.

I haven’t taken time to explore to the extent that they merit the social networking/bookmarking sites in the context of site promotion. Perhaps this will be the topic of another post a little later on, although I have begun to make mental note of these resources and ideas are fermenting on how I could use these as a vehicle for site promotion. In looking at the social bookmarking site del.icio.us I did submit the site there.

As an active participant in numerous Internet forums, I also used the signature facility on a few this week in order to promote the site. Again, site promotion through forums is a broad topic and perhaps one to return to in a later post.

Days Four to Thirteen Promotion Steps Taken

1. Bookmarked the site at deli.cio.us;
2. Submitted the site to another free directory;
3. Included reference to the site in a PR6 forum;

Day three. Very little opportunity to work on this today, so little to report. I added some additional update services, namely:

http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.moreover.com/ping

Day two. This morning, I hopped over to XML-Sitemaps and created a general XML sitemap. After uploading the XML sitemap to the root direcory of the site, I added it to the relevant section of Google’s Webmaster Tools site - this requires an account (free signup). It seems to be a common thought that this method will encourage Google to index the site a little quicker than if left to it’s own natural wandering (and since this site presently has no links to it from other sites, it is improbable that it’d be found by the spider without the addition of a sitemap.)

I also submitted the intrinsic RSS2.0 site feed that comes directly out of WordPress to the Yahoo! Search Site Explorer service, which is currently in beta (this service also requires you to sign up for a free account.)

Day Two Promotion Steps Taken

1. submitted Google sitemap;
2. submitted to a second directory (http://www.linkledger.com/);
3. submitted RSS feed to Yahoo! Search Site Explorer;

Day one. Today, I determined to undertake a small project with this domain, namely to see whether I am able, and how long it would take me, to elevate the Google PageRank of this site to 5 or greater at no cost (other than my own time investment.)

The domain is a little under a year in age, registered on 24th February 2006, and although perusal of the httpd logs indicates occasional visits from both Googlebot and Yahoo!’s Slurp, there is no trace of the site in either search engine. Indeed, this useful little tool returns zeroes all round: no links in Google, Yahoo! or MSN, zero Google PageRank, zero Alexa Rank.

Discussions with others have yielded no consensus over the advantage (or, indeed, disadvantage) in using a domain that is close to a year old. Has Google already examined and tagged the domain as inactive? Is it possible to re-invigorate a domain’s presence within the search engines after it has been assessed as inactive (and if so how easy is it)? If nothing else, we will learn the answers to these questions over the ensuing months.

I’ll log details of the exact steps taken in promoting the site so that others might use the information as a basis for their own site promotion projects. I’ll also leave the commenting features enabled in the hope of encouraging feedback from others engaged in similar projects. If you are doing something similar or find this effort useful, then please do take a moment to comment.

So, the starting conditions are a ten month old nondescript domain with a vanilla WordPress installation, a free third party template and no entries.

Day One Promotion Steps Taken

1. inserted HTML META tags into template pages;
2. altered the generic ‘about‘ page to include relevant text;
3. set the default URL scheme within WordPress to appear SE-friendly; chose the ‘date and name’ based URL scheme, although this can be altered at any time;
4. added additional site update services to the ping services for updates and posts; these were added:

   http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
   http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
   http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
   http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
   http://bblog.com/ping.php
   http://bitacoras.net/ping/
   http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
   http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
   http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
   http://coreblog.org/ping/
   http://ping.blo.gs/
   http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
   http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
   http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
   http://ping.weblogs.se/
   http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
   http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
   http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
   http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
   http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
   http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
   http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
   http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
   http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
   http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
   http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/

5. enabled the database backup plug-in (not site promotion related);
6. submitted the blog to one web directory (http://www.linklair.com/); I realise few, if any, directory owners are going to be enthusiastic to list a one day old blog;
7. signed up for a Bloglines feed button so that others may add this site’s feeds to their Bloglines feed management.

Today, I did something that I have not done since early teens.  Yes, today, my friends, I trod in dogshit!  The things us Londoners have to countenance in the name of getting to work!  Despite the initial apparent downside (and, believe me, there are many - including the tell-tale Snickers wrapper that subsequently stuck to the underside of my left shoe) it wasn’t all bad.  As I stood in my socks wiping the half trodden remains on the office curtains, my gaze was snared by the distant dance of a group of lads playing footy in the neighbouring park and I pondered the impact the ubiquitous Richard has had on modern life and, perhaps more importantly, on our great Isle’s blessed national game.

Now, common folklore prescribes that it was once feasible to walk across Clapham Common in a straight line.  Half frazzled bar flies in the many dives and boozers that now surround the common still lament the day their noble descendents would return home from swatting uprisings in the dominions and be able to take their privileged offspring for an enjoyable stroll or worry-free kickabout on “that yonder green.”  No more, sunshine!  Nowadays, we see entangled lovers wander off the twilit paths on to the grass and it is a half dozen steps and whooosh! they are straight into an impromptu Torvill and Dean routine, slipping and sliding like ducks on ice.

These piles, no - get it right - these veritable heaps of dogshit, have not gone unnoticed by the lofty inhabitants of the plush suites at Lambeth Borough Council HQ.  After months of furrow-browed deliberation by the members of a local council think-tank, they finally wheeled out the Clapham Common Shit Patrol, the essence of which is as follows: some homesick Bangladeshi in a fluorescent jumpsuit (pining the rich aroma of the Dhakar slums) kangaroos about the Common on a four wheeled, industrial strength Cack-Vac sucking up turds by the kilo.  Charming.  Now there’s a job we’d all love.  Might make for a few interesting conversations at future job interviews (”Ah, Mr. Ramasurwatee, I see you were an employee of Lambeth Borough Council.  Would you care to outline your duties and responsibilities in your last position?” … “Dogshit!”)

Anyhow, a distinguished young fellow named Ayers it was who was responsible for my last brush with dogshit.  (Dogshit and I have been happy leading our lives pretty much in parallel since then, our trajectories through space and time not meeting again until today.)

Back then, we were kicking a ball about on the green, playing “heads and volleys” (do kids still play that?) and I was manning the net.

“This one’s for the keeper,” he bellowed from deep on the right wing, rolling the ball through an ochre puddle of Scooby Doo’s finest blend.

Ayers was a foot taller and two stone heavier than the rest of us, captain of the school XV, wanted to play front row for England (which, I think, he eventually did, but in a far larger game, against the Iraqis in the sands around Baghdad) and the keen purveyor of merciless hidings so, as I learned that day, there was a tacit agreement among the kids that he was allowed to roll the ball in dogshit as much as he seemed fit.

So what of dogshit and the beautiful game?  Here’s the theory.  Post war affluence led to many more people keeping dogs, and a quick glance over a recent publication of the Department for Environment, Dogshit Division (“Post War Inner City Turd Density: A Practical Survey”, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, GBP 2.50 - comes in a fine brown envelope) confirms a rising trend in dogshit on the Capital’s open spaces (not to mention pavements) in the immediate post-war era.  But instead of hunting out greens of lower cack density, the enterprising kiddies of that age faced the rising threat head-on incorporating the brown dollops in their footy games.  By the early sixties kids had become highly proficient in not only skinning a pack or barking, nipping defenders, but also concurrently running the gauntlet of the dogshit slalom, and a new era in ball control was born.

It wasn’t until the appearance of the hardened little brats of the Thatcher years that indifference dealt a severe blow to the English game.  Do you think there has been a player to have borne the revered three lions on his chest in the last 30 years who hasn’t heard yelled from the sideline “For Christ’s sake, son, it’s only a bit of dogshit - get on with it!”  I’m sure you too can imagine a teenage Shearer hearing this familiar cry after falling behind a mounting attack to cautiously examine the brown smudge on his forehead; or the crowd singing it in unison to a schoolboy Shilts as he appeals to the bench for a clean pair of gloves.  But it is precisely this indifference to the omnipresent Eartha that has made the English winger a present day dying breed.  Today’s rec. ground superstars just plough on through it (“it’s only a bit of dogshit - get on with it!”) instead of nimbly negotiating the turd gauntlet.  Gone are the Heighways, the Barneses and the other masters of the deft touch that keeps your kit white; we just don’t produce them like that any longer.  Today, if the ball looks like it’s stuck to a winger’s foot, then it probably is, Snickers wrapper style!

And there you have it flawlessly presented in black and white! If the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton (as Wellington astutely proffered) then the 1966 World Cup was won negotiating the turds on the playing fields of England.

[Exeunt]