I’ve setup a new site recently with my friend Violeta from All Tips and Tricks, it’s called Easy Recipes.

The site is built on Wordpress and provides a nice selection of tasty, yet easy to prepare recipes.

The problem is that the site has been up now for about 3 weeks and is still not appearing in Google’s index. It’s very strange because usually I find Google picks up new sites in a matter of days.

I’ve added a Sitemap and submitted this via Google’s webmaster tools but still no luck.

The domain does have history in the Wayback machine – and the history displayed is good – however I am now wondering if the site has been used by a more recent owner for some negative purpose and possibly is now being penalised by Google. The Wayback machine does not show the most recent year of history so this period is unknown.

I’m hoping with a link from my own personal blog that Google may come to its senses – if not I will have to file for a reconsideration request.

If anyone else has tips on rapid indexing, or overcoming penalties in Google – I would love to hear about them in the comments below.

About a year ago I put up a site to test out a number of search engine algorithm theories I had. The site is http://stars-without-makeup.info/ and focuses on celebrities or stars without makeup.

The site has never had a huge amount of traffic, and has not ranked highly in any of the engines until recently it moved to #3 and then #2 in Yahoo. Surprisingly this netted between 900 and 1000 visitors per day for a brief period, but just as suddenly as these rankings were bestowed they were gone! Yahoo now ranks the site at 49th and this change occurred overnight.

Why is this?

I’ll be pondering this question and will let you know what happens. I’m looking at content, backlinks and a number of other factors.

A very good friend of mine has a beautiful cat, the breed is Russian Blue.
We were talking about her cat recently and it emerged she is part of a larger network of people who love and collect Russian Blues in Europe.

This friend is also a web designer and has built a really cute website for the cattery and Russian blue community.
Take a look: http://www.cendre-de-roses.ro/

If you were interested in buying a Russian Blue they are apparently very smart and good natured pets, and come highly recommended. The Cattery currently has Russian Blue kittens for sale, but get in quick as stock is limited!

I must say the kittens are unbelievably small and cute! Who could resist one of these!

Norman Sheppard has a good tip today that shows you what to do if Dreamweaver suddenly stops working. It’s a Dreamweaver bug.

This has happened to me on a number of occasions – and has always puzzled me. Working away in Dreamweaver and suddenly it dies – It won’t open again except for a few seconds when my workspace flashes before me and then vanishes.

My resolution was this  – I deduced that it was the site directory that I was currently working in that had caused issues (Yes didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out).

1. So I renamed the directory
2. then created a new directory
3. Dreamweaver then opened
4. and I downloaded all my files again off the live server….

Now I know what really happened – as Norman explains what causes Dreamweaver to stop working is when a file in your site is exactly 8,192 bytes, or a multiple of this number. The fix is to find the file and just add a few characters to it, using notepad for example – then Dreamweaver will open again.

Read the full story at the link above. Interesting

I’ve found that using dofollow for all links in Wordpress comments is generally not good because it attracts unmanageable amounts of spam – basically spammers use bots (scripts, automated programs) to surf the web looking for dofollow blogs. When they find them they come and personally leave spammy comments hoping that the author will approve them. Yes spammers automate spam commenting too – but these are easier to pick up because they are generally less relevant to the content.

What has bugged me about this is that if I reply in my own blog comments then any URL is also nofollowed. Thsi bothers me because I quite often link out to other sites in response to users questions and I don’t want these links to be nofollowed – I’m writing teh comment, I’m placing teh link, so why shouldn’t be considered by Google to be a dofollow editorial link?

The solution to this problem is an excellent little wordpress plugin http://www.everfluxx.com/follow-my-links/

This provides dofollow links for the authors posts. Just what I wanted.

I just wanted to thank Vladimir Prelovac for his Wordpress Ping List.
I have just added it to this blog and a couple of others – It’s a much more comprehensive list than the one I was using previously.The list should be entered into Writing Settings > Update Services in your Wordpress admin.
When you post a new blog entry these services will be notified of your blog post increasing online exposure.

The list:

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

Welcome, I’ve just put this blog up and am quite pleased with how it’s come together.

I wanted something very simple and minimalistic, where I could post my off-topic thoughts that do not fit into the context of my other web properties.

I started with Wordpress, an excellent free web publishing application – or blog. Installed this on a web host, and got down to finding myself a good clean wordpress theme that I could modify and build upon.

I settled for Empty Canvas by Romanian designer Adrian Diaconescu, It’s just what I was after, Thanks Adrian.

Next step was to create a simple, clean logo. When in need of a quick typography fix I usually head on over to DaFont, type in my text and then preview their top 100. A good place to start for logo design ideas.

Angelic War from Dirt2 caught my eye and I decided to have a play with this – I typed my surname, and name of this blog, “MacKinven” into Fireworks, my graphics application of choice, and then added a slight red gradient over the text, giving the result seen at the top of this page.

Happy so far.

Next up was getting my HTML Page Titles optimised for SEO. I found a great post from Nathan Rice, explaining how to do this. I made a couple of small modifications and ended up with this code:

<title>
<?php if ( is_home() ) { ?>
<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> &mdash; <?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php wp_title(”); ?> &mdash; <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>
<?php } ?>
</title>

Adding this to your header.php gives a nice Title tag for the home page that is the blog title and blog buy-line together – For posts this gives the post title first followed by the blog title.

Done! And welcome to the blog.