Fuzzy is Clear
making sense of distributed media, technology, and everyday living.
This is one awesome job of video editing! Thanks to Shoemoney for the great post about Shoeperstar Aaron Kronis!
Drew showed off some amazing IIS7 features using languages such as PHP. His blog on cool IIS7 tricks blog is a great resource for you all looking for new ways to run PHP on IIS7 and windows, etc. The membership model in ASP.net will now extend over to apps running in PHP which is an awesome leverage of IIS’s ASP.net membership model.
There are many Advantages of PHP on IIS7:
* Moduar architecture for reduced attack surface
* XML based config systems
* Remote management capability
* Advanced diagnostics
* Integration with WMS and media pack
Ability to extend IIS7 using managed code
Here’s a quick recap from Nathan Buggia at Mix08. Great review Nathan – it was clean simple and a great session.
Crawling
What does the robots.txt file say?
Can we download this page? Are there links on it? How does this page relate to other sites about this topic? Is there anything unusual about this page?
Page is chunked into bits, stored separately. Images, meta tags, etc.
Ranking
Inbound links are key. They are the endorsement of what pages link to this page – ~20B pages in MSN.com for example.
Big arrows
Small arrows
Bad orange arrows – bad sites linking to you
Domain name structure – MSN treats msn.com/realestate differently than realestate.msn.com
Searching – what did the user enter into the search box? The engine looks at the 20B pages, RSS Feeds, structured content, etc and then orders them based on the search term.
Use HTML Semantically – simple is better. Using simple H1 and other basic html tags for best structure.
Proper Use of Common Tags: <a> <h1> <title> <meta> <frame> <table> etc..
Javascript – don’t lock up your navigation, etc behind JS as search engines don’t really index the text, etc.
RIA Strategy Guide – (Rich Internet Applications)
Monolithic – Best used when only the entry point is indexed, etc.
Linkable – full site indexed – metrics, reporting, etc.
Crawlable – Full site is indexed and well ranked, etc. Good example is finance.yahoo.com
Tips and Tricks
Search Engines can’t crawl ASP.net post backs, etc.
Make sure all your pages have the correct meta tags, etc. That is important for the teaser text in the search engine results across all the major search engines.
When redirecting old pages, be careful using client side redirects. It’s much better to do a server side 301 redirect than to use client side redirecting, etc.
Linking and URLs
store.com/products/microsoft_zune_80_G2 *better
store2.com/products/microsoft-zune-80-G2 (BEST)
store3.com/products.aspx?id=23weqwe (worst)
HTTP Status Codes
200 – Page was OK
404 – Page wasn’t found – be careful always using a 200 for a true 404 (“Soft 404″) – best practice is to 301 that 404 page – best solution is to 301 the page to say a newsletter page, etc.
500 – Internal Server Error
304 – not modified – basically a bandwidth saver 
must support conditional GET to utilize, etc.
Canonicalization
What’s the difference?
www.visitmix.com
visitmix.com
visitmix.com/default.aspx
The way DNS works is that each site can resolve to a totally different domains. Choose one option and stick with it – be sure to send all cases to the main site, etc.
Best Solution to avoid diluting your page rank is to 301 all non WWW requests to www Requests, etc.
It’s an interesting idea when I think about it – how many of the top affiliate sites or top traffic sites have literally thousands of domains? And then again, I wonder how many of the top affiliates have only a handful. It’s a classic question that I have pondered for some time.. breadth vs. depth.
Is it a better strategy to focus on only a handful of sites to really build them up ,or should one take hundreds of domains and build them out to make a wide swoop at an industry. Would love to see your thoughts in the comments on this post.
Also, here is another hypothetical question – what is the best way for someone, who has amassed say only a few hundred domains, to monetize them most effectively? Is it parking? I don’t think so…but I might be wrong. What do you guys do? Just an open discussion about it…any thoughts are greatly appreciated
So i took this pic back in January – any guesses what the subject might be?
I thought it would be cool to have a place to talk about things in the technology world. Since I have been in the web world for about 8 years now, it’s about time I have a place to call my own. I plan to use this blog to talk about everything media related – whether it’s new ways to leverage YouTube content to build video search portals via PHP or asking Shane how to quit your day job to be a .com millionaire.
This will be my little place in the world. Hope we can get some good conversations going via Fuzzy is Clear Cheers! Matthew