Monthly Archives: August 2010

Sending script requests through multiple IPs

One of the more useful things you may want to do with Perl scripts if you’re into crawling websites is to pipe your script’s requests through multiple IP addresses.

This is actually pretty simple when you know how, but doesn’t seem to be documented that well across the web. So the following steps should work pretty well if you’re running an Apache server:

1. Configure Apache

Make sure you’re running the mod_proxy module. Then add the following code to your Apache conf file:

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ProxyRequests On
<proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from internal.example.com
</proxy>

2. Install Squid

A dual purpose caching & proxying program it can be installed on RHEL 5 by following these instructions.

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Report a broken link

Just found a “Page not found” error on the RNIB website – why don’t more 404 pages have this “report a broken link” feature? It shows users you care and gives developers useful information:

Oh and it probably wouldn’t hurt your link profile either to find out & fix these broken links quickly and as a matter of process.

5 SEO Lessons from Mad Men

As a new series of the consistently excellent Mad Men kicks off its fourth series in the US, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on a few advertising rules from the gurus at Sterling Cooper that can equally be applied to SEO.

Rule #5: “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation”

Reputation management can be a key part of an SEO’s job, especially as clients learn that Google is their new home page. So how do you deal with negative search results appearing for your brand name?

  • Change the conversation – Dell are a fantastic example of this; after the “Dell Hell” episode, Dell turned around their customer support, and with the IdeaStorm website actively showed their customers they were listening. There aren’t a lot of large companies that have the ability or will to turn that kind of thing around.

In SEO there are also a few other bits we can do to address reputation issues:

  • Change Suppress the conversation – just because an isolated voice has a grudge against your company, that doesn’t mean it’s justified. What about the hundreds of satisfied customers who’ve given you testimonials? By its nature, negative press gets more traction than positive press – a bit of link building towards positive reviews can help give your satisfied customers a voice. Of course if you don’t have any satisfied customers, that’s a different story entirely ;)
  • Change Influence the conversation – imagine you’re Microsoft and have just launched a flagship gaming console. People are searching for [xbox reviews] but the first thing Google Suggest throws up is “xbox repair” and “xbox red ring of death”. Search volumes are said to influence the suggestions box, and we know ATL advertising can have a significant effect on search volumes. For a large company like Microsoft, it’s possible a co-ordinated ATL campaign could influence searcher behaviour, if not to remove the RROD suggestion, at least push it down a bit. How about releasing a red Xbox and promoting that; phrases such as [xbox red], [xbox red 120gb], etc may start to populate the suggestions box. This example’s rather far fetched but I think it’s a valid point.

    • It's notoriously difficult to affect Google Suggest, but a creative ATL campaign may insert new suggestions

  • Change Buy the conversation – a dangerous road to go down, in that you’re rewarding your critics, but if there’s a result from a poisonous blog that just won’t budge in the SERPs, approaching them with an offer to buy the site may help remove them. Read More…
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