HELP! MY SITE HAS 939 CRAWL ERRORS!!1 I see this kind of question several times a week; you’re not alone - many websites have crawl errors. 404 errors on invalid URLs do not harm your site’s indexing or ranking in any way. It doesn’t matter if there are 100 or 10 million, they won’t harm your site’s ranking. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ch/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html (archive.org) In some cases, crawl errors may come from a legitimate structural issue within your website or CMS.
Ultrasonic-triggered MP3 player with Arduino
This small MP3 player is triggered when the ultrasound sensor notices someone nearby for a longer period of time (must be closer than 70cm for >0.9s). The hardware uses: Arduino Uno R3 (archive.org) Seeed Studio Music Shield v1 (archive.org) and micro-SD card with a MP3 file (shop (archive.org)) HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor (eg shop (archive.org), they’re cheap) Breadboard, speakers, jumper wires Optional: LED, 330 Ohm resistor (to show that it’s still running) I hacked the Music Shield to include risers for some of the pins.
Spaces in URLs
Q: Does Google allow spaces in URLs? A: Yes! But because other sites sometimes have problems with linking to URLs with spaces, we generally recommend using dashes (-) or underscores (_).
Sample page with lorem ipsum
This is just a sample page There’s really nothing hidden in the content here. No need to check the first letters of anything here and check for rot16. Images from PlaceKitten.com (archive.org). Here’s a section Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Zeno autem, quod suam, quod propriam speciem habeat, cur appetendum sit, id solum bonum appellat, beatam autem vitam eam solam, quae cum virtute degatur. Theophrastum tamen adhibeamus ad pleraque, dum modo plus in virtute teneamus, quam ille tenuit, firmitatis et roboris.
Hackers stealing your PageRank
The last time I wrote about a hacked site, it was using a redirect that sent some users to a different site. This kind of hack is pretty common (even though it’s usually not as complex as mentioned in that post), it leverages the sad fact (archive.org) that users are often easy to trick and not browsing with protection (or a current browser (archive.org)). A different angle of attack is to redirect only search engine crawlers to a different site.
Seeing nofollow links in Google Chrome
Here’s a simple trick to view nofollow links in Google Chrome. Just drag and drop the following link to your bookmark bar and hit it whenever you want to see links with the rel=nofollow HTML microformat: Nofollow? This bookmarklet inserts a tiny bit of CSS into the top of the page you’re currently viewing. The CSS is similar to that which is used in other nofollow highlighting methods (archive.org): a[rel~=nofollow] { border:1px dashed #852!
Confirm that you're using Analytics on all pages
Here’s something from my mailbox - someone wanted to know how he could crawl his site and confirm that all of his pages really have the Google Analytics (archive.org) tracking-code on them. WordPress users have it easy, there are plugins that handle it automatically. Sometimes it’s worth asking nicely :) - let me show you how I did it. As a bonus, I’ll also show how you can check the AdSense ID on your pages, if you’re worried that you copy/pasted it incorrectly.
Running Firefox in parallel
Sometimes it would just be great to have multiple instances of Firefox running at the same time. Some web applications just love to eat memory in Firefox, some web pages go crazy if you have JavaScript enabled and sometimes you just want different sets of cookies to let you manage two accounts at the same time. I’ve been trying to do that for years and did the most exotic things to make it happen.
Go hack yourself - recovering your FTP password
All of the websites I put together at the moment are used for playing around and testing things. It’s fun to set up a site, try some things out, delete it or just let it sit and then - usually much later - start over and try something else. The only problem is that by the time I am ready to start over, I have forgotten my password. I can find my user name, it’s in the FTP client and visible in my hosting control panel, but the password is not visible anywhere.
How to use Google webmaster tools stats with Excel
Google’s webmaster tools (archive.org) has a neat feature that lets you download your query and click statistics (once you have verified ownership of your site). The data you can get from there is quite comprehensive, but hard to break down for use in Excel. As a fun exercise I put together a small Python-script that takes the CSV file downloaded from your webmaster tools account and turns it into new CSV files for queries and for clicks (both with the position numbers as well).