SXSW Google and Bing how to improve your search rankings

Good Q&A with Google and Bing regarding how to improve your search rankings. All about SEO/Search Engine Optimisation. Interesting points that came up;

• Facebook has a robots.txt file which blocks all web-crawling of their site. And Google mentioned that they have been blocked by Google. Whereas Bing has a partnership with Facebook. Could that be a big concern for Google. Especially in light of;
• Facebook Graph search - does that worry Google or Bing, they didn't really answer that one very directly, they just made some comments about them waiting and seeing and it could be interesting. Whereas I think it could spell quite a problem for Google...
• They re-iterated before contacting them in order to understand a problem on your site in terms of site ranking then you should make sure you are fully utilising the web master tools as they will reveal a lot of the problems / issues and how to fix them.
• Interesting discussion around when a site has gained a poor reputation, or you've taken over a domain with a poor reputation, you can request a "re-inclusion" request (after you've rebuilt the site and distanced yourself from the site before) - this will effectively wipe the slate clean and get you re-listed on Google.
• Interesting discussion about content behind a login - what's in front and behind the login or paywall should be the same, outside should be a subset. If you offer a completely different experience internally then this is known as "cloaking" and is frowned upon. The guy from Bing also explained you should do a spreadsheet of all the links/content on your site and place a value on all those links, and you need to flip it round and see how you can get a subset of your most valuable content outside the login, in order to help attract users in to the site.
• Note you can setup local listings options for your site, to reflect for a business, where the local region(s) for that business is.
• If you are having problems with content not getting crawled or appearing in search, use the "fetch as googlebot" and "fetch as bingbot" tools to see what the crawlers are seeing.
• Utilising schema.org to mark up your website is a good idea, as it helps the search engines understand your sites content and index it appropriately (and display it appropriately) it doesn't get you higher on the search rankings though.
• They repeatedly talked about how you can perform better on search when you are in a domain dominated by larger players - and that is to pick a niche keyword(s) and build a reputation around that, and then expand from there. Also the suggested phrases at the bottom of search can help you decide what keyword phrases to focus on.

MacBook Air setup

After giving some consideration I decided to get the MacBook Air 11 inch 64 GB laptop. The plan has been to use it as a cloud based device.

In order to utilise it as a cloud based laptop I have done the following;

• Followed the welcome screens and setup a user account
• Added in my iTunes Apple ID to get iCloud. I have two apple IDs one for iTunes and the one I had for mobile me. So I had to undo the iCloud service and put in my mobile me Apple Id - this didn't allow for notes and email - and it was asking me to create an iCloud email address - that is when I realised it was the wrong id. I then changed the ID and was then able to get all the iCloud services working.
• Configured my iTunes Apple ID in iTunes, authorised the new computer and setup iTunes match on my other MacBook Pro. Now when I got to iTunes on my Air it allows me to either download my music or stream it - really good. Strangely nothing appears on the iTunes match tab - which was slightly confusing initially.
• Installed software and software updates from the App Store, so this got me Pages, Numbers, Things, Xcode.
• Installed Evernote, Spotify, Drop Box
• I then moved my documents/projects folder to Drop Box on my MBP and moved my code to the DropBox
• On the Air I then selectively chose the project and code folders I wanted, and selectively chose some of my photos to download
• Setup photo stream in iPhoto, I'm not sure if I can get the DropBox photos to render within iPhoto so I am viewing them outside iPhoto.
• Configured iPhoto and Facetime - and my Air got added, and all the other devices notified me of this.
• Added my backdrops folder to drop box and setup a decent background to my desktop
• Bought a cover off of Gelaskins
• Now the policy is to do everything on this device in the cloud, and all setup.

Loss of page rank gone down to zero

Unfortunately my page rank of www.kevingordon.org.uk has gone down to zero (0), when it used to be 3 or 4, that might explain why the traffic to the site has also reduced.

It isn't clear why the page rank has gone down, but it may be related to the Twitter and Blogger plugins I've put on my home page. So I've taken the following actions;

1. Removed the Blogger and Twitter plugins from my homepage
2. Added a description meta tag to my home page
3. Now hoping for the best :-(

I will review in a few weeks and see if it's made any difference to my page rank, but going down from a page rank of 3 or 4 to zero seems some what unfair.

Please let me know if you have any other ideas why the page rank would have gone down so much?

Setting your Raspberry Pi up as a Media Server

So I've given up on getting BSP running on my RPi at the moment and instead I went about setting up my Raspberry Pi as a media server. And I've installed Raspbmc based on the xbmc (xbox media center) and it is friggin' awesome. All my videos stream - at a better quality than my PS3 media server and with very little buffering or lag. Not only that but it's got iPlayer too (after a bit of effort). I go through and explain how to get Raspbmc up and running, how to connect a network hard drive with your media, and how to get iPlayer up and running.

1. Download the Raspbmc installer for your Mac here http://www.raspbmc.com/download/ Follow the instructions here http://www.raspbmc.com/wiki/user/os-x-linux-installation/ to install it on a SD Card - note that you need an SD Card dedicated to running your Raspbmc.
2. Once you've downloaded the installer and run it, it will put the appropriate content on your SD Card, say no to installed to a usb jump drive.
3. Now you are ready to put it in your RPi
4. So put it in your RPi and boot it up, it usually takes 20 minutes plus to go through the whole installation routine, but it should go through without any issues - make a coffee - and then reboot a few times. I got a couple of warnings / error messages, but it all went through fine
5. Then it'll be up and running.

Linking to your media

1. To do this go under video, and go to files.
2. Go to "Add Videos"
3. When the Add videos dialog appears, go to "browse"
4. For me it involved selecting the "Windows network (SMB)" then choose MSHOME, choose the computer, disk and sub-folder
5. Choose a name for it (type it in), and choose okay
6. Choose that the directory contains Movies - to choose the movie scraper
7. Turn on "Movies are in separate folders that match the movie title" and "Scan recursively"
8. Choose okay
9. Choose "Do you want to refresh info for all items within this path" say yes
10. Let in scan the folders
11. Now go home
12. Now to play movies go within Videos and files and choose the movie of your choice.

Installing iPlayer.

1. Download the iPlayer plugin here; http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-iplayerv2/downloads/list
2. Place the zip on your media server / hard drive where you are getting the content.
3. Go to System Settings, then Add-ons, then choose "install from zip file"
4. Then navigate to the file, and choose for it to install
5. Once installed you've find it under Videos, then add ons

RPi BSP status update

I failed to get BSP to install on my MacBook Pro, there were two many make errors that I could not resolve.

However I tried running and installing the software on a raspberry Pi and it seemed to work fine. I chose single core, Linux, UDPIP, and everything looked fine, until I tried to compile a simple programme. When compiling a simple programme I get the following error;

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lbspcore_00
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lbspudpip
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lcpr

So it is basically failing to link some libraries that it can't find. I think when I did the initial make there were some errors - so perhaps these libraries failed to be created. Also it maybe something to do with choosing the UDPIP setting, so I could try installing BSP on another RPi and choose TCPIP. In fact initially I should choose the generic standalone one.

Running BSP on RPis (Raspberry Pi's)

For my university dissertation I did an experimental investigation into parallel computing using the BSP (Bulk Synchronous Processing) paradigm. You can download it here; www.kevingordon.org.uk/projects/bsp/experimental-parlallel-computing-final-report.pdf.

So this is my new project to get BSP running on a Raspberry Pi, what I'm going to attempt to do is the follows;

1. Install BSP on 3 RPi (Raspberry Pi) nodes
2. Get the BSP daemon to communicate between the 3 nodes using the test profiling software
3. Get the parallel algorithms I wrote as part of the dissertation running on the 3 node RPi cluster.
4. Write some more interesting parallel algorithms to run on the 3 node cluster
5. Buy addition RPi's perhaps get a 10 node cluster running
6. Profile the RPi cluster
7. Get the BSP running on OS X
8. Profile BSP running on a single multicore OS X node
9. Compare the 1 node (multi-core) OS X computer to the 10 node RPi cluster
10. Based on the resulting performance perhaps get additional RPi nodes to add to the cluster

So thats the plan, watch this blog and I will post the results.

How to get apps to open in a dedicated window OS X

Something that has been bugging me for a while is that when I restart my Mac, and I select to re-open windows, the apps get open in random desktop spaces.

Well I found a solution!;

Basically, you to the desktop space that you want your apps to open in, and for each app in that space, right click, and go to Options > Assign To > This Desktop. Then once you've done that for each app in the desktop space, do it for the other desktop spaces.

Now when you restart, the apps will open in their dedicated space, phew!!!