Posts by Dani

Make sure the backlinks are on pages that are not noindexed (they neither have a meta noindex tag nor a noindex http header), as well as the pages’ URLs not matching any rule on their website’s robots.txt file.

Additionally, make sure that the page on your own website the backlink points to doesn’t match a rule on your site’s own robots.txt

If all that checks out, you can go to Ahrefs.com and set up a free account and see if Ahrefs can detect the backlink.

Something else to check out is DaniWeb’s SEO backlink checker at https://www.daniweb.com/tools/backlinks

To use the tool, enter your own domain name as well as a list of URLs that you expect your backlinks to appear on. It will check each of the URLs and make sure that there are no meta noindex tags, http noindex, robots.txt rules, etc., and if there’s any technical reason why the backlink shouldn’t be found, so you don’t have to do all of that manually.

So basically my Palo Alto technique :)

I don’t think there’s a better answer than that. Productivity hack when not coding are none other than breaks from coding. It’s so simple :)

what was missing was a programming hub of news / forum / interviews

I have always been a strong proponent of having editorial (news, tutorials, interviews, etc.) complement the user-generated forum discussions. In the past, well over 50% of our gross revenue from advertising went straight into paying for staff writers. IMHO we used to have a lot of tech news content being published regularly, but as traffic declined, so did revenue, and so did the budget for staff writers. The nail in the coffin was when I was no longer able to afford Davey (happygeek), because his gig at Forbes turned into a fulltime promotion and there was just no way I was able to compete with what they were paying him. I feel like a lot of members left when happygeek left. For sure, our Google rankings tanked a lot due to no longer having regular news stories and editorial daily.

However, I'm still keeping up with some staff writers. For example, Johannes just published an interview last week, and Usman just published a tutorial a couple of days ago. Of course, we don't have the level of clout that we used to in order to attract interviewees like Steve Wozniak anymore, but we're trying.

You have the itemtype set to a VideoObject but, as you point out, only sometimes is there actually an .mp4 file. The rest of the time, it's a static image such as a png, jpg, or jpeg. Google probably doesn't trust your meta tags since they are inaccurate half the time.

This is definitely not a targeted attack at anyone. Please take it just as me having a bad day and venting.

I'm kinda tired of people constantly telling me that I'm the reason that DaniWeb traffic has tanked over the years. And if only I had done this differently. Or done that differently. Or listened to members more about this. Or listened to members more about that.

I have always done what I thought was in the best interests of DaniWeb long term. There have been many times over the past twenty years that I've looked back, and hindsight is always 20/20, and thought that maybe if I hadn't done this than that wouldn't have happened, or I did this wrong, or I screwed up here, or I screwed up there, or I did that right after all.

But the thing is, at the end of the day, I'm the only one willing to put my money where my mouth is.

In the current landscape of tech and programming forums, Dream.in.Code went out of business. DevShed went out of business. Cre8asite Forums went out of business. Bytes.com is hanging on by a loose thread.

Yes, we aren't nearly as popular as we were in the 2010s. Heck, we aren't even profitable anymore. But I'm paying for all server costs out of pocket. I'm working on the site every day (that I am able to, given recent health challenges). I've made, on average, 700-1000 code check-ins annually for the past ten …

I asked ChatGPT for some interesting conversation starters and it suggested this. However, the more I think about it, the less I can come up with something! I enjoy walks on nature trails, but hiking is huge amongst techies in the Bay Area. My husband plays DDR regularly for exercise, but that has a cult following amongst nerdy people. He enjoys gardening, but that's him and not me. I love binge watching TV, but I'm all about sci-fi, and so that's not exactly unexpected for a techie either. Then I started thinking about the girly things I like, but I'm very much not into fashion or makeup or anything like that. Perhaps I'm just so stereotypical it isn't even funny?

OK, you know what? I have a dog. I devote all my free time to her. Let's go with that. :)

There is no way of determining the owner of an email address, especially from a free service such as GMail. Anyone can sign up for a free gmail account and purport to be anyone. However, if you're getting emails from a scammer, forward them to abuse@gmail.com so that GMail can follow up and take the appropriate action (e.g. shut down the GMail account).

You can use a website like Built With if you want to quickly see what frameworks a website that is already in their system is using.

However, to figure it out for yourself, it's just a matter of looking at the HTML source code for a webpage and seeing if you can find javascript tags, etc. that are used by the framework. For example, you can see that we use jQuery and Bootstrap here at DaniWeb.

That being said, this is only going to tell you what's being used on the front end. It takes some hacker-level sleuthing to figure out what backend technologies a website is using, if they aren't announcing them.

To clarify, I am suggesting:

[...]

//make your email body to send here
$survey =
    "RadiantNewHorizonHomes.com General Inquiries" . "\r\n" . "\r\n" .
    "Name: " . $_POST['Name'] . "\r\n" .
    "E-mail Address: " . $_POST['Email'] . "\r\n" .
    "Phone Number: " . $_POST['Phone'] . "\r\n" .
    "Comments or Questions: " . $_POST['Message'] . "\r\n"
;

[...]

After code changed, not only will still not send email but screen turns blank white.

That's a PHP fatal error. It could be a syntax error, or it could also be that PHPMailer is not in the location you're telling PHP to look. Do you have any way of accessing the error log? Without access to the server, perhaps through a web-based control panel like cPanel, etc.?

At first glance, I see that on lines 11-18 in the code you posted above, you don't have a semi-colon at the end.

Isn’t that what black hat is?

Hi and welcome to DaniWeb.

I know that in my experience, OR's are very bad for speed you can get away with a few but they can get very bad when they stop the whole query making use of one of the main indexes, you can actually speed it up by moving the or's into the HAVING usually.

Thank you for that tip! I never thought of that, but it totally makes sense!!

Another option is to use AJAX to load the data after the page has loaded, I moved to AJAX & Javascript websites like 6 or 7 years ago - let the DOM load and use javascript to put the data in after it has already rendered.

We do that with DaniWeb Connect business cards e.g. https://www.daniweb.com/connect/users/view/1 because figuring out the matching is super resource intensive.

I currently am looking at storing all data in a Redis DB updated periodically from MariaDB, so the backend updates the data instantly over SSE(server sent events) so the react app keeps up to date without needing to wait for data over the network.

DaniWeb uses Redis for a handful of things here, but most certainly not as sophisticated as storing the majority of our database and updating in realtime. (We also use Memcached, but I like Redis for the combination of performance and persistence.)

Another option is to switch your Database server to an M2 SSD if you haven't already, those things are insanely fast

That's super …

chemistry --> moles

SELECT sum(points) total FROM ... HAVING points > 10

I don't have experience with MariaDB, but in MySQL, something like that will work as long as I do SELECT sum(points) AS total FROM ... HAVING total > 10. Is that what you were getting at?

As far as what I was trying to accomplish that provoked this question, I was working on a HAVING clause that was filtering recommended topics by a bunch of OR clauses. Nearly all of the filters could be accomplished in WHERE, but there were two (specifically, that looked at whether the end-user had posted in the topic, or had unread posts in the topic). At the time I was using a subquery in the SELECT clause, hence the need for HAVING. I switched to using JOINS, and then was able to use WHERE. And that's how I shaved nearly 50ms off of https://www.daniweb.com/programming/4 for logged in members.

Not that it is an excuse, but I would like to offer up an explanation, if I may.

You can see here that only 4 days ago, FarrisFahad had a button to pay by Paypal on his website, and wants to convert it into utilizing a payment API (e.g. something that accepts credit cards). This takes a decent amount of backend programming and working with the credit card processor's API. For a small business, especially some guy who sells wood veneer, hiring the right web developer who can modify the out-of-the-box eCommerce platform he's using to handle this is likely completely over his head.

And as far as phone numbers ... I am of the opinion that small businesses should not invest in toll free numbers. They're super expensive (the business has to pay per minute) and pretty much everyone has a flat rate mobile plan these days, so you wind up spending a lot of money on something that doesn't even provide a huge value add to your customers.

Yes, on a smartphone, we currently are not showing our full editor. This is on our list of future improvements. As of right now, our full editor is not mobile compatible.

Update: Our editor has been mobile compatible for well over a year now.

I'm going to mark this question solved.

Why would I, as the website publisher, fill out a form on your search engine's website anytime I update a page?

Currently the thing I hate most about TV shows is how much time elapses between seasons. I feel like I've been waiting for season 2 of Severance on AppleTV for forever! (It's been over 2 years already since season 1 debuted.) Speaking of that, is there ever going to be a second season for Squid Game? I can't imagine that Netflix wouldn’t invest more in something that was so popular and made them so much money.

Rahul, do you mean a mobile app for iPhone or Android? Wordpress can build some incredibly powerful web apps.

RIP Dream.In.Code :(

It's now a year later, and apparently Twitter ended up in the trash. We only have X now ... ;)

Still have a long way to get top reputation though! ;)

Is that what you want your preferred URLs to look like?

I would recommend Wordpress.

I can see that the URL that you linked me to has 4 steps to create a purchase.

The first one is to create a Purchase via an HTTP POST request. That can be done with a cURL request. cURL requests require some backend programming such as via PHP or some other language. Are you using a server-side language to write your web app? If so, which one so we can better assist you? If not, you cannot use this API.

Make sure that every page has the correct link rel=canonical html tag set to tell Google what the one and only URL to the page is.

Ensure there are no internal links anywhere in your site that use this wrong version of the URL.

Remember, Google is finding this wrong URL somewhere! It’s not making it up :)

Ideally, implement 301 redirects from the wrong version of the page to the correct version.

I don't have personal experience with multilingual websites or non-English websites to be able to advise you on what's best. However, I would advise you that while it's appropriate to use multiple fonts, you want to ensure the entire website has a consistent look and feel, navigational structure, and design language. Otherwise it will be very confusing to the end user and not a good experience, and Google realizes that.

Google won’t get confused as long as you implement 301 redirects from non-www to www. The benefit of keeping both search console accounts is you can keep track and see that Google is stopping/slowing down crawling the old one and no longer indexing it.

If Google search console is still showing you indexed pages for the non-www property, then you know you have a technical SEO problem you’ll need to solve.

Hello,

Google Search Console is showing that vidceo is not the main content of the page, because I don't see any video on this page? I don't see how not having the carousel loop by default will change that?

Or are you referring to the other products at the bottom of the page that are rotating through as well?

Either way, I'm not seeing video anywhere on the page?

Can you provide a URL with an example of a product that has video, so I can see why you think Google is not prioritizing it?

As far as your carousel is concerned, I see a link to the javascript file https://www.kupisi.mk/js/dz.carousel.js at the bottom of the page. When I look at this MoonCartCarousel, I see that it is just the theme making calls to a jQuery class called Swiper and telling Swiper to set autoplay with various delays of 1500-2000 milliseconds. So then I looked at swiperjs.com and I can see here in the API docs that simply removing the autoplay: { } parameter will completely disable autoplay. You can make some other tweaks as well.

dz.carousel.js currently looks like this (I passed it through a JS beautifier to format the code):

var MoonCartCarousel = function() {
    var handleMainSwiper = function() {
        if (jQuery('.main-swiper').length > 0) {
            var swiper = new Swiper(".main-swiper-thumb", {
                loop: true,
                spaceBetween: 10,
                freeMode: true,
                watchSlidesProgress: true,
                autoplay: {
                    delay: 1500,
                },
            });
            var swiper2 = new Swiper(".main-swiper", {
                loop: true,
                effect: "fade", …

As someone who has been in the SEO industry for over two decades, it doesn't really matter if you use www or non-www. All that is important is that, whichever you choose, you stick to it. That means that all links on the web (social media, etc.) point to the same version of your domain. All internal links on your website point to the same version of your domain (if they are not relative links). All that matters is that you're consistent.

If you have canonical links set up in your HTML, make sure they reference the new www version of your domain. You will also want to make sure you have redirects set up to redirect every non-www URL to its www counterpart with HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect. Make sure you're not using 302 temporary redirects, as that sends a different signal to Google.

Since you've switched, you will also want to create a Google Search Console property with the https://www. version of your domain. I'm not sure if you're already using Search Console (you should be!) but, if you already are, you'll need to create a new property.

I believe Google Analytics also requires a different property to be set up and differentiates between www and non-www.

As far as whether it was a good choice, that's up to you. Google doesn't care.

Also, Cloudflare support is never ideal. I have no clue why they would recommend you switch to the www version if you're getting …

The .htaccess makes the URL accessible from a friendly URI. However, it does not change any of your HTML code for you. You will still need to modify all of your HTML code to link to the new friendly URI instead of the original URL.

I hate to tell you this, but Google hates web directories and none rank anymore. Gone are the days of Yahoo!, Dmoz, etc. I don't want you to waste a lot of time because I personally don't feel you'll be able to sell a lot of these.

There are some paid models that still exist today, such as The Yellow Pages, Yelp, and Angi. I would browse sites like Yelp to get ideas for what they offer and are doing. Is your intention to sell it as a Yelp clone?

Unfortunately the first link is for support with PHPMailer itself (totally different library), and the second link is just a generic example of how to use the library which we are already doing. Thank you for trying though!

Now you are just splitting hairs

I don't think so, but let's just agree to disagree.

I have been in the industry for a very long time, and have never heard of it.

There’s white hat, of course. Black hat. And then there’s grey hat, where you’re being creative with white hat techniques designed specifically to focus on short term gains.

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, I've used quite a handful of those AI detection APIs to no avail. They also often catch false positives, which is perhaps even more so detrimental to my use case.

What was wrong with good ole using SMTP?

Has anyone here successfully used an XOAuth library for PHP? Specifically, I'm looking to connect to my Office 365 mailbox.

Well, I think what they mean is that the writing does not have a soul behind it. ;)

I don't know anything before Usenet.

Huh?! GEnie to now? Sorry, I think I'm totally missing something here.

No. I haven't heard the name CNET from anyone other than you in probably close to a decade.

There was a huge ton of talk about Reddit, though. Especially revolving around Google's recent partnership where they are now paying a shit ton of money to access a private API of all Reddit content, and how favorably Google is ranking Reddit in the search results, perhaps undeservingly so.

But, yeah, basically what you're describing is exactly the reason why I don't feel DaniWeb is an appropriate place to post AI-generated content. I feel like, within the context of a community forum, posts should be written by the posters they posit to be written by.

Neither article is published on a site devoted to digital marketing, or written by someone close to the SEO industry, so I take both articles with a grain of salt. However, according to the Tech Crunch article, Google announced a search quality update on Tuesday. I actually spent the first half of this week at an SEO conference where they made the announcement. Google likes to launch their big algorithm updates to coincide with SEO conferences as the quickest way to get the word out throughout the industry.

That being said, there's nothing particularly inaccurate in this article, with the exception of the first sentence. I would rewrite, "Google today took aim at the SEO industry, which has gamified search rankings to destroy the value of Google Search results." to instead say, "Google today took aim at bad actors within the SEO industry, which has gamified search rankings to destroy the value of Google Search results."

The second article you linked to on ars technica is much the same. It seems as if tech journalists without a firm grasp of the SEO industry make the generalized assumption that Google is at odds with SEOs, and that couldn't be further from the truth.

Google has an SEO getting started guide and SEO community advocates such as John Mueller, who frequent SEO conferences (I think in his latest tweet he mentioned attending the upcoming BrightsonSEO conference). For as long as I've been in the industry, Google has been one …

Hello there! Firstly, so sorry for taking so long to respond to this thread. I was actually away at an SEO conference (I'm going to write a post about it in the next handful of days, and, yes, I'm mildly feeling a bit better).

That being said, what you're asking for is definitely doable, because we are doing the exact thing here at DaniWeb.

For example, check out our Programming Forum. You can see that it uses infinite scrolling. As you keep scrolling down the page, more and more topics load automatically.

However, if you view the HTML source code for the page, you'll be surprised to know that, under the hood, there are separate HTML pages for page 1, page 2, page 3, etc., and back/forward page navigation links in the HTML. This is how Google is able to crawl each page.

We use a Javascript library called Infinite Scroll which does a little magic to hide the page navigation links from being visible (although they're still there in the DOM!) and, as the end-user scrolls down, uses AJAX to load page 2, page 3, etc. and tack what's on that page onto the end of the page that the user is actively on. At the same time, it modifies the URL in the browser to reflect the updated page number so that, if the end-user refreshes the page at any time, what they get are the contents of page n.

Just as a random tidbit: Google …

Hi and welcome to DaniWeb!! Thanks for joining and telling us a little bit about yourself.

Hello and thank you so much for joining DaniWeb!! It was great meeting you today and I really appreciate the support.

It really depends on the specific niche of the website. However, from my perspective (and this is only my perspective), most people get their fill of memes nowadays across Tik-Tok, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.

People have already incorporated these sites into their daily browsing habits. For me, I would probably not go to a separate website just looking for memes, but maybe that’s just me.

Don’t have a mailing list? If not, perhaps create a sign up form on your site. Mailing lists are a great way to keep past users engaged and coming back.

I, very hackily, create an object of type stdClass as so:

$arr = array(
    'foo' => 'bar',
    'baz' => 'bat'
);

$obj = json_decode(json_encode($arr));

How can I now quickly add a third property to $obj without PHP getting angry?

Start by reading SearchEngineWatch.com and SearchEngineLand.com

Join and participate in the forums over at WebmasterWorld.com

Those are a great start :)