I’ve just put up a rentacoder request, first one in ages. I was feeling lazy and I need my home page fixing and its a nightmare with some code embedded in php etc.
But I can use winmerge to pick out the changes.
Accepted a big with in 15 mins of posting, £11 🙂
by JM
I’ve had a few thoughts on ways of optimising SoftTester to try and spread a bit more of the link-juice around the program details pages and up the number of visitors. I don’t know whether they will work or how much effect they will have but they could be worth trying out.
First Thing to Try
The highest PR/ strongest page on SoftTester now is the homepage. It’s got most of the incoming links. Currently it pushes PR to the details pages via the category links, e.g. Accounting & Finance, or Keyword lists or Author titles. These types of pages spread the PR fairly randomly, e.g. authors beginning with A might get a bit more link-juice than those starting with Z, or accounting programs might get more than internet programs for example. Overall the link-juice probably gets spread fairly evenly but it might be worth a go at concentrating the PR on things people search for more often.
When I say search for more often, I mean search for on Google not SoftTester, since the two might be different. If you use the Adwords tool to look for common searches, you’ll find DVD software, Photo Software, Antivirus Software and Screensavers are all very, very popular searches. The standard PAD categories don’t match up with these searches.
To maximise the chance of matching on these searches, I’d recommend adding sections on the front page listing the 5 or 10 most popular titles on SoftTester with these keywords in their title, e.g. DVD in the title or Photo in the title. 5 or 10 titles should be enough to pass some decent PR to a spread of programs; these programs can then spread the PR through to similar programs via the related programs lists on the details pages.
Second Thing to Try
The other thing you could do is on each program’s detail page list the 10 most popular titles in the same category as the program. I’d also list the 10 overall most popular titles throughout SoftTester. Doing this will reinforce your popular programs and give them some more link juice. Hopefully they will then do better in SERPs.
Third thing to Try
Your screenshots currently just show the image all on their own in the browser. I’d recommend putting the screenshots into proper pages as – like the screenshot pages on SoftwareLode, e.g. http://www.softwarelode.com/7271/screenshot-batterymon.html.
Fourth Thing to Try
Change the titles of your download pages from “Free Software Download | Free Trial ….” to something like “Download Title of Program”. When I look on Google the Downloading pages on other PAD sites show up quite frequently in SERPS. Your download pages might do better if they all had unique titles based on “Download” and the name of the program.
Fifth Thing to Try
Start capturing the 2000 character description from the PAD files and show this on your details pages. Give Adsense and Googlebot more to get their teeth into.
There’s no guarantees doing any of the above will increase traffic but they might be worth a try. Doing numbers 3 and 4 would in theory almost triple the number of “working” pages on SoftTester. Even if the pages don’t do terribly well, adding proper screenshot pages will throw more links around SoftTester.
by ML
I’ve been doing some work on softtester and noticed my page errors table was 80mb, I was shocked.
So I picked one record, one from an actual user, not a robot. However both are the same in this discussion.
The record shows a page which doesn’t exist, correctly.
However, google and other sites don’t get a 404 error, they are presented with a search script which provides them with alternative results.
In this case, its presented with 1 search result of the page they were looking for, however this record was deleted some time ago and a re-submitted program / accepted program is been shown. However this new program although with the same name has the new page name format program-name-program-id.
Lets just recap…
Page requested :- abc-program.shtml
Search page shows :- abc-program-999.shtml
However it could just as easily be
free-dvd-ripper.shtml
with search page shows :-my-company-free-dvd-supreme-ripper.shtml
So I’m in a loop with google / robots.
I don’t want to show a nasty 404 error page, but I need to break the cycle, so that google is updated and looses the old url.
Or do I? , it is traffic.
Maybe I’m being penalised by google?
Anyway, if I wanted to break this cycle I guess I could just add NOINDEX,FOLLOW.
Thoughts?
by JM
At the moment I have a “tracking” table, which I use to store both searches and downloads.
TABLE `tracking`
`TID` bigint(20) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`PadID` bigint(20) NOT NULL,
`Phrase` text NOT NULL,
`PageHandle` varchar(10) NOT NULL,
`Referer` text NOT NULL,
`Agent` text NOT NULL,
`Lang` text NOT NULL,
`RemAddress` text NOT NULL,
`DateAdded` timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
PRIMARY KEY (`TID`)
I think i’m going to just use this table for search tracking and create a new table for tracking downloads, this isn’t really a problem as in most cases (apart from basic info like IP and useragent etc) it uses differnet fields.
I’m going to work on the principle that one download equals for unique IP & UserAgent & day. In English one download per user agent from a specific IP address per day.
The obvious thing to do would be to up the IP address, user agent and the day on one field and make it a unique index, but thats going to make the field quite big. Maybe the user agent string isn’t important? and I could just use IP and Day, with the day in Julian format.
Whats the table look like that you use Mike?
Comments?
Up until the last couple of days I was getting poor click through rates compared with SoftTester. Although I can’t be certain I’ve made improvements that will stick in the longer term, my Adsense has recently improved by a factor of 5 in terms of clicks and earnings.
What I had noticed was that the ads shown on my site were pretty generic. They were mainly for free software or DVD downloads. Ignoring the DVD downloads, I can guess that ads for free anything have pretty poor earnings. I’d often only get 3 or 4 cents a click.
After a bit of research, I found you could guide Google into using certain content on which to base ads. I found that if you put these sections around your content in the page, it might help make ads more relevant:
<!- google_ad_section_start ->
… the real content …
<!- google_ad_section_end ->
I did this on my site but didn’t really notice a big improvement. Then I noticed that you could also tell Google to IGNORE content too using these sections:
<!- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) ->
… content to ignore …
<!- google_ad_section_end ->
I also read tips on how/ where to place content on a page to make it noticeable for the Google Ads spider. The advice included:
1. Keep the content near the top of the page.
2. Bold keywords you want to highlight.
After reading this, I took a look at my pages. A typical page had a line of navigation links at the top of a page:
Free Software Downloads / Business & Finance / XXXX
This gave me a clue. Maybe my handy navigation links (for the user) were getting picked up by the Google Ads system. Maybe my bold “Free Software Downloads” link was making Google Ads show ads for free software. So I put in the “ignore” section around the line of hyperlinks and hey presto! In the last 2 days I’ve made about 5 times the income I was making before and the ads seem much more relevant to the page.
I’d like to try and switch my pc off during the day, at the moment, I’m either at my pc or on my laptop or doing other things. I don’t want to have to end switching my pc on and off all the time. Also I don’t want to have to buy another copy of outlook. I also have BIG PST files.
My aim is to access my email, of which I have many POP3 accounts, and my PST files from my laptop without having to have my pc guzzling electricty all day.
Ideally I’d like a solution where one day I can access my email online, when I go to work.
Any suggestions?
by JM
There have been a number of posts on this blog about improving the performance of SoftTester. The majority of these posts don’t apply to 321 as the script itself is already in good shape for on-page optimisation. The page titles, meta description and inter-page linking are all looking good.
I’m guessing that 321 doesn’t get many visitors though at the moment – at least through search engine traffic. The reason I’m guessing this is that it has few pages in Google’s main index. Most of the pages are in Google’s supplemental index which is purgatory for web pages. Pages in the supplemental index are very unlikely to turn up regularly in searches.
To see how many pages are in the main index, do something like:
site:/www dot xxx dot com
You’ll probably find around 50 pages on the whole site.
Do the same for SoftTester and you’ll find around 2000.
The answer to getting more pages in the main index and more traffic is to get good links. We have 4 shareware sites in our network and 3 of them are doing pretty well (or starting to do!) pretty well at building links more or less automatically. The main problem with 321 is that I can’t see it has an award system in place for software titles. For example, SoftTester has neat looking award graphics that authors can use to link back thereby improving performance in SEs and also boosting visibility for the author’s software titles.
Dipsy has already given a good set of links that should allow 321 to get more titles submitted but without the award system the new submissions will be slightly devalued since the submitters won’t be exposed to the request for a linkback.
I’ve only looked at 321 for a short period so I apologise if I’ve missed the award/ linkback system. If the rank/ traffic on 321 can be improved then over time all of our sites will benefit since the links we pass each other will strengthen in value.
For more info on some of the topics in this post, see:
http://blog.softtester.com/index.php/2008/06/softtester-offsite-optimisation/
http://blog.softtester.com/index.php/2008/06/softtester-serps-improvements-starting-point/
http://blog.softtester.com/index.php/2008/06/softtester-serps-stage-2/
I’d just like to welcome Illusion (aka Dan) to the blog, me and Blue have known him for a while. Hes a student and studying programming at university, hes done work for us both on RentACoder.
OK, I’m going to set the ball rolling and discuss his software site, which we will call 321 so were keeping some anonymity.
I’m going to start with the basics.
Have you emailed those software submission service providers, some provide web submission and others provide software?
Whats your linking building strategry?
by JM
I guess I hadn’t kept a close eye on things, but I was doing some updates to the site yesterday and noticed that I had PR on my sub pages. The home page is PR2 and several other pages are PR3 also, the ones linked by the recent searches at the top.
Also the page where I produce a pad file and program that is PR3.
I just thought that was interesting.
I guess I need to get those other pad / programs done, that will hopefully spread the PR further.
Actually the same thing has happend to the KMS site, although home is PR1 and page page 2.
by JM
Following comments from made by customers we decided to look into adding some advanced security settings, as provided in 3 screens within MS Access. However, following our analysis we realised that we’d basically have to copy the screens.
Since we wanted to provide a stability in this feature we decided to give customers the option to use MS Access and those screens towards the end of the securing process. Then pass back to the program to complete the process.
by JM