scrape 2

And this one is from my "accessories" page.

Lithium ion battery (NP-50): Obviously, the camera does come with one, but it might be handy to have an extra one in your pocket if you decide to go camera crazy while on vacation. f50fd battery

scrape 1

This blurb is from my "overview page".

Where to start? Well, I guess with, I'm a bit jealous. Even though it's just a fact of life you have to deal with when getting anything electronic, the F50fd does seem a lot better than my F10 and well, boo. The FinePix F50fd is the latest installment to the already fantastic F series of compact digital cameras from Fujifilm. As I said, I own a FinePix F10 (6.3MP, 5th generation SuperCCDHR, 1600 max ISO) with roughly 7,000 images taken so far and I still love it. Even ~3 years later, it’s still a great camera and I wouldn’t have any qualms about pitting it against any of today's compact digitals (although after ~7k images, I have noticed that the battery is just now showing signs of not holding a charge as well as it used to). f50 12

Been a while

So after about 50 gazillion redoes of my finepix site, I think I have the basic structure figured out. Problem now is I need to see how "the man" (google) is going to like it. The spiders haven't come around very often and as it stands only 2 pages have been indexed (that's partly my fault, of the 10 links that were in the xml sitemap I submitted, 8 were bad... ok, so maybe it was all my fault.) Anywho, even though I believe I said somewhere in an earlier post that I wasn't going to post stuff from my site here (to get the spiders to pay attention) I'm going to do it anyway. Just until my stuff gets indexed. At some point I'm going to make a more lengthy and worthwhile post about the workings of the site (perhaps with some of the PHP code I've struggled to write), but for now I'm just going to focus of getting stuff indexed. later foo.

f50 finepix

Yet another update.

So what to say this time. Well, google finally got around to updating its index showing the new site. Unfortunately, my index and sitemap.xml pages are the only ones showing and the rest are in the "more results from...". Bah! At least they are all indexed this time so I don't really care too much about that. Another thing also got fixed. For a while there this blog was actually ranking higher than the site I am working on! Argh. But like I said, it's fixed now. I have really been slacking off on the social bookmarking thing however. I'm on simpy, startaid, and somewhere else (can't remember, like I said - slacking). On the plus side, I've gotten pretty far in a PHP book I've been reading. Oh, and since google seems to like .pdf files, I've made .pdf copies of all my pages and stuck them in the main directory (with links). I didn't add them to the sitemap yet cuz I want to see if google will find them on its own. I've also run across powerpoint slides on the net as well, so just to see what would happen, I made copies of my pages in the .ppt format as well, couldn't hurt. What is the point? Well, hopefully with the mixed media, google might think my site is more relevant on its own and give it a higher ranking. According to google's webmasters panel, I think I'm only ranking for a misspelling of fujifilm (fujfilm I think). What? How could it think that when I don't have any misspellings in any of my pages? I'm either going to have to break down and do much more bookmarking, spam the comment section of this blog (since it's already ranking), or start another blog and just spam the heck out of that. I really don't want to do that, however. I'm trying to be a smarter blackhatter and splogging seems so passe' and quite pedestrian. Maybe I should mosey on over to the "buy viagra" crowd and see what they are doing. I'll get it someday. I will, however, leave a link to my .html sitemap here, fujifilm f50fd.

Alright, Alright, Fiiine! I'll make the changes.

Ok, so after much debate with myself (I do that a lot), I was able to wear myself down and convince myself to redo the whole site (all four pages of it). Before, the site was made of a mixture of tables (HTML) and CSS and all of the pages were in the same directory. The result was a site that was tedious to make changes to (because if I wanted to make a structural change I had to do it to all four pages) and a site were only the .xml sitemap and main page showed in the search engine results page (SERP) of google. The other pages were glaumed into the "similar pages" of the SERP, boo. So I made two big changes. 1) I moved the entire look and structure over to a single .css page (so now a change to a single file has a site-wide impact) and 2) I moved each page to its own directory. Hopefully the separate directory thingy will convince google etc. to include all pages in the index. I'm also working through some reading material so hopefully I can learn PHP before the sun explodes. One potential drawback is that the free site that I'm using (awardspace.com) doesn't appear to have the cURL library for PHP installed. If you don't know, that's a library that allows you to emulate a web browser which allows you to do nifty things like automate the process of making e-mail accounts, creating accounts and posting on social bookmarking sites, and making the all mighty webbots. I'm interested in the ones that will go through a proxy server (masking its origins), enter search terms I'm targeting into search engines, and then visit my site through the results page (hopefully convincing the search engines that my site deserves a higher ranking). That, social bookmarking, and some other tricks (which I will be learning) I think will do the trick. Buuut, by the time I get all that stuff going, probably no one will care about the fujifilm finepix f50fd. My immediate goal, however, is trying to convince google to visit my site a lot more often than it does (which at the moment is around every 8-10 days). What is annoying is that my non-SEO blog deadgrasshopper.wordpress.com will get things indexed in a matter of hours. Understandable since it is wordpress's site, but still annoying.

OK, so a change to the blog

So as you can see, I've removed the scraped stuff from this blog. It didn't look very good and I wasn't doing anywhere near enough to have any impact with the ole search engines. So nothin' but blackhat adventures here. Weeell, maybe I'll keep leaving links to my grand experiment site in each of the posts. Finepix f50fd!

My next update

So all four of my pages are indexed at the moment. Buut, currently only one is actually being displayed (the part 2 page) the others have been omitted due to being "very similar". Clearly a demonstration that the googlebot isn't very intelligent. Each page is very different. I can only guess that it's saying that because the anchor text for the links is almost identical and the meta tag description is exactly the same. To try to fix this I've changed the meta tag stuff. I really don't want to change the links, mainly because I don't feel like having to go back and manually change the listings on all those social bookmarking sites. I actually made these changes a few days ago, but google hasn't updated anything. From looking at the webmaster site on my google account, I know that their bot revisited the site after I made the changes, but they aren't showing up in the main listing. I've either been "sandboxed" or I haven't done enough poking at google to convince it that it needs to pay attention. And as I've said before, it's a real drag doing this manually. I've been keeping up with the reading on various blackhat sites so I don't waste too much time doing things that don't matter. But lately, rather than being a motivating force, I find all that info being more of a discouragement. There is soooo much to learn it is easy to get overwhelmed and be paralyzed into inaction. Since I wasn't a computer science guy in college and my normal life has nothing to do with this kind of stuff aaand I'm looking at this as kind of a hobby, I find myself asking if all this effort is going to be worth it. At this point, I'm not even sure I know what the endgame is here. I don't know about you, but it's hard to keep at something if you can't see the point in it. But for now, the motivation is still there and I suppose if I do manage to get a decent ranking, get the site monetized and get some cash trickling in, that will keep my interest up.

I have decided to try a different strategy. Even though I should probably keep the scraped content on another blog rather than pollute this one, I'm not (combination of laziness and, again, doing all this manually). So to keep the garbage down, I think I'll post the junk I've scraped off my own site, leave it here for a few days and then delete it. That way I'll have at most maybe 5-7 posts of scraped stuff at any one time, but it'll just be new scrapings. I was considering not doing any more, seeing as how google (and apparently yahoo) have found the "money" site, but since it isn't getting updated in the index I'll have to keep doing it to try and get google to pay attention.

I've started trying to learn php (using the manual off of the php.net site) doesn't seem too bad. I think it'll just be a matter of working through it. Fortunately for blackhat, you don't have to learn everything about the language. But again, is this really worth it? Try looking at some of the stuffs real blackhatters are doing with PHP. Depressing. I don't think I'm ever going to get as good as these guys. And, of course, this is the problem. Blackhat pays off through sheer scale. Scale takes automation. Automation requires something like PHP. Again, is the effort going to be worth it? For now, I think so.

Got indexed in Google

So I was able to get the site indexed with google. Not a big deal, just submitted a sitemap to google using their "webmaster tools". All you need to do is have an account with them, sign in, and you will see it. It was about 24 h after I submitted it that the site was indexed. Odd thing though, the first indexing only included the third article I wrote (I wrote 4 articles, each on a separate, static page) and the sitemap itself. Yesterday, only the index page showed up. Now, the index page and the 3rd are showing. Mmm. This is an extremely small site at the moment so I don't understand why only 2 pages stuck. My understanding is that it's the really large sites that have problems getting fully indexed. Mmmmm. I suppose I could try uploading another sitemap. Whatever. Time for more social bookmarking! CHARGE!!

Uhh, slow going

So I've been at this for a few days. Uhh, slow going. The spiders have yet to find my Finepix f50fd site. As you can see, I haven't made too many posts here. I've mainly been putting stuff on my wordpress blog. Mainly because that one is a bit older and the spiders know it exists. Although it seems to only be the Google spiders for some reason. I guess I'm going to have to look up how to get Yahoo and MSN to pay attention. Does any care about Ask.com? I don't know about that one. Ya they've done some commercials on the old boob-tube, but I see that one flailing around, maybe going down for the count. But they do have a good concept going (the whole integrating everything one the web into one search result). Buut with the big hitters moving in that direction already, I think they are going to have a tough time sticking it out. Ah, what do I know.

What I do know is that it is a royal pain in the posterior making SEO pages by hand, uhhh. I told myself in the beginning I was going to do everything by hand, but this is shear torture. I think I'm going to look into one of those content creation scripts. RSSGM is one, people seem to like it. Just one more thing to learn though, joy. On a more interesting note, there seem to be some tools coming on-line that will generate original content every time. No more stealing someone else's stuff (although I would never do that - 1) I like being able to look at myself in the mirror and 2) After making content on my own, I know how much time and effort is put into it... just can't do it) or spinning your own content. These new tools work off of a database of words and use syntax rules for making almost (or seemingly almost) coherent sentences. The product reads like something translated into English using a bad translation program. Just give the program a list of keywords you want it to include along with the frequency and presto-chango, you can have hundreds of genuinely unique content packed with words (or more specifically people) you are trying to target. Unfortunately, the only tool that I am specifically aware of at the moment is a paid service, uhh. I suppose not an issue if you are a full-time pirate racking in the cash, but I'm a small fry and want to try doing this stuff with free resources at first. Perhaps if I get around to learning PHP, I'll just make the tools myself. I guess that's it for now.

My Grand Experiemnt

So I have an interest in Web technologies, playing around with websites, and search engines especially. And I figured, hey, why not see if I can get a good listing on Google, and maybe other engines, for a half-decent term. Well, I like digital photography, I own a FinePix f10, so why not try to get indexed for something like that? It turns out that Fujifilm has released a few versions since I got my camera, so it probably makes sense to target the most recent incarnation, the f50fd, since more people will be searching for that then the f10. Over the next few weeks, I'll be using this blog to document my efforts and to try to get those pesky spiders to find and index my f50fd site. Let the experiment begin, chaaarge!

-the hopper