A few years ago some friends and I planned to build a battling robot to enter into the UK's Robot Wars TV series. Unfortunately, the series was cancelled before we had the chance to complete it.
Later, when another TV series, TechnoGames, sais they would introduce walking biped robots in the next series, I started to build one of those. Amazingly, that series was also cancelled and the walking biped events never took place.
My project was shelved because I had too many other things to do.
At the time, we set up a website, Robot Assassin, showing our experiments and development of our robots.
I am now going to resurrect the Robot Assassin site as a "Niche Content" or "Article" site, to use Internet Marketing speak.
It's going to be an experiment to see whether niche sites really can earn money from Adsense and other Affiliate programs. It will also serve to demonstrate whether having regularly updated content really does give you a high rank in Google.
Finally, it is also a means of furthering my knowledge of the PHP scripting language.
There's nothing on the site yet - I only just switched the DNS to my new host, so it will take a few hours to get up and running. I also need to design the new style and put together some content before it goes live.
I plan to set up a robotics forum, so if you're interested, why not bookmark the site and come back later.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Getting Googled
Although I have been concentrating on the Alexa Rank of my sites, I am also very interested and keen on getting my sites ranked by Google.
Except for Google themsleves, nobody seems to know the exact criteria used by Google to rank sites. However, amongst the unknowns, there are a lot of known criteria, so of course everyone concentrates on them.
Google doesn't want to list junk sites because they are no use to anyone, so content is very important to Google, as it should be. To this end, I had previously created static web pages so that all of my content was there in plain HTML for the search engines to see and index.
Since then, I have discovered the wonders of PHP scripts and MySQL databases and dynamic pages. This means I have fewer actual pages on my site, but several of those pages have content added to them dynamically (on request), and that content comes from my database.
Not to worry though. Google does index dynamic pages as long as it knows how to access them.
Dynamic pages usually have a list of one or more details added to the page address, like this (I've highlighted the details):
http://www.cafetorium.co.uk/product.php?products_id=108&osCsid=8eea7
This means "load the page called product.php, and fill it with product data from the database, where the product ID is 108&osCsid=8eea7".
The product could be an article for sale, an article - anything really.
Here's the address again as a real link:
Blogging Secrets
Anyway, as long as you give Google all the possible combinations of product details, the resulting pages will be indexed.
Fortunately, on sales pages, those links exist, and
The Cafetorium has a list of all products, where all those links will appear in one page.
For good measure, I always create and submit Google Sitemaps for all of my sites, which tells Google all the pages that are available.
And finally, if you wonder why I put links to my site in this blog, it's not for the convenience of readers, nor as blatant publicity. It's because Google indexes the Blogging sites (especially Blogger), and it's a good way for Google to find links to pages.
Except for Google themsleves, nobody seems to know the exact criteria used by Google to rank sites. However, amongst the unknowns, there are a lot of known criteria, so of course everyone concentrates on them.
Google doesn't want to list junk sites because they are no use to anyone, so content is very important to Google, as it should be. To this end, I had previously created static web pages so that all of my content was there in plain HTML for the search engines to see and index.
Since then, I have discovered the wonders of PHP scripts and MySQL databases and dynamic pages. This means I have fewer actual pages on my site, but several of those pages have content added to them dynamically (on request), and that content comes from my database.
Not to worry though. Google does index dynamic pages as long as it knows how to access them.
Dynamic pages usually have a list of one or more details added to the page address, like this (I've highlighted the details):
http://www.cafetorium.co.uk/product.php?products_id=108&osCsid=8eea7
This means "load the page called product.php, and fill it with product data from the database, where the product ID is 108&osCsid=8eea7".
The product could be an article for sale, an article - anything really.
Here's the address again as a real link:
Blogging Secrets
Anyway, as long as you give Google all the possible combinations of product details, the resulting pages will be indexed.
Fortunately, on sales pages, those links exist, and
The Cafetorium has a list of all products, where all those links will appear in one page.
For good measure, I always create and submit Google Sitemaps for all of my sites, which tells Google all the pages that are available.
And finally, if you wonder why I put links to my site in this blog, it's not for the convenience of readers, nor as blatant publicity. It's because Google indexes the Blogging sites (especially Blogger), and it's a good way for Google to find links to pages.
The Alexa experiment continues
Since I created my robot to view all of the pages of one of my sites while running the Alexa Toolbar, there's only been a slight move in the Alexa Rank (less than 1000), and it's no more than my other sites for which the robot visits only one page.
However, the updating of rank is somewhat erratic - it often goes for over a week without changing - so it still might have some effect.
However, the updating of rank is somewhat erratic - it often goes for over a week without changing - so it still might have some effect.
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