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Rank Checker: Automate Your Search Rank Reports

Published

on April 3, 2008

. 4 Comments

Aaron Wall of SEOBook has released a new SEO tool called Rank Checker. This tool allows you to easily track your rankings and rank changes on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search (MSN).

This free tool is packaged as a Firefox extension, making it quite reliable. You can manually check rankings for a list of keywords, and can even setup scheduled tasks to automatically fetch rankings at specified times and intervals.

This tool saves me a lot of time since I used to do this task manually. Digital Point provides a similar tool accessed through a web interface. However, it does not provide data from Google unless you own a now discontinued Google SOAP API Key.

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Happy April Fool’s from YouTube

Published

dauclair

on April 1, 2008

in News

. 2 Comments

This morning I stumbled upon YouTube’s April Fool’s Joke. Every featured Video on the YouTube home page links directly to the music video for Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up. I did not realize it at first, and I found myself watching the video thinking, “Did I actually click on this?”

It turns out that the video, which was a number one hit in the late 80’s, is an infamous internet meme called a Rickroll.

A Rickroll is where an internet prankster posts a link in a discussion, claiming that the link contains content related to the discussion. When the user clicks on the link, they are taken to the Rick Astley video. They have just been Rickrolled.

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Google Webmaster Help: Group Chat Recap

Published

dauclair

on March 28, 2008

in News and SEO

. 7 Comments

This morning I was fortunate to be able to participate in the ‘First-ever Google Webmaster Help Group Chat’. Though it was labeled as beta, it turned out to be a great session.

The group chat, hosted by Webex, consisted of a panel of 13 Googlers, namely our Google friends Matt Cutts and host Adam Lasnik.

After web-cam-assisted introductions, the Googlers reviewed a site which had been chosen from a small group of submissions to this thread. The very lucky site was pictureline and a comprehensive review covering design, usability and SEO was given. Pictureline was chosen since the site already implemented many SEO best practices, but still had room for review and improvement.

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Sun Microsystems Acquires MySQL

Published

dauclair

on March 3, 2008

in Code and News

. 0 Comments

Sun Microsystems has acquired the open source database MySQL on February 25, 2008. The acquisition is notably celebrated it on the Sun.com home page. MySQL AB was had for approximately $1 billion in total consideration.

From the Sun web site “MySQL database is the world’s most popular open source database because of its fast performance, high reliability, ease of use, and dramatic cost savings.” All very true statements. I have, as have millions of others, embraced MySQL with open arms the day I learned about it. There is just no equal alternative in terms of compatibility and availability. The site goes on to describe how Google has embraced the MySQL database platform to run business critical systems.

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February GoDaddy Coupon Codes

Published

dauclair

on February 19, 2008

in Guides and News

. 2 Comments

GoDaddy has a great deal on .TV domain names: only $19.99/yr! That’s right, they usually go for over $40! I expect that many of the great .TV domains are going to start disappearing fast with prices this low, so hurry up and register yours while they’re still available.

Private Registration is usually $8.99 per domain name, but if you register 5 or more, you get free Private Registration on all domains in your cart. I try to buy domain names 5 at a time to get the free Private Registration. It saves me nearly $50, and I can qualify for the discount by adding one or two cheap $2.99 .INFO domains to my cart.

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