Web Log of Greg Mathews

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that the yzoo script will become available soon.

Well we have decided to sell the script as a site rather than on it’s own for the time being. The first site being onlinebestfind.com which just went live yesterday.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am not going to name them of give the urls but I am getting pissed off with proxy servers that Google and other big search engines insist on indexing. They are a nightmare.

Recently I discovered one such proxy server that has 1500 pages indexed in Google, about 90% of them are actually dynamic copies of Yzoo.co.uk and it’s related sites. Why is this a problem?

1. They somehow tend to get listed in the SERPs higher than the original content, bringing less visitors to the real site.

2. The search engines appear to be comparing the proxy and original site and treating the original as having duplicate content and then removing it from the SERPs.

3. The proxy servers tend to remove all javascript code etc from the page, basically disabling ads being displayed such as adsense and then they place their own ads on the page, stealling ad revenue from the original site.

How can this problem be resolved, well first and most importantly the big Search engines should not even index these proxy servers, it would not be hard for them to do as there are give away signs in the urls of these sites.

As a webmaster you can redirect proxy server users to a ‘forbidden’ error message or a specific page informing them the site is not available via that proxy, but that takes time, you need to find the IP addresses of the Proxy servers and these can be changed easily by the proxy owners so you need to be ontop of it.

Something needs to be done about these thieving proxy servers and fast, it is getting stupid. I know there are reasons that people use them and I don’t like refusing them access to my sites but if the proxies they use insist on stealling from me then it is their problem rather than min

The time has come for us to make the scripts behind the Yzoo Search meta search engine available for sale.

We have had requests for this in the past and have always declined, but it appears now that it is the right time to do so. We have to clean the script up before we can offer it on our site at CGIScripts4U so it won’t be available for a week or two.

If you are interested in being one of the first to know when the scripts are available  then please leave a comment here and we will contact you as soon as the script and documentation is ready.

I received an email from adbrite yesterday informing me that click fraud has been identified on our site and as such the site can has been disabled.

I am sure this is the same problem as with Bidvertiser a  few days ago but when replying to the Adbrite email address ( support@adbrite.com) it bounced, I tried from numerous email accounts and they all had the same problem. In the end I had to use the online form in the hope that they will be able to resolve the issue just as bidvertiser have.

OK so we removed adsense from Yzoo as requested by Google and bidvertiser ads are being displayed.

When I logged into my Bidvertiser account today I was presented with the following message:

We have recently detected invalid clicks generated on your BidVertiser ads. The invalid clicks were generated from the following IP(s):
218.111.59.157 , 66.249.85.69 , 74.125.16.39 , 72.14.193.4 , 72.14.195.225 , 66.249.84.14

The listed IP(s) are now blocked in our system, however, we ask that you take any necessary actions to avoid generating any further invalid clicks this way.

Read the rest of this entry »

After 18 months of Yzoo.co.uk having adsense ads being shown on the site Google has today decided that it is breaking the Adsense policies.

As normal, Google give no information about which policies are being broken but sent a ’standard’ email. Over the past 12 months Yzoo has earned over Quarter of a Million US dollars via Adsense and I dread to think how much Google has earned from it so I would have thought a bit more detail could have been provided.

Yzoo has now removed adsense from all new searches and replacing them with other advertising networks such as Adsdaq and BidVertiser which, it is hoped, will at least earn Yzoo enough for it to pay for itself.

In the past I have reported, on here, that Google have dropped the site Yzoo.co.uk from their Serps, this has been happening on a regular basis about every 6 to 8 weeks and the site has been relisted again within a few days after I have tweaked it.

February 2008 was the busiest month yet for the site, seeing more than 700,000 page impressions a day on a number of days, but then during the last few days of the month the innevitible happened, the site disappeared from the Serps. I tweaked again and the site reappeared, but this time only for a week or so when it vanished again.

Read the rest of this entry »

OK its been about 10 days since my last post so lets try and bring you up to date.

I found that the Yzoo database replication was getting out of sync. I had set up 4 databases all replicating with each other in rotation, ie dbase1 -> dbase2, dbase2->dbase3, dbase3->dbase4 and dbase4->dbase1 then all the scripts would use the database with the lowest server load. In theory it should work, in practice it worked poorly. It appeared the replication itself on such a large database with hundreds of updates every minute was in itself causing a high server load.

I decided to reorganise (again), now dbase1 and dbase2 replicated with each other, and also dbase2 replicated its data to dbase3. I then modified the scripts so all lookups where done on dbase3 only, and any updates where then done on either dbase1 or dbase2 whichever had the lowest load. dbase4 is now used for two other sites listed below.

This appears to have had a dramatic effect, BUT during the process I wiped out the database in my mistake.

Read the rest of this entry »

In theory a proxy server allows a user to surf the web anonymously, many students use a proxy to bypass school restrictions when surfing using the school network.

This week I discovered that a visitor to your site via a proxy could be detrimental, while checking the Google search results for one of my sites I found one such proxy imsosneaky.com actually stores the urls that people visit via their proxy and these urls get indexed in the search engine results. Go to Google and try the command site:imsosneaky.com and browse the results, you will find clone’s of pages on Yahoo and many other big sites.

Read the rest of this entry »

This may sound strange but I do have to wonder if Google do have some kind of limit set for a site. Let me explain.

Over the past year I have seen traffic to Yzoo.co.uk go up and down, and this in turn effects the amount of income it brings in. The problem is that the traffic appears to peak and then suddenly drops to nothing in a matter of days, and every time this has happened I have notted that the position of Yzoo in the Google results has dropped drastically.

Here are a few examples:

December 21st 2006 the site was getting 30,000+ page impressions a day, this dropped to 7,000 a day by 26th December, I put this down to the holiday season and did little about it.

In January I did some mods and the site picked up again and by March 8th 2007 I was getting 80,000+ page impressions a day. But again out of the blue this traffic vanished and from 10th March I was down to less than 10,000 impressions a day and this time it remained like that for a few weeks. At the end of April I made some more changes and eventually by June I was getting in excess of 200,000 page impressions a day.

On July 24th there was another peak of 620,000 page impressions for the day, but by the August 1st 2007 it had dropped massively down to less than 100,000 impressions/day and falling as low as 24,000 on 10th September.

Now this panicked me and again changes where made, some minor some a bit more serious and by Monday of this week,8th October, I was exceeding 300,000 impressions a day. Now I may be jumping the gun here but it looks like another slumps has arrived, since Monday the traffic has dropped, yesturday was 160,000 impressions and today it looks like it could be as low as about 70,0000 impressions for the day.

Read the rest of this entry »