Like a lot of other weblogs this “Web Development Blog” has lost today 2 points in PageRank (went from 5 to 3). A week ago I had the idea that this blog will get a PR6 based on the information I got via the Google webmaster tools. After reading about PR drops from Andy Beard, Tim Nash, Darren Rowse and several others I noticed that all of them (including me) thought the reason could be some link sales. So maybe all of us tried to sell a link some time ago?

Text Link Ads

I think most of all websites with content for webmasters link to this website because they pay $money for referrals and I saw a lot of high quality blogs on their “Link Market Place”. Maybe is the affiliation with TLA is the reason for lot of this PR drops. TLA has a PR zero since several weeks and was maybe one of the first sites getting a PR drop (edit: they got a penalty from Google, you can’t find them on their company name). I remember me that TLA has send us new affiliate links using a TinyURL; some action to safe what was left? I removed my website from the TLA market place because I never earned something and also the prices from my TLA competitors are so high that I can’t believe that there are a lot of people making the “big” money there. I know some webdev site with a PR6 (or 7) was selling links for several hundred $ a month, this website has a PR 4 now. (more…)

Effectively marketing your website for better exposure to search engines, or search engine marketing (SEM), has certainly changed over the years. From the days when keyword focused Meta tags were the de-facto method to grab top rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages) to the recent days, and today still, when most major engines weigh the value of incoming links more heavily than any on page factors in their ranking algorithms; there’s been big changes in the methods used by website owners to take hold of their fair share of visitors from the major search engines. Today, there’s a new twist being thrown into the search engine marketing game, and that’s come about with the new concept of blended search results.

Blended search - mixing multiple media types with natural listings

It doesn’t really matter which major search engine you’ve decided to use as your portal to the World Wide Web; Google, Yahoo, Ask or MSN, they all have something in common. Something besides the obvious, that is. These major search engines, who grab nearly 100% of the daily search engine user base worldwide, are all starting to offer their own forms of blended search results. Instead of the plain-old text based website listings that used to be displayed when performing a search, users are seeing related images, blog posts, links to news stories, related videos and a whole slew of other topically related media attached to these searches. (more…)

The basic idea of each social link community is that people share their discovered links with others via the Internet. Actually it’s only allowed to send those links to your social community friends. Having a lot of friends with the same interest like yourself is something very valuable to generate a lot of traffic to your website or weblog. We all know that both communities digg.com and StumbleUpon are good for big traffic if some story became hot in these communities. A listing on the digg.com main page is good for many 10K of visitors. Let’s have a look on the link sharing features which both communities provide:

StumbleUpon (SU toolbar fun)

Each SU member can add friends while stumbling other member pages. Members of stumbleupon use a browser toolbar for voting and navigation (stumbling), will say you need to send links to your friends via this toolbar. Your friends will notice your “shout” because of some tiny red number in their SU toolbar. After they stumbled your page they see your message and it possible to send some message back. If you have some active SU friends and they like what you send them via the toolbar it’s possible that this “Stumble” becomes hot and the stumbled page becomes a hot item and is presented more often to other stumblers. (more…)

FTP hosting is often much cheaper than regular web hosting. The upload with an ftp client is for sure the most common way, but could be a problem for people behind a firewall or without enough rights (capabilities) to install a FTP client. For those a upload via a web form is the best solution.

Upload limitations by your web server

The default value for file uploads within PHP is 2MB, if you need to upload bigger files you need to change your PHP configuration or need to create a .htaccess file with this code to upload files of max. 16MB:

php_value upload_max_filesize 16M
php_value post_max_size 20M

The value for the post_max_size is larger than the value for the upload_max_size because we want to be able to upload more than just a file (also other data via text fields or text areas). The .htaccess file needs to be in the same directory than your upload script.

Using cURL for file transmissions

cURL is a great library for file transmissions via different types of protocols. The library supports the transport via POST, GET, FTP upload and much more. cURL is also able to authenticate on the target server or website.

In this tutorial we want to upload a file to some (password protected) remote FTP server via a web form. (more…)