Archive for '2010'

You may have seen the blank white screen of death in WordPress if you were fixing something, upgrading manually or automatically, installing or removing themes or plugins, or using the editor to add or remove code.

Wordpress white screen of death fix

It happens, you’re working along – and all of the sudden your main web site is a plain white screen, and even your wp-admin login has gone to white screen – and you have no fix! No way to login to your site, and all visitors see is a broken web site.

What do can you DO?

If you’ve run into WordPress problems before, you’re first instict might be to delete your themes and plugins from the site (after downloading a copy of course), to see if one of them has a conflict. That’s a really good idea, but not good enough to fix the white screen problem in many cases.

An easy check for this would be to go into FTP, and then into the /wp-content folder, and just rename the /wp-content/plugins folder to /wp-content/old_plugins. See if your white screen of death goes away. If not try removing all the themes but default and see if that fixes it.

There is another thing you can check as well that is often the culprit, it’s a blank line at the bottom of your wp-config.php file in the root of your site. Open this file up in a text editor and see if you have a blank line, or if the last line is code. If it’s code your fine, if it’s blank – delete it, save, and re-upload to your site and see if that fixes it.

If none of this works – then the problem is most likely a wordpress upgrade issue inside the database with one of these problems:

1. What plugins are installed
2. What theme is installed
3. What version of WordPress is installed
4. Your .htaccess file is screwed up

I’ve had nearly all 4 things be the cause of my problems at one time or another. So to quickly fix the problem – I usually do the following…

How to fix the WordPress white screen of death

1. download a copy of all plugins and themes
2. delete all plugins and themes (except for default) from the web site
3. delete the root .htaccess file
4. manually upload the latest copy of WordPress in FTP right over the files there
5. make sure there isn’t an .htaccess file inside the /wp-admin folder
6. visit http://www.site.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php to upgrade the db to latest version
7. login to the dashboard via wp-admin
8. click on “settings->permalinks” and then “save” to generate new .htaccess file
9. check that front end of sites now works
10. re-upload theme and activate
11. upload plugins one by one, checking for conflicts as I go
12. site is fixed!

Hopefully this helps you fix your WordPress white screen of death problems!

Google Pagerank Updates

No more Google Pagerank updates? I think that Google is now throwing away pagerank – or at least has something in the works to replace it.

Looking at the pagerank updates the last few years, there were 2 in 2007, 5 in 2008, 4 in 2009, but only one in all of 2010 to date (in April). We’ve been waiting patiently for 8 months now, and some thought the PR update would occur in July, then Sept, or Oct, and here we are in December with still nothing. Some believe it will happen on New Years Eve, as it did in 2009.

Personally – I think we might have seen the end of Google Pagerank updates as we know them. Many SEO people will tell you that the PR numbers don’t really mean anything anyway. You can get a first page ranking in Google without them. You can get good AdWords quality scores without them. Pagerank now seems like just an antiquated online measuring system to tell you what you already know.

Google changed it’s index dramatically this year – first with the “caffeine” algorithm that made updates faster then ever before. Then they turned on google “instant” – where results change before your very eyes with each stroke of the keyboard. If the index can change in under an hour, and users can see 30 different front page search results as they type – pagerank just seems that much more antiquated or useless, doesn’t it? The fact that Google has put pagerank updates on the backburner for nearly all of 2010 kind of underlines that fact.

I’ll be surprised if Google updates pagerank on Dec 31st, 2010 – because I think the next time we hear about pagerank (from Google) will be that it’s going away, or being replaced by something else.

What do you think?

It’s not very often that you find new Free SEO Tools, and I hadn’t posted in awhile, so it was about time I had some new tips and tricks for you. Blekko is a new search engine. That’s right – there’s actually a new search engine.

Blekko is very different, and yet it’s not. It uses “slashtags” with keywords.

You could search, for example:
web design /wordpress

or
obama /liberal

The slashtag operator returns relevant results for a keyword that are “handpicked by a human”. Try searching for “obama liberal”, the results are very different. The sites founders say that Blekko.com will filter out all the garbage sites, spam sites, content farms, porn, and crap online – because the slashtags are created by people. Also, if you click “spam” under any result – it’s removed from your search results forever!

They’ve also taken the liberty of making it easy to shop, just try these searches:
ipod /amazon
ipod /ebay

and get instant results!

I’m sure Blekko will be very popular with lots of people. I wanted to show you why it’s a hot topic now among surfers online, but I haven’t yet mentioned yet that there are custom slashtags built in for SEO. With all the tools out there requiring monthly fees, and Yahoo’s questionable backlink checking feature (now that bing is in charge) – Blekko’s free SEO tools don’t come a moment too soon.

Check this out…this is the search for:
www.jtpratt.com /seo

(click the image for full size view)

by typing in any domain name and /seo – you can instantly see backlinks, indexed pages, a hostrank number, and the backlinks are then listed beneath the charts (ALL of them). On any backlink listed, you can click for instant whois, seo (for that site), or even a comparison of that site vs. yours.

In fact you can compare up to 4 sites at once with the Blekko free SEO tools, and you can check out duplicate content reports as well.

Try the following searches to view multiple reports and features:
www.domain.com /seo
www.domain.com /links
www.domain.com /urlseo
www.domain.com /links /rank

Since the new Blekko Free SEO Tools are so new, nobody really knows (yet) if the data is completely accurate when compared to Yahoo and Google, or even which reports are most useful. The data is good to have however, and if nothing more – is a great free benchmarking tool when comparing to other SEO tools and data. I highly advise you bookmark the site – and check it out!

Believe it or not – YES, there is a magazine for web sites (called Website Magazine). I have been subscribed to this magazine since it first came out 5 years ago. I try to tell everyone about it, because it’s a great resource.

I highly recommend you sign up for FREE, you can get 4 free issues in the mail at no cost, and you can get the digital version each month for free as well. You can get all 12 months in print if you pay the subscription fee – but you don’t have to spend a dime if you don’t want to.

I like Website magazine because there are articles about SEO, blogging, making money online, social media, affiliate marketing, PPC, buying ads, webhosting, and more! Just about anything involved with websites. Most issues also usually have at least one great “list” of web sites you should know about. This month was 50 video web sites, last month was 100 social media web sites. You can read all of their articles online for free as well.

Whether you take the free or paid route, you’ll be glad you found website magazine – I learn something every month.

Signup for FREE here:
Website Magazine

If you’re an affiliate marketer, you might also be interested in “FeedFront” magazine – which is completely free (in the US only). They also have free PDF’s of each issue online – you can find that magazine here:

FeedFront Magazine

Is your “Wordpress ping list” useless? It just might be – read more to find out why having a huge ping list in WordPress might just be “so 2005″ (lol).

What is a WordPress Ping List?

In your WordPress dashboard – if you go to “Settings -> Writing”, and the bottom of the page there is a little box called “Update Services”.

Just like it was above that box, when you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the services listed in that box. It sends out a little electronic message we call in geek terms a “ping”.

By default every installation of WordPress has at least one entry – which is:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

5 years ago when blogging was on fire, and RSS feeds and feed readers were just getting mainstream – it was popular to add all kinds of entries to the “update services” ping list. In fact, jamming 100 entries in your WordPress ping list to ping every RSS aggregation service wasn’t only popular – it worked! It got you a lot of additional traffic.

Things are different now. Let’s go back to that default entry every WordPress site has:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

You might not know this, but the web site Pingomatic.com is owned by the WordPress Foundation. If you follow that link and go to their web page you’ll see a list of about 20 services that are pinged automatically.

At this time that list is: Weblogs.com, Syndic8.com, Pubsub.com, Moreover, News Is Free, Spinn3r, Collecta, Blo.gs, NewsGator, Blogdigger, Weblogalot, Topic Exchanage, PostRank, Superfeedr, Feed Burner, My Yahoo!, BlogStreet, Icerocket, Google Blog Search, and SkyGrid.

For those of you that still have a ping list from “back in the day” – you’ll probably notice that most of these ping services are usually in everybody’s “recommended list of ping sites”. It also means, if Pingomatic is in your list – you’re already sending content to these sites once, and the second entry is now a duplicate. The last thing you want to do is repeatedly send pings out for the same content, the IP address of your web site might getted banned for “overpinging”. In addition, nearly every modern web crawler in the world follows Weblogs.com religiously – so every search engine is also automatically notified of your new content with the one Pingomatic ping as well.

How to Find Ping Errors

One of the problems with pinging is that it’s a one way service. A ping is an electronic message that goes out: “Look at Me, Look at Me!!”. How do you know the ping was actually received? You don’t – because WordPress doesn’t track whether the ping was received or not.

But guess what – there’s a plugin for that!

The plugin I use is called Error Reporting – because I like to track ALL errors in WordPress. One of the features of this plugin (that I found out about by mistake) is the dashboard widget that shows “ping errors”. If you don’t want the full error reporting plugin, you can download and install just the Ping Watcher dashboard widget plugin by itself.

The image above is the dashboard widget with some ping errors listed. If you choose to have a huge “Wordpress ping list” – you should probably have that widget installed so you can see when entries go bad. You may wonder why the Pingomatic site by WordPress only pings 20 services when your huge ping list has 100 entries? It’s really NOT because your list is better, it’s because there are only really 20 relevant services left out there to ping to – and WordPress handles them all by default. Should you choose not to believe me, the ping errors widget will sniff out all the bad ones for you.

Technorati Hates Pings? Yes, believe it or not – Technorati now even hates pings. Over a year ago Technorati stopped accepting pings. I’ve read in more than one place that Yahoo no longer accepts pings as well, but I can’t verify this. If you have a ping list of 100-150 entries, odds are a great deal of the URL’s are either no longer online – or not accepting pings anymore.

I’m not surprised that many people don’t know about outdated sites, the Official Update Services page at WordPress.Org is severely outdated. Their own list of ping services not only has URL’s that are now obsolete, but nearly everything in that list (still working) is now handled by Pingomatic itself. In addition, nearly every alternative and resource link is outdated or bad as well.

I am specifically writing this post and optimizing it to get ranked #1 for “Wordpress Ping List” to educate people on how and when to use pinging services in WordPress.

Penalty to Pinging Too Much?

One of the things clients ask me, and I see in forums a lot is the question “Can I get a Penalty for Pinging too Much?” The answer simply is “YES”. You can get banned temporarily or permanently for pinging too much.

Which brings me to the next point – do you know how often WordPress actually sends pings out? Let’s say you publish a new post in WordPress, a ping goes out. Oops, you forgot something and edit the post after checking it 5 minutes later, another ping goes out. Maybe you really screwed up the copy and revise the post 10 times in the first 30 minutes after you published it. You just sent out 11 pings for the exact same post.

The ping services DO NOT KNOW the difference between publishing a post and editing a post, they only know that you’re pinging for the exact same page OVER and OVER again. WordPress sends out a ping EVERY TIME a post is edited or updated. This may not affect you, but I edit posts A LOT.

If this is the case for you – you might need to install the WordPress Ping Optimizer plugin.

The image above is the settings page for the Ping Optimizer plugin. You can add and remove entries from your WordPress ping list (syncs with the official “Settings -> Writing” Update Services list in your dashboard). You can “limit excessive pinging in short time” or even turn pinging off if you need to for a short time! There’s even a “ping now” button, just in case you’ve added content to template files, header, footer, or sidebars (places that don’t get “published”).

What Should I Do?

As someone that is a professional WordPress Consultant, working on 300+ WordPress projects per year, and personally owning 50+ WordPress sites of my own – it’s my opinion that the old school “Wordpress ping list” is now dead. I would delete everything except the default pingomatic entry – unless you have specialty content (audio, video), that requires you to ping a site not on the default Pingomatic.com list. If you make a lot of changes to your content, install the the Ping Optimizer plugin as well. If you choose to have more than the single Pingomatic entry in your ping list, be sure to add the Error Reporting or Ping Watcher plugin to track errors for ping entries that are no longer working. Also, be aware that every entry your ping list has is something WordPress has to do when publishing posts. If you have a ping list with 100 URL’s, those 100 pings have to go out EVERY TIME you publish a post, and the post won’t finish publishing until all 100 pings are done. If you have just the pingomatic entry – your posts will publish more quickly!

John Pratt is a full time WordPress Consultant. If your WordPress web site needs work – you can find him at JTPratt Media.

Last week I spoke at WordCamp Detroit, and my presentation was “Wordpress Theme Hacks that Anyone can do”. There were 100 registered attendees, and I have to say – it was a packed house! Presentations ranged from plugins, to SEO, Social Media, building content, video blogging, WordPress multisite, PHP, and more.

WordCamp’s are a great way to network with other individuals that are using WordPress. Attendance is mixed, so you might find yourself talking to bloggers, developers, content experts, people from corporations, and even main street businesses.

All in all it was a great experience for me, and I met some people for the first time I only previously knew online – and made a lot of new connections.

You can read more about, and view the slides from my WordPress Detroit Presentation here

I’ll be attending and speaking at WordCamp Detroit this weekend in Troy, MI! Here’s the WordCamp Detroit 2010 Schedule for this weekend. It’s bound to be a LOT of fun, with all kinds of presentations running the gamut – from business, to SEO, plugins, multisite, social media, video blogging, and my favorite subject – “hacking WordPress themes”!

There are WordCamps all over the world, but I’m glad that after 6 years of using WordPress – there’s FINALLY a WordCamp within driving distance of my area! You think that since I’m a full-time WordPress consultant that I would have attended one of these before, but I’m usually so busy working on client projects – that I don’t have time to travel. My company JTPratt Media does wordpress plugin development, SEO, online marketing, and theme creation and customization sooooo much – I just don’t do a lot of networking with other people in the WP community. I have to say, this weekend will be good to get out, and great to meet new WordPress people! If you happen to see or meet me this weekend, please comment below!

In this WP Robot Review, we’re going to talk about all the new features that have come out since my long since outdated original WP Robot Revew. Now WP Robot 3 not only has many additional features, but the way you utilize it within your site is much easier as well.

I’ve said this many, many times in countless reviews of automated tools on this blog – but I want to say it again (if this is your first time here). WP Robot is a premium WordPress plugin that you can purchase to create and augment content within your WP blog or web site. If you want to be successful using it, you’re best off manually editing every single post WP Robot creates, so you publish entirely original content posts. If you use WP Robot to completely “autopost” content from other sources on your site entirely – then you’re nothing better than a spammer or scraper site. In addition, you’ll see first hand that google will drop you like a hot potato if this is all your web site does.

Best Practices for WP Robot 3 Usage: Use the plugin as tool to augment your web site. For instance, I have a web site where I review guitar gear. WP Robot helps me find new products to promote, new video reviews, find questions online people have asked (that I can answer), it helps with price comparison, translations, images, and more. I no longer have to scour the web for things to write about, and supporting content for posts – WP Robot does it all for me within my blog(s).

You can see in the image to the left that once you install and activate WP Robot 3 the options are pretty simple. You can manage or create a “campaign”, and then you have options, templates, and a log.

Setting up WP Robot 3

Once installed you have some general options:

One of the first options is to have the WP Robot posts “published” immediately, or go to “draft”. All my posts always go to draft, because I would never just repost content from another site (it won’t do any good for my blog). You can randomize your post times, comments, auto-create tags, and cloak affiliate links. If your keywords or topic is close to something similar, you can exclude certain keywords to prevent certain things from showing up as well.

Here we see that we can enter Amazon options, Article options, and clickbank options to pull content from these 3 places. Clickbank and Amazon are used as “affiliate” sites – places to get products you can review, and if some clicks to buy, you get a commission. It’s always best to write your own “mini-review” of each product before the yahoo description – google is pretty darn good at figuring out that you just lifted an image and description from a matching Amazon page. Add your own content, and google won’t mind at all. You almost have to do that with Clickbank items, since the descriptions usually aren’t that good anyway. For articles, I do the same – but the original content I add is basically an introduction to the article.

These are the available options for pulling content from eBay, Flickr, and Yahoo Answers. I’ve used ebay auctions at the end of posts for years. It’s great to write a review of something, and then show the item available in live auctions. Never try to make auctions the sole bit of content in a post – it’s not worth a google penalty (I’ve had them all). Flickr pulls are only images anyway – so they need to have orignal content added to those posts are they won’t get indexed for much of anything. Yahoo answers pulls are perfect though, because you can post the question, and the answer – and they your own answer right after it! Some of my best posts have come from Yahoo Answers.

Yahoo News, YouTube, and RSS feeds can also be used as options to get content from. Yahoo News is great for showing breaking news, and then writing your own opinion in the post as the original content. Professional news sources quote other places all the time. YouTube can be used for product reviews, lessons, and all kinds of other things – provided you add textual content before and / or after the video. RSS feeds are tricky, you don’t want to steal content, but it’s great sometimes to pull headlines from places to augment a post, or even from somewhere like Craigslist.

in the image above, you can setup translations for any content you pull (great for international sites), and you the ability to pull “tweets” from twitter as well.

New in version 3 of WP Robot is the ability to get products from Commission Junction (CJ), and Oodle. Personally I don’t know why you would want to pull content from Oodle, since it’s not really a classified site at all and it just scrapes content from 100 other sites. It also mixes in eBay auctions and affiliate products at times, which (in my opinion) screws you out of the opportunity to monetize the post yourself. Commission Junction, on the other hand is one of the oldest and largest affiliate houses online, with thousands and thousands of merchants to get products from.

Press release options aren’t available (yet), but you can get products from Shopzilla, and the final option is the ability to control error handling.

How to Use WP Robot 3

WP Robot 3 is one of the most powerful plugins on the market today for augmenting content. We’re going to take a look at how to add a new “Campaign”:

The first thing you choose is they type of campaign. You have 3 choices, keyword campaign, rss campaign, and browsernode campaign. The first is of course creating posts from keywords. The second, creating posts from RSS feeds (other sites). The third is creating posts from specific Amazon categories.

Next, in main settings you choose some keywords, one phrase per line. On the right you type in the categories you want to post to, and below you choose how often to post. You can also choose to create categories if they don’t exist.

Next you choose how your post is created using a “Post Template”. By default you have 1 template that will get used 100% of the time. However, you can choose for a keyword campaign to have say 4 templates used 25% of the time, or 5 used 20% of the time, etc. As long as percentage for all templates adds up to 100% – you’re good. You can choose to save and load templates that you’ve made in the past – for the purposes of this review, we’re just going to keep it simple and use 1 template for all the keywords (a default template).

I wanted Amazon items, so on the “load preset” area I choose “Amazon Default” from the dropdown, and then the “load” button”. The post title and post content area are automatically filled out for me. You could setup the titles any way you wanted, and you can put as many things as you want in the post content area, but until you understand how the template tags work – it’s probably best to just stick with the default templates at first.

When you load a default post template, the title and post content area are filled out automatically. You can see when I loaded the example, there seems to be some options other then just the template tags themselves, like {amazon}.

For instance, if you just use {amazontitle} in post title, all you get is the original title from the amazon product listing.

If you use this in post title:
{amazontitle}[random:20] Reviews[/random]

It will show the amazon title, but 20% of the time it will randomly add a space and then “Reviews” at the end of the title.

This will show the name of your keyword, and 50% of the time the amazon title and 50% of the time an ebay title (as long as you use both amazon and ebay in the post content area.
{keyword} [random:50]{amazontitle}[/random][random:50]{ebaytitle[/random]

You can do the same exact things in the post content areas. This is my default for amazon posts, it shows one amazon product, a second amazon product 15% of the time, and 2 ebay auctions after that 50% of the time:
{amazon}
[random:15]{amazon}[/random]
[random:50]{ebay} {ebay}[/random]

If you look at the WP Robot template tag page, you’ll find all kinds of ways to create the perfect post titles.

You have some pretty amazing “optional settings for each campaign as well. You can choose to to replace or exclude keywords. This can be good if internationally a word is spelled differently than the products origination country. You can exclude keywords too, so say if you’re looking for “pee wee baseball”, and you get “pee wee herman” a lot – you can weed that out.

You can choose specific amazon departments, or ebay categories. You can even add custom tags for uses in advanced themes. You can translate posts from one language to another (even comments), and you can have a “delayed start” for your campaign as well.

Once you’ve added a campaign, from the main screen you can see each campaign you’ve added, the keywords, categories, how many posts have been created, and when the next post is set ot occur. You can copy, edit, delete, pause, or “post now” from any campaign, and below you can bulk post (from all campaigns), and even backdate.

Click on any campaign to edit it, and you have the same bulk post and backdating options. You also get a log of posts that have occured, and you can see in the example above (click for full view), if you have multiple sources of content, and one or more couldn’t get data – the log will tell you.

Below that in “keywords overview” you also see how many posts have been created for each keywords, and in what categories. You an also edit your campaign at any time, going back to the same screen as when you orignally created it, and edit the keywords, content, etc.

Building Sites with WP Robot 3

Beyond the initial setup, by adding “campaigns” to WP Robot you can target specific keywords and post relevant content quickly. You could use WP Robot to get new product ideas to write reviews about, to offer relevant content and items to an already successful blog, or to build up a new blog or WP powered site.

You have unlimited potential for post creation, with the ability to mix content from all kinds of different places in a single post. You can complete control over titles and post content, with the ability to randomly mix just about whatever you want. The possibilities are literally endless!

My advice to you is to try WP Robot for yourself right away, it will probably become one of the more valuable affiliate plugins that you’ll own. One of the nice things about purchasing WP Robot 3 is that you can buy all the features at once, or just the modules you need (ala carte).

Click Here to Visit the WP Robot Site

Disclosure: The link above is an affiliate link. We hope you’ve liked our review of WP Robot and it’s features. We actually use it on many of our web sites, and if you click that link and purchase the product, we’ll get a small affiliate commission for the referral (that’s how we pay the bills around here).

By knowing “How to Ruin your SEO in 5 Easy Steps”, you’ll better understand some pitfalls to avoid – that could ruin your credibility in search results. There are some things you could do that would quickly change your rankings for the worse.

1. Write Horrible Titles

There are lots of factors to good search rankings, but none is more powerful than a good post title. This is the title for that page listing in search engines, and the keywords contained within it largely determine what search terms you’ll come up for. If you want bad rankings, just write bad titles! Don’t use keywords, use meaningless words, make the titles excessively long, and don’t explain what the post is about.

2. Link to Questionable Web Sites

Remember when your mother said “you’re only as good as the company you keep”? Google believes that too. If you want to start dropping down in search rankings, just link to questionable sites, like ones with spam, mal-ware, illegal software – even linking to places suspected of or associated with this kind of activity is enough.

3. Get Malware on Your Site

Online security is HUGE nowadays, and if you get malware on your site – you’ll be ripped out of the google index the same day! You’re visitors will even get a nice warning message is most browsers that says “this site is infected with malware!” All it takes is to have an old version of most anything installed in your site (wordpress, forums, scripts), and it’s a backdoor for spammers to break into your site, and install links to spam and malware sites. Don’t pay attention to security, and you’ll be on google black list quickly!

4. Excessively Link to Other Sites

If you have more than 50 links on a single page, google will suspect you of link stuffing, building a linkfarm, and a hundred other things. It’s healthy to link to your own content and other sites, but if you want to drop your SEO just link to dozens and dozens of pages and sites in your posts.

5. Build Unusually Large Amounts of Backlinks

As in the last point, if you want to drop SEO, just build 1,000′s of backlinks quickly! You still see services that will build “thousands of forum links” overnight, or tons of social media bookmarks. Nothing will put you in the sandbox or give you a google penalty quicker, than trying to game google by building tons of backlinks quickly!

Recently someone told me that “Yahoo Search is Dead, why should I register my web site”? It’s no secret that Yahoo and Microsoft are now partners, and it should further be no surprise that about a month ago Yahoo announced it’s search results would be served by Bing.

If you’ve had your site awhile (and have been reading this blog), then you already now that one of the key parts to getting (and keeping) good search rankings, is to register your site with the 3 big search engines: Yahoo, Bing, and google. So, how that Yahoo is getting it’s search results from Bing, you shouldn’t both registering your site with Yahoo Site Explorer any more – right?

Nothing could be further from the truth (for now). Yahoo wants webmasters to keep using Site Explorer since it feeds information to Bing. So, even if your already registered with Bing, keep your Yahoo Site Explorer registrations up – it can only help!

References:

Yahoo Site Explorer
Google Webmaster Control Panel
Bing Webmaster Tools