Site Updates, Wopular | featured news

Because Google’s Panda Update 2.5 has taken away a chunk of Wopular’s traffic, I’ve decided to try out web 2.0 link exchange programs. I read that they’re significantly more sophisticated than their previous incarnations. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never tried them with Rotten Tomatoes.

I spent the whole day dealing with servers. The facility where Wopular and MoviesWithButter are hosted were having some network issues. I was able to get MWB up and running within an hour or so. Wopular was a whole different story. The Database is about 21GB. It's a huge db, so whenever there's a network issue, I can always count on at least one corrupt table. And it always happens to be the largest table, which takes several hours to diagnose and repair.

About a year ago, I decided to add an autorefresh to pages that contain feeds so that content would always stay fresh. I set it to autofresh every 3 minutes. I could have been done this via ajax, but my ajax kung fu wasn’t good enough then (or now). I went with the easiest method, which is a simple meta tag addition to those pages. I got the idea from Drudge Report.

It was fine for about a year until the week of the Panda Update 2.2, when all pages with the autorefresh would give the Googlebot errors and not get indexed.

Google have been tweating their search algorithms this year to battle content farms and scrapers. They named this tweak Panda Update. In February of this year, they released the first version, which was aimed at lowering the rankings of content farms - i.e. eHow, ezinearticles.com, and wisegeek.com. I don’t consider my site a content farm, but I did saw a 40% decrease in traffic as soon as the new algorithm went live.

It’s been a while since I last blogged; I’ve been busy working on a new site. Anyway, I’m back … with another slight adjustment to the newsrack on the right sidebar of the homepage. I moved Huffington Post and Fox News to the bottom, but above Digg.

I knew Yahoo Buzz was one of the “sunset” sites - properties that would be shutdown by Yahoo. I still kept it on the site, but moved it to the bottom of the homepage. The quality of the articles being voted up have been on the low-end months before its eventual demise was announced; sometimes, you even get spam. The site had also been redesigned to its bare essentials.

Working at Rotten Tomatoes kinda messed up my general view of advertising trends. The movie season peaks during Summer, takes a nosedive during Fall, heads back up during the Winter arounds Oscars, and levels off again during Spring. It’s a bit different from what I’ve experienced so far with Wopular, which is probably more in tune with the average website.

Apparently, the Washington Post had a redesign recently and their feeds were modified. Yahoo Buzz also had some changes lately - seemed like they streamlined the site and eliminated some categories. It is one of those “sunset” sites that they’re either planning to shutdown or sell off. Ft. Worth Star-Telegram also had a redesign, but that was probably more than a couple months ago. I didn’t notice until a user emailed me. Feeds for those three sites have been updated across the different categories on the top nav.

UPDATE: Add Deadline.com to the list of updated feeds.

Last Thursday, Google launched a new tweak to their search algorithm. It was targeted at content farms, which many consider to be spammy sites whose content are created solely to attract search engine traffic for specific keywords.

I do notice more and more of these sites on Google’s search results. For me, the main offender is ezinearticles.com. Most of the articles I get from there are completely useless. They’re just keywords being repeated over and over again with a bunch of fillers. I can see why Google wants to push those sites further down their search rankings.

While updating Wopular, I noticed that from time to time, the site would locked up for a couple minutes. Most of the time, I would just wait it out. I finally looked into the slow query log for mysql and found the troublesome query.