David Chan’s Blog

Original post (June 24, 2008):

A quick search for myself reveals that I’ve been taken off the Google index (do a quick search for “david chan blog”), and I might know why.  My guess would be that my Twitter Friend’s links appeared to be “spam” to Google’s crawlers.  I’ve heard of people being penalized for link spamming, though that was not my intention at all.

My Twitter blog digest posts will be disabled until further investigation.

Update (July 7, 2008):

After investigating and confirming that I’ve been black-listed by Google, I have sent off a notice of reconsideration.  Will update again when reply comes.  Stay tuned - it’s going to take several weeks.

Update 2 (evening July 7, 2008):

Within about 12 hours of my Google index reconsideration submission, it appears I have regained my old positions for some search terms. I’ll need to do more checking to make sure that all my old posts have been indexed.

If anyone else runs into this problem, I would be more than happy to guide them through the reconsideration process.

My coworker Nick Simpson is truely amazing.  He is one of the most knowledgable sys admins I’ve known and I’ve been with many different companies (ie. I’ve been around the block).  His blog is neatly designed and he stumbles on many neat things.  Just recently I’ve been introduced to a new Facebook app to keep track of birthdays, and I got that information from his recent post titled “Facebook iCal birthdays“.

But if you do a search for “Facebook iCal Birthdays” on Google, you won’t find Nick’s post.  Even a search for “Nick Simpson” doesn’t return much from his blog.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the permalinks for his blog posts are in a very machine unfriendly format.

This doesn’t translate into any searchable keywords, and makes it hard for anyone to find this via a keyword search.

I’m a big fan of searchables and many readers of my blog find my content via search engines (actually, only through Google…is there any other search engine?).

I hope Nick reads this and changes his permalink structure to include the post’s title, or the post’s keywords, as part of the permalink for the story.  You may already know this, but in WordPress, going into Settings->Permalinks will allow you to choose a suitable link for your posts.

What good is creating content if no one can find it?

You may have heard of Google I/O, but you may not have known it to be a secret weapon in Google’s grand scheme.  So powerful, Google advertises it proudly on tshirts as “Google KO”.  KO as in Knock Out.

[Image via TechCrunch]

Excerpt: “Attendees of the Google I/O conference today were given t-shirts that, presumably, were supposed to spell GOOGLEIO on the front in binary. Just one problem, the actual message printed spells GOOGLEKO”

Google Gets Fancy With Google I/O TShirts.  Too Fancy. [TechCrunch]

A mid-term mission of mine is to appear on the first page of the Google (US search) index for the search phrase “David Chan”.  I’ve been working on it on and off, studying SEO here and there on my free time.

A tool I use to check my search engine ranking position (SERP) is the Top 100 Rankings Position Checker.  Not noted for its looks, it’s pretty useful in finding if an url is within the top 100 Google results for a particular keyword or phrase.  Best of all is the ability to bookmark your query so you can validate your ego in one click!

Hmm my current rating is “very nice”, but as this tool points out, it’s not good enough.  More work on this in the future.

I used part of my weekend to play around with WordPress themes, and honestly they were easier to edit, change and implement than I thought. While I was changing things around I decided to give this blog a new name and feel. I felt that the old “Brain Barn” wasn’t at all accurate with describing the kind of content I tend to write, and from the knowledge of the kind of keyword searches and incoming links to this blog, I have decided to rename it to “Everyday Extra”.

Brain Barn gets the boot; enter Everyday Extra. It was better than just “David Chan Blog”, and besides, I like alliterations.

Edit: the layout still has a minor alignment issue in IE6, working on fixing it as I find time. In the meantime use Firefox

The name David Chan is definitely a common one. Firstly, the last name Chan is the Asian equivalent of Windsor or Smith. Lee and Wong top the list of most popular Chinese surnames, but Chan, which is sometimes spelled Chen, is definitely in the top five. Secondly, the first name David happens to coincide with that of a certain Biblical King of Israel. You get the point.

I’ve met several people with the same name in Vancouver, and even went to high school with one who is the same age as me. There’s no lack of David Chans in the world, but what about on the internet?

Searching for “David Chan” on Google.com will give roughly 17.7 million results. As of this writing I am result number 52:

In the Google.ca search I occupy results #45 and #46. My search position is not bad given the relatively short span that I have been running this weblog, however my goal is to make it into the top 10. Unfortunately, looking up http://blog.dekandustry.com on a Page Rank calculator reveal that this url currently has a Page Rank of 0, out of a possible 10.

Positive linking, and optimizing the site to web crawlers are things which top my current research list. Other popular blog rating/ranking sites like Technorati and Digg are also of interest and they contribute to my daily visit count.

I look to break into the top 40 David Chan search results soon, and will be writing about my findings and experiences in experimenting with increasing internet traffic.

You’re not a fool, and neither am I. So lets not all jump onto the latest Google product bandwagon.

Want WiFi around? Just flush it down.

Google is once again diversifying their services by introducing free wireless broadband for households. Called TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider), it looks to be quite faster than services most people pay for. Check out the screens below.

How to setup your very own TiSP connection.

TiSP faq.

Interested? Sign up here: Google TiSP. Be warned, this page might go down due to the high demands of free broadband.