It’s a really nifty plugin that has a slick interface and several differnt information views.

Key Features

Visitor Details View

The main page is called the visitor details view and it shows the latest hits and has several ways to limit the results. You can view a summary for the past day, 7 days, 1 month or one year. You can exclude spam hits or spider hits or spam and spider hits along with several other combinations.
The chart uses Google’s chart api and is pretty slick.

Spy Visitors

The Spy Visitors feature lets you look at visitors to your site in real time. It uses JQuery to update the hits and gives it a flash sort of feel. In fact the whole plugin feels a little flashy although I think it’s all done with javascript.

Current Visitors Online

This view is kind of like the visitor details view combined with the spy visitors view, except for there is not real time updating. It shows more detailed information about the visitors who are currently online.

Options

There is a rich set of options. I haven’t even gotten acquainted with them so I won’t talk much about them. One thing that I did find limiting right off the bat though, was the ability to exclude not only exact IPs, but IP blocks. My ISP seems to change up my class C network quite a bit and sometimes I’m even on different class A or B networks. It would come in handy to be able to exclude IPs by a range or just specifying the beginning of the IP instead of having to list all possible IPs I wanted to exclude completely.

Well, it seemed to be a pretty easy fix once I tracked down the pertinent chunk of code.

I went down to line 1523 where this was:

I changed that to this:

If you don’t have this plugin installed and are looking for a stats plugin or something to augment other stats tools you’re already using, give it a try, it’s pretty cool.

Hence, the Troll Filter for vB. It’s my first greasemonkey script althought I’m sure it won’t be my last. I just started on it yesterday and have only spent about an hour on it so it could be pretty buggy, however it seems to work as expected on a few forums I’ve tested it on.
The script relies on element IDs and classes in the vB html, so if they change this script could break.

You’ll need the greasemonkey extension for Firefox installed, of course. Here’s a good tutorial if you’ve never used greasemonkey or installed greasemonkey scripts before. It’s easy, peasy, monkey-greasy.

Make sure you after you install the script that you go to tools->greasemonkey->manage user scripts and include the forums that you want to use it on. You can just put an asterisk in the include box if you want it to run on all vB forums.

To add users you’ll have to be somewhat comfortable with javascript(sorry). The user/replacement values are constructed inside an object literal. It’s not that hard if you just remember a few rules.

1) Where there is an ‘example_user_1′ before the colon, put your user there in all lower case.
2) Enclose the stuff on both sides of the colon with quotation marks if it is a string and not a variable using single or double quotes (’) or (”).
3) Add a comma after each entry unless it’s the last one.

Edit: the backslash character wasn’t showing up in front of the metacharacters such as \d and \w. I had to quadruple slash them.

Here’s a plain text version in case the above code gets screwed up.

I think what a lot of people call “relevant backlinks” are overrated. There are still pages that rank for very competitive terms for which the backlinks are all just links in the footer on every page of a big site on a diversity of topics. Relevancy will surely become more important as algorithms get smarter but for now I don’t think it’s as important for SEO right now as lot of people say it is.

Everything being the same(like amount of effort in acquiring a link), I’d take a link that is given in a natural flow of text that is closely and unequivocally related to the content at hand, but those links are harder to get from others and I’m going to try to get whatever links I can that are not part of some artificial scheme that could get my site in trouble. That means forum signatures, social networking sites, blogrolls, footer links on every page of a site, whatever.

Here’s a good post on the subject. http://seo-theory.com/wordpress/2007/06/18/the-relevant-link-myth/

The post is almost a year old but I think it’s still relevant because whether he was right or wrong then, enough time hasn’t passed for that to have changed.

Link relevancy seems to be largely determined by anchor text

Michael Martinez’s contention is that the anchor text is what dictates relvancy, so that any link going to a page with relevant anchor text is relevant by virtue of that text; it doesn’t matter what the rest of the page is about. Well it’s hard to know exactly how Google measures the relevancy of a page in relation the page it is linking to but I find it difficult to believe that Google’s algorithm — even given all the data it has collected to work with and glean info from — is smart enough to determine relevancy of a page in relation to a page it links to with a lot of accuracy unless it relies mostly on anchor text and text in close proximity. Let me rephrase that, an algorithm can definitely determine the relevancy between two pages, based on probability models and such, but not in a way that could take the human factor fully into account and in a way that is necessarily in the best interest of the user.

Relevancy algorithms probably are still lacking in their usefulness in the real world

Sure you could probably quite easily determine the relevancy between two pages with an algorithm or fancy formula, and I’m sure Google does this to some extent(I just don’t know how important it is), but an algorithm will never be able to determine a relevant relationship nearly as well as a human. So why force an assessment of context that is likely to be flawed outside the academic world of mathematical models and penalize a page that is likely to be useful to a human who is much more capable of discerning context?

Take portal sites for example; Many portal site pages provide highly relevant links to many different types of pages, they just offer different sections on the page for different topics. Michael Martinez in the post I linked to above used the example of CNN, saying, to paraphrase, ‘if CNN linked to your site about car insurance from their home page would you email them and tell them to remove the link because their site is not about car insurance’?

I just took a quick glance at CNN’s home page. From a quick scanning I see references to Iraq, Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King, the rising price of gas and stock market closing numbers. So how would an algorithm determine the theme of that page in a way that could determine the usefulness that a link to another page has? (How does an algorithm know that this page or at least this area of the page isn’t really in any way related to the five subjects I mentioned two sentences ago?) If there was a section on car insurance on the home page of CNN would it be irrelevant? I don’t think so because as a user, when I go to CNN I want a small amount of information from a variety of topics so I, being the reasonably intelligent human that I am, can decide what resource I would like to consume at that point in time. Algorithmically, I just don’t think we are there yet so apply a heavy penalty for being non-relevant when the algorithms are not smart enough to completely discern the context.

Looking for irrelevancy as opposed to relevancy

What the algorithms probably are able to do at this point is find links that have certain characteristics that make it likely to NOT be relevant. This means detection of artifical linking schemes(link exchanges) and maybe even where the links are placed on a page. For example all popular blogging platforms have fingerprints that identify them, if links showing up in a certain area of the page(in relation to the code of the page) and that area has shown a high probably for paid links, then a probability model could be applied to find it’s liklihood of not being relevant.

Summary

I guess to summarize the opinion I have on the subject is don’t worry too much about just getting “relevant” links(get them if you can for sure) but do worry about not getting links that could be easily seen as NOT relevant, in computer or human terms.

I’d like to see some controlled experiment done to try to get insight into how Google does measure relevancy of backlinks, but I haven’t found one yet. If you know of such an experiment please leave a comment and let me know.

I got into using Squidoo late. I bought a lens to help me get into the thick of things about a month ago and have created three of my own since.

The lens I bought is this one: http://www.squidoo.com/canong5

It’s doing OK in Google for some model specific longtail searches but I suspect it could do better with more links and promotion, as always. The good news is that Google is at least open to ranking it. Maybe it’s the age of it.

When using the date parameter in the advanced search interface it shows Nov 2007 as the age of the page.

Advanced Search Results.

The first one I created on my own is here: http://www.squidoo.com/stock-trading-for-beginners

I first published it at the end of April sometime. It got indexed quick and started ranking for longtail terms quickly. It then dropped for some of those terms but now it is on the climb again. It’s 8 for “trade stocks for beginners” which is related to one of the phrases I was targeting. So now since I know Google likes this page I can start adding to it and really try to get some longtail luv.

From here on it’s a sad story.

The last two lenses that I published have been indexed but they might as well not be. They don’t show up for ANY search terms. As was pointed out to me by thefluffanutta on the SquidU forums, you can see that they are clearly indexed by doing a info:[site urls here], but they show in the SERPs for anything, not for their own titles, not for unique quoted text fragments taken from the pages, not for anything.

Here are the two lenses:

http://www.squidoo.com/computer-security-software

http://www.squidoo.com/ink-cartridge-refills

I don’t know why this happening. Supposedly Google slapped Squidoo last year after some big spam attacks on the site. I don’t know if they are simply filtering some pages on the squidoo.com domain that aren’t largely based on on-page factors or what. One thing that makes me wonder is that I’ve been putting links to my Squidoo lenses in my signatures on web forums. I’ve been linking to all lenses right in a row in my sig. I’ve gotten the most links from Digital Point Forums, some from Sitepoint Forums, some from Squidu.com forums and few from other places. Maybe this looks suspicious to Google since Squidoo has been the focus of spammers in the past. I don’t know if I should remove the links and try to get some links from other domains, keep them there and try to get links from other domains, or just write them off and start creating my next lens and see if time fixes it.