One of the primary goals of every webmaster is to rank well in major search engines for specific keywords in order to get as much organic search traffic as possible. But, how do you keep track of search positions? Doing it manually would take a lot of your valuable time, specially if you’re tracking multiple sites. The guys at Link Assistant have produced a great free tool, Rank Tracker that performs this job for you.

Rank Tracker can track multiple sites and you can track as many keywords per site as you want. Stats are collected from any of the selected 3 main search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) plus from Overture. Rank Tracker keeps track of previous results and shows the rank diff for each keyword. Here is an example for one of my sites:

Quite nice, I can see straight away which keywords have progressed, which have dropped, but I can also find out if any of the keywords I’ve been working on have made it into the first 100 entries. When you click on a specific rank, you can see it’s position through time, such as on the following diagram:

Rank Tracker supports Google and Yahoo APIs, but you can use the ordinary (non-API) access as well, although you must take care not to perform too many requests in that case so you don’t get banned by the search engine.

Overall, this is a very clean, easy to use and extremelly useful application. If you’re a webmaster, go and get it now.

Tags: Ranking, Search Engine Ranking, Google, Yahoo

During the last year my support forum saw a huge increase in registrations and posts made by spammers. A few common prevention techniques I applied did not work and I was forced to close the forum for new registrations for a while, until I had time to find better methods of dealing with spam. Fortunately, this turned out to be a fairly easy task, thanks to the excellent phpBB Antispam HOWTO page which lists the drawbacks of some existing techniques and recommends a few mods, developed by the site owner himself.

Textual Confirmation: The core of the solution is that a user/bot performing the registration is required to answer a simple question. In case of a real person, the answer will be provided, but every bot will stumble and fall. This really worked.

The site also suggest the Links Rejector mod, which allows phpBB to reject posts that contain links and are made by guest users. So, after a long period of accepting posts by registered users only, today I turned this protection off and my forum now accepts posts by guests again. As long as they don’t post links, of course. It’s nice to be free again.

I must add that each time a spam registration or a guest post is rejected, these tools send a notification to the forum administrator and to the community spam database. It’s not clear who uses that data and for what (the mods above certainly don’t care about them, it’s not a learning system), but hey, they helped me, so if this helps build a “community database” that’s fine with me.

Tags: phpBB, Spam, phpBB Spam, Forum Spam

There are many junk websites being offered for sale nowadays. It is therefore important to have a tool which would be able to give you a very quick overview of a site, something like it’s age, alexa ranking, number of backlinks and it’s homepage pagerank. iWebTool has exactly that, they call it “All-in-one Lookup”. In just a couple of seconds it list this information, which allows you to decide if you want to investigate the site further or not. It’s a time saver.

Tip: To make things even faster, you can lookup any site by going to http://www.iwebtool.com/domain.tld directly. If you’re using Opera or Firefox, you can create a customized search and make this lookup process even faster (so, you just type something like “iwt domain.tld”).

SEOlogs webmaster tools is an excellent collection of online tools which are very useful for tracking the success of your sites and also for evaluating sites that are being sold.

The Backlinks Analyzer Tool is the best one I’ve seen anywhere, I’ve been stunned with some of the backlinks it managed to dig up.

The Fake Pagerank Detection tool is the first tool to run when someone is selling a website with a PR. I was amazed and somewhat horrified with the amount of unscrupulous webmasters out there, trying to make a quick buck from new sites and inflating their PR. So, this tool quickly eliminates the bad guys.

The Keyword Difficulty Check Tool is another great little tool from SEOlogs. Enter a keyword and see how much you’ll have to work to get good rankings. It’s so simple yet very powerful as it saves a lot of time while exploring new niches.

There are many other very useful tools over at SEOlogs.com, so if you have a website go check them out, you’ll need them sooner or later.

Tags: Pagerank, Keywords, Backlinks, Seologs

Due to certain circumstances, during the past few months I’ve been dedicating a lot of my free time to the money making side of web development. Instead of developing software I focused on developing new websites, marketing them, finding good domains and smaller established websites and investing in them for the future. This whole “business” is a huge time consumer, at times quite chaotic and disorganized, but has so far been rewarding and satisfying. So, since I miss posting here, in the following months I will write about some of the interesting stuff that I’m finding and experiencing in this new area I’m exploring. I’ll touch the various webmaster tools I’m now using on a daily basis. This could be interesting, since most of the good tools in this niche are not free (they are quite pricey actually) and it is not easy to find unbiased reviews on the web. I’ll probably also touch the whole domain business area with some newbie views and opinions.

Tags: Webmaster, Webmaster Tools