Evidently, so-called “thin content” is a thing, and it’s bad for websites. It’s basically where you link to something, maybe with a quote, and you add some commentary to it. Google supposedly hates this, since you’re not providing enough value, not contributing to the conversation, not creating the best possible resource for that topic. Etc. Well, fuck that.…
DISQUS Comments Re-enabled
I’ve re-enabled DISQUS comments. I’ve gone back and forth on this a few times over the last couple of months, but I’m going to leave them enabled for at least a month to see how it goes. If I’m getting valuable comments I’ll probably keep them. If there aren’t any, or they’re just flamewars in my older posts,…
How to Redirect Archives to Pages in WordPress
Changing your permalink structure on WordPress is non-trivial. It can break your site, orphan your content, and do murder to your SEO. I have a heap of very old links from Lifehacker and other domains that point to content on my old domain, when I was using an old permalink structure. So I needed to be able to…
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The Difference Between Organic and Direct Web Traffic
If you host any type of website you’ve probably heard the terms “organic” and “direct” with reference to web traffic. Many people confuse the two, so here’s the difference. Organic traffic is traffic from search engines. Direct traffic is traffic from someone typing your URL into their browser or using a bookmark to get to your site.
From Chartbeat to Google Analytics
I’ve been using both Chartbeat and Google Analytics for a couple of years now. I basically used Chartbeat for elegant and cleanly displayed realtime metrics, and Google Analytics for the drilldown data. Google Analytics released their Realtime view a long time ago actually, but it simply didn’t provide the kind of data I wanted to see. But with…
Top WordPress Attack Passwords
As the creator and one of the maintainers of the SecLists Project, I like creating lists of usernames and passwords that are live and used in the wild. So I decided to capture some data on what usernames and passwords were being attempted against my site’s WordPress install over a single day. Here are some of my findings:…
The Difference Between a Category and a Tag
If you’re into blogging at all you’ve probably come across the terms “category” and “tag”. There’s a lot of confusion around them, as they’re both terms that you assign to posts so that your readers can find them. Here’s a simple explanation of the difference. Categories Categories define a taxonomy to your site, meaning they’re hierarchical, (like folders…
List all Social Shares of Your Website Using Google Analytics
There are many services out there that show you how many tweets you’ve received. Or how many Facebook likes, Google +1’s, etc. But it’s been more difficult to see all shares of your site across all networks. Turns out, Google Analytics actually has this built in; you just have to hunt for it. Clicking “Overview” in the Social…
Google Pagespeed Not a Good Choice For High-traffic Sites
So I have just finished optimizing my web stack to the nth degree. Host, web server, application server, database, caching, DNS, CDN—everything. One of the components I used was Google’s Pagespeed, which comes in two forms. Here I’m speaking of the local version, i.e. the package you compile into Nginx and then configure. From there it optimizes content…