Pocket SEO » Scripts

How to Add a Dynamic Copyright to Your Web Site Footer

Josh — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 20:45:04 +0000

In preparation for the new year, this is a simple but useful PHP snippet for keeping your copyright notice up to date on your blog or Web site.


echo 'Copyright © 2006 – ' . date("Y");
?>

The HTML entity – just means a dash. You could also do just:

Copyright ©  echo date("Y"); ?>

It works on WordPress blogs also — just insert the code snippet in footer.php.

How to Turn Proxy Hijacking Into Inbound Links to Your Web Site

Josh — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 04:49:40 +0000

Proxy hijacking is a problem that has been in the SEO news lately. Dan Thies has a good post about it on SEO Fast Start.

Basically, proxy hijacking occurs when search engines index your Web pages through someone else’s proxy. Here is an example from a proxy site that has indexed a duplicate of wunderground.com’s about page:

Dan Thies mentioned a few solutions to the problem. One is

…a PHP script that implements the “reverse cloaking” defense, putting a “nonindex, nofollow” robots meta tag into your pages unless it’s a spider that you have configured the script to recognize.

That solution may remove your proxied page from Google index (unless the proxy strips your element), but it doesn’t provide any benefit for your site.

Another alternative is to turn that indexed proxy page from a dangerous duplicate of your Web page into an inbound link.

Getting the IBL

To find the IP address of the proxy, use the Show IP Firefox Extension. It will show the IP address(es) of the Web page that is in your browser.

The IP of the proxy is usually the same as the IP that grabs your content. If not, it’s probably on the same C-block of IP addresses, and you can grep it out of your logs (see below).

The first example assumes that the proxy is grabbing your content from the same IP address that is seen with the Show IP Firefox Extension. This PHP code has not been fully tested, but is just intended to be an example of the technique.


$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
// change the following nn.nnn.nnn.nnn to IP addresses
// and add others to the array as necessary
$cloaked_ips = array("nn.nnn.nnn.nnn","nnn.nnn.nnn.nn");
if(in_array("$ip",$cloaked_ips)) {
    echo <<

Your Main Keyword


Name of Site or Some Keywords
Please visit the site directly:
name of site or keywords.


EOF;
    exit;
}
// everything above is for the proxy,
// and everything below this code is for direct visitors
?>

If the above code works when you view your site in the browser, then you know that the proxy is using the same IP address that is showing in the Show IP Firefox Extension.

If it is not showing the alternate content to the proxy then you can test it by removing the last number from the IP address in the script. If that doesn’t work, I recommend grepping (searching) your log files for IP addresses on the same C-block.

IP Hunting With Grep

Grep is a Unix command that you can use to search large files (such as logs) for information. If you haven’t used grep before, I recommend a grep tutorial or a full command line tutorial like this, this, or this.

To find IP addresses on the same C-block use a line similar to this in a Linux, MacOSX, or Cygwin (Windows) terminal:

egrep "nnn\.nnn\.nnn\." access_log > ip_addresses.txt

That will give you a file named ip_addresses.txt that contains a list of all the hits on your server from the same C-block as the proxy. You will probably find the correct IP to block in that file.

Tracking Proxy Indexing

This is just an idea that I haven’t fully tested yet, but you may be able to keep track of duplicate content on proxies with Google Alerts.

Setup a comprehensive search for something like intitle:”site name”, or even better, intitle:”site name” inurl:”cgi”. Here is an example screenshot:

If you have additional tips for combating proxy duplication, please leave a comment below.

How to Install Linux on an External Hard Drive

Josh — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 03:00:12 +0000

Some of the SEO recipes that I will be posting on this site require a Unix-based operating system such as Linux. Mac OS/X should also work for those examples, but I’m not as familiar with Mac so you may have to adapt the scripts somewhat.

This post shows a way to install Linux on an external hard drive so that you don’t have to modify your internal hard drive for a dual-boot Linux/Windows setup.

(Sorry about the quality of the image above — it was taken with my cell phone.)

The reason that I recommend having Linux around for SEO is because of the scriptable shell and text processing abilities. For example, if you wanted to find the number of outbound links on a page you could just type the following into a terminal:

lynx -dump "http://pocketseo.com/" | egrep -o "http:.*" | wc -l

That is just a very basic example. There are many great possibilities with Linux, and I will cover more-interesting SEO scripting recipes in the future.

Install Ubuntu on External Hard Drive

I’m currently running my main operating system from a 120 Gb external hard drive that I got at Best Buy for $101 including tax. Here are the steps:

Download a copy of Ubuntu Linux. I’m using version Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn”.
Burn the CD image to a CD-R with these instructions. You will end up with a Linux live CD.
Turn off the computer and remove the internal drive(s). Otherwise you risk getting the MBR overwritten when you install Linux.
Boot the computer from the live CD. As soon as the Ubuntu start screen appears, plug in the external hard drive that you want to install to. Start Ubuntu from the menu that is provided.
Once the Ubuntu desktop has loaded, double-click on the install icon and follow the installation instructions. The installation process should take between 20 to 40 minutes.

When the installation is done, remove the live CD and reboot the computer from the external hard drive. You should then be running a full installation of Ubuntu. You can put your regular hard drive back in the computer and just boot from the external hard drive when you want to use Linux. You can take your Linux installation with you wherever you go. Any computer that you plug the external hard drive into will have your entire operating system on it.

If you haven’t used Linux before, check out the Ubuntu help docs and the Ubuntu Forums.

If you want to experiment with the latest Linux desktop, try the Sabayon Linux Live DVD. An example is below:

More about Linux and SEO techniques is coming soon.

Getting More EDU Backlinks

Josh — Fri, 25 May 2007 03:03:45 +0000

If you already have lists of hundreds or thousands of potential backlinks contained in multiple files and want to extract the EDU links from them you can run a quick shell script on them.

Take the files that contain your lists of backlinks and put them in their own directory. Then navigate to that directory in the terminal and type the following lines:

for f in * do cat $f | grep '\.edu' >EDU-$f done

An explanation of the script:

for f in * means to loop over each file in the directory.
cat $f outputs the contents of each file.
grep '\.edu' >EDU-$f searches through the current file in the loop and extracts each line that contains .edu and then writes it to a file that begins with EDU-.

How to Find Thousands of Potential EDU Backlinks with GNU/Linux

Josh — Mon, 21 May 2007 20:18:57 +0000

If you use GNU/Linux or Mac OS/X (or even Cygwin on Windows) you can use a little one-line script to quickly build lists of thousands of possible backlinks. It can be used to build lists on any kind of Google query, but this one specifically finds pages on EDU sites.

The script below visits a page of Google SERPs with a text browser and then formats the data for you. The example below uses the Links Browser, but you can also use Lynx.

links -dump 'http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aedu+keyword&num=100&start=0' | egrep -o "http:.*" | grep -v "google.com" | egrep -v '[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}' | awk '{ print "

"$1"

" }' >> backlink_hunter.html

The output is an HTML page with a bulleted list of links. You can then use Firefox to middle-click on each link and quickly scan them to see if they might be a candidate for a backlink request. Useful Firefox keyboard shortcuts for this are Ctrl-w (close tab), Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab (move between tabs). Here is a screenshot of part of the output:

A quick explanation of the script:

links -dump (or lynx -dump) tells your text browser to dump the contents of the page into the terminal. Both text browsers create a list of URLs from the page at the bottom of the output. We are dumping a Google query for your desired keyword, with 100 results per page, starting at the beginning (&start=0). You can run the script multiple times, increasing the start parameter each time (for example: 101, 201, 301, up to 901). 100 results is probably enough to start with though.
egrep -o searches each line for text starting with http:. The -o option means to only return the matching portion of the line — in this case, just the URL.
grep with the -v option removes lines that match the regular expression — in this case removing any URL that interally links to Google.
The next grep -v line removes all URLs that match an IP address because Google links back to itself in the SERPs with an IP address. This will leave us with only outbound links from the SERPs.
awk takes each remaining URL and encloses them in
tags to format them in a list.
The final command of the script — >> backlink_hunter.html — appends the output the the file backlink_hunter.html. If the file doesn't exist, it will be created. If it does exist, it will just append the output to the end of the file. That way you can change the &start= parameter in the Google query and append the next set of results to the file, creating list of up to 1000 URLs.

I recommend experimenting with different Google operators and seeing what happens. Using this one-liner is much faster than some other methods of hunting for backlinks. The script can be expanded to do more — this is just a basic introduction to the concept.