- Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

This statement has now been removed.

So much uproar had been given to this one simple statement. DMOZ had become a coveted directory which became very difficult to get into. DMOZ even got its own discussion forum where webmaster after webmaster would vent about the corruption of DMOZ as the webmaster could not get their site listed. Frankly, nobody would have cared about DMOZ without that statement in the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Now that this statement is gone, I am sure the cries of anger will be soon gone as well. After all, how could there be corruption in a free service maintained by unpaid moderators who do not make their presence known. Furthermore, who really uses DMOZ to go shopping anyways? Do people that are listed in DMOZ get a significant amount of referral traffic from the site? Since I was never able to get my sites listed in DMOZ, I may never know.

The Yahoo Directory was the real one in question. You could pay Yahoo $299 and get listed - well, that is if they accept you. That is a nice chunk of change for one incoming link. The question is whether or not it is worth it.

For my Tire Chain website, I decided to give it a try. The webpage that holds the tire chain companies had a whole two companies listed. Now it has three companies listed since Tire Chain Dealer is now on the list. The page of the tire chain sites has a Page Rank of 1.

Here are the results.

1. The Yahoo Directory Listing made no know impact on my organic listings.
2. I recieved some solicitations during the first few days as some internet marketing companies use the “New Listings” section to find leads.
3. Since removal from the “New Listings” section, I have recieved no referral traffic for about 6 straight weeks from the directory - and I am in season for tire chain sales.

My conclusion is that the Yahoo directory is not worth $300. Instead, consider spending your $300 getting a good press release written.

During the first two months, I went from page 26 to page 10 and then back to page 15. You can read more about this in my post called Directory Listings And Shopping Directories/.

After this article, I encountered a drop from page 10 to page 15 that was explainable by changes in the text on the main page where I reduced the number of times the keyword phrase of “tire chains” was used in the text. I added a few more mentions of it and was able to recover back to page 10.

Another thing I did was I signed up with a marketing firm called Triangle Direct Media. They use an large network of bloggers to help websites to get backlinks using the blogsphere. After adding 25 new backlinks using this approach, I jumped up to page 9. Well, a one page jump is better than nothing; however, it is nothing to write home about. The vast majority of these backlinks (but not all of them) were low quality links – PR0 sites with lots of website reviews found therein.

During the next fifteen days, not much changed in terms of content or ranking.

Then during the following two weeks, I did the following.

1. I added a significant amount of new content by adding tractor tire chains and tire chains for graders, loaders, and scrapers. All of this new content made good use of a product landing page with links to the multiple catalog entries for each model. Each page in the catalog for each model then linked back to its landing page.

2. I added an improved page heading section to visibly better describe the site in plain text. I am not talking about the meta tags. I am referring to the top most section of the readable text within the page—you know, where you usually land a graphic with the name of the site. Except, instead of using a graphic, I used plain text with a descriptive tagline.

3. I had another round of bloggers add another 25 backlinks to the site—once again, mostly low quality links.

4. In the discussion forum at forum.tirechaindealer.com, I changed the default setting within the forum software to not convert outgoing URLs to html links but instead display them as plain text. Originally, I had about 100 outgoing links to weather and road condition pages to assist users with finding road condition information for their state. In this one move, 100 outgoing links were removed and replaced with plain text.

5. 3.5 months had elapsed from the time the site was made public and if the so-called aging filter where real, then it should be getting close to time to expire.

So after taking all these steps, I noticed the site get spidered on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and again on Thursday. Friday morning came around and the site jumped from page 9 to page 2.

So which of the five items caused the site to bust through the penalty filters and place it with the rest of the legitimate online tire chain companies? I don’t know that I will ever know for certain. Nevertheless, now I know where the real competition is. Spot 17 sure beats spot 95. Now I only have 14 more sites to surpass to make it into the top 3. Just give me a few more months and I will report back to you.

Which is better?

Option 1: http://tirechaindealer.com/forum

Option 2: http://forum.tirechaindealer.com

My previous belief was that they were exactly the same. My belief was based on my experience that when you go to Google and type site:tirechaindealer.com into the search bar, you will get back all of the pages, both from option 1 and option 2. The tire chain site has http://tirechaindealer.com/catalog and http://forum.tirechaindealer.com. Since all pages come up, I simply assumed that the structure of the domain name was irrelevent.

However, according to the experts at Jive Software, thier experience has found that Option 2 gives your base url no credit for its content. Option 1 gives your base url full credit for its content. Therefore, you should always use Option 1 unless your hardware requirements forbid it.

Could anybody out there with experience with this issue give me further enlightenment as to whether my friends at Jive Software are correct?

I am now divorced and single again. It is not something I am proud of here. I was married to one person for about 16 years. We went through about 5 really rough years and we terminated the marraige. I was love starved and rushed into another marraige that according to my own parents was an ill advised marraige. Five months after the marraige, we split up. Five months later we tried again and four months after that we split up again. Now that divorce is final. What can I say, two divorces in two years.

So where do I go from here?

I will tell you. I am not going to focus on dating. In fact, it will probably be several months if not longer before I even try to get a date. I will not be signing up for any dating websites. If I find someone I wish to pursue, it will have to happen naturally with the people surrounding me from Church. I am not ready right now anyways. I have finally downsized and until I feel comfortable that I can expand the family and be prepared to do so financially without the woman I marry able to stay at home taking care of the kids, I don’t think I should even consider anything.

The focus I have is several fold:

1. Be a good Dad to my two kids. They are with me every other week including every Sunday. I like the arrangement. I miss them when they are gone, but I use this time to take care of things I otherwise would not be able to do. Tonight, after finishing the homework, we read in the Book of Mormon and then played Dragonology. That was our Family Home Evening which we thus far failed to have this week due to homework spilling late into the evening.

2. Build financial security. I have a good job with Quest Software and my Tire Chain website is on the cusp of taking off if I can improve the rankings. I think if I can have the Tire Chain site at the top of the search engine and add a couple more rock solid money generating websites, I will have financial security. This type of business should even thrive well during a drastic recession.

3. Be one with God. While Jesus was suffering in Gethsemene and was offering his intercessary prayer, he stated in John 17, “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through thier word; That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” If I can keep my heart, mind, and actions on fulfilling his works, then I shall be one with him. I feel right now that I am one with him. I feel of his blessings all around. And living my life according to his paths is truly about the most important thing to me.

4. I want to help people. I feel I have suffered much over the past several years. Trial after trial was just happening until I finally ridded myself of personal sins and removed myself from the poisons I had encountered. Now I am now quite calloused. The injuries happened. Why they happened will always be debatable. But I can no longer debate them. They happened and I must move on. Because of the trials, when I see someone hurting, I feel their pain right along with them. They don’t know it and they don’t see it. They only know the pain they feel. But I do feel it. There is a wonderful primary song that I have been singing over and over in my mind now for many weeks.

Because I have been given much, I too must give;
Because of thy great bounty, Lord, each day I live,
I shall divide my gifts from thee,
with every brother that I see
who has the need of help from me.

Because I have been sheltered, fed by they good care,
I cannot see another’s lack and I not share.
My glowing fire, my loaf of bread,
My roof’s safe shelter overhead,
that he too may be comforted.

Because I have been blessed by thy great love dear Lord,
I’ll share thy love again according to thy word.
I shall give love to those in need,
I’ll show that love by word and deed.
Thus shall my thanks be thanks indeed.

I actually am a very happy person right now. I have been through the refiners fire. I came out of the fire several time all warped and messed up. So I was thrown back into the fire to be once again reshaped, polished and finished. Hopefully, I am sharp enough and bright enough now that I can become a real tool in the hands of the master.

In resolving the issue, I looked at both the CSS and the HTML layout of the media wiki components which were nothing more than div tags.  I tried to solve the problems by modifying absolute vs relative positioning, modifying the z-index on the various components, and I was really tested on finding the solution.  Then I found it.

The CSS attribute of the dominant div tags included overflow:visible; as attributes.  For some reason, this attribute was forcing the div tag to be on the top layer.

/* overflow:visible; */

Problem solved.

File type does not meet security guidelines. Try another.

So after digging through various discussion forums, blogs, and code, I discover the fix.  It is in the database.

To add uploadable file type extensions, go into the database in the wp_sitemeta table.  The table looks like this:

 meta_id    | bigint(20)   | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
 site_id    | bigint(20)   | NO   | MUL | 0       |                |
 meta_key   | varchar(255) | YES  | MUL | NULL    |                |
 meta_value | longtext     | YES  |     | NULL    |                |

In there you will find a meta_key of “upload_filetypes”.  Add the extension of zip or whatever file extension it is that you wish to upload into the meta_value field. 

Now you should be able to upload that file type without receiving the security error.

By the way, my current version of regular Wordpress has no issue with uploading zip files.  I am not certain why Wordpress MU does not allow it by default whereas regular Wordpress does allow it by default.

Shouldn’t I be in hundreds or thousands of these Listings?
You hear it quite often that each link is a vote for your site; However, be aware that a link in a thousand directory listings does not mean a thousand votes for your site. There are many services out there that you can pay and they will automatically submit your site to hundreds or thousands of directory listings. I recommend that you not use them. I have seen first hand and read on various discussion forums how these services have damaged sites resulting in harsh penalties on the placement of the Google search engine results - penalties not easily remedied. I have also read in various discussion forums of people signing up for these services then seeing their site immediately either banned or heavily penalized on Google. Furthermore, these automated services arguably go against Google Terms and Conditions and the spirit of what Google wants which is that they do not want people to pay for search engine placement. They instead want the world to recognize your site naturally and then they will push your site up front. Google has gotten pretty good at detecting these schemes and will not allow these schemes to help you.

So should you deal with these directories at all in your strategy? Yes.

Directory Listings
One general guideline is that a good directory listing does not accept all applicants. A good directory listing screens each site for quality and only accepts the site if it is a quality site. These directory listings should be turning down about 25% of the applicants. If they are not following this approximate rejection rate rule, then their directory will become too spammy to be useful and their effect on the search engine placement will be meaningless. Since these sites must screen your site prior to listing it, good directory listings require a fee to pay the reviewers for their time. This fee may range from less then $10 all the way up to $299 for the Yahoo directory listing. I recommend that you do both a Google search for directory listings and a Yahoo search for directory listings. Find those directory listing which place well and submit your site to several of these.

Another factor to consider is that some directory listings have page rank on the actual listing page of your site as opposed to only having page rank on the home page. Look for sites that give you legitimate PR strength on the page your site will be on without lots of outgoing links to counter the strength. You won’t find a whole lot of these; however, when you find them, give them priority.

Shopping Directories
What differentiates shopping directories from directory listings are two things.

1. Most will not give you link love. They will instead list your site with an internal redirect that will end up taking the user to your site. As a result, these shopping directories will not help your organic search engine placement.

2. People actually use some of these directories to go shopping. Three examples are shopinusa.com, Yahoo Shopping and Shopzilla.

If you have a site with good potential for income, then making use of these shopping directories may very well be worth the fees. Shopinusa.com is a free directory with a premium service available if you choose to pay for it.

Targeting Phrases
Through the learning process, I also determined that the directory listings can play a factor in long tail search phrases. As you are building these listings, do what you can to name the link to your site using some of your targeted keyword phrases; however, some of the directory listings will not allow you to do this. Do the same in your blog entries. Mix up the text of the links to be text likely entered by search engine users. This will greatly improve your search results on the less competitive phrases without hurting you on the competitive phrases.

Case Study
I made the new version of tirechaindealer.com available early in July. Quickly after it being indexed by Google, it showed up on Page 26 for the search term of “tire chains”. This was already a significant improvement over the original url of www.tire-chain-dealer.com. www.tire-chain-dealer.com was a site that had previously used one of those submission services. After using the submission service, I felt that I had lost control of my search engine optimization strategy with the site doing well on some long-tail searches but horribly on the important search term. In July, www.tire-chain-dealer.com showed up on page 36 for the same search term of “tire chains”. I made certain I was using unique content on the new domain name of tirechaindealer.com.

During the first 20 days of the new site, I used the following strategy.

1. I added You Tube movies with links to the site.
2. I signed up for a handful of free directory listings.
3. I modified some of the incoming links to the original site changing the url to the new domain name.

YouTube had some benefits in that it not only gave me incoming links from YouTube itself, there are other websites that feed movies in from YouTube and may result in incoming links independently. My posting to YouTube was done the same time I made the site available and was already a contributing factor at getting me to page 26.

On July 31, I was on page 18.

During August, we made some significant progress - couple of steps forward, a step back, and a couple more steps forward. Instead of targeting free directory listings, I paid for about 8 paid for listings. I also added entries into about 6 automotive blogs and found a handful of other miscellaneous links in unrelated SEO forums. I was quickly seeing progress as the listings resulted in the site moving up to page 15. I added a link into the highly respected Edmunds.com and I immediately jumped up to page 12. I soon received an email from the webmaster telling me that he was removing my posting as being solicitation. I immediately dropped back to page 15.

About this time, I was getting frustrated about Google not finding my new links in the directory listings, so I added a helpful reference in my tire chain discussion forum with a list of all of the links to my site that were in the directory listings—in other words, I added reciprocal links to the directory listings. I added the same reciprocal links in this blog creating a three way reciprocal link effect. It seemed that Google did not like that very much at all. All of a sudden, my tire chain site dropped back three pages. Hits on my blog immediately dropped about 30% as well. I quickly removed those recipricol links concluding that I must have hit a penalty. I don’t really care what anybody else’s opinion is about reciprocal links. I don’t believe that Google likes them anymore unless they are naturally occurring. In fact, I believe that Google will penalize you for them if they have any type of appearance of manipulating the search engine. I base this statement on interviews of Matt Cutts, the follow-on opinion of Eric Enge in answering a question I posted on his blog following his interview of Matt Cutts, and my own personal experience with reciprocal links. Focusing on reciprocal links is old school and will no longer help you-and it may hurt you.

The new links from the directory listings did eventually kick in and I moved back up from page 18 to page 15 and got stuck there for about three weeks.

On August 15, I did the 301 redirect of the old site to the new site which you can read about in the previous blog entry. On August 25, the redirect kicked in place and I moved to page 13.

On August 31, I moved up to page 10. My only explanation for the sudden increase from page 13 to page 10 was that the penalty that I had incurred three weeks earlier from reciprocal linking must have outplayed itself and now the penalty was removed.

As I look at the Google analytics, of all of the directory listings, none of them are driving traffic to my site. I do believe that they are a significant factor in increasing the strength in the Google results. The shopping directories; however, are driving traffic to the site. I am also getting significant traffic from long tail search results in Google.

I am almost done with using directory listings in my SEO strategy for this site. All that are left are the Yahoo Directory and DMOZ - the two directories highly recommended by Google. Late last week, I gave Yahoo my $299. I am not yet included in the directory. I applied for DMOZ in July over six weeks ago. The thing about DMOZ is that you have no control as to if or when you will be accepted into this directory. I just keep my fingers crossed every day hoping for inclusion. But I am not holding my breath.

I would like to see exactly what the inclusion in the Yahoo Directory will do for the placement. Unfortunately, the September strategy may prevent us from seeing its results without other factors coming into play.

The strategy for the month of September is to use press releases and the addition of new unique content plus the inclusion into the Yahoo directory already mentioned. My goal is to be on Page 1 by the end of the month. Let’s see if we find success at this task. I would say that going from page 26 on July 10 to page 10 on August 31 is a pretty significant jump.

Conclusion
My conclusion is that directory listings when done in moderation can play a significant role in your search engine optimization strategy. They will help you. However, they will not get you to page one for competitive keyword search terms. Also, when overdone, they may hurt you. It is however, a perfect beginning at giving your site legitimacy and strength in the search engines.

Enter pass phrase:Apache:mod_ssl:Error: Private key not found.

On my Redhat machine, I am not even prompted to put in the password. It simply fails on me.

While it would be preferred to find a way to configure the passphrase into the startup files, I am not able to figure out how to do it. However, I do learn that you can eliminate the passphrase from the key file and this is what many on the internet recommend doing. This is the command to eliminate the passphrase.

# openssl rsa -in www.key -out new.key

Thanks MNX Solutions…it took me an over an hour to find you.

http://www.mnxsolutions.com/blog/apache/removing-a-passphrase-from-an-ssl-key.html

Setup
I am hooking my OpenBSD directly to the internet as it is intended to become a firewall. During the installation process, I configured one ethernet card for the external network, gave it an IP Address, and a subnet mask. But I could not see where to place the Gateway value.

The network settings given by the ISP were as follows (values changed to protect the innocent):

IPAddress: 81.147.68.133
Subnet: 255.255.255.128
Gateway: 81.147.68.129

To look at my settings, I went to /etc/myhostname.fxp0 which was the name of the file for configuring the network card on this particular machine. This is what it should have looked like.

INET 81.147.68.133 255.255.255.128 NONE

Since I did not know where to put the Gateway, I originally tried variations such as replacing NONE with the gateway address. However, whenever I tested the network, I was still not able to access or ping the DNS or anything outside of the subnet.

Solution
The gateway needed to be added. The file for the gateway did not exist by default. To add the gateway, I had to create the following file:

/etc/mygate

Inside that file, I added the IP address of the Gateway.

After saving the file, I rebooted the machine and now my access to the external network works properly. I can fully access the internet.

What I finally figured out later is that the Gateway address is one of the parameters that you set during the installation. I must have left it blank while I was going through the installation process. However, they did not call it a gateway. They called it something else.