Just Search Labs Just Search Research and Development

Nearly every man and his dog has heard of ‘Web 2.0′ recently, but you may not have heard of the term ‘Web 3.0′. It is being thrown about more and more in an effort to describe the new direction the web is taking, but what does it actually mean? Is it just another marketing buzzword which means very little, or is the web evolving yet again?

Proponents of Web 3.0 point out the growth of cross-service mash-ups, social media sites with more of an emphasis on the user than before and steps towards ubiquitous internet access with devices like the iPhone and Google’s Android platform. They say that now more and more people have access to their favourite social media sites from wherever they are, the usage of these services will change: Google Maps will no longer just be used to find a way to get from A to B, but a way of finding where you are in an unfamiliar location and finding the nearest bar or restaurant – replacing the need for dedicated GPS devices.

Opponents claim this is nothing new, it is just the usage of web services which are changing – users finding new and more ingenious ways to make the web fit them rather than the other way round. They show that since most of the new ‘Web 3.0′ content is in essence just a combination of that which has gone before, that it is no different, and that a massive paradigm shift on the net like the one social media caused will not happen for a few more years yet.

In reality it is a bit of both. The idea that the web evolves in fits and starts, from 1.0 to 2.0 and now 3.0, is a particularly misplaced one. We have seen the internet change from its initial general purpose of a glorified encyclopedia in its early days, through a new platform for shopping to its current status as a social tool, but none of these changes happened overnight.

For instance, people talking to other people and arranging social events over the net has existed since the beginning and evolved steadily as a wide-spread tool: e-mails became chat rooms which became instant messaging programs, and then all of a sudden we ended up with MySpace and Facebook. They were the massive leap, but they were not the first sites based around users.

So what is the upshot of all of this? The way people use the net is changing unmistakably, but I think it is more of a slow mutation rather than a rapid shift taking place. We are bound to see more and more sites like http://www.searchme.com/ popping up, and more mash-ups taking hold as successful ideas and concepts. I prefer to think of this as Web 2.1 – leaner, fitter and better for purpose.

This all means that no longer will the driving force on the web be big business trying to make a quick buck, but it will be these startups and businesses creating unique services or combinations of existing services which serve the user’s needs much better. The huge leap in mobile internet access quality and availability will undoubtedly have a big impact and as users get more web-savvy, we will hopefully see a whole new generation of sites to steal our time. Here’s hoping!

Geoff Adams
Programmer, Research and Development

A frequently asked question is how do you optimise a site that ranks well in Google.com say, mysite.com  and you wants to rank well in other English speaking countries such as the UK, Australia and Canada. How do you optimise the site to avoid a duplicate content penalty?

Put simply, if the content is the same on multiple sites, then the worry is that Google will penalise you for duplicate content even though it is obvious that the sites are different parts of the same company.

If you have a .com version of the domain then you can go for sub-domains so the URL will be uk.mysite.com or canada.mysite.com, australia.mysite.com. These are treated as separate domains and will require separate SEO strategies to rank well in the country specific search engines with links being made from sites from those countries.

You can also buy domains for your site in the  countries you wish to target, such as mysite.ca, mysite.au, mysite.co.uk and host these sites in their respective countries.These can also be redirected to the main company site with information stored in country specific directories or as subdomains. E.g.

mysite.ca -> canada.mysite.com or mysite.ca -> mysite.com/canada/

Whatever the method you choose, there would be a duplicate content penalty caused by using a substantial amount of content from the main US site. Even though these countries have their own idioms and expressions for words, this is not going to be enough to make the content substantially different from the main site. It means that you would have to write unique content for each site. The amount of new content that has to be written can be reduced by using an iframe to hold regions of duplicate content, as Google does not read the content within an iframe. To ensure that this does not get indexed you can add nofollow noindex in the the source page.

It is instructive to see what a few multinational companies have done:

Apple - in each of the countries the domain is using the main apple.com with a directory. The sites look exactly the same. They also have created the country_code.apple.com with a 301 redirect to  apple.com/country_code/ Apple, surprisingly, does not own the apple.co.uk domain although the other country specific TLDs do redirect to their respective directories.

Ford – these have used the country specific TLDs to geo target and the sites look completely different and designed by different web designers. This would obviously help to avoid duplicate content.

Nokia – Flash navigation to a country coded TLD.

Intel – Poor Flash navigation that actually did not work, so could not find the domains.

BP – its home page is http://www.bp.com/home.do?categoryId=1. Different regions are not considered at all. Locations are specified in the sitemap but they all belong to the same domain. Every page appears to be part of a content management system which produces terribly unfriendly URLs.

For large companies it is relatively easy to dominate the SERPs in any country they are targeting and pehaps this is the reason why many corporate web sites are so poor in terms of SEO and usability. Many have chosen to use Flash which would be a considerable disadvantage to any other site. With search results becoming more biased to location, it is more important than ever to handle international SEO results more carefully to avoid duplicate content and irrelevance in local SERPs.

Update:

Matt Cutts at an interview in PUBCON 2008, shed some light on this. He recommended that for geo-targeting of websites using the individual country specific domains would be the most advantagous solution. After that, subdomains or directories within the site it does not have any ranking advantages although it might be slightly easier to configure using directories.

Sir Pumpkin Longshanks
Programmer, Research and Development

It’s a known fact now that links are good for SEO. I am not going to sell you the benefits of links, that’s been done many times everywhere on the web. Building links takes times and effort but generally pays on the long term.

If you have a decent design, a good way to get links is to submit your site to web galleries. Web galleries started to appear a few years ago when everyone was talking about web 2.0 and CSS. At this times, designers started to care more about design. The use of cascading stylesheet quickly became the way to go and everything was for the best.

There is now tons of galleries around. Most of them featuring any website as long as they look good. Others focusing on niche category like blogs, one page portfolio or w3c valid sites.

So if you think your design looks good enough here are the main galleries you should try to get featured on:

http://cssvault.com/

Page rank 8, the highest pr of my selection.

http://cssremix.com/

Page rank 7, one of the oldest still around.

http://bestwebgallery.com/

Page rank 6, features any type of site, even flash but very selective.

http://www.stylegala.com/

Page rank 7, I’ve heard it was the most hard to get featured on. Never got anything published there.

http://cssmania.com/

Page rank 7. An other very good one, updated very frequently.

I estimate at around 150 the number of galleries live. Of course most are unknown and wont gives you any good links. But If you’ve spent money on your design it definitely worth a try. Submissions usually take 2 minutes.

Benoit Gilloz
Programmer, Research and Development

The PHPNW conference was this weekend, and 8 members of staff from JustSearch showed up to support the PHP community and learn a couple of things along the way. The conference consisted of 174 attendees, with 12 sessions hosted by 16 speakers.

Refactoring PHP Code Talk

The talks ranged from simple usability and design to getting started in Drupal and they were all well researched, planned and executed. I was especially impressed with the 3D timeline used in the Twittex talk.

The two talks that stood out for me where the Introduction to the Zend Framework and HTML to Drupal in 30 minutes. I will definitely be looking into these two products, and perhaps even buying a book on the Zend Framework.

There was also a panel discussion who were asked some questions from members of the audience. This included a question about the namespace separator in PHP 5.3 which is the backslash (). I have been watching the backlash to this decision recently and I am on the side of the PHP developers. Apart from the fact that there is literally no other character to be used it just makes sense. The backslash character is used in Windows to separate directories and it makes sense to put your libraries in a directory structure and reference them using directory slashes.

If you went to the event and want to leave feedback then take a look a the PHPNW08 Page at Joind In.

phpcodemonkey and his PHP hair cut

If you are interested in finding out more about the PHPNW group then take a look at the PHPNW group website.

JustSearch would like to thank Jeremy Coates (aka phpcodemonkey) for creating and organizing this fantastic event and having the best PHP themed haircut I have seen. We would also like to thank everyone who took part and we look forward to not only the event next year, but the PHPNW socials each month.

Update:

It’s been a few days since the event and some of the slides have been released. So I thought I was add some links to those slides here.

• K.I.S.S. – Keep It Simple Stupid (PHPNW)
• The Power Of Refactoring (PHPNW)
• First Steps with Zend Framework

If you find any more then post a comment and let us know.

Philip Norton
Lead Developer, Research and Development