While we have been happy to focus on fast email support and writing lots of tutorials, having a forum opens up interesting possibilities for feedback and peer-to-peer help.

And yes, we have finally implemented this idea After some  searching we settled on the domain name http://webhelpforums.com which stands for Web Help Forums. The forum is now up and running!

Feel free to drop by and say hello. You can ask us questions about our products or get help with website building, search engine optimization, ppc keywords, sitemaps etc.

The new version 2.0.2 contains improved support for video sitemaps and new support for code sitemaps. While support for both sitemap file kinds may still have a few rough edges, you can now create complete video sitemaps and code sitemaps for most websites in a fully automated way

Should you encounter any issue or have feedback, please let us know. We will be ironing out any issues in the next release. We also intend to improve our sitemap generator tutorials section soon including those tutorials covering the more exotic sitemap file kinds

Already back in late nineties this was the best website validation tool to use when checking websites for errors. Now, much later, it still continues to improve, year after year, surpassing all other tools of its kind. People using alternatives such as the W3C HTML and CSS online validators owe it to themselves to try this combined HTML/CSS and accessibility validator.

Are you only working on personal or educational websites? Then you may be interested in their free html validator. While not offering nearly as many functions as the standard and professional versions, it will still complement W3C validators and give more tips and warnings about website issues.

Note: While our general purpose website analysis tool supports HTML and CSS validation using W3C online validators, this process is slow and does not cover the same amount of areas CSE HTML Validator does. However, CSE HTML Validator comes with an API which means we will investigate if we in a future version of our software can integrate with this validation engine as well!

The FAQ covers almost everything including how to diagnose and solve crawling errors, handle websites on unstable webservers, scan large websites, questions about XML Sitemaps Protocol, weird Google Webmaster Tool issues, how to configure A1 Sitemap Generator etc.

If you have ever had any questions regarding sitemaps, I highly recommend checking our
sitemapper tutorials and the new sitemap questions and answers database

Low Quality Websites in Search Network
I came by a blog post by Marketing Shift which shows that the Google Search Network encompasses a lot of websites, and not just websites and search engines of high quality. Indeed, looking at the Google Search Partners website, at least I get the impression that websites in the search network are search related. As pointed out in the blog post, the search network also contains websites that have little to do with search, an important distinction when it comes to setting initial bids. However, that is not really what makes my heart jump…

Websites in Search Network Costing you Money
While above is bad enough, it’s the fact that websites such as GameCopyWorld are part of the search network. At least that is my conclusion as I have had an ad show while I had content network disabled. I believe the website is using Google Search Box / Adsense for Search. Yes, I don’t develop games so why do I care? Well, the before-mentioned website may have many buying-willing users which simply are searching for a way to get paid games to work… But I have a strong suspicion that there exist many more websites in the Google search network without any significant amount of users willing to pay for software.

Let me list a few reasons why I think this is bad from an advertiser perspective:

• People on websites that promote and distributes solutions to circumvent copy protection solutions most likely not do not have a high user percentage share that are willing to buy software.
• The search network is enabled as default. If you decide to keep it on, you are forced to bid the same on all search network partner websites as you bid for searches on Google search engine itself.
• You can’t opt out of individual websites in search network. Yes, you can opt out of websites in content network, but not the search network.
• Google does not share a complete list of search partners.

Alternatives to Google Search Network
I personally have disabled advertising on search network. I rather focus my time and money on campaigns where I can control as much as possible. Here are some alternatives that I am currently doing or considering:

• Advertise on Google search engine itself. Easy, transparent, and high quality clicks.
• Advertise on Google Content Network. Using tight adgroups combined with site exclusion and huge number of negative keywords makes this doable.
• Advertise directly on other search networks. Some paid search advertising solutions and networks are MSN Adcenter, Yahoo, Ask, and LookSmart.

I wrote this blog post since I know how hard most shareware, indie game, and software developers have to work. Whether big companies or mom-and-dad software operations, we are all not just competing against each other, but also against a high amount of software piracy and copying. I much rather spend money advertising on websites that are clearly relevant and not associated with something that compromises the success of my own business.

PageRank Sculpting Explained
The idea behind the name PageRank Sculpting is not hard to understand. PageRank is the name of the algorithm Google uses to calculate importance for pages based on linking across the entire internet. Mind you, PageRank is just one of many algorithms Google uses to actually rank your pages in search engine result pages. The sculpting part comes from the ability to control how link juice flows throughout your own website.

PageRank Sculpting Examples

1. Many blogs are full of links to various social bookmark and community services. I love social websites such as StumpleUpon, del.icio.us and Digg, but there is a downside to them if you are running a blog.

   Say you are writing a blog post that has one or two links to websites you find interesting. You may think you are giving some nice link love to them; however, by far most of it will be eaten by all those social bookmark links many blog posts are filled with.

   I support the idea of linking to other websites, but at least consider nofollow links that are repeated in each and every blog post you make. If you don’t, even the link juice that flows through your internal links may be diminished in value.

2. The other more conventional area of PageRank sculpting is simply to ensure your important pages, e.g. those promoting your products, get more internal link weight than less important pages such as legal and contact.

   Strategies vary, but if you have a vast number of non-important pages, you can nofollow or limit the number of internal links to them.

PageRank Sculpting Tool
This post would not be complete without a pointer to a website analysis tool we offer that can help you experiment with PageRank Sculpting using robots.txt, noindex and nofollow in <meta> tags, and nofollow in <a> link tags.

A1 Website Analyzer can scan your entire website and all links in it. You can also enable/disable various options for finding links (e.g. enable/disable nofollow support).

After website scan has finished you are shown the entire website and with columns of data for each URL. The important columns in the context of PageRank sculpting are:

• Links to external URLs.
• Links to internal URLs.
• Linked by internal URLs.
• Calculated importance score.
• Scaled importance score.

The importance is calculated by weighing the strength of all links and pages within a website. Links gives more juice if they come from an internally highly linked page that contains few other links. The scaled importance score is logarithmic and have range 0..10.

If you want to control link juice flow and sculpt your PageRank, A1 Website Analyzer is the website analysis tool you need

• Have XML sitemap priority values calculated based on all internal links within the website. There is a setting to prevent “extreme values” to be used, e.g. 0.0. This is the default configuration.
• Override priority and set same value for all pages, e.g. 0.5.
• Leave out priority values in total. This is probably preferred to using the same value for all pages.

For more information about how priority values are calculated, see our XML sitemaps priority value article.

I have been hard at work in engineering the website scanner engine with a special focus on improving the already fast crawler while also have it consume much less memory. I am happy to report I succeeded at both

Overall this update focused on:

• Increase crawler speed
• Minimize memory usage
• Various user interface improvements
• Various crawler engine improvements

If you are already a registered user of A1 Sitemap Generator, updating is as easy as downloading and installing the newest version.

After scanning, you can view data for all pages. 5 columns in particular will be of interest to you:

• linked by internal
• links to internal
• links to external
• calculated “importance” score
• importance score scaled

The importance takes into effect the respective strength of all pages and links within your website. Example: A link carries more weight if it resides on a highly linked page that contains few links. The scaled importance is logarithmic and assigns a value between 0 and 10.

In addition to above data, A1 Website Analyzer also shows document character set, file size, response time etc. As a small extra bonus, you can even have your entire website scanned for HTML errors. That is, however, slightly slow since it uses the online W3C HTML validator API – and takes much care not to stress it .