The impact of heavy use and high temperatures on hard disk drive failure may be overstated, says a report by three Google engineers. The report examined 100,000 commercial hard drives, ranging from 80GB to 400GB in capacity, used at Google since 2001. The firm uses “off-the-shelf” drives to store cached web pages and services. “Our data indicate a much weaker correlation between utilisation levels and failures than previous work has suggested,” the authors noted.

When creating sites on a large scale you have to be sure that you dont make life easy for anyone looking to track you down or to ban your entire network. So it is important that you dont leave any footprints.

I have talked with people who change their template on each batch of sites they do – to be honest I never did, I simply changed em once in a while.

What really gets me though is when people use a publically available system and dont even bother to change the default templates it comes with. Some people also make a simple error here too, they see the structure of the site in visual terms rather than in coding terms. They simply look at the css and alter it to give the site a different look. Dont get me wrong you can make sites look completely different using just the css but remember one thing.

THE SPIDER SEES THE CODE NOT THE PAGE

So altering the css and leaving the divs and page structure as is means from the spiders point of view its the same as the default page, stupid move eh?

Even when I am doing wordpress templates I change the layout structure from css to tables so suddenly from a search engines point of view its not a simple wordpress blog its a normal yet unique website.

Think people think!

Edit: THIS IMAGE IS OF ESRUN – HE MADE ME POST IT IN PLACE OF HOMER

[photopress:Photo_74.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

Apple Windows Mobile iPhone Theme, originally uploaded by TheAgencyBlog.com.

Apple are reportedly sending cease and desist letters out to bloggers who post this photo. Its a picture of a windows mobile skin someone created to look like the new iPhone.

I can understand if they want to stop the skin maker but anyone who even talks about it? Isnt this the same company who did the 1984 style adverts in the eighties? Now they are acting like the oppressive state.

I know there are many people who will laugh or take the piss out of me here but im old and stuck in my ways. I am now convinced that I really do not like CSS for layout in pages, dont get me wrong I use it all the time for styling the text and the links and even for background images etc but as a replacement for tables in laying out a page CSS blows in my opinion.

Everytime I use it i find myself lost in a pointless battle between negative divs and IE compatability, well sorry sod it I am gonna keep using tables for layout until the compromises go away…

don’t….

OK well if you must..

• There isn’t an easy way to make money with Adsense, in many ways it can be as hard and as frustrating as any other money making procedure
• Content generation isn’t the hard part at all. To be honest as long as its unique most content will do for starters. TRY to provide some value to the visitor as you will last longer and you will therefore make more
• Good page titles mean good ad targeting
• don’t bother with section targeting – its bollocks
• Make sure your internal link structure is very very clear, you want to get crawled and indexed as quick as possible
• Build in batches and if your brave interlink between sites in the same batch (Never cross link between batches)
• Don’t flood your sites with links, the engines will index based on very few well placed links, if you can use your own network to get the bots in rather than having to go and ‘get’ links elsewhere
• If you have to go and get links make sure that you do it ethically and provide value for the link they give, 100,000 yes I agrees is not smart in my opinion
• Don’t over optimise the sites, be loose and natural
• Don’t do anything that can get you banned
• Remember you should have done this 18 months ago
• Learn PHP at least
• Never use someone else’s template
• Css might make a site look different but from a spiders viewpoint its the same code
• Get the cheque it feels better..
• Never believe what people tell you they earn – if they tell you then its a lie (Reduce by 80% minimum)
• Clean your keyword lists religiously – you don’t want bad words in there
• Strip out the words where you are wasting your time and where you wouldn’t provide value to the advertiser (There is NO point at all creating pages for terms like ‘bad debt’ or ‘Viagra’ your just wasting everyones time
• Make sure you can control your adverts remotely so you can: -
• Turn them off when you need to
• Monitor and control who clicks and when
• Ban people or ip’s that may be trouble
• Swap them out where it makes sense or if you get banned
• Get good stats
• You know which advertisers you are sending clicks to (You never know how useful that could be)
• Don’t rely on the money from Google
• Don’t do anything that would piss off the normal user (The boy scouts on the other hand will always get pissed whatever you do so meh)
• Turn off the advertise on this site link
• Play with ad formats and placement to get the best CTR
• Don’t try to game Google
• Never use an off the shelf content gen
• Watch what you use and what it does
• Make sure you know how you got indexed and formulate a plan to repeat what worked

I hope thats useful, some may argue with parts but its a good grounding i think.