I ended up not finding many answers for this but decided to check my video card drivers. I was running a Nvidia Geforce GTX570 with 285.62. I decided to give the beta drivers a try; currently 295.51 as of this writing. That ended up fixing it.

I guess there was a bug with 285.62 for Windows Media Center and it must have also fallen under WLMM. Anyway simple fix after an hour of research. Hope this can help someone else out.

I have a good example from an actual client I was working with. A few weeks ago we compared their website against a few local competitors in the industry. One specific local competitor was ranking very well for a trophy phrase with “Pennsylvania” in it which is great for them. Or is it? This site was for sure getting many more views as there are many more viewers in Pennsylvania as a whole than just specific parts of Pennsylvania. However, was a visitor searching with the term Pennsylvania who was from the other side of the state more likely to convert than a visitor who is just miles away from the business searching with a local SEO term? No.

Without getting too specific, it was a local service business who was more likely to convert a visitor who could see an employee face to face or at least know they were only a few miles away, not on the other side of the state. When I researched some local SEO key phrases without the state name, I noticed there was almost no competition. I added some cities, counties, and other local terms into my SEO of their site and what do you know, within only a few weeks we have top 3 results for almost all of the local phrases. After analyzing some Google Analytics reports we noticed that many of these phrases even began converting in that short period of time. Visitors were searching for these local terms and actually finding what they wanted.

My point in all of this is that instead of focusing all of our time on that one trophy keyphrase, do some exploratory research into some other easily converting options. When it comes down to it, does ranking really matter for that trophy phrase? Or is the number of conversions on the site more important? 

Sencha Touch, a Mobile JavaScript Framework, allows developers to create mobile web apps that look and feel native on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry touch devices. It is the first of its kind to support HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Even more impressive, the library is under 120kb! It supports enhanced touch events just like a native app like tapping, double tapping, swiping, tap and hold, pinching, and rotating.

Since it is a cross-platform framework, it works with Apple iOS 3+, Android 2.1+, and BlackBerry 6+ devices. That has to be well over 90% of the US mobile traffic at this point. With a framework like this maturing, why would developers and for that sake, companies looking to maybe have a mobile app made, want to shell out a ton of money for something that would essentially have to be created at least 2, maybe even 3 times?

I think as mobile platforms become more and more fragmented, we’ll only see more developers and publishers turning back to the mobile web. Developing once and deploying across a wide range of devices seems to be an easy choice to me. Don’t get me wrong, mobile web experiences are still lagging behind native apps, but with frameworks like Sencha Touch popping up, I think we may see a turn away from a mobile app for everything.

Take Sencha Touch for a ride:

Try in full screen for the full effect.

*Keep in mind this is an iframe, so it isn’t anywhere near perfect but click and drag and move around. It will also only work correctly with a Webkit browser like Safari or Chrome.

Pennsylvania Nursing Home Abuse Attorneys

1. Unsubscribe The Gmail ‘All Mail’ folder

Step 1

Remove the subscription to the Google ‘All Mail’ folder.
This provided the biggest relief for me because with this enabled, everything was being synced two times. Click on the inbox folder of the account you want to unsubscribe “All Mail” for

Step 2

Click the Folder tab at the top of the Microsoft ribbon in Outlook 2010.

Step 3

Click the IMAP Folders button in the middle of the ribbon.

Step 4

Change the middle box from All -> Subscribed and click query

Step 5

Highlight at least the the “All Mail” folder and click unsubscribe. You could do this to as many folders as you want to unsubscribe. I imagine having only a few subscribed would yield the best results but only disabling all mail made a huge difference for me.

2. Two copies of all sent mail?

Make sure you disable Outlook’s feature that saves mail in the sent folder. Gmail already does this so having both enabled yields to duplicate sent messages.

Step 1

Click the file menu in Outlook 2010

Step 2

Click Account Settings > Account Settings.

Step 3

Highlight the account you want to change, and select Change. Then click More Settings in the box that appears.

Step 4

Under the Sent Items tab, select Do not save copies of sent items.

I hope this helps some of you out who many hate how slow Outlook 2010 is with Google’s IMAP. For those of you who may even have two gmail accounts, one for Google Apps and one Gmail account like me may notice an even bigger difference.

For this site we also included a quote form to make is easier for potential customers to request a quote on onions. Now they can even do it from their smartphone or tablet without an issue!

If you run a website that has a contact form, you’ve likely received the dreaded internet marketing spam in your inbox. Services claiming to get you on the front page of Google for your keyword or how a Facebook page can create qualified leads for your business.

Being an SEO myself, I know how aggravating this is because people aren’t even looking at what services I am offering! I am offering similar, legitimate services to my customers that they are trying to sell me. This is the type of thing that gives SEOs a bad name. In my experience I have noticed that most of the problems originate from one place, India. To combat today’s anti-spam tatics, blackhats have found a new trick, pay a live person in India who can get around these anti-spam methods for pennies on the dollar. Luckily I found a relatively easy way to stop them without shutting the entire country out of your website entirely. This will work for any country but again for the scope of this article, India is the example.

* For those of you who need to have people from a specific country like India contact you via a contact form, you cannot use this method unfortunately.

What I am going to show you is how to limit the POST function to specific countries. The POST request method is used when the client needs to send data to the server as part of the request, such as when uploading a file or submitting a completed form so keep in mind this will affect all POST methods on your site. For many, this is most forms that we want to be blocked for these spammers anyway.

This article is written for WordPress users running Contact Form 7 with DNS hosted through CloudFlare. I wrote a section for anyone running an Apache web server using the POST method who can still benefit even if not using CloudFlare.

Step 1

(Optional)

I can’t speak highly enough about CloudFlare, plus it is FREE for what we need. If you haven’t heard of CloudFlare, head over to their site to check out the short video explanation. I won’t get into detail about CloudFlare but it makes blocking certain countries much easier. Sign up for an account and get your site setup then come back. You should know what DNS is before signing up and proceeding through their setup wizard but for the 20 + sites I run through CloudFlare, the setup wizard was always as easy as just clicking next.

Step 2

In the root of your WordPress install, look for a file named .htaccess. Some FTP clients require you to show hidden files to find this file. .htaccess files (or “distributed configuration files”) provide a way to make configuration changes on a per-directory basis however we are going to use the file in the root with /wp-admin/, /wp-content/, and /wp-includes/ to block forms (and all POST methods) from being submitted sitewide from India. Edit the file in your favorite text editor (I use Notepad ++). After the # End WordPress Tag on the next line, paste the following code in replacing XX with the two digit country code you want to block.

<Limit POST>
SetEnvIf CF-IPCountry IN UnwantedCountry=1
 Order allow,deny
 Allow from all
 Deny from env=UnwantedCountry
</Limit>

To block the country of India from POST and stop most of this SEO spam, use the exact code I use:

<Limit POST>
SetEnvIf CF-IPCountry IN UnwantedCountry=1
 Order allow,deny
 Allow from all
 Deny from env=UnwantedCountry
</Limit>

Keep in mind the code above is ONLY if you have your DNS and Nameservers hosted through CloudFlare. For those of you who wonder how it works; CloudFlare will pass a request to your webserver and insert a variable in the header: “CF-IPCountry”. The variable contains the standard internet two-letter country code: “US” for USA, “IN” for India and so on.

Full list of country codes.

I hope this helps some of you out. I do this for every client site right now who doesn’t have clientele in India. In the future more countires may jump on the bandwagon. Luckily if you only want people contacting you from say the US and Canada, there is a simple fix you can do right now. Just flip flop step 2 including the ‘Order allow,deny’ and ‘allow from’ and ‘deny from’.

<Limit POST>
SetEnvIf CF-IPCountry US WantedCountry=1
 SetEnvIf CF-IPCountry CA WantedCountry=1
 Order deny,allow
 Deny from all
 Allow from env=WantedCountry
</Limit>

Alternate Non-CloudFlare Solution

For those of you who don’t want to use CloudFlare (you really should), the above Apache method of limiting POST will work but it will be a little more of a hassle for you to maintain IPs. Below is an example from Country IP Blocks. They maintain lists of IPs for specific countries allowing you to block specific IPs. I only posted 5 ‘deny from’ IPs as the list is huge for India.

<Limit POST>
order allow,deny
# Country: INDIA
# ISO Code: IN
# Total Networks: 961
# Total Subnets: 34,673,664
deny from 1.6.0.0/15
deny from 1.22.0.0/15
deny from 1.38.0.0/15
deny from 1.186.0.0/16
deny from 1.187.0.0/16
#
allow from all
</Limit>

Open /wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core/bp-core-widgets.php and look for the LI class “vcard” around line 60. Then find the php tag which outputs the avatar:

bp_member_avatar()

and add ‘type=full&width=125&height=125′ including the ticks.

bp_member_avatar(‘type=full&width=125&height=125′)

This will output a standard 35×35 avatar by default unless you changed the default somewhere else in the install. By researching the accepted parameters, found that I could set the type, height, and width. The reason I set type also was I didn’t want it using the default ‘thumb’ type of 35×35 and resizing up to 125×125 as it would look terrible as you can see here:

I set the type as full so I could resize the 150×150 ‘Full’ image and not have a terrible looking picture.

bp_member_avatar(‘type=full&width=125&height=125′)

Each parameter needs to be separated with a ‘&’. That is it, change the 125 in height and width to size to your needs.

Now my political supporters look great.

What does this mean for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

This likely means that if you are trying to trick search engines by using short term hacks or black hat tricks to get a higher rank, Google will one day figure it out and likely ruin your ranking.  The best long-term method of SEO is to provide information that users want to actually consume. The old saying that content is king is more true than ever.

Google’s Panda Update

Google Panda is a revision to the Google ranking algorithm that was first implemented in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of low-quality sites and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.  This change reportedly affected the rankings of almost 12 percent of all search results. More recently in November of 2011, Google released the freshness update which is why blogging can be more helpful than ever. If you search for the new release date for the Google Nexus phone by typing ‘Google Nexus Release date‘, you won’t want to see the old results when people were rumoring wrong dates in early November ’11. As of this writing the smartphone wasn’t released yet so there was a new article showing almost every hour. Google is obviously giving preferential treatment to fresh articles.

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html

What should you do?

There are a few steps that you can take as a webmaster without knowing any code or on page optimization techniques.

1. Link Building

This is the process of building links that point to your blog. One way links from high-page rank sites in a similar category normally help your rankings the most. Reciprocal links will also work however they aren’t desirable.

2. Blog Writing

Keeping your site up to date with fresh content has also proved to be important with recent updates to the Google Algorithm as mentioned above. A blog is a simple and easy way to do this. Create content relevant to your website.

3. Social Bookmarking

More and more users are joining different social network day by day. Getting your content in front of these users so they can easily share with their networks is a terrific traffic booster as well as rank booster.

4. Forum Commenting (Do-Follow)

Post relevant comments on forums or blogs giving do-follow links back to the comment author. Don’t post garbage as your comment will likely be deleted and you could even get IP labeled as a spammer which won’t help you at all.

Feel free to post some questions in the comments below or ask for a free evaluation of your site so you can understand how to rank better.