Muskblog: Making the Internet better since 1995

Although my redesigned webpages only look and function a bit differently, under the hood I’ve added more structured metadata for Googlebot and his friends to find. Metadata isn’t new it has been around a long time on MacOS and online but spammers seriously abused both the keywords and description tag, to the point where Google now ignores both. Structured metadata is new formats, championed by industry heavyweights, to help make it easier to index and share content online…

Adding featured images aka thumbnails to my WordPress theme turned out to be a lot of work. Getting them to appear in my RSS feed in a valid manner was probably the worst, but what is going to take the longest time is retroactively adding featured images to all my old posts…

This morning while I lay sleeping, someone got the bright idea to post something as me on Twitter. If this wasn’t bad enough it turns out they posted as me on Pinterest and on Facebook too. They were selling something called “garcinia cambogia”. Apparently Pinterest is seeing a rise in hacked accounts, they of course blame me and my password. Clearly the spammers and scammers have Pinterest in their sights…

Based on Google’s recent announcement, webmasters are going to have to do without keyword referrals, so the act of collecting strange ones and blogging about it will also come to a close. Other search engines will probably continue to send referral data, but Google knows the value of this information…

I’ve used Google Analytics for a long time. I first installed it on Muschamp.ca in November of 2005. I had installed Urchin during one of my co-op work terms while at Shell Canada. One day I got the bright idea to look at all the traffic Google has recorded…