The Mobile Developer

OK well after a few days of mobislim.com not even coming up in a google mobile search for “mobislim” it has now appeared as slot 6 on the front page. We are still not ranking for other search terms such as the “radish diet”.

So our site is currently in index limbo. Our old urls, which we’ve 301′d to the new homepage are still in the index, (but presumably not doing very well since they are only linked to the homepage), but our new super amazing mobile seo friendly urls have not been indexed yet. Here’s a link to the main mobile slimming page. And here’s a link to the cold water diet page, which as you can see has been beautifully crafted - now please please please mr google spider - can you crawl mobislim and particularly pick up this fascinating article about the cold water diet?

Last night we deployed mobislim.com v2 - which is now governed by the Scorch Controller. This Java Spring MVC based controller framework ensures that our slimming diets and health site now benefits from SEO friendly urls. In addition to this - page titles and page meta is now based on the asset / article being viewed. We are also using the heading tags when presenting article titles. The combination of the above should lead to a whole load of hot loving from google mobile search.

We have already captured our page rank at the begining of the month and today I have some captured some interesting resutls already. It seems that this blog itself is enancing the page rank on mobislim! My trusty colleague Maria Sanchez is going to come up with a list of tough and competetive terms which we want mobislim to rank for. I will update when I hear more from her on the mobile analytics and mobile slimming blog.

Due to the change in url formats, I now need to go and perform a load of 301 redirects so that we do notlose the page rank on our old pages.

An example page for the old slimming diets sections is:

http://mobislim.com/viewZone.jsp?p=auxu_zx2

An example page for the new slimming diets section is:

http://mobislim.com/k-fve/zone/2/slimming-diets.htm

An example page for an old article is:

http://mobislim.com/viewAricle.jsp?p=ax3

An example page for a new article is:

http://mobislim.com/k-zfve/slimming-diets/article/3/the-less-food-diet.htm

Hopefully google will like the *new look* url’s as much as I do!

Update: Having major problems comming up with an apache rewrite rule to do perform the above re-writing, kind of because the rule involves using both bits from the url and also the parameters. Ah, I’ve just figured what I need to do now! Back to the drawing board…

We had confirmation today from Bango Button that we could upgrade the framework for mobislim.com so that it could utilise our new Scorch Controller (TM). This was also ok’d by the mobislim web mistress and mobislim blog writer - Maria.

Scorch Controller ensures that the cms publishes search engine friendly url’s. But simply putting mobislim under Scorch Control was not a big enough challenge for the day. I am therefore currently working on enhancing the ScorchControl to:

• Create a dynamic page title based on the current asset / page command function.
• Read in meta data from the current asset and if present use this to populate the “decription” and “keywords” meta tags. (This requires adding these fields to the asset object, and creating setters for these in the CMS.
• Generate related tags for articles / assets. i.e. if an article is tagged with “health”, “slimming” and “diet-pills”. Then when on the view articles page, there will be links for health, slimming and diet pills, which list all articles containing these tags.

We can then create a google mobile site map for the new mobile seo friendly url’s.

I propose to have the above all running and migrated by the crack of dawn tomorrow. The fact that I can do this within this time frame is all down to the beauty that is Spring MVC - the Java framework which the Scorch Controller is implemented in.

More soon!

Have finally managed to sort out the permalinks on word press for this blog - the problem was that although WordPress was able to modify the .htaccess file, the url rewriter was being ignored by apache. This is almost certainly down to the super lame httpd default install on this fasthosts server.  I fixed the problem by putting the url rewriting code into the “dont’t put anything here” section of the vhosts.conf file and it has fixed the problem nicely. I’m even happier that the old urls work too so no having to add redirects to keep up my existing page rank! Now to press on and get the new version of our mobile slimming site - mobislim v2 - live onto our production environment.

Ok So I got up at the crack of dawn to get working on my mobile seo for our animation fc tottenham hotspurs wallpapersm ringtones and animations site .

Ok actually dawn hasn’t happened yet, but what has happened is that we now rank for ‘Spurs Chants Ringtones’. We are on slot 5 on page 1. Interestingly the page leads you striaght into the main spurs page, and not the special spurs-chants-ringtones page we created.

I wonder what other things we can do to boost it’s position. I’m thinking about experimenting with changing the hyphens to underscores… [to be continued].

OK So I managed to get the sitemap picked up by google, and google has crawled the pages. The great news is that we now show up on page 1 of the google search for “mobile animations”. This is brilliant because it is on the web page of google mobile search, which is actually the default page which users see. The bad news is that we wanted it to appear, and were expecting it to appear in the “mobile” results tab. It is still not there. Also I am having problems getting this url to be picked up by google! http://mob.animationfc.mobi/a/spurs/spurs-go-marching-in-ringtone.jsp

Hopefully there will be more news on this soon. But it certainly seems that what google does for mobile (and I guess this isn’t a surprise) is somehow done less frequently or carries less weight than standard web indexing.

We are not ranking at all for “spurs chants ringtones” on google mobile search (mobile results). Have created a new page on spurs and called it spurs-chants-ringtones. I have added some spurs chants ringtones keywords and page title etc. I put a link to this page from our new static Animation FC main page (mob.animationfc.mobi) which goes to this page. The url is http://mob.animationfc.mobi/a/spurs/spurs-chants-ringtones.jsp

I posted a blog on my Animation FC Animations For Mobile Blog about this yesterday. I did not mention this page on twitter though.

I have spent some time this afternoon performing some simple mobile seo for the Tottenham Hotspurs wallpaper ringtones and animations site.

1. We were getting no ranking for “spurs ringtones” so I’ve changed the page name to include spurs in it. i.e. the new link is http://mob.animationfc.mobi/a/spurs/spurs-ringtones.jsp instead of just being ringtones.jsp
2. I have changed the title tags for each page to go in <h1> tags were possible. (using <b> for wml devices).
3. I have resubmitted the google sitemap with the new urls. Last time it took a year for google to pick it up so I’m hoping for a quicker turnaround this time.
4. I have created a special landing “preview” page for a couple of ringtones. One of them I am going to link to in this blog, and will get my friend and seo expert David Carruthers of One Result to metntion it in his blogs etc. The other one we will not, and we will see which one, gets boosted. The link of the one I am increasing the inbound links for is the Spurs ringtone, “Spurs Go Marching In” - the url is: http://mob.animationfc.mobi/a/spurs/spurs-go-marching-in-ringtone.jsp
5. I have changed the generic “Spurs” title on each page to be specic to each section. i.e. the page title for Spurs Ringtones is now “Spurs Ringtones” and not “Spurs”.
6. I have submitted the sitemap to the root domain i.e. http://mob.animationfc.mobi/ instead of mob.animationfc.mobi/a/spurs/
7. I have also changed a method which is called by all anchor writing tags which calls response.encodeURL(href) to now do absolutely nothing. This is because I noticed that google had included a jsession id on every single url it had crawled… (not good).
8. This site does not make use of the new ScorchController(TM) so is still parameter based. However, I spent a small amount of time ensuring that we were optimising the parameters for the football site so that they did not contain any redundant information.

Well that’s about it… now to wait and see when a) my sitemap gets picked up b) the site gets crawled and c) if any of the above has done any good!

This evening I just finished the core implementation of our new Spring based MVC controller for providing SEO friendly url’s. It’s called the Scorch Controller and it takes makes all its decisions autonomously based on the ScorchState. After it has forwarded to the appropriate JSP it then gives the JSP the ScorchState which it used to get to the JSP. The page can then use the state to create the seo friendly external links for the ScorchController. A few weeks ago it was all a dream but now it is live and working at an undisclosed location. Tomorrow I am going to create a google mobile site map and submit the secret site. Then I am going to try and migrate the ScorchController into mobislim.com our slimming and dieting based mobile web analytics product, so we can see how the search engine optimisation is affected.