Linking from the page to an internal article with old dates I could understand if not agree with as a cause but taking the date of an external resource and for a homepage in particular. As ergophobe succinctly put it, WTF!?!

Apparently they don't currently have an ETA for fixing the youtube date thing so will be testing some fixes and will feedback on how resolving it goes

@ergophobe

Yeah, That seems to be pretty much it. Kinda kicking myself that I whilst I checked all internal links I didn't check external resources for related dates. As I said it seems to be a bug and hopefully one they will fix soon but definitely something I'll be adding to my checklist in future.

@Rumbas So it was just a blog post in your case? Is that issue still live now? I checked blog posts as mentioned above and they were all clear but if blog posts are also causing it I should probably check some other sites as well...

Both, have you seen any ranking flux as a result of the date in snippet? a lot of people are saying it shouldn't be an issue rankings wise but have been seeing massive fluctuations in this sites rankings.

I've been doing a site audit over the last few days and something that has been driving me mad is seeing a date from 2014 attached to the snippet for the homepage in the serps.

I'd checked all the usual suspects, lastmod date in sitemaps, server headers, blog posts linked from homepage etc and then found today that there is apparently a bug going on that is showing a date in the snippet for the upload date of an embedded youtube video on the page. Apparently a lot of people are having this problem.

Sure enough the page in question had a youtube video on the homepage who's upload date exactly matched that of the 2014 date shown in the snippet.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-snippet-date-wrong-22986.html

Just thought I'd give a heads up in-case anyone else here is having the same problem. Also big up to Jennifer Slegg for spotting it!

Just a wonderance really. If webmasters en masse stopped using / actively opposing use of Google Analytics would the propaganda machine start pushing the idea that it's use actually helped in improving rankings?

Domain Monster have a bulk domain checker, good company to deal with as well although not the cheapest.  http://www.domainmonster.com/domain-registration/

I am a total Wordpress whore and use it to build pretty much all of my sites both for myself and clients.

That said, I do agree with Jason's point and if he hadn't already, I would have cited the Mac / Windows argument also. Below is some context in terms of the popularity of WordPress. These stats are from Matt Mullenweg's 2011 State of the Word which is well worth watching. http://ma.tt/2011/08/state-of-the-word-2011/

• WordPress 3.2 had 500,000 downloads in the first two days, representing the fastest upgrade velocity ever.
• WordPress now has 15,000 plugins and 200 million plugin downloads, and we're doing a lot of work to make the plugin experience more seamless.
• 14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world use WordPress.
• 22 of every 100 active domains created in the U.S. are running WordPress.

In terms of security tips, check out these articles and the linked resources http://www.codeforest.net/10-wordpress-security-tips-that-could-save-your-site and http://www.askapache.com/wordpress/htaccess-password-protect.html

Also, Paul Madden wrote a very interesting article a while ago about the potential to mess with a Wordpress site via Webmaster Tools without having to resort to traditional hacking methods. http://www.paulmadden.co.uk/how-to-take-down-a-wordpress-site/

Thanks for all the comments in my (very) extended absence! I am still planning on building my own partly because I really need to get back up to speed on the coding front and it's a project I am interested in, despite the delay in getting started but also because I've still not yet found anything that exactly meets my needs. The main question remains which language I go with.

That said, after a few mentions of Authority Labs, I am checking them out at the moment. They offer a 30 day free trial on their pro version (50 domains, 1000) keywords although I would probably look to use the api if I was going to go with them.

Quote from: JasonD on July 29, 2011, 07:51:44 PM
I've just had a thought. I presume you're all aware of Cristoph's Link Research Tools?

I've used this a couple of times before and found it really excellent, it makes visualising data and actually figuring out what to do with it a lot easier than many of the other tools I've seen. If I had to pay for any link intel services at the moment, this would probably be one.

I also really like Majestic and have personally found it's data pretty accurate all things considered. Some features like the historical data are particularly handy when looking at velocity of link building

I did have an SEOMoz pro account in my previous position and whilst I found some of the tools quite useful, I just found some of their core tools (linkscape, campaign manager etc) too buggy and would not pay for a pro account again at the moment although they do have great potential.

Thanks for all the replies

@ edo Rank Tracker is actually the one that I have been using for the past few years and generally have found it quite good, although I've had some issues over the last few months with it not being as accurate as it used to be for UK serps and also a lot of prompts for captcha entries.  I take it you are not finding such issues?

@ Rooftop Yeah, if I do end up going for a paid solution raventools is definitely one I will consider, I've not used before but heard a lot of good things about it...

@ Will.Spencer Any particular reason you would go for PHP over PERL for something like this? I have no objection to using another language over PERL just strikes me as more geared towards this kind of project

@thesaintv12 market samurai is something I've heard mentioned before and kept meaning to check out, thanks for the reminder

The general consensus seems to be that I am trying to reinvent the wheel, which I agree with to a point, although I think there are obvious benefits to developing your own tools. Not necessarily cost savings so much but understanding exactly how the tools you use work and being able to see where the flaws lie and how they can be improved upon.

Lol, thanks. I know what you mean.

Apparently the syntax puts a lot of people off  although I think that is partly due to what is it's greatest strength, that it is very flexible meaning scripts can be thrown together in a quick and dirty fashion. Also no one likes to look at regex regardless of language...

Hi All,

Having spent most of the last 6 years or so working in-house, I have gotten spoiled and used to having a big company behind me to purchase any software / services I want which tbh has made me a bit lazy.

Now I am on the freelance path and have to consider the cost of everything I use, I am looking at building some tools of my own, not just to save money but also to try and get my coding skills back up to speed (another area I have gotten a bit lazy in)

The first thing I am planning on making is a Rank Tracker. Nothing fancy at the moment, just something to run on a scheduled basis via cron job and export the results to a database.

I have some previous experience a few years back using Perl and this is what I am planning to work with, I was just wondering if anyone can recommend any good modules to look at, particularly for Google. Also if anyone can suggest any good open source solutions written in Perl that I can tweak to my own requirements that would good.

Many thanks!

Quotestill we're not at a point in time when you can markup a page in confidence that it will render as intended across even the most recent releases

Here here. It often put's me in mind of the mobile phone companies who frantically rush to bring out the next great Internet enabled device when the infrastructure is not there to properly support existing usage.

Browser wise, Internet Explorer is by far by biggest bugbear, it is incredibly frustrating that you can do the most basic thing like add border radius and have it work fine in web kit browsers but have to arse around with things like browser behaviours or image based background for decent IE support.

If you are working with IE 8 then http://css3pie.com/documentation/supported-css3-features/ is quite handy for some CSS3 compatibility such as border, radius, shadowing, gradient support etc.

Thanks once again for the welcome guys

Thanks edo and thanks again Jason for pointing me here

They are pretty damn awesome. May have just found my Nephews Christmas present for this year which I am sure my brother will love me for... :p