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Case Study: Richard Silver’s Torontoism

When Foliovision first got acquainted with Richard Silver back in 2013, we knew we were at the start of a very fruitful relationship. Richard was already a big star on the Toronto real estate scene, being a real estate agent for the past 35 years and an ex-TREB president. He came to Foliovision with his Richardsilver.com site, which was badly hurt by Google Penalty at the time and found itself at the bottom of Google search results.

Together we built Torontoism.com and produced hundreds of articles during the past four years. Torontoism grew, and today it is a team of five real estate agents supported by two customer relationship gurus, catering to both Torontonians and international buyers and sellers. Here is Richard's and Torontoism's success story.

Keep reading Case Study: Richard Silver's Torontoism

FV Simpler SEO Improvements

This new version took us a while to release. It brings a lot of SEO and functional improvements. Some of the changes affect your site structure, so our upgrade note makes sure you are informed:

SEO Improvements

  1. WordPress attachment URLs are redirected to file URLs  - when cleaning up client websites, we often find a lof of URLs like

    Keep reading FV Simpler SEO Improvements

How To Do Social Media Right: Tweet and Get Retweeted

This is the basic outline of the presentation I made at ReBar Toronto. Alec moderated and we fielded a lot of questions together about Google+ and Facebook after the presentation. Alas, we only have detailed notes from the opening presentation.

The first rule of tweeting the right way is to actually have something to say. No one can accuse you of spam if you share something that’s of real value to them. You should always remember that. If you are tweeting about something which you wrote or posted to your own website, make sure you would want to read it first before starting to promote it to other people.

Keep reading How To Do Social Media Right: Tweet and Get Retweeted

FV Simpler SEO: Post slug shortener

Improve your post slugs with our plugin - it shortens the post slug of new posts to 3 longest keywords allowing you to add what's relevant.

Quora SEO: Best single resource to learn SEO

Every week Quora will mail you questions and answers which you might be interested in. In my inbox just arrived Aaron Wall's answer to the question "What's the most awesome SEO material I can lay my hands on?" Aaron and I go back a long way and I'm always interested in what he has to say about SEO, so I clicked through.


Aaron Wall of SEObook: would you take SEO advice from someone
living in a trailer park. In the case of Aaron Wall, mostly yes.

I was astonished at how facile and amorphous Aaron's answer was, apart from the first sentence (which is a very important distinction). Enough to comment on it and write this post.

Keep reading Quora SEO: Best single resource to learn SEO

Mining Google Places for Business

I don't know if you've noticed, but fluffing has been an ongoing issue in the Google Places for Business. Lots of businesses have lots of fake reviews.

On the other hand, some of our clients have tried to have clients post reviews for them. This has sometimes not worked out too well. If those reviewers don't have active Google Plus or Google Places for Business accounts, the reviews would disappear after a week or two.

Google is tightening the screws still further now. For once, I'm glad they are doing so. There is no place for fake reviews in Google Places for Business.

Here's the new drill.

Keep reading Mining Google Places for Business

WSJ Speakeasy Technical Review: Fail

Mimicing such tracking tomfoolery on small successful sites will not make you more like the "big boys". It will just drive people to your competition.

WordPress Speed Test 2012: WP Super Cache vs HyperCache

WordPress cache plugins were in really sad shape by the summer of 2012. WordPress 3.3 and WordPress 3.4 have changed some important parts of these plugins and they started to collapse. The first one to go was W3 Total Cache (at WordPress.org) which has been getting about 50% broken ratings since last fall. After spending months learning how to use W3 Total Cache just right (it's a complicated beast), we had to pull it off all our sites. Fortunately the much simpler WP Super Cache (at WordPress.org) remained bullet proof.

This spring and summer WP Super Cache broke too. Garbage collection does not work reliably any more, leading to people getting served week old pages. Donncha first suggested it's impossible to make WP Super Cache work for all hosting out of the box. Strange as for more than five years WP Super Cache did just that. The real answer came a bit later. WP Super Cache is a free plugin and Donncha just doesn't have time anymore.

I have hardly any time to devote to this any more. One of the dangers of becoming a father I'm afraid.

We've struggled to get garbage collection working properly to keep our clients' sites cached but reliably up to date. For the moment garbage collection still won't run reliably on at least Informed Comment. As JuanCole.com is one of the most read political sites in the world, this is something which needed to be fixed right away. It turns out there is a third WordPress cache plugin out there, Hyper Cache (at WordPress.org). We know the author of this plugin Stefano Lissa from his Newsletter Pro plugin which we use for a few clients. Lissa's code is good, he can handle sophisticated tasks while keeping the code structured enough for external teams to find and repair bugs and he answers his email.

So while HyperCache is less well-known than the big two, it seemed worth a try. We think long and hard before changing horses on core functionality like caching as we have years of experience with our core plugins. Usually our philosophy is better the devil you know is better than the one you don't.

In addition, WP Super Cache has mod_rewrite capability which means no PHP has to run (and hence presumably no CPU) to serve cached pages. We put a high value on Super Cache's capability to bypass PHP processing. But to our surprise testing last year had shown to Hyper Cache to be a bit faster than WP Super Cache. Other testing had shown Hyper Cache competitive. What is also worth noting from the other two tests is that in a comparable environment W3 Total Cache is in no way superior to either WP Super Cache and Hyper Cache, just more complicated. Complicated is bad: KISS is the best development rule ever written.

We still didn't really believe these results and thought there must be something strange in the test environment. We wanted to test against a real site and a real server that had been online.

We still had a testbed server available with Informed Comment on it and no traffic. The nice thing about this test bed is that it is a very limited 768 MB VPS with bare bones Apache and mod_php on it. I.e. we knew that if we gave it a good effort we'd be able to saturate it with proper external testing from LoadImpact. Our main dedicated servers with nginx would cost hundreds of dollars per test instead of $15/test. Based on past testing, we far prefer real web traffic than synthetic benchmarks like ApacheBench.

Here's what we found with 500 concurrent connection test. First the results for WP Super Cache.

Now from the challenger HyperCache.

Basically the results are identical. Both plugins allow the post to be downloaded at a fairly constant 1.8 seconds per load.

Keep reading WordPress Speed Test 2012: WP Super Cache vs HyperCache

Search Love Conference London 2011 – Day Two

Full set of

Keep reading photos of all searchlove 2011 speakers from day two here.

Despite potential hangover from the last nights party, everybody came thrilled to the second day of Search Love Conference in London, co-organized by SEOmoz and Distilled.

The first runner was Ciarán Norris of Mindshare. His lecture Personalization, Profiles and Privacy didn’t offer many calls to action, but two of them were important for all marketers:

    • Web is becoming more and more personalized. Get ready for it, you will have to learn more about visitors and treat them individually
    • There are the Web rules, but there are also the legal rules of the country you operate in. If you are tracking your visitors, you may get burnt.

    Search Love Conference London 2011 – Day Two

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