Sometimes this webmaster stuff gets a little frustrating and recently it has been back to back days for me. I have one of my blogs with a pretty quick crawl rate having an indexing issue. See the image below Click to enlarge

Webmaster Tools Results

so according to trusty reliable Google webmaster tools I shouldn’t anything to worry about in terms of indexing, I know there is no site out there with a 100% index result my problem is the results when you use the popular time age method site:yoururl.com to find out how many pages are indexed. The problem with this is you might be viewing a data center that hasn’t been updated yet or is not in sync with the most recent data. See image below Click to enlarge

site:url.com method

So why are the two numbers different? Is it really the data centers? I’ve been having this issue for a few weeks now and I doubt it’s the data center issue I still get a low result when using the site:yoururl.com method. I’ve asked in the Google webmaster help forum and was told it was a data center issue I’m not sure who to contact now I’ll probably linger around the webmaster world forums and ask there.

The most frustrating thing about this is the blog is quite new and building out its popularity is vague at the moment till I get a precise number of indexed pages. On the contrary traffic hasn’t fluctuated up or down dramatically it is leaning more towards a steady growth so I’m sort of believing the webmaster tools result a bit more due to the slight increase of traffic. Of course I’ll keep an update of this issue and please if anyone has any suggestions comment below and let’s solve this together!

I’ve been with CWH for about 3 years now and the first 2 years have been smooth sailing up until now that is. I’m subscribed to a 3 month standard VPS package and lately have been getting out of memory errors popping up upon accessing my websites. I’ve contacted the support team multiple times about my problem but their immediate solutions are usually hour timed fixes. The problem will occur for me at least a few days after they solve the ticket.

I’m not knocking on their customer service it is actually superb, what I wish for is they make a big note on my account about my problem so that every time I talk to a support staff by email or live chat. They can easily see the history of the fixes made. It seems every fix they have come up with to get rid of the problem is a different one. Never the less they have stated the problem for me many times which was lack of RAM. I’ve upgraded to more RAM for the VPS since then but still getting errors.

Most of the sites I have hosted on the VPS haven’t been touched and no additions to them have been made for the last 2 years they just sit there comfortably earning. Unless they are down of course so I’m wondering what process of the VPS is killing my available working memory. I’ve asked this question and still no clear answer available.

If someone were to ask me right now how I would rate CWH I’d have to give them a 7/10 they claim 99% up time but for me personally it feels like 95%. I do recommend their shared hosting plans though they seem to give you much more unlimited services / bandwidth for the dollar compared to their closest competition like dream host.

My action going forward now is whether to grab more RAM for my VPS and wait it out. I need my sites up!

Amazon.com has finally had enough of spammy marketers using content reviews as content for their sites. I’m glad they are finally doing this because I’m so sick of seeing the same product landing page with scraped amazon review content. View the official note below.

Dear Developer,

On November 8, 2010 the Reviews response group of the Product Advertising API will no longer return customer reviews content and instead will return a link to customer reviews content hosted on Amazon.com. You will be able to display customer reviews on your site using that link. Please refer to the Product Advertising API Developer guide found here for more details. The Reviews response group will continue to function as before until November 8 and the new link to customer reviews is available to you now through the Product Advertising API as well.

We are introducing efficiency guidelines for high volume users related to API usage. These guidelines are designed to promote efficient use of the API while providing the most effective advertising functionality and feature-set for application developers like you. Starting October 15 all usage will be subject to the efficiency guidelines. In addition, due to low usage, we plan to deprecate a subset of API operations and response groups. Please refer to the “Efficiency Guidelines” and “API Changes” sections below for details on the efficiency guidelines and API operations/response groups slated for deprecation. The efficiency guidelines will be phased in over a period of three months, starting July 15, and by October 15 all usage will be subject to these guidelines.

The Product Advertising API Team.

Efficiency Guidelines
The purpose of the Product Advertising API is to advertise Amazon Products and thereby enable Associates to make money by creating Amazon advertisements and sending traffic back to Amazon. A small number of users are requesting very large amounts of product data while generating a very small amount of product sales. The Product Advertising API efficiency guidelines are designed to promote efficient use of the API. Each account used to access the Product Advertising API will be allowed an initial usage limit of 2,000 requests per hour. Each account will receive an additional 500 requests per hour (up to a maximum of 25,000 requests per hour) for every $1 of shipped item revenue driven per hour in a trailing 30-day period. Usage thresholds are recalculated daily based on revenue performance. To ensure that each account qualifies for the additional threshold increase, the URLs served by the Product Advertising API must be used when linking back to Amazon and the Associate tags used must belong to the account owner.

API Changes

Due to low usage, the Product Advertising API operations and response groups listed below will not be supported after October 15, 2010:

• Operations: CustomerContentLookup, CustomerContentSearch, Help, ListLookup, ListSearch, TagLookup, TransactionLookup, VehiclePartLookup, VehiclePartSearch, VehicleSearch.
• Response Group: ListmaniaLists, MerchantItemAttributes, PromotionDetails, Subjects, Tags, TagsSummary, VariationMinimum

Additionally, due to low usage, we will be discontinuing Multiple Operation Requests and the TextStream search parameter. If you require continued access to these APIs, please contact us to discuss your use case.

Now this doesn’t affect me in any way shape or form because I have always had unique content. It will hurt those who tried to be a bit sneaky and added their own words to the scraped content. Some have even gone as far as spinning the text. Kudos Amazon!