Show support for ProcessWire in site tagline

[Martijn Geerts]

Nice one Pete, I just added it to a "hobby" project.

[ryan]

@Pete, looks good to me. Earlier this morning I had plugged in something very similar into the default profile. I've just got it in the dev branch right now, along with a bunch of other updates.

[OllieMackJames]

Done on couple sites, but here's a suggestion. Ryan, if you want to get up high in the serps for certain phrases, why not add this as a module to PW:

Add a special attribution module In which you:

1- choose the keyword phrases you want to rank for

2 - make sure these are used in (random or you specify the weight) variation in the attribution phrases and let your module take care of the variation

Reason you want anchor text variation is to guard against G's - over-optimisation penalty, which means do not get all anchor texts to be the same, because in the end this will seriously hurt your rankings. I forget now, but there was an example of a big site that I think sold templates, who got ditched for their seo rankings simply because all sites out there linked back to them with one anchor text term, which led big G to believe they over-optimised their back links and wham, they got the penalty and went way down the serps.

If you make this a module that does it all on automatic, you could even update the module to keep on checking your anchor text variations and bring your backlink-profile in line with what you want to rank for.

Just my 2 cents.

[ryan]

I think that's a pretty interesting and smart idea actually. But it doesn't sound very white hat… more like a trick for getting around a Google algorithm. Would you install this on your sites knowing that the purpose of it was to come up with random variations on keywords to boost pagerank for processwire.com? I'm not sure even I would install that module. We are in this for the long haul and want to stay far in the white hat area when it comes to SEO, which is what we have been doing. But I appreciate your mention of this and am pretty impressed by your idea, even if I'd question what hat it goes into. 

You also bring up a very good point. If someone can be totally white hat and still get penalized because of legitimate links back to them, then it probably makes sense to tweak and adjust the anchor text when it's in your power to do so, just to avoid too much redundancy. After all, we don't want to get penalized for following the rules. So maybe we adjust the links in the default site profile on occasion when other updates are being made. However, I'm not really sure over optimization would ever be a problem for us, because how many people stick with the default profile, as-is… probably not many. Not to mention, the links are there for people rather than search engines, so I prefer to just use the words that speak most clearly. But definitely something to think about down the road, should our site profiles start showing up all over the place.

[OllieMackJames]

I think that's a pretty interesting and smart idea actually. But it doesn't sound very white hat… more like a trick for getting around a Google algorithm. Would you install this on your sites knowing that the purpose of it was to come up with random variations on keywords to boost pagerank for processwire.com? I'm not sure even I would install that module. We are in this for the long haul and want to stay far in the white hat area when it comes to SEO, which is what we have been doing. But I appreciate your mention of this and am pretty impressed by your idea, even if I'd question what hat it goes into. 

You also bring up a very good point. If someone can be totally white hat and still get penalized because of legitimate links back to them, then it probably makes sense to tweak and adjust the anchor text when it's in your power to do so, just to avoid too much redundancy. After all, we don't want to get penalized for following the rules. So maybe we adjust the links in the default site profile on occasion when other updates are being made. However, I'm not really sure over optimization would ever be a problem for us, because how many people stick with the default profile, as-is… probably not many. Not to mention, the links are there for people rather than search engines, so I prefer to just use the words that speak most clearly. But definitely something to think about down the road, should our site profiles start showing up all over the place.

Ryan,

I am all for white hat, but I know of sites that never did anything at all with link building, only focused on the best content on their topic, yet on april 24th last year many of those totally white hat sites also got totally floored, after the dust settled and it became clear what to investigate, and figure out the specific april 24 update, we ran  backlink profiles on sites that had NO backlinks built to it that were not purely organic, in other words these backlinks just pointed to the site because other people just for whatever reason decided to link to the site. BUT the anchor texts just used one basic term tyoo often to g's liking. The back link profile apparantly incurred an algorithmic penalty. And the traffic went down the drain...

And the other example I gave was because a company who built themes, thought it smart to have all these themes come standard with a link pointing back to the makers of it.

I have come to grow into the conviction that it is not about white or black hat, there is something else going on here.

It is about freedom, and about one big monopolithic party sending out bots sniffing everybody's sites and ripping all that content and throwing it into a database and then manipulating the database to present search results. And they make a living showing clickable ads on top and to the sides.

All fine and dandy, play by the book, but the book now shows that if you get too many people linking back to your site with the anchore text processwire, the day may come that big ole g will just refuse to show your site even for our very own name. Don't ask if this will happen; it happened before and it still happens.

So Ryan, if you are in for the long haul, and I hope and trust you are, imo you must guard and protect also your long term search results. And if you start asking for attribution links, you do well to realise you could be setting yourself up for consequential damage. And that would not be nice especially if it can be prevented.

Now if you would have a module that does this, why would that be anymore white or black hat than asking for a link back to show what drives the site?

Here's how I think about it more and more:

I love my freedom, freedom to build sites with great content. And I respect g's freedom to sniff my sites and many other sites. And if based on what the g-bot finds it decides to put my site on top, more power to them.

Ryan, you asked:

"Would you install this on your sites knowing that the purpose of it was

to come up with random variations on keywords to boost pagerank for

processwire.com? :)"

First of all, this is not about page rank, it is about showing up in the search results. Second: here's my reply question to you: do you Ryan, founder and bright mind behind processwire, want to totally hand over your search results future to an outside entity that is driven by bottom lines and will and does use algorythms to do stuff that can easily incur penalties to your bottom line?

BTW, fine either way with me, I just wanted to chime in and add my 2 cents seeing you are treading dangerous waters if asking for backlinks, without controlling things that can do damage.

Great CMF btw, I am loving it more and more!

[ryan]

It is about freedom, and about one big monopolithic party sending out bots sniffing everybody's sites and ripping all that content and throwing it into a database and then manipulating the database to present search results. And they make a living showing clickable ads on top and to the sides.

Well I'm glad they do it. But it's not like we don't have a choice. We can put a robots.txt in place to opt-out when/if we want to. 

All fine and dandy, play by the book, but the book now shows that if you get too many people linking back to your site with the anchore text processwire, the day may come that big ole g will just refuse to show your site even for our very own name. Don't ask if this will happen; it happened before and it still happens.

Someone searching for ProcessWire, getting something other than ProcessWire, would be considered a poor quality search result. The optimizations that Google makes are intended to increase the quality of search results, not reduce them. However, I recognize that temporary anomalies and unintended consequences can happen, and people occasionally get slapped down when they shouldn't. But that doesn't change the big picture. Google does what they do in order to increase the quality of their search results. If the quality goes down, the audience goes elsewhere, and they know that. Just because you or someone you know got slapped down when they shouldn't have doesn't change the big picture or long term. We should all be working towards increasing quality.

Maybe what you are suggesting (changing the terms) does work to increase quality, but by our definition. Looking bigger picture, It does seem grey hat, and I'm guessing Google would frown upon it (though who knows, I could be wrong). But if we proceeded with that understanding, that we are doing this to work around Google's algorithm, then we'd be engaged in a risky behavior. If a future Google algorithm detects our strategy, the sites linking to us would themselves get legitimately slapped down for participating in the risky behavior. 

Another thing to consider is that your site can't be penalized for who links to you, or in what quantity. Only those linking to you, and the value of the links [to you] can be penalized. If a thousand sites out there have a link in the footer that says "Powered by ProcessWire open source CMS", does that mean that ProcessWire deserves a high placement for the term "open source CMS"? No. It seems reasonable to me that a large quantity of links like this (whether identical or randomized) should not carry the same value of more organically generated links. If I start randomizing the anchor text of those links, then I'm trying to make that link look like something it's not in order to boost the value of it. 

So Ryan, if you are in for the long haul, and I hope and trust you are, imo you must guard and protect also your long term search results. And if you start asking for attribution links, you do well to realise you could be setting yourself up for consequential damage. And that would not be nice especially if it can be prevented.

When we ask for attribution links, Google is not the audience. Google can do what they want. If they give us a boost, great. But we want attribution links so that people can show pride in what they run and share it with their audience. Old fashioned marketing. Regardless of whether Google considers the value of those links reduced, due to quantity and similarity, we benefit. There is no situation under which the presence of those links could hurt us more than if they weren't there in the first place. 

Now if you would have a module that does this, why would that be anymore white or black hat than asking for a link back to show what drives the site?

Maybe this is totally okay. But it seems like a grey area to me. If it has the blessing of someone like Matt Cutts, then I'd be supportive of it. Otherwise, I'd worry about involving users of the module in a potentially risky behavior. I may be able to write a module to outsmart Google in the short term, but not long term. 

First of all, this is not about page rank, it is about showing up in the search results.

While one may not equal the other, they also aren't isolated from each other. 

Second: here's my reply question to you: do you Ryan, founder and bright mind behind processwire, want to totally hand over your search results future to an outside entity that is driven by bottom lines and will and does use algorythms to do stuff that can easily incur penalties to your bottom line?

Yes. But note that there is no "bottom-line" (this is not a for-profit venture), and I do not see Google as our primary source of future growth. I see primarily word-of-mouth, but also the resulting links and social networks as being our source of growth.

But even for my for-profit clients, I advise them to do the same and focus on the site and audience (and accessibility to them) rather than Google or some other search engine. Of course we care about Google, and pay attention to the webmaster guidelines, especially search accessibility and semantics. But I don't get involved in sites or business models that are built around living or dying based on organic search placement. That's a risky model regardless of what you do. 

BTW, fine either way with me, I just wanted to chime in and add my 2 cents seeing you are treading dangerous waters if asking for backlinks, without controlling things that can do damage.

Damage only relative to the potential value of those links if all links were equal. And I don't believe attribution links should carry the same value as organic links. Maybe they don't deserve more value than a rel="nofollow", I really don't know.

Great CMF btw, I am loving it more and more!

Thanks. I also appreciate your interest in helping our search performance. I'm not trying to challenge anything you say, just enjoy participating in conversations about this stuff, and hope you do too. While I'm very grey area about what you are proposing (and I may be wrong), I do think we have plenty of room for improvement from the SEO side, and discussion like this is a great launching point. 

[OllieMackJames]

Hi Ryan,

Sure, more than happy to discuss this topic. Just hope it helps. This is one thing I have been studying a bit over the years, I am not a programmer and can not give back anything regarding programming or modules, but my intention is to give back something to the pw community and this is a bit of my expertise so that is why i jumped in.

You said:

"Another thing to consider is that your site can't be penalized for who
links to you, or in what quantity. Only those linking to you, and the
value of the links [to you] can be penalized."

This I hear so often, but it just is not what I see back in facts that I have studied.

In principle your statement is valid as in this is how it should be, but there is a difference in how things should be and how they are.

Exactly because other people now can damage your site by throwing thousands of useless links at your site, big ole g finally opened a link disavow tool in the webmaster area, and the sheer existence of the link disavow tool to me proves that links can and do hurt your rankings, but let me go another way to see if I can help a bit 'forward wise' with developing vision for processwire seo street smarts.

I still am totally in favor of first giving vistors what they are looking for, always have been and will be because they butter the bread. My main focus is all on building sites so smart that they are a honey pot to visitors, so they stay around etc. and share etc. etc. And for PW the best thing of course is people talking about it and sharing the greatness of it as a tool, and at the end and the beginning of the day that will take you the furthest, and there your brilliance and processwire's community's brilliance already really shines!

OK, what would I propose to do?

I would do something along the folllowing lines:

- make a module that does the following (I would have to hire someone to do this, but hey, I would do it like this):

* upon going live with a site, and upon handing over the site: ask people if they want to show the world one time on their whole site that they use processwire under the hood

* then I would ask people as well to simply choose what attracts them the most in this cms:

= ease of use ==> anchor text: processwire used here because we love this easy cms

= search engine optimisation simplicity ==> anchor text: we chose processwire, the seo cms number 1

= it was the choice of our designer ==> anchore text: processwire, the cms of choice of designers

= Etc. Etc. whichever you think would be the reasons people can go for pw

= other: open ended anchor text.

The last option in the module would then be, where they wanted to share this link JUST ONE TIME ON ONE PAGE: home page footer, about us page, sitemap, whatever.

I would try to stay away from sitewide footer or sidebar links, because that is not healthy. It is much better to have IP diversity in the back links and have anchor text variety.

This way processwire would get the best of many worlds:

- marketing information regarding what makes people choose or like about processwire - VERY VALUABLE

- good ip variety of sites linking back

- anchor text variety of backlinks

Thanks again!

[teppo]

I'd love to trust Google in this matter, but what I've read so far seems to support the views expressed above: Google is actually making webmasters pay for their "unnatural link profiles", which could theoretically be a result of actions by people they have no way to influence.. although they do also offer a way to contact them regarding this very issue.

How common this is and how much (and in what ways) it really affects individual sites seems to be up to debate even (and perhaps especially) within SEO expert community. Taking all things into consideration I wouldn't worry too much about this issue, though it would seem that unless Google decides to alter this behavior "powered by" links are not as good a strategy as they used to be anymore.

- make a module that does the following (I would have to hire someone to do this, but hey, I would do it like this):

@OllieMackJames: problem with this proposal is that ProcessWire generally stays out of markup generation and doesn't know what your site looks like or what kind of elements it contains. It doesn't even know if you're creating a website or something entirely different. This module could, of course, work while installed on the default site profile, but as Ryan pointed out above that's probably not a very common situation with live sites and thus doesn't do much good.

On the other hand, some kind of slogan / metatag / badge generator would be at least fun but perhaps even useful. I'm thinking something along the lines of HTML5 logo thingy, though enhanced with (random?) slogan generator for couple of different use cases 

(Personally I'd love to see a WillyC slogan generator. That'd be awesome.)

[ryan]

This I hear so often, but it just is not what I see back in facts that I have studied.

I actually find it rather difficult to believe that they would go beyond simply disregarding the links (devaluation), and instead make those links actually penalize the site being linked to. It seems like it could be very easy to mistake devaluation for a penalty. Is there any real evidence? If I was showing up first for some term, and then was off the map, I can see how it would look like a penalty. Yet, the math behind it might not involve any penalty at all, just a devaluation of those links from the equation. 

Wouldn't this be hugely open to abuse? Creating an entire new industry of SEO of hurting competitors by linking to them? After all, it's incredibly easy to create a bad neighborhood of sites, but incredibly hard to create a quality site. I don't claim to have insight on Google, but it seems silly and unsustainable for them to give bad neighborhoods this level of control and manipulation potential. 

If you guys are right about this and there is testable proof, then my inclination would be to remove ourselves from the picture and simply not have links. The attribution text is ultimately the most important part.  People can find ProcessWire on their own. Though this all seems rather silly, as the point of the link is to be a convenience to the user so they don't have to go find it themselves.  But I would want to see actual proof before acting upon it. I suppose we could always link it to a Google search for "ProcessWire" too.  

Exactly because other people now can damage your site by throwing thousands of useless links at your site, big ole g finally opened a link disavow tool in the webmaster area, and the sheer existence of the link disavow tool to me proves that links can and do hurt your rankings, but let me go another way to see if I can help a bit 'forward wise' with developing vision for processwire seo street smarts.

If some site has a lot of other sites disavowing its links, I can see that as being a penalty factor for the site doing the linking. That would be understandable. I would not have guessed it could go the other way around. 

OK, what would I propose to do?

I think your proposal is actually very good. It solves all of my concerns. Thank you for the suggestion and idea. Admittedly, I'm now feeling like I need to do more research, but if what you guys are saying is testable and proven, then I'm more inclined to prefer just text attribution rather than a link. 

@OllieMackJames: problem with this proposal is that ProcessWire generally stays out of markup generation and doesn't know what your site looks like or what kind of elements it contains. It doesn't even know if you're creating a website or something entirely different. This module could, of course, work while installed on the default site profile, but as Ryan pointed out above that's probably not a very common situation with live sites and thus doesn't do much good.

We do have a class of modules called Markup modules. This module idea would fit well within that segment. 

[OllieMackJames]

Hi Teppo, great link you posted http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-unnatural-links-warnings

Ryan, I think if you read that article, you will be up to date pretty much, there is much more of course, but this gives good pointers.

Also do please read the comments below on that page, because what happened to seomoz is not really what happens to smaller sites.

SEOMOZ already had lots of back links and also has and had a very active sydication strategy of their content, so they are harder to take down.

Regarding your attribution text suggestion, I would just take that as one of the options, nowadays g seems to recognize use of brandnames as well and gives the brand name owner credit for that as well.

This whole seo field is a bit of a mine field, and I am hopeful g will try to correct the spam-your-competitor-possibilities, but I am not holding my breath...

I would not hesitate to use attribution links as I proposed, and if you build an option in it to change all links to attribution text only upon an update of the module, you are covered all ways.

Now one final remark here, regarding seo smarts, g now heavily seems to look at the environment where the link exists.

It used to just be enough to have a link with the anchor text that you wanted to rank for and spammers apparently spammed the living daylights out of this, then g wisened up and started looking more at the text around the link, so spammers found that out as well and put links in text snippets about the topic.

Then the link networks jumped in, allowing people to post articles about certain topics that were then posted to many sites, and we have all seen thoses sites I suppose, they add no value whatsoever and can be recognized a mile away. Of course g wrote an algo that recognizes those sites.

Then also the panda algo came aroud, focusing on bounce rate, time on site, etc. etc. GREAT! this helps people who have great sites that help people with
great content that people want so much that they stay around.

The penguin update was all about over optimisation, either on page, or intra-site-linking, and outside back-links.

Now one final thing about outside links: it gets more and more important that links come from sites that are related to your topic.

So with that in mind, maybe - next to the module above - ask developers/designers to link to your site with an explanation on a page where they write a review about processwire and why they use it, and have them put a link in that article to processwire.

But the best ambassador should always be processwire itself.

If someone wants to develop a module, I would be happy to think along and help with the concept and testing, great to hear that the markup module apparently can be of service there.

Wishing you all happy PW-ing!

[n0sleeves]

I went ahead and made a "powered by processwire" animated GIF if anyone would like to use it Have two versions - one for black backgrounds and one for white.
I made it kind of large so you can shrink it to whatever size you'd like. I am using a setting of 140 by 47 pixels. You can see the one for black backgrounds in action at one of the sites I designed here. I am searching for a GIF animator that will allow PNG files so I can have it completely transparent on any background. Will upload soon. 

For White Background

For Black Backgrounds

[hellomoto]

Mine is preceded by "Proudly"

(like WP has by default, which I never put myself, and I feel is unnecessary at this point given how it's usually fairly obvious when a site is built with WP, and their existing popularity)

[MisterM]

New to PW ....

I'm working on my personal bread/food blog using Processwire. I'm impressed of all the work that has been done and is done around this great framework. I'm not a web professional but have some programming background (labview, delphi,c, c++,...) and it was a great pleasure for me to dive into the api and the great forum. Just reading helped me a lot to start my prototyping.

To come to the point : "Powered by ProcessWire Open Source CMS/CMF ... " is quite long for a responsive footer if you put your personal copyright down there too. Any idea how to shorten it without being too short? ;-)

Regards

MisterM

[LostKobrakai]

I'd just strip of the "Open Source CMS/CMF" part. If someone is really curious because of that line he'll surely be curious enough to google the name as well.

[teppo]

@MisterM: first of all, great to hear that you're enjoying ProcessWire and the forum! To answer your question, I would simply use "Powered by ProcessWire". Seems snappy and obvious enough to me, especially if it's also a link to processwire.com

[diogo]

Powered by <a href="http://processwire.com">P<span class="no-mobile">rocess</span>W<span class="no-mobile">ire</span></a>

[pwired]

Or a nice little link button, any way or size you want, somewhere at the bottom of your site

[FrancisChung]

Apologies if it was mentioned before here (I speed read through the contents), but what about making certain plugins like Wapplyzer and similar tools easier to detect that the site is running Processwire rather than JQuery + Apache (or Ngnix). 

I've just tested it on our site and that's what it returns. 

As a web dev newbie, I'm always interested to see the technology stack of sites I visit so I rely on tools like Wapplyzer to give me an approximation. Word of mouth is good, but also is piquing curiosity amongst the dev crowd?

I guess you'll need to contact the authors of these tools and see if they're willing to cooperate ...

[FrancisChung]

Also, is there a standardised "Powered by Processwire" button or link anywhere I could use?

[szabesz]

@FrancisChung

For security reasons (security through obscurity) I would make such a feature optional. Although security through obscurity is not considered to be some sort of actual "protection layer" or such, in some cases I still do not like to advertise such info.

[Mike Rockett]

I also haven't read this thread, but BuiltWith has us listed: https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/ProcessWire

[ryan]

Quote

I also haven't read this thread, but BuiltWith has us listed:

Historically w3techs has been tracking this stuff the longest as far as I can tell, and their information is updated often. They show ProcessWire nearing in on the 0.1% market share threshold (only 2 spots away from the 0.1%+ table). The info on this page below is interesting. The entire page is sorted by market share (highest to lowest). It shows a lot of CMSs ahead of us, but a lot more below us in market share, including some fairly recognizable ones. 

https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all

[kongondo]

Thanks for sharing this @ryan. It throws up some very interesting statistics. They seem to be very up to date, assuming of course that their research methodology was sound. I have no reason to doubt them though . Some interesting stuff on this page as well.

Edited December 29, 2016 by kongondo
some link

[Mike Rockett]

Thanks for that, @ryan and @kongondo - nice to see some insight. In terms of the market position, we totally need to move a little more upwards on that graph. Moving right would also be good, but I'm merely pointing this out from a performance perspective. High-traffic sites would do well with us.

[FrancisChung]

4 hours ago, Mike Rockett said:

 In terms of the market position, we totally need to move a little more upwards on that graph. 

So many CMSes in the market!

I always thought one of the reasons why Processwire still remains relatively invisible is because current AFAIK there aren't any courses or books available for Processwire (Correct me if I'm wrong)? 

We have some great introductory tutorials on the Processwire site but beyond that it's a lot of trial and error and searching / asking through forums. Which is not a bad way to learn, but I don't know if that's everyone's cup of tea.

To this day, I think there's a big gap in the market in terms of a book or a course that shows you how to build an example site using Processwire from Scratch with empasis on Wordpress users that might look to move on?

I'm guessing Packt Publishing and Udemy might be best candidates for a commercial outlet as they seem to have content for lesser adopted technologies.

If no one is willing to publish it, then just having it as sale through the shop or even free would be great for more people to try out.
Not all Developers would be willing to jump through hoops to learn so having a book like that would at least give them a reason to try it out.

I understand writing a book or creating a course is no easy task and quite time consuming, but I'm sure even a community lead joint effort it wouldn't be too difficult ...