This is a great article on search engine spam, and different kinds of SEO. Give it a read:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421

If you’re not aware of SEO:
Search engine optimization, the use of various techniques to improve a web site’s ranking in the search engines and thus attract more visitors
- http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sEO

SEO is one of the most important things around on the Internet. Without it, you’re not going to get anywhere. Before the Internet, to get people aware of a product or service, you would advertise it on the radio, TV, flyers, signs or word of mouth.
These days, the most efficient way of advertising your product is by optimizing keywords for search engines.
If, for example you searched “new computer” on Google, you’ll see all sorts of sites, but normally you’ll click the first few.
If your website is ranked in the top 5 you will get a lot of search engine traffic. From there, other people link it and share it on Facebook and Twitter.

This is why SEO is extremely important. If your website has a lot of content but has not been optimized for search engines, you will lose traffic and customers.

SEO isn’t always about making sure you have the most keywords with the best ranking, it can be how the user will write the keyword (i.e. be clever). Using the example above, I got some weird and random websites related to “new computers” so I then intentionally made a typo… “new ocmputer” and it came up with the Apple website for iMac – and we all know they’re not the worlds cheapest computers! Most people will actually Google something spelled wrong, because they rely on the search engine to correct their spelling. Most of the time people don’t realize they’ve spelled anything wrong so they continue to the website. This is one of the ways competing companies use SEO.

Tags: article, interesting, SEO, webapp

In the past, I’ve worked with a large table for ‘transactions’ (with way over 800 million rows) – I’ve found that things tend to break on large volumes of clients trying to things such as INSERT (the disk keeps doing weird stuff like doing an earlier INSERT before an older one, leading to memory problems and bottlenecks).

I learned a small trick, and that is to use INSERT DELAYED

When a client uses INSERT DELAYED, it gets an okay from the server at once, and the row is queued to be inserted when the table is not in use by any other thread.

By using this, it will not slow the database down by much, but it will free the database to write the INSERTs to disk at any time, so it can bundle a bunch of inserts together – this will stop any weird behavior in your MySQL database, in turn making it faster than it was previously (no memory problems, having to restart all the time and no more large bottlenecks).

Another thing to watch out is using MySQLs time functions like, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP or CUR_DATE() because they will be called everytime the query is executed so you should make sure any time data is generated by your programming language (like PHP) rather than by the database.

This sort of practice would be used for something that records/logs all transactions in a virtual economy, or logging all user events etc.

Tags: INSERT DELAYED, large volume, mysql, PHP, script, webapp