I have been developing in PHP for around 5 years now and have been selling scripts for about that long too. The website is EdgePHP.com. These last couple of years I got very involved in helping others develop and maintain sites and sort of put Edge PHP on the back burner.

But lately I have been putting a lot of effort into it and it shows. The site’s pagerank is back up to 3 and the Alexa rank, whick is steadily falling fast, is at 238,683.

A I recall, the highest pagerank ever for the site was a pr4 with an Alexa rank of somewhere around 78,000. That is around the time I shifted into neutral and started coasting.

I have developed several new products and improved many existing products.

Three things have contributed to the the recent success of the site.  I developed new products and content, I lowered prices and started contacting my customers directly to let them know what has been going on.

EZFetch is a new,  simple web fetching script that allows you to grab content from other sites and include on yours. Here’s a good real example of how to use EZFetch.

EZFetch Demo

So, if you are itching to scrape some content because there’s no other way to get your hands on it (and you know you are) give this script a try.

MyMovies is a great script for adding movie listings to a website. However, I must say first that MyMovies is not meant to be a big time global service for use by people coast to coast and I hope you are not thinking you have a shot at that anyway.

But if you have a small community website that could benefit from movie listings you shoud give MyMovies a look. One of the cool things you can do is have the main page open to a particular zip code so people in your community would not even have to search Another cool thing is that the main search page sets a cookie that rememb the user’s last search.

How does MyMovies work. It gets the listings from IMDB. All the movie links open at IMDB. So you are not really showing their content on your ste. Instead you are just linkingto their site. So it is god for you and also good for IMDB because they can attract new users who may not have otherwise found them.

As recently as a few years ago (eons in web time) many of the web’s most prolific gurus were recommending huge amounts of dynamic content as the way to create traffic. Flypaper, as it was called. And mostly duplicate content. I did a lot of that business and business was good. After all, you pretty much needed a programmer for any of that.

Content management systems always help some promise but who could have known it would be like this. Now, some of the most popular sites on the web scarcely need a webmaster or even be professionally hosted for that matter. Just upload Wordpress and  you are good to go.

Now those who churn out word rule the day. And those words need to hold some interest, or at least be unique enough in structure to pass the “NEW” test with Google. Because, after all, it doesn’t matter what you have if it’s not good in the SERPS.

Of course, for old dogs like me, Google has really taken the fun out of things. After all, it was so much fun to game their system and win. That’s pretty tough to do these days.

Sometimes I think Google’s real mission is simply to be the most successful purveyor of duplicate content on the web. Which, of course, they already are. Think about it.