Reuben Yau

I installed the new ga.js tracking script on this blog a few weeks ago and decided to take a look today to see if there are any reporting differences. Here’s what I found for the same time period:

Here’s a couple of screenshots of the top referring phrases. You can clearly see the differences.

Old:

New:

So as you can see, there’s quite a discrepancy, even for my site which doesn’t get a lot of traffic at all. I think I’m going to have to dig into this further and compare these stats with log files to see which is more accurate. I also want to make sure that the tracking codes really do appear on every page, to make sure that isn’t skewing the stats somewhat.

I’ll post back again when I find more info. If anyone else is doing a similar test, what are you finding?

Our CEO announced today that we came in first place for the Outstanding Product (less than 50 employees) category in the prestigious TechColumbus TopCAT Innovation Awards.

We were up against some tough competition from some local companies with very cool products, so it’s very exciting that ECNext was chosen.

In Jan 2007 ECNext also won the category for Outstanding Technology Team Under 50 People (press release).

TopCAT Awards have been run by TechColumbus for the past 10 years and is recognized as a premier event for technology companies in Central Ohio. The ceremony was held last night and drew over one thousand attendees compared to one hundred at its launch in 1997.

ECNext runs the fastest growing business information research website (manta.com), providing over 45 million worldwide company profiles and enables researchers to purchase online and download detailed market research, industry analysis reports and company news.

I’ve been a little preoccupied lately and tonight I decided to try out the new Google Analytics tracking code, which uses ga.js instead of urchin.js. To do this, I created a new profile, then added the new code in the footer.inc for this Wordpress theme. This weekend I’ll be comparing results to see if there’s any differences in stats or reports.

Google could be heading down a slippery slope with Youtube and now knol. Their organic search results are meant to be unbiased and provide the most relevant results for any given query. In 2000 Google launched Google Adwords and we started seeing sponsored search results. That was ok, the ads were clearly marked and listed alongside the search results.

Google starts releasing additional services to diversify their revenue streams, like the Google search appliance, site targeting, radio and print ads.

At some point here, they suddenly realized that they have this great money making scheme called Google Adsense, but they only ever take a cut out of each ad because as a search engine, they’re designed to send traffic away. The next logical step here, from a money making point of view, is to take a larger percentage, or take the entire ad revenue. They can only do that if they become a content publisher. At that point there’s a huge conflict of interest in serving relevant, unbiased results and a serving up your own site, which makes money.

In Oct 2006 Google bought Youtube , then in May 2007 they launch Universal search to provide Youtube with more exposure in the search results.

Now with Google knol they want to extend publishing to textual content and run adsense. To ensure quality content and to keep the spammers at bay they will probably not offer a rev share either.

Since wikipedia has such a strong organic presence, that leaves 9 spots on page 1 for other reference material type sites. Enter Google knol and that reduces it to 8. Throw in Google’s diversification of search results and now for ecommerce queries, you may find that there’s only 1 spot left on page 1 for an informational article about a product.

So once knol builds critical mass, what could happen? Well obviously sites like about.com will loose rankings to knol. answers.com who already took a 28% traffic hit this year could face a double whammy by loosing rankings and having their keywords links in the results are replaced with knols.

What do you think might happen? Would you want to contribute an authoritative article to knol?

I used to work for an SEO agency in Pittsburgh and dealt with a number of interesting clients in a variety of industries, with large and small sites. There were a number of funny incidents that I encountered, which I’d like to recount here, although names will be withheld.

No Google Traffic
After taking on this client I gained access to their webtrends reports and it showed an astounding lack of Google organic traffic. I looked over the meta tags and page content and all seemed to be targeting the right set of keywords to some degree, although onpage could still use some improvement.

I knew they weren’t doing anything advanced like IP delivery so I used Firefox with the useragent switcher extension and confirmed that with my useragent set to googlebot, slurp or msnbot I could browse the site without any problems. After checking the robots.txt I found that googlebot had been disallowed! After asking the client’s developer why they decided to ban googlebot their response was: It was crawling the site too often and there were errors on some of the pages that were leading to open database connections and locking up the server.

Needless to say the developers got a quick lesson in why banning googlebot to mask their programming errors is not good business practice.

Want to hear more stories? Do you have any of your own you’d like to share?

At pubcon I listened to a session by George Aspland about various techniques to optimize PDF files for search engines. Part of his ongoing research is to see whether links within a PDF file pass link juice. To test this, he asked if session members would download and republish one of his PDF files. So here it is. Good luck, it will be interesting to see the results of this test.

Optimizing PDFs for Search Engines (1.8MB PDF file)

While I met a bunch of great people, there were a great deal of people I didn’t get to meet. Some were just rude or didn’t have any time for me (the man with the golden shoes and the offwhite hound dog), but apart from them, most others were polite enough to exchange pleasantries.

For those I didn’t get to meet, feel free to leave a comment, or you can catch up with me (my username is Pittbug) on the SEO refugee forums.

Thanks to Brett Tabke for the free beers, I shall return again next year.

Just a quick note to say that next week I’ll be at pubcon in Vegas soaking up the latest SEO/SEM issues and techniques.

If you want to meet, you can either post in the thread on seorefugee here, or call me using GrandCentral:

This marks almost one year since I started this blog, which was a direct result of having attended Pubcon in 2006.

I’m using Scratchback. You’ll probably see the widget on the right with the links that say Get In My Top Spots. Those are the text links that you can buy for just one dollar.

The last person to buy a text link automatically goes to the top of the list. Right now the widget is set to show five links, but if the inventory gets filled I can increase the number of links, up to a maximum of 20.

This widget displays prominently on all pages of this blog. Most of my visitors are webmasters and SEOs who are interested in Google Analytics and search engine optimization.

So now’s the time to dig behind the couch cushions, scrape those dimes and nickels together and buy a text link for $1.00.

Note that these links use nofollow so Google won’t drop my PageRank :D

I don’t usually take much notice of Live search traffic to this blog because they usually don’t drive much if any traffic at all. But I decided to look today and noticed a few weird entries in Google Analytics. I had a bunch of referring keywords from live.com with 1 visit, 2 page views and 0 time on site. Click on the thumbnail to see the full size image:

When you see patterns like that, you have to assume that it’s a bot that’s hitting your site. I downloaded my logs for the past week and took a look. To my surprise there were entries like this:

65.55.165.26 - -
[29/Sep/2007:12:12:45 -0400]
“GET /black-people-on-ebay-again/ HTTP/1.0″
200 25905 www.reubenyau.com
“http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=people&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP”
“Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)” “-”

If you’re not used to reading raw logs, the important items here are the IP address in the first line and the referrer in the 5th line.

Using whois.arin.net you can see that the IP address belongs to Microsoft:

OrgName: Microsoft Corp
OrgID: MSFT
Address: One Microsoft Way
City: Redmond
StateProv: WA
PostalCode: 98052
Country: US

OrgTechHandle: MSFTP-ARIN
OrgTechName: MSFT-POC
OrgTechPhone: +1-425-882-8080
OrgTechEmail: iprrms@microsoft.com


This type of behavior is certainly not in the spirit of the internet and something that’s definitely quite annoying.

So why is Microsoft referrer spamming me? I start searching on forums and I start finding that I’m not the only one being targeted here.

http://ekstreme.com/thingsofsorts/blogging/yell-if-microsofts-livecom-spammed-you-too

http://www.webmasterworld.com/msn_microsoft_search/3424476.htm

http://www.seo-scoop.com/2007/11/13/past-time-for-msn-to-pony-up-to-the-real-truth-about-referrer-spam/

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2007/11/13/microsoft-needs-to-quit-fucking-with-my-adsense-scripts/

So as it turns out, msndude from webmasterworld apologizes and basically says “don’t worry, be happy - and btw, if you block it, you might get banned”. Here’s the actual quote:

The traffic you are seeing is part of a quality check we run on selected pages. While we work on
addressing your conerns, we would request that you do not actively block the IP addreses used by this quality check; blocking these IP addresses could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index.

HUH? Excuse me? You have a bot that’s not exactly being very nice but I’m not allowed to block it? What kind of practice is that? I don’t run a spammy MFA site. I don’t do anything shady, so why should I have to sit here and have my stats polluted for absolutely nothing in return. If Live was sending me traffic I could perhaps turn a blind eye, but considering that they’ve been on a pretty good downward trend recently, you’d think that they’d want to do a better job of appeasing webmasters. Here’s their traffic over the past few months according to quantcast:

As of tonight it’s being blocked. I really don’t want to play this game, but this type of behavior should not be tolerated by webmasters.