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July 30, 2007

Google Analytics Not Working

Has anyone else noticed that Google Analytics stopped working yesterday and still isn't working? Any news as to when Google will have it up and working again properly?

I need my daily dose of Analytic lovin' and anxiously await its return.

This just sucks.

Posted by sean at 01:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Business.com Appreciates (Because of) Your Support

One of the big stories last week was the sale of Business.com to RH Donnelly. Because the business.com domain has been one of the rock stars of domain buying & selling, I found a few other numbers you might find interesting. Following are a few of the years that business.com changed hands, as well as the price:

• 1997: $150,000
• 1999: $7,500,000
• 2007: $345,000,000

I remember the sale in 1999, and how many believed its record-setting price epitomized what Alan Greenspan called "irrational exuberance." But what I didn't remember is that the 1997 sale also set a record, at least according the article I cite above.

In terms of raw numbers, $345 million is quite a haul. But note that statistically, the domain had significantly better annual appreciation between '97 and '99 (2450%) than it did between '99 and '07 (563%).

Today, of course, business.com is more than just a domain name. I'll be very interested to see what Donnelly does with it and whether -- or how quickly -- it can recoup its investment.

Posted by erik at 12:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 25, 2007

How the U. of Kentucky Web Team Spent Its Summer Vacation

I really don't consider myself a spam cop, but this is too good to pass up. Just one more, then I'm done; I promise.

A few days ago when I was working on a previous post about how small sites are using big, well established sites to "vouch" for them, I showed some examples of SERPs for [cialis]. One thing I didn't get a chance to explore is how the University of Kentucky shows up on page 3 at Google:

When you click over with JavaScript disabled, you get the typical UK search page:

When you click over with JavaScript turned on, you're almost immediately redirected to the Cialis landing page at extra-drug.com:

At first I thought maybe there was some hijacking going on, but a cursory look at the UK Search page shows it was an inside job. Here's the smoking gun:

So we know how the page ranks for the terms. And also note that when you click over to the UK Search page from another UK page -- even with JavaScript enabled -- you don't redirect. So there's some referrer-based server-side magic going on here too. The real nagging question here is, who is making the money? A single guy in the UK CS department, or is it shared among many of them? Surely code like this doesn't go unnoticed for long.

Like the techniques I described in the earlier post, pill sites hooking up with the college web site crowd is nothing new. Danny Sullivan blogged about it over two years ago, after Search Engine Watch users found the Stanford Daily selling text links.

The Stanford editors pleaded ignorance, but that excuse doesn't cut it in the Big 10. These Kentucky guys know what they're doing.

So what's the most interesting angle of this whole mess? The fact that it takes place on the Search page on the University of Kentucky web site. How could this be anything BUT an Oedipal glove-slap to UK's biggest search-focused alumnus?

Posted by erik at 02:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 22, 2007

Pharmaceutical Sites Riding In On Established Coattails

While I typically find sports metaphors trite and unimaginative, this one works fairly well, so I beg indulgence. The pharmaceutical game has always been considered a pretty cutthroat environment in organic SERPs, and that's still the case today. Some sites are using the equivalent of offensive linemen to penetrate an otherwise difficult defense and make room for their own site to squeeze through the gap.

Here's the philosophy: If your site can't rank by itself for certain queries, use the broad back of an established site to knock some of the weaker sites down the SERP to make room for themselves.

Take a random but popular drug -- Cialis. The query for [cialis] shows two such instances on the first page of results, in spots 8 and 10.

First case: Alexa
So how does Alexa fit into the Cialis game? The folks at pillls-deals.com (which is where pillsdeals.com redirects) spread guestbook and comment spam across 20,000+ sites and link to ... not their own site, but the Alexa profile page for their Cialis page. The Alexa page gets crawled and begins to rank for [cialis] due to factors like the anchor text dropped in the guestbook spam. If a user clicks over to the Alexa page from the [cialis] SERP, it still requires another click to get to the pills-deals.com site, so I'm curious about the clickthrough on a #8 result that requires an additional click beyond clicking away from the SERP. Still, the rankings portion of the equation seems to be working.

Second case: Technorati
Here's a double slap in the face of Google. The crew at xlpharmacy.com (or maybe just an adoring fan) set up a fake Cialis blog -- on Google's own Blogspot.com domain, no less -- and used Technorati tags to tag each post the same way: "Buy Cialis Online. FDA Approved Quality Pills. cialisxl." So queries like [cialis] and [buy cialis online] show sites like the Technorati tag page in their top results, since Technorati tag pages are crawled and indexed by Google. Again, once the user clicks over, it requires another click to get to the actual pill sales site. And even if the user clicks over from the Technorati tag page to the fake blog (cialisbuyonline1.blogspot.com), the user never even sees the blog -- instead, falling prey to a JavaScript redirect to xlpharmacy.com.

Neither of these techniques is particularly new, which is part of the problem. Pharm SERPs seems to be as useless and irrelevant as they've always been, representing one of the biggest problems that engines' anti-spam teams face right now.

Posted by erik at 02:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 17, 2007

An Ampersand Gets More Results Than All Other Punctuation, Combined

This is one of those few demonstrably true things. Even though it might actually be more accurately described as a symbol, in our character-challenged world of SEO Title tags we are more likely to view it in the same manner we view the disappearing punctuation mark.

But Google knows it is a logogram, and treats it as such, differently from the mere punctuation it eschews.

Try each one of these searches yourself and tell me which one is the outlier: [!], [@], [(], [)], [-], [;], [:], [“], [‘], [,], [.], [?], [/]—and—[&]!

& is also so well respected as to have its own eponymous magazine. Now what punctuation can also claim that?

Posted by john at 03:05 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 13, 2007

Wagon Mourns Howard Cunningham, And Wiki is an Honorable Man

Friends, Romans, SEOs, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Howard, not to praise him;
The actors that play men live after them,
Their characters loop in syndication,
So let it be with Howard…. The noble Wiki
Hath told you Howard was fictitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Howard answered it….

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Cunningham

O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason…. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Howard,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

Posted by tom at 11:28 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 12, 2007

Web 2.0 Product and Domain-Naming -- from 1877

I came across a perspective-offering gem today while listening to the Writer's Almanac (Real Audio version).

It's the birthday of the man who gave us the Kodak camera, George Eastman, born in Waterville, New York. He was working at a bank when he got interested in photography around 1877. He took his first dry plate photograph the next year with the camera that he invented—a view of the building across the street from his window. He developed this little handheld camera, and he called it the Kodak because it was easy to remember, difficult to misspell, and it meant nothing, so it could only be associated with his product.

With company (i.e. domain) names always a hot issue, especially as they pertain to search reputation management, typo traffic, and owning the SERP for your company/product searches, it's quite interesting to hear similar philosophies dredged up from yesteryear.

Stories like this always make me happy that I'm not in charge of the search presence for the Hilton hotel in Paris.

Posted by erik at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 11, 2007

SEO Tools: SEO For Firefox

One of the tools I'm using more often these days is the "SEO For Firefox" extension/add-on created by Aaron Wall. SEO For Firefox provides site information including:

* Google PageRank
* Google Cache Date (date Google last cached the page)
* Cached (number of pages indexed at Google)
* Yahoo Links (incoming links from other domains according to Yahoo)
* Google Supplemental (number of pages in Google's supplemental index - see Erik's last post for an update on GSI)

One way to use it in Firefox is by selecting Tools > SEO For Firefox > Lookup Tool and entering a URL. Here's what the result looks like (click thumbnail image):

I use SEO For Firefox more often when searching at Google or Yahoo. Under each site listed in the search results, site information appears directly below each search engine result. Here's what it looks like (click thumbnail image)::

Each of the individual site "info blocks" are clickable if you want to dive in deeper and each can be turned on or off via the Options Menu. I recommend only turning on the info blocks that you are most interested in analyzing or monitoring since the more you have turned on, the longer it takes the program to pull all this information for every search engine result.

Also, when you're not needing this comparative site data, you can click the button in the lower right corner of Firefox to turn the program off.

Posted by doug at 02:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 06, 2007

Google Weighs in on Image Replacement (sIFR)

On the rare occasion when an engine expresses an actual opinion on a real technique, It's a welcome, welcome sight. So imagine my glee when I read Google Webmaster Central Blog's take on dealing with Flash.

While John lamented the mixed signals just last month, we've been asking the question internally for years: From a best practices standpoint, does image replacement stand safely in the DMZ of glorified CSS, or does it boldly encroach the characteristic of "showing engines one thing and users another"?

And that's just the beginning. The real problem, when you're using image replacement, is not the insertion of stylized copy, but instead, what you do with the HTML text you're replacing. Some systems simply let it lie underneath the script-spawned Flash layer, while some use "hidden" status in CSS, while still others pull it off the visible screen and hard-code it somewhere in the -5000px range -- each of which is detectable and grounds for a good spanking if your motives are anything but pure. Traditionally, that left us with the worries of trusting the algorithm to detect our motives.

But forget all that, because today we know, and we know it based on the way all such things are Known -- because it's mentioned in an official Google blog, midstream in a list of "practical suggestions" about how to deal with Flash:

sIFR: Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML -- it's just displayed by an embedded Flash object.

This proclamation, coming on the heels of Independence Day, is fitting, because no longer are we bound by the tyranny of not knowing on whose side of the fight sIFR truly sits.

Posted by erik at 07:20 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 03, 2007

SEO Speedwagon Enters its Third Year

Over the weekend, SEO Speedwagon celebrated its second birthday, which I suppose means we're beginning to enter the "terrible twos."

With any luck, we'll be able to effectively deal with problems that surround typical two-year-olds, such as the following:

• Increasing our vocabulary (more categories!)
• Effectively dealing with our waste (pages in the Supplemental Index)
• Learning how to share (better linking out to SEO resources)
• Handling growth (Intrapromote is adding staff -- and that means more bloggers!)
• Trying not to annoy you by constantly asking "why?" (we are inquisitive, after all)

For some historical perspective, here are some of the issues that were on the plate in the summer of 2005, when we started blogging:

• Adwords introducing geo-targeting and dropping five-cent minimum bids
• Click fraud reaching $1B annually (by some estimates)
• Ask (Jeeves) and MSN publicizing their imminent PPC systems
• Google's quarterly profits growing four-fold over the same period in 2004

Looking back, we've acquired a really strong and loyal group of readers, and we really appreciate the feedback we receive. Here's to a strong third year.

Posted by erik at 12:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 02, 2007

Wiki Offers SEO an Olive Branch?

Have you looked at Today's featured article at Wikipedia? Cue the apocalypse. . .

Wiki is featuring SEO in its Article of the Day. In other news, Donald Trump has appointed Rosie O'Donnell as his next apprentice.

Posted by tom at 10:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack