Alexa has been providing meaningless data even before they were purchased by Amazon.com. Unfortunately people still reference Alexa data as if they were the holy all seeing manager of the internet. They aren’t, and therefore have unreliable data. It is easy to see why so many people (and even venture capitalists) want to believe in the Alexa.com data – it’s the only data we have. Compete.com has a similar internet traffic profile statistics program, and it will be interesting to see if they can deliver better results than Alexa.
For traffic modeling sites such as these, in general the more popular a website is the more accurate stats are produced by these 3rd party programs.
Here is a search that will bend your mind: try looking up Alexa on Alexa. It shows 0 results. Why? Because every Alexa user has the alexa toolbar installed by default and this would skew their results close to 100% internet reach, when in reality their installed base is closer to 1%.
CmdrTaco from Slashdot writes:
Alexa doesn’t work because of who will install it, and perhaps more importantly, who won’t. Let’s start with a place I’m very familiar with: Slashdot readers. Until recently Alexa didn’t work on Firefox… instead only IE users participated. On the internet as a whole that’s fine: like 80% of users run IE. But on Slashdot only like a quarter of you do.
Google used to have a supplementary index where it would list lower quality pages and pages that could be duplicate content. This was called the supplemental index and it gave SEO’s fits for years. In the summer of 2007 Google abandoned the Supplemental Index and officially states that supplemental results no longer exist.
While visiting the Googleplex for the search engine strategies conference in San Jose I spoke with a Google engineer who said this about the supplemental index: “We took that dog out back and shot it.”
So now the SEO industry has no easy way to see our pages which have been flagged as second tier, duplicate content, or pages without enough links to appear in the regular index.
Here are 2 searches you can perform to replicate supplemental results:
I have a love hate relationship with Google Analytics. This is a fantastic program with a great user interface and conversion settings that are second to none. GA is also easy to setup, configure and use in real life, features that are not shared with other major analytics programs.
What I dislike about Google Analytics is giving my your data to my largest referral source. Installing this javascript on a website is the same as giving Google the keys to your safe deposit box – they will know everything about you. Google will know exactly how many visitors you get, where these visitors come from, how many pages they view and what they buy from you. Google will know if you are faking anything or if you have poor conversions. And they could use this data against you by lowering your natural rankings or increasing your Adwords CPC.
Anyway here is an awesome flash program that allows you to run Google Analytics on your desktop without having to be online.
Nicolas wrote this awesome program WITHOUT using an API. Yes he just hacked the GA data to import it into Adobe AIR. Very cool. Download Google Analytics on AIR.
This is a great video interview with the current Playboy Playmate of the Year, Sara Underwood. This blonde is loaded with investment advice and is ready to help you pick winning stocks. Watch as the Playboy Playmate chats about her investing strategy and which stocks to pick for 2007.
Live video interview from the 2007 Magic Apparel Convention in Las Vegas Nevada. Playboy is well represented at this high end womens clothing show.
Actually, Sara Underwood doesn’t know much about investing but is very experienced at being the Playboy Playmate of the Year. She should become a video blogger!
Dmoz, where art thou? Thou hast forsaken your loyal users and contributors and become a tyrannical organization. Dmoz.org founder Rich Skrenta opines on the ongoing internal struggle of the open directory, and how many problems could be related to retaliation by Time Warner employees over the failed merer with AOL.com.
Skrenta admits that dmoz is broken and has succombed to SEO’s. He seems to relish the fact that the site had a PageRank of 10 and forced Google to re-engineer their algorithms to accomodate the dmoz spam. Everyone knew a listing in the open directory was worth gold, and now it literally seems to require gold (or cash) to be added.
I have been a contributing member of the open directory since 1999 and during my time as an edit of several small categories I took great pride in makine sure only quality sites were listed. Approximately 1 in 5 submitted sites were good enough to be listed, and the rest were low quality spam.
A brief history of dmoz:
Originally launched as NewHoo in 1998
Aquisition offer from Infoseek.com 1 month later
Sold to Netscape.com in 1999
Netscape was sold to AOL.com in 2000
6 week dmoz outage in 2006
September 2007 Dmoz Google SERP’s problem
Google search engine results page for the dmoz search. Note dmoz.org is not #1.
Many websites and blogs are discussing the current state and future possibilities of Dmoz, but the biggest question is how many people really care? I mean seriously, who uses the open directory as an information resource?
Filed under linkbuilding, since no one outside the search engine optimization community seems to know what Dmoz.org is.
Microsoft, its just unfortunate to be you at the moment. Your MSN, Windows Live, Live.com or whatever you call your search engine these days is great at providing results from your company’s personal websites, but doesn’t distribure top rankings evenly.
In the screenshot below, 70% of the links point back to a Microsoft owned website. I did a search for templates, and MSN clearly thinks it has the best templates as it dominates the top 7 keyword positions. Microsoft, if i really wanted to only search for microsoft templates, I would have used a keyword like “microsoft template”.
It has been 2 years since the launch of MSN search, and there are still major problems.
Microsoft Live Search Bias:
Come on MSN, this really makes you look bad. And you wonder why your Live.com search engine marketshare is decreasing.
In August 2007 , Google Sites maintained its position atop the core search rankings with 56.5 percent of U.S. searches, gaining 1.3 share points versus the previous month. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 23.3 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (11.3 percent), Time Warner Networks (4.5 percent) and Ask Network (4.5 percent).
Try out Miva pay per click advertising and get $25 in free clicks. Miva.com provides valuable traffic for some products and is definitely worth trying out for your website. Miva.com is the #4 PPC player behind Adsense, Adcenter, Ask and YSM. Miva delivers about 1/10 the traffic that Google Adsense provides, but it is about 1/10 the cost.
For example, the keyword “mortgage broker” is around $60 per click on Adsense and around $3 on Miva.
New advertisers signing up to MIVA today get $25 in free advertising, which is a good deal. My experience is that websites selling products will have higher conversion rates than sites selling services.
Miva has gone through a raft of name changes and product switches and was originally called Findwhat.com. Miva was originally an e-commerce shopping cart solution which is now on a new domain mivamerchant.com. Miva is definitely pushing its Pay-Per-Click Ads over the shopping cart solution as a way to increase their recurring revenue.
Another new offering my Miva is Miva MC with is their acronym for Monetization Center. Think of Miva MC as a clone of Google Adsense. Miva MC lets you the publisher place inline pay per click ads in your content and get paid per click.
Miva MC offers 3 types of contextual advertising (just like Adsense): Content ads, Inline ads (similar to Kontera) and search ads.
I have not yet tried Miva MC but look forward to reviewing this contextual ad service in the future. MIVA, if you’re reading this please send me a free coupon to try your contextual ad product and I will signup and do a writeup.
This post title is perhaps a bit harsh and may not be justified, but 2 things are true: Blogrush is an externally hosted widget that will increase website load times, and Blogrush is growing exponentially.
I have just started using Blogrush and to get the most value out of this blog widget you will need to be an early adopter.
The main benefits of this service is allowing you to find new sites related to your blog. There are probably hundreds of people in your niche that have interesting things to say, and you will never read them. This is like personalized autodiscovery for blogs, and gives you an indication of what you will find, unlike services from stumbleupon.com. Also, Blogrush has an affiliate program, while stumbleupon does not. What is cooler than getting credits for new signups?
I just saw a pretty good deal on the Verizon DSL website. This only indirectly affects online marketers who work from their home or office. We are a captive audience, because you can’t remove the “online” from online marketing. The cost of unreliable internet service is way too high to justify using cheap DSL.
The are offering 768 Kbps high speed Verizon DSL for $14.99/mo with a two year contract. With this 2 year agreement and $14.99 price point, Verizon is guaranteeing this price for life as long as you stay an active Verizon DSL customer.
Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, and a good indicator that high speed internet prices will be falling in the future. Competition is great for the internet marketplace, and telcos are in a fierce battle with cable companies over the right to provide you entertainment services. Verizon FIOS is a faster internet service with up to 5 Mbps. I’ve been considering FIOS, and at $29.99 per month it seems like a pretty good deal, especially if it can replace my cable.
This is just a note that has nothing to do with Verizon DSL service. Since I pay Verizon almost $150/mo for my DSL and cellphone service this is a company I interact with regularly, and they interact with me regularly by debiting my bank account monthly.
I can’t stand their company name and still think it is the most ridiculous company name aside from squidoo.com. Verizon has very reliable broadband services but the name sounds like some sort of Mormon version of Zion on the horizon. While i’m railing on verizon, im not a fan of their corporate color scheme, it reminds me of a fire department that tries to do tech. The Verizon.com website really doesn’t do much for me either, its plain like the 1950’s. Luckily their service rocks, otherwise this company would be in trouble.
*update*
Argh – i misspelled their name Verizion – damn this name is confusing.
This is cool – the Google Plane. This airplane is not actually owned by Google, but solely by the 2 cofounders Larry Page and Sergy Brin. The plane is owned through a Delaware holding company and The FAA Registry states Blue City Holdings LLC. Oklahoma City as owner.
The plane originally had seating capacity for 180, but was modified to seat 50. Now the plane features hammocks hung from the ceiling and possibly a California king size bed for Brin.
Hotshot designer Leslie Jennings, who has done work for Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was hired to retrofit the plane, but this ended in a huge dispute and a lengthy lawsuit. The plane has now been retrofitted, and is jetting Google executives all around the world.
This widebody Boeing aircraft is capable of transoceanic flights and can carry 6 full sized cargo containers.
More recently, Sergy and Larry have been flying into the military base in the silicon valley, Moffett Field. This airport is restricted to military and government use only, and strictly prohibits private and even commercial air traffic. But the google plane has been seen coming and going from this off limits airport. Not even Larry Ellison has this much pull with the air traffic control board of the San Francisco Bay Area.
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