If ever you were in doubt that there was random magic in SEO then ‘Define an English person’ should display that there is some unknowns.
Define:English Person
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Every. Single. Day. someone asks why this metric doesn’t correlate to that metric, or if this metric is this number and that metric is another number then why the third calculated metric is different to the calculation.
Generally all metrics are shit, and about to get a hell of a lot shitter with the EU Cookie crapery, but that’s a whole different post
None are more shitter than Referral Tracking
[Read the rest of this entry...]
So a lot of sites have some fun exploits they leave lying around,
here’s one:
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/celebrities/lady-gaga/
notice the ‘next 40 stories’ link at the bottom of the article list, paging through that means:
Hi,
In the last couple of weeks I’ve spent quite a large amount of time playing with analytics, most specifically Omniture.
I don’t know about other analytics packages (well, I do but I can’t be arsed to think about it), but Omniture has a massive implementation flaw, which of course opens the door for some fun.
There seems to be no security tie between the page containing the beacon and Omniutre, what I mean is, that Omniture servers will accept a beacon ping from anywhere, any page on the internet.
Sooo, for instance, I could wander over to Apple and have a quick shifty at their Omniture beacon and then copy it into any page on the web, and that page would start contributing data into Apple’s Omniture account. They have no domain blacklist / whitelist you see.
So this is where any SEO would start thinking, ‘How can I push this ?’
Well, since the ping to the server is javascript generated, this means you can easily script the beacon transmit function ( s.t() ) to send all manner of fun stuff into the Apple Omniture account.
Obviously, once you can push false stats into a sites analytics, you’re going to be able to generate a shitload of headscratching by anyone within the organisation that spends time analysing those stats for leverage, which is usually the SEO guy.
kekekekekekeke
I’ve been really hung-up on whether to write this post or not. There’s a general likelihood that it may cause the de-indexation of this site. Search Engines should not be editors, but they possibly will seek to protect their business. That will make this an interesting experiment.
Advertising
Most Search Engines generate revenue from advertising, some search engines facilitate this advertising on 3rd party sites (we don’t display ads, but wordpress even has easy plugins for publishing these adverts). There’s some guidelines about what you can publish, etc.
The basic model, as I’m sure you are aware is that a Merchant asks a Search Engine to display an advert in some way when a certain phrase or word is searched for and then will pay on each click, or to contextually analyse the page surrounding the advert and deliver the Merchants advert into places where the contextualisation is correct. In this second model, the website displaying the advert gets a portion of the click revenue when an action is performed.
All this works terribly well, and barring some clickfraud skullduggery it’s a model which seems set to continue.
Micropayments
The more astute amongst you will have realised where this is going already.
Forever, Business has been working on a way of acquiring micropayments for web content. But have generally failed to come up with a pain free way of harvesting these from passing Audience who generally feel that web content should be free.
Obviously, Business is doing it the wrong way round, and there’s no alternative for them.
Tips Jar
Imagine, during your general trawling around the web, say from Digg or Fark or B3ta or wherever, you had a low impact mechanism to thank a publisher of some content you liked by dropping a few proper real world coins into their tip jar. All it would take would be about 3 mouse clicks.
Would you do it?
You go to a site, you see something that genuinely interested you written by a small time website owner desperate to make a few bucks here and there from his site.
Would you do it? Would you?
If you do, just make sure you visit a few pages wherever you end up.
Martin knew many people globally, he was a world citizen and, frankly, an oddball.
There was some uncertainty whether the tales he told were true, or tall. It didn’t matter, he was a force of nature, often infuriating, often cocky but always full of ideas on how he was going to make the world better.
I knew him while he lived in London, always talking about the 8 bedroom apartment he was going to rent in Kensington and flat share with several super models who ironed his shirts. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, this is the enigma that was Martin Schaedel.
Rest In Peace, Martin Scheadel.
In my humble opinion, which isn’t worth much, the public face of SEO in the U.S., for all their publicity attention seeking, is a failure. We’ve written about it here before, about how Superstar SEOs san about on the back of doubling the traffic to a site back in 2001 which they think gives them an open ticket to stand up, claim they’re the best SEO in the world and join the speakers circuit *yawn*.
And this works for them, they’ll get the call offering them some money to go mend something somewhere .. and panic.
For people with an ounce of knowledge about SEO, the U.S. has always appeared behind the curve, this is fine for them, their audience is vast and a teensy bit of SEO knowledge can make some gains, changing an ‘and’ to an ‘&’ in a title tag say. They still constantly whitter about PageRank and Keyphrase density and spam tagcoulds onto anything they can find – Zzzzz.
There are a few U.S. SEOs that we know of that actually ‘get it’ – the whole thing, the whole kit and kaboodle, everything from stats implementation and shortcomings, through Business Intelligence, onward through prioritised reccomendations, into implementation and through Executive reporting (‘here’s a graph, it goes up … that’s a Good Thing for your company’
It was through Jessica (indirectly, she doesn’t know me), that I landed on this article – which is possibly one of the most intelligent writings I’ve seen about SEO so far this year (and by far one of the most interesting to come out of the U.S.)
Have a read, It starts of with an interview of Stephan Spencer who nails it, and then moves to Jessica who puts icing on the cake
enjoy
Yahoo! can’t have a lot of faith in their Web Analytics suite (formerly IndexTools). I say this because they are using free 3rd party analytics software on several of their sites instead.
We recently exposed the use of Google Analytics on the Yahoo! Rivals site which was bad enough.
You can imagine my shock when I discovered Google Analytics code on the Yahoo! Search Blog:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-6563788-1″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>
Great PR.
Article has moved Yahoo! Rivals Analytics
Because we are fucking useless
by the way
PARIS HILTON SEX TAPE FREE DOWNLOAD
I’m place-marking this to take to bits later, so far I can’t read past the second paragraph without exploding
MSNBC MSN Article on SEO
