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

Q: What is a Referrer?
A: In this instance, we’re talking about the last site you visited, in an ideal world, your browser would remember every site you visit, in order and tell the next site, which site you were last on. This is a browser function, it’s client side functionality, it’s the individuals browser that remembers the last site you were on and gives that information to the next site visited.

So hang on, you’ve generated a reliance on a metric that requires each and every single person who visits your sites browser to blag where they came from?

Hopefully, you’re starting to see why this is bullshit.

Lots of people, quite rightly, don’t want a site to know where they’ve come from, or the last site they were on, all manner of malarky could ensue so mechanisms exist to make sure that the referrer is not kept or transmitted by the browser.

Or you might be on a secure site, which links out to another site, that second site shouldn’t really be passed the secure site as the referrer, that might make it … insecure

Referrer tracking is great for web owners, many a happy hour can be spent grepping the log for referrers and then visiting them to see what they are (you can see the stupidity in this also, web owner ping pong)

Referrer log spamming used to be a great laugh, especially on those .edu or .ac.uk sites which published their AWStats, inbound from a University domain anyone?

Anyway, the myriad of things that strip the refferer include things like personal privacy software, corporate firewall, browser settings, some browser plugins, some redirects, etc etc etc

Referrer tracking is shit, but it’s some kind of barometric

I heard B&Q the major purveyor of fine quality tools and materials for builders, trade, plumbers for all your household needs was thinking of selling www.diy.com – which of course is madness (even though it’s worth a mint).

They’d easily make more money than the URL is worth, even in this economic climate, if they made the site useful in any way at all.

There’s so many half cocked attempts at plugging content in there (it’s actually got some good DIY guides if you can be arsed to hunt around for a couple of hours to try and find them). and theyre pimping it so hard with great big offer gif’s that the site is unusable.

The search and navigation is fatally broken.

Here’s a challenge – go to the B&Q website at www.diy.com and try to find out if they sell a bathroom wall light with a shaving plug.

It’s fun for all the family. It’s like a Pirate Treasure Hunt – ARRRRRRRRR

SEO-001

Some of you might have had the misfortune to try and use their weirdy site, which has far too many problems to list here.

Anyway, so, you’ve got a calamitous CMS system, it happens to us all, what do you do. I tell you what you do, you try and bolt some ‘save-yer-ass’ SEO onto it that’s what. Behold:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_en-GB&q=inurl%3awww.currys.co.uk+inurl%3aseo

For example:

http://www.currys.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/234260

Automatically I’d be thinking I’d be looking at some kind of doorway sub-site, but it’s all so mashed up and broken that it’s of no use at all. I don’t really know what it’s trying to do.

Anyone who remember the SEO/Google ‘Tolerance Years’ will shudder that an SEO is flagging his SEO work by using SEO as a directory point.

ho hum

SEO-001

Hopefully this means an end to the ’Buy a Steam Cleaner for you Dad as a Christmas present, it’s what they always wanted. It makes a perfect present, and comes in a lovely big box which looks great when wrapped up.’ bollocks on the Shopping channels.

I had a look at the QVC site in passing, look at this disaster:

http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/view.2/app.detail/params.item.V25685.desc.Karcher-1500-PSI-Pressure-Washer-w-Dirtblasterand-VPS-Wand

Homepage duplication:
http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/view.2/
http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/

Dead Directory:
http://www.qvc.com/qic/

 Logo links to:

http://www.qvc.com/?rewrite=no&cm_re=MH-_-LOGO-_-LOGO&cm_sp=MH-_-LOGO-_-LOGO

ooh look:

http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/view.2/app.detail/params.item.Kiss-My-Arse

returns a 200, so if it’s linked to, it’ll get indexed

sheesh, what a mess, and thats just the start of it – there’s loads more like how they’re (mis)handling internationalisation and stuff, but Meh! I’ve got a turkey to cook

SEO-001

We’re playing as we go along with it, we’ve never used wordpress before and it has some limitations. Som of which we’ve fixed, some of which are being fixed, and some of which will never be fixed.

Mostly, this site is just a chassis. Imagine being asked the question

‘So have you ever seen a site which does …example… very well?’

and having to keep a catalogue of sites in your head, because not one site does everything perfectly – well.. we’re having a go, but none of us wanted to hand code a site from the ground up (we don’t have time) so slapping WordPress into some webspace became the obvious answer.

Some things we’re currently having some problems with include:

Over-riding auto generated meta descriptions
A nice 404 page
Recent searches

for example

Anyway, we’re getting through the list as best we can.

This post is a category pinch-point as well

Go to the Your SEO is shit hompage

I’ve been working in the SEO industry for over a decade and never once have I posted in a forum, written a blog post about SEO or spoken in public about what I do.

The reason: the best SEOs in the industry operate in stealth mode.

I realise the irony that I’m now posting a blog entry about this, but I’m using the alias SEO-003 to prove that I’m not doing it for my own personal gain.

It has become a necessity for me to vent about the industry I work in to prevent me from suffering a stroke or other debilitating mental breakdown.

While the true SEOs toil away and perfect their craft, the celebrity SEOs perfect their public brand as a façade for their lack of knowledge.

If you are a true SEO, run silent, run deep (unless you need to blog under an alias to prevent yourself from suffering a brain haemorrhage).

More rants to follow.

SEO-003

Background:

Yahoo! spent a lot of money on:

a). Rivals.com – a sporty site type thing, not really my cup of tea – but gotta love those spammy footers huh
b). IndexTools – a brilliant analytics product

And they MUST have some kind of corporate traffic reporting anyway, for ads n stuff…. So you gotta ask yourself:

Why has Rivals.com implemented Google Analytics?

<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”><!– var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-3966162-2″);pageTracker._setDomainName(“rivals.com”);pageTracker._initData();pageTracker._trackPageview(); // –></script>

Apart from everything, this phrase springs to mind:

(5M pageview cap per month for non AdWords advertisers.) 

SEO-001