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

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.

The loss of Martin in a light aircraft accident at Santa Monica airport leaves the world a lot less colourful and definitely more lonely.

Rest In Peace, Martin Scheadel.

SEO-001

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’

Jessica Bowman

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

SEO at Enterprise level is a flop

SEO-001

SEO-001

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-EfRLaZFSU

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