Now Digg has grown too big for it’s boots

There is little justification for Digg acting as it does.  Sure, ban spam pages designed to sucker in Adsense revenue but Squidoo, Digital Point forums, SEO News Blog?  It is hard to see any justification for these except that they proved too popular.  But is that not the whole point of community tagging?  Have I missed something vital here?

And the List of Domains Ditched by Digg Keeps Growing

Quick status of your pages in Google

Small, perfectly formed and even useful : Google Webmaster Tools – Site Status

That said, Google Webmaster tools are more useful but can be dreadfully slow.

1157 US patents containing “Search engine”

The newly released Google patent search tool provides an endless opportunity for digging up the bizarre and downright unbelievable.  However, it is also useful to glimpse what some of the larger internet monoliths are pondering.  Try using the tool to find all terms containing the words “search engine” ; all the usual culprits pop up – Overture, Napster, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Google.  It is also fascinating to see the the age of many filings – their subject matter is as relevant now as they obviously predicted it would be. 

I can smell the scent of lawyers from here.

Very funny ….

A bit late but this is most amusing.  A commercial site asking a blogger to remove their content from Google as it ranks higher!

Cloaking good or evil?

Cloaking good or evil?  Does it depend on your site’s reputation as far as Google is concerned? Does Google Allow Cloaking When They Like the Site?

Now this is not just an esoteric question for us.  The majority of our material is locked behind at least a free registration screen – and the very best behind a paid membership program.  Now if Google are serious about indexing the deep web then our situation must be taken account of and some solution provided to at least expose the value of the non-paid for material.  Sure, we can cloak for now (and probably get away with it) but this only a band-aid, and a germ ridden one at that.

I know Google have a premium content programme but it seems to have gone very quiet.  Please Google, speak to us content owners that need to make a living from our material rather than rely on ads.

New Firefox Google Toolbar

Well, in beta but nice to see the IE toolbar feature upgrades from ages ago is now available for us f’foxers.

Official Google Blog: Nifty Toolbar upgrades for Firefox

Clickfraud less than 2%?

Been following this for a bit but this is a great post by Shuman Ghosemajumder on his quote to the effect clock fraud in Google was less than 2%.  In fact, while quoted this by Andy Beal, what he said was that the quantity of invalid clicks which were detect as a result of reactive investigations was a “negligible proportion” – and then clarified negligible as under 2%. 

A subtle difference but important .. Google, Click Fraud, and Invalid Clicks | shumans.com

Incliment weather for Yahoo!?

Missed this yesterday, but was rather tied up in budgets and planning. Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update

Must remember to dig into my Yahoo! keywords and backlinks on Friday.

New google finance tools

Like it .. Google Finance

Enough to knock Yahoo! finance off it’s perch.  Nope, but getting there.

SPF .. again

Ok .. ok .. I know it is a bug-bear of mine at present but a 15% rise in AOL traffic is nothing to sneeze at. And, as this rise coincided with the SPF record change, I thought bingo. But … the rise is only present on 3 of the 4 sites. Typically, the largest AOL subscriber base has seen it’s 3rd week on week decrease. Ideas .. none. I really hate AOL!

Blogging still on the rise

57 million and counting ….

Mailing list tools

We have given up.  Last year, we purchased a “commercial grade” email system that claimed to integrate with our SQL database with ease.  Yet it has been getting progressively slower and slow to the point that each hour’s send-list was taking over 80 mins to get out the door.  Ok, so each slot might be going out to 200,000 opt-in people but all this app had to do was create the individual emails.  Sending is taken care of by the absolutely wonderful Lyris mail engine (never failed).

So … techies to the rescue : cue one home-written email application coded inside of 3 days and now sends the entire hour’s job lot in under 15 mins.  Not exactly rocket science [sigh] and makes the $3k+ app look a little sad.

And the issue? Well, I have been fighting a rearguard action to convince others that we should be using our scarce resources to better effect than re-inventing the wheel each time we see a problem.  Don’t you know it – the wheel we then go and buy is not only flat but square!

How about buying into hosted email delivery systems?

Sadly, once you reach 200,000+ emails a day, the cost per email starts to get prohibitive.  One popular service lets me email 100,000 people for about $500 six times.  Hmm .. that $2000 per site per month.  Not feasible.

Back then to the latest in re-invented wheels … shiny new alloys with split rims anyone?

Clash of cultures?

According to complete.com, Yahoo!’s peanut butter episode has done little to stem the decline in it’s share of the search audience.  Indeed, the Sunnyvale lads and ladies are suffering one of the worst declines in the last year. 

And these figures are certainly reflected in our own visitors stats.  Google has been on a consistent rise for 9 months – with a huge jump around August for some unexplained reason.  Oddly, I still feel Yahoo!’s search results are often far less spammy than Google – but is the brand any longer as strong.  The complete.com evidence would suggest they are being out-marketed by the whole search industry including Ask.  And most had written them off as a major player earlier this year.

SPF records

Darn .. Monday morning and I find out that the SPF domain record changes have only just propagated.   This accounts for why the Thursday and Friday daily emails did not deliver the expected rise in AOL traffic.   To be honest, I am a bit sceptical about the whole SPF business (and other mail approval schemes) but it is a ticked box and at least is one less reason to worry.

Update : Well, looks like they are working. Email bounces we experienced last week are no longer arriving back from the likes of Hotmail. Woooo !!

Call me cynical ….

I love google alerts. Especially when one tells me we have new link-love for one of the sites.

Call me cynical, however, but Sports Direct Online » I was backpacking in the Sleeping Bear Dunes smacks too much as SEM spam.  And not too good an attempt either.  I assume it is some form of affiliate marketing/adwords wheeze but very poorly implemented.  It reminds me to revive a YAP (Yet Another Project) I have had on the back burner for months – an anti-bot mechanism for the sites.  From last month’s logs I estimated a good 20% of bandwidth was sucked by scammy scrapers and other scum extracting our content for nefarious purposes.  IncrediBill has the right approach – ban the lot!