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!

Yahoo backlinks down

Yup – 2nd consecutive week to see a drop in backlinks from Yahoo!  And we are not the only ones.  Is a Yahoo Update Underway?

Traffic is strategy and pages indexed has not changed – so nothing to get too worried about yet but, as we do not have 1,000’s of spammy inbound links, it is of slight concern.

Nooooo! not again

Anyone remember the SouthWest Airlines virtual checking homepage from 2001?  Surely it can’t really be making a comeback Virtual Shopping Malls Making a Comeback?

Social bookmark sites not cutting it for B2B

Hmm .. don’t often disagree with any musings from the SEOmoz lot but I do take issue with SEOmoz Blog | Interesting Little Technorati Link/Rank Tool.

I often feel the SEM/O community generalises the extent to which all the digg/technorati community sites affect B2B traffic and business.  You only have to look at the categories for existing material to see it is deeply unattractive to any exec wishing to research their individual sector or business.  Sure, we have submitted our best stories to Digg and, fair play, achieved some traffic but no conversion and thus useless.  Cracking the business community is tough – you only have to see how few forums succeed to understand the scale of the task but, if someone managed it, what a gold mine.  And don’t even get me started on Alexa!

Google customers better spenders than Yahoo or MSN

More gems from Google Analytics : Google search customers convert better than Yahoo … close to double the spend per visitor.  This runs counter to a study by WebSideStory claiming customers found AOL and MSN converted best followed by Yahoo then Google last of all. 

Ok, so we are firmly in vertical B2B space but this was historically the domain of Yahoo – have Google really become the defacto standard for consumers and business alike?  I remember an SE conference in 2003 where many speakers were adamant in the dominance of Yahoo for non-geek searching.  How times have changed. 

Odd Google URL requests

Hmm .. odd one this morning.  Checking Google webmaster tools for the sites this morning and noticed 431 pages not found by the crawler.  Ok, some are historical .asp files that we never bothered to move over the .aspx but others are a bit more worrying.  There has been a sudden rash of requests where the “?” and “=” parameter characters have been grunged : article.aspx%3FID%3D89362&lk%3Dnp.  Now this is a straight forward Next and Previous article link so why it got munged ….. a puzzle.  Given over 400 in a few days, I am leaning towards it being a rogue bot scraper copying the content somewhere.  Time to go trawling in the log files.

Backlinks and a glorious tool

We have an in-house resource that recently started obtaining backlinks. Until now, it had been a very sporadic activity relying on a combination of boredom and panic to instigate a flurry of activity for a few days.  Hardly productive to put it mildly.  Fortunately, our new employee had that elusive combination of web literacy and an innate sense of how to write empathic emails.  Her customer service missives are received with none of the usual cynicism by customers and she has retrieved a good few people from the unsubscribing.

Now, in our sectors, 200 backlinks represents good going – there are that few reference sites. So finding a good quality backlink tool for her to use was essential.  Up popped a recommendation for Backlinks Analyzer tool while trawling YAB (yet another blog): wonderful! It organises competitor backlinks by .edu, .org, .com. etc. and weeds out duplicate linking. Absolutely perfect. She now has our top 5 competitor’s sites and about 3 months worth of link requests to work though. Lovely pre-Xmas present and a highly recommended tool.

SPF … its magic I tell you

Ok, finally got round to looking at why the 1000’s of AOL readers on our mailing lists don’t always receive their daily or weekly emails. Aside from some truly abhorrent anti-spam policies, it appears AOL likes you to have SPF records for each sending domain. So, after a few quick checks at dnsstuff.com I determined, just as I thought, we had no such entry against any of the domains.

For the terminally DNS challenged like me, a Sender Policy Framework is simply way for the receiving email system to verify that the email is being sent from a server authorised to do so. And it is a simple one line update to each domain record.  You can see the effects from different IPs from here : SPF Validation

A few ping-pong emails to our ISPs support desk later, and we have 5 brand spanking new SPF records. I remain to be convinced this will help get through the AOL eye of a needle but – ho hum – can’t but help can it.

As for other reasons – work your way though AOLs guide here. [grumble]