Posts from ‘Google’
Google’s internet service now a reality?
Google just announced what looks to be a trial period of its internet service wrapped up in a nice looking Holiday package.
When you’re traveling this holiday season, you can enjoy free WiFi at 47 participating airports and on every Virgin America flight. Just bring a WiFi-enabled laptop or mobile device and stay connected to family and friends for free while you travel now through January 15, 2010.
The airports included are listed here. Information about the free inflight service Continue Reading
During the past few days I’ve noticed a lot of junk results in our GetClicky account. We track several thousands visits a day via GetClicky, and a major portion of this traffic comes via organic search. Most of it via Google.
These “junk results” (this is what I consider them) basically show Google.com as the referrer, and include no data on the keywords or keyphrases searched to reach our pages. Usually what we see is the full URL for the search query, which gives us keyword data and in turn helps us understand our audience and what they’re looking for.
At first I had no idea why this was happening, and my first instinct was to blame GetClicky for providing the junk data. However, when I logged in today I saw a link to this GetClicky blog post.
I’m not going to quote any of the post here because unless you read the entire page you might end up a bit confused. In summary, though, Google is testing a change in the way they handle referring URL’s that essentially blocks analytics programs from being able to track search data.
What this means for you and I is that if Google proceeds with this (and we’re already seeing it roll out into production stage), you and I will have no clue what people are searching for when they find our pages.
And if that doesn’t already get your blood boiling, here is the real kicker… Google can STILL track data and provide it via Google Analytics. Why? Because Google still has this data internally, so there is really no reason to assume they can’t push it into Google analytics.
In other words… Google appears to be telling webmasters and anyone who tracks search data that you have to use Google Analytics or you simply can’t track search data at all. Which, in effect, might render stat trackers obsolete.
The Smackdown blog has a great rundown of the situation. I highly recommend you have a read.
I think this is a really low blow if it turns out to be a permanent change. What say you?
John McCain’s campaign staff might want to start paying attention to the chatter going on in the left wing side of the blogosphere regarding his search engine results.
It is time to start bomb bomb bomb, bomb bombing again. No, not Iran, but John McCain’s Google ranking.
In looking for a search engine optimization against McCain, the first step is to choose good websites to optimize. Here some criteria for good websites:
* The website should already be in the Google top 100, for searches on John McCain, making it easier to increase the ranking over time.
* The website should have the word “McCain” in the title of the search result making it easier to optimize.
* The website should be from a well-known news source, making is less obviously a partisan attack.
* The website should have a long life span, and not in danger of being removed before the general election.
* The website should be a negative news story on McCain, not an opinion piece.
So, in essence, the left isn’t even trying to hide their efforts. Instead, they openly admit their shady practices and bluntly put together a game plan via a publically accessible blog post. Continue Reading
You might want to read this…
And for the record… I’ve been a publisher for about four years now and I completely agree with everything mentioned.
My post about the internet in 1996 got me thinking and prompted me to take a look at my own websites from five years ago. Until now I didn’t realize how long I’ve been doing this. Sure, many have been doing it for a lot longer, but for me five years of being self employed, at least part time, has been quite a run.
My first website went live in late 2003. It was at Backpackerdeals.com, but for some reason Archive.org has nothing previous to February of 2004 and even then the cache seems to be missing.
Anyway, the site was an affiliate site for student travelers. It was a lot of fun, and the site made a few bucks. More importantly, it helped me learn what NOT to do and opened up a lot of doors for my internet marketing career.
My main mistake with Backpackerdeals.com was that I knew nothing about code when I started it so I used an out of the box solution. Which, at the time, was complete crap. After a few months I began to learn a bit about code and felt backed in to a corner with the site builder.
In the summer of 2004 I launched two more student travel websites. Backpackearth.com and Traveljive.com. I’ve since sold both sites, and it looks like the new owner took the content and parked the domains. But the two sites made me quite a bit of money from 2004 until early 2007.
This is Archive’s cache of TravelJive in the summer of 2004.
As you can see… it’s quite laughable. But in those days it was quite popular. On average, any given day in 2005 would result in about 600 unique visits. Backpackearth.com was doing MUCH better!
In 2004 the main source of revenue was Google Adsense. I was getting decent checks every month and it felt worth the effort. In 2005 Google Adsense started paying so low that it was almost insulting, so I yanked Adsense in favor of the new Yahoo Overture network. Overture paid more per click, but was still somewhat lacking.
This is when I entered the text link market. Yes, I was one of those… Continue Reading
Well, the Adsense team blogged about Adsense being down today, but they apparently miscalculated the amount of time it would take to be back up and running.
Tomorrow, from 10am to 2pm, our engineers will be performing routine system maintenance. You know the drill: you won’t be able to log in to your account during these 4 hours, but rest assured that we’ll keep serving ads to your pages and tracking all clicks and impressions in your account.
4 hours for me has become 8. And now the site is back up, but all it does is continuously reload. I can’t even try to log in…
Kind of a bummer…
After years and years of research, millions of dollars, and hiring of some of the most intelligent people on the web, Google still can’t stop the spam blogs from flooding its index.
This morning I woke up and started searching for information about the Wyoming GOP Caucus. I started with regular search, but the results were old, outdated, and some what irrelevant. Clearly the wonderful live search results I experienced Thursday night during the Iowa Caucus were not running things this morning. I then jumped to Google Blog Search and sorted the results by date.
Here is what I was met with. Continue Reading
The official Google blog dropped a few links to some of the posts on another one of its blogs, pointing out the companies interest in “climate change” issues and advocacy. Continue Reading
