If you're seeing a lot of referral traffic in your Google Analytics data, you're not alone. Contributor Jonathan Hochman explains how referral spam happens, lays out methods to combat it and suggests potential solutions for Google's consideration.
Update: The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center now says it’s gotten hundreds of reports of this problem, and is seeking complaints from people who have been affected. Recently a friend contacted me because his daughter was in tears about her mugshot photo being posted on the Internet. She was arrested a few years ago, the matter […]
I recently had an interesting conversation with Microsoft adCenter support which left me feeling sad about how Microsoft is missing out on opportunities to expand their market share in search advertising. Let me start by saying, I’m a fan of adCenter because it provides high quality traffic and a solid return on investment for many […]
All too often web site security is somebody else’s problem. It shouldn’t be. If you work on websites, you should know the basics of web security. The more popular a site becomes, the more value it accrues, the more likely it is to become a target. As you apply search marketing techniques to a site, […]
As if SEOs don’t have enough things to worry about already, add malware to the list. Why does malware matter to SEOs? If the site you are working on gets infected, its search traffic will plummet. Search engines attempt to remove infected pages from their search results, or they label them with an ominous warning, […]
SEOs have traditionally recommended using search engine friendly menu systems such those based on HTML styled with CSS instead of those written in JavaScript. The primary language understood by search engines has been HTML, but now several search engines have learned how to read JavaScript. I recently found an example that reveals how much progress […]
I spotted an interesting story on Talking Points Memo about how John McCain had a menu item “Golf Gear” on his campaign website. My first thought was that this must have been clever hacker trying to make McCain look like an elitist. But no, the McCain campaign earnestly thinks golf gear is that important to […]
Kevin Johnson, President of Microsoft’s Platform & Services Division, announced the release of the adCenter Desktop Beta during an SMX Advanced keynote speech today. The software application allows advertisers to create, optimize, and manage online campaigns with Microsoft. Previously advertisers were required to manage their campaigns through a web interface, a relatively less efficient means, […]
This morning I was handing off a project to a developer and found myself ranting about the common mistakes developers make when coding HTML. These boneheaded mistakes can cause search engines to choke when it comes to indexing your websites. And its easy to avoid making these mistakes. Here’s how:
Often, the hardest part of any search engine optimization or marketing campaign is getting changes made to the website. Figuring out what to do is often easier than convincing all the stakeholders—including marketers, IT departments, web developers—to take the necessary actions, and coaching them along the way as they apprehensively take baby steps forward. As […]
Before investing time and effort in search rankings, and even before setting client expectations, it makes sense to gather whatever intelligence you can about the keywords you’d like to rank for. SEOs and webmasters have few reliable sources of information about the relationship between rankings and traffic. But Wikipedia’s traffic stats can help, offering some […]
Among the most powerful trends of the last three years has been the emergence of community/social media/social-networking sites with large user bases and incredible traffic. The traffic enjoyed by these successful virtual communities creates financial incentives for bad actors who want to hijack traffic for their own purposes. The open participation inherent in user generated […]
Recently I’ve been working on several ASP.NET 2.0 sites and had to research the best ways to set up URL rewriting, permanent redirects, and custom error pages. ASP.NET 2.0 is a popular platform for building corporate websites. Among my clients, this solution seems to be very popular with medium to large corporations who have an […]
Microsoft upgraded the adCenter user interface early Saturday morning. Within each ad group, the Keywords tab now shows complete statistics and provides editable boxes so the user can change bids on that same screen. In previous versions of adCenter the keyword statistics were presented on one page, and editing happened on a different page. Switching […]
Wikirage is yet another Wikipedia data mining tool. This one lets you see what topics are hot by quickly identifying the 100 most edited articles for the last hour, day, week, or month. If you like to track rising keywords and memes, this tool is a fine place to start.
I spent last week at Family Camp in Maine. They had an awesome 1920’s Arts & Crafts style lodge where we could get online after the kids went to bed. Unfortunately, the camp’s Linksys router was fried by a lightning strike. My only other option was Blackberry-modem. Verizon’s NationalAccess plan provides near-broadband speed in most […]
In Vote On the Most Shameful Wikipedia Spin Jobs, the Wired Blog Network reports that Virgil Griffin, a Caltech graduate student, has released a Wikipedia Scanner search tool that identifies edits by corporate IP block. Just type in the name of a corporation to see what sort of anonymous Wikipedia edits have been coming from […]