Having links to your blog or website is important on the web. Not just because people may actually click on them and end up on your site. The mere presence of a backlink to your site by itself may increase your search result ranking (this is not the only parameter though!). And this simple fact is like pandorra's box...
Link spam
Some time ago I had created a website for a friend, very basic, very local, custom made. I had added a guest book (old school) and even though it was handcrafted it got picked up by spambots at some point in time, posting pages and pages of links and garbage. A simple captcha-like solution was enough to stop the madness. Captcha's indeed have conquered the web as a response to spambots and the like. But nowadays spamfighters have another weapon at their disposal..
rel=nofollow
By adding rel='nowfollow, to a link, as attribute inside the anchor tag (a-tag), a webmaster can prevent 'PageRank' attribution to this external link. The behavior is quite established amongst all major search engines. Whether the searchbot actually follows the link depends on the search engine. Note: Google nowadays does subtract the would-be pagerank from the total amount you can give away (ie other links on your site do get less as if there was no nofollow, but the nofollow link doesn't actually get it).
Why is this important?
Apart from being effective against spam(bots), the nofollow attribute is also important when you are seeking ways to (legitimately I presume) promote your own site. Since version 1.5 WordPress adds nofollow to all links in user-submitted content (ie comments headings and contents) by default. This may be relevant if you want to acquire links to your site by posting comments on other blogs (as is suggested in numerous videos and blogs elsewhere). Using the tool SEO Quake (which has plenty more features you may want to turn off for your own surfing convenience) you can quickly identify which links on a site actually have the nofollow attribute.
The future of the web?
It is interesting to think about where this is going. More and more sites and platforms are making use of nofollow, as backlink seekers' strategies evolve. Ultimately, this may at some point degrade the informative value of ranking algorithms because 'true' links are also removed from the equation. It is therefore not surprising that the amount of 'PageRank' is not the sole determinant of search rankings anymore. As more intelligent systems emerge, this ratio will most likely keep decreasing over time. What to do then, if you want to promote your website? Content, my friend, is King. Social media, my friend, the Queen.
PS:: this was, in hindsight, part three in an otherwise unintended series of html tags that play a role in search engine optimization :-D
Posts tonen met het label SEO and Marketing. Alle posts tonen
Posts tonen met het label SEO and Marketing. Alle posts tonen
Meta Description
Adding meta tags to your webpage is no longer the number one SEO tip. I think the meta keywords are literally dead. Google at least claims it now ignores them. For the meta description tag however things are a little different, and I attribute some value to it.
What is the meta description tag?
Meta tags are HTML tags you place inside the section of your web page. As the term already suggests, meta tags say something about your page. The meta description tag is supposed to contain a short description (a few lines or even just 200 characters as I read somewhere as a guideline) describing your page. Google and other search engines use this tag to summarize your page in the results list. In other words, if you supply a meta description tag, this is litterally used as the short snippet of text below the link to your site in the search results.
Here's what a meta description tag looks like:
Humans
Search engines are computers, and ranking happens by algorithms. Whether people actually click on your link within the list of results is another. Try and observe your brain as you yourself scroll to pages and pages of search results and try to figure out what actually triggers you to click on them. Most likely, the contents of the short description was part of your decision process. Well, that is why the meta description tag matters.
What if I have none?
If you have no meta description tag, Google will try and 'make' one for you, based on a combination of a few snippets of your website text. Sometimes this may work out fine. Often, you can do better!
Meta description vs Ranking
So, the meta description tag is important for your click through rate (CTR). Does that in turn also affect the ranking of your site in future searches? Apparently, the answer to this question is not readily available. Bing supposedly admitted to incorporate this information and Google most likely does as well, in one way or the other. The overall effect though will probably be quite marginal compared to all other ranking parameters.
What is the meta description tag?
Meta tags are HTML tags you place inside the section of your web page. As the term already suggests, meta tags say something about your page. The meta description tag is supposed to contain a short description (a few lines or even just 200 characters as I read somewhere as a guideline) describing your page. Google and other search engines use this tag to summarize your page in the results list. In other words, if you supply a meta description tag, this is litterally used as the short snippet of text below the link to your site in the search results.
Here's what a meta description tag looks like:
<meta name="description" content="Blah blah blah my site about blah blogging and SEO and blah"/>
Humans
Search engines are computers, and ranking happens by algorithms. Whether people actually click on your link within the list of results is another. Try and observe your brain as you yourself scroll to pages and pages of search results and try to figure out what actually triggers you to click on them. Most likely, the contents of the short description was part of your decision process. Well, that is why the meta description tag matters.
What if I have none?
If you have no meta description tag, Google will try and 'make' one for you, based on a combination of a few snippets of your website text. Sometimes this may work out fine. Often, you can do better!
Meta description vs Ranking
So, the meta description tag is important for your click through rate (CTR). Does that in turn also affect the ranking of your site in future searches? Apparently, the answer to this question is not readily available. Bing supposedly admitted to incorporate this information and Google most likely does as well, in one way or the other. The overall effect though will probably be quite marginal compared to all other ranking parameters.
Google's Webmaster Tools (vid)
Google posted a video on Youtube giving some tips about using Webmaster Tools for SEO. Frankly this tool doesn't become too exciting until you are already getting a bunch of (search) traffic and/or inbound links, but it is still a really nice tool. I blogged about it a little bit before, but this video does a much better job discussing the ins and outs of the tool (wonder why that may be...;)
Offspring Update
So at the beginning of this year I set some goals. One of them was to try out various niche blogs. The first one is up and running for a while now and I have used it to experiment with various ways of promotion. This involves Twitter, Twiends, Facebook, Farmville (yes really), Bit.ly and comment-posting.
This post
For bit.ly I wrote a post already. For Twitter, Twiends and Facebook I will write separate posts but only when I have a better understanding of these platforms. For now, I'll update you on what I tried so far.
Facebook & Farmville
First, I created a Facebook page, and started playing Farmville. Why? Because Farmville is popular and Farmville requires neighbours. People are actually willing to crap their friends list with random Farmville players if their true friends don't actually play the game. External websites promoting this didn't really work (should try and make one myself!), but posting on Facebook Neighbour fanpages (there's a bunch of them) did. If you want to speed things up a lot you can actively add others.
Twitter
Next, I created a Twitter account and started to follow other people by searching for things like 'need inspiration' and posting links to my blog. Roughly 10% actually followed me back and it did generate a few hits and even a retweet. But this doesn't really scale up. Actually Twitter's rules are against aggressive following. And against advertising. Aggressive unfollowing is even worse. Furthermore, I don't really feel comfortable harassing people like this.
Twiends
In came Twiends. It is an odd website where you gain credits by following others, visiting websites, watching vids and liking facebook pages (you can also buy credits). You can trade these credits for people returning the favor. I followed a bunch of people that offered many credits and then started to like facebook fanpages like mad (you need an 'approved' facebook page for that, which wasn't a problem for me because I had a lot of friends already because of Farmville). In the end, I quickly had 300 followers on Twitter. The sad thing is that most of these are quite hollow (like mine). A few weeks later there's still 200 left, but posting a link to a blogpost doesn't result in any visit. It may however, help to get started (ie if you follow a random person and have 100's of followers, he/she might be more prone to follow you back?).
Facebook again
Back to facebook, I now created a fan page (tried a group first because I didn't know the difference, as I said I'm mainly doing this to learn by doing) for my blog. I invited my 'friends' and switched my Twiends strategy from getting Twitter followers to getting Facebook likes. See where this ends up...
Closing remarks
In a nutshell, I'm working on and over the boundaries of what I would normally find acceptable. For now I am far from convinced by anything I have seen. What did generate some visitors was commenting on other blogs and the postaday2011 Wordpress tag I added to my posts. My goal was to write a post every other day, so I need 30 by the end of February. I've been posting every day for the first two weeks. I think I'll spread the other half over the remaining time. Also, I will try the commenting-strategy a little more actively. Although less scalable (I do read the post).
This post
For bit.ly I wrote a post already. For Twitter, Twiends and Facebook I will write separate posts but only when I have a better understanding of these platforms. For now, I'll update you on what I tried so far.
Facebook & Farmville
First, I created a Facebook page, and started playing Farmville. Why? Because Farmville is popular and Farmville requires neighbours. People are actually willing to crap their friends list with random Farmville players if their true friends don't actually play the game. External websites promoting this didn't really work (should try and make one myself!), but posting on Facebook Neighbour fanpages (there's a bunch of them) did. If you want to speed things up a lot you can actively add others.
Next, I created a Twitter account and started to follow other people by searching for things like 'need inspiration' and posting links to my blog. Roughly 10% actually followed me back and it did generate a few hits and even a retweet. But this doesn't really scale up. Actually Twitter's rules are against aggressive following. And against advertising. Aggressive unfollowing is even worse. Furthermore, I don't really feel comfortable harassing people like this.
Twiends
In came Twiends. It is an odd website where you gain credits by following others, visiting websites, watching vids and liking facebook pages (you can also buy credits). You can trade these credits for people returning the favor. I followed a bunch of people that offered many credits and then started to like facebook fanpages like mad (you need an 'approved' facebook page for that, which wasn't a problem for me because I had a lot of friends already because of Farmville). In the end, I quickly had 300 followers on Twitter. The sad thing is that most of these are quite hollow (like mine). A few weeks later there's still 200 left, but posting a link to a blogpost doesn't result in any visit. It may however, help to get started (ie if you follow a random person and have 100's of followers, he/she might be more prone to follow you back?).
Facebook again
Back to facebook, I now created a fan page (tried a group first because I didn't know the difference, as I said I'm mainly doing this to learn by doing) for my blog. I invited my 'friends' and switched my Twiends strategy from getting Twitter followers to getting Facebook likes. See where this ends up...
Closing remarks
In a nutshell, I'm working on and over the boundaries of what I would normally find acceptable. For now I am far from convinced by anything I have seen. What did generate some visitors was commenting on other blogs and the postaday2011 Wordpress tag I added to my posts. My goal was to write a post every other day, so I need 30 by the end of February. I've been posting every day for the first two weeks. I think I'll spread the other half over the remaining time. Also, I will try the commenting-strategy a little more actively. Although less scalable (I do read the post).
A website's importance
White Collars
In daily life, we value information partially based on the 'authority' of the messenger. In other words: if something is brought by Reuters Press, we value it more than when we hear it from a 15 year old who doesn't even know how to spell correctly. If your doctor tells you to do this or that, you are more prone to listen then when the old lady at the supermarket does so. Although there's cases when this strategy doesn't work out too well, it is normally quite an effective strategy. With so much information coming at us, we simply have to use these rules-of-thumb.
Websites
In the world wide web, these notions of 'authority' are important as well, in many ways. Some users may have the tendency to easily believe whatever is written on the web (which can be a problem all by itself!), others may be more critical, taking into account the source into account when evaluating the relevance of information. Search indexers help out here a lot by trying to sort information based on the 'authority' of the source. Webmasters try and make use of this of course, but that's not what this post is about.
Estimate it yourself
This post is about wanting to get a quick estimate of a site's reputation for yourself, when your existing knowledge leaves you clueless. This can be for various reasons. Perhaps you found information and want to know how trustworthy it is. Perhaps you want to know which sites could be most effective to partner with, to buy ads on, etcetera.
The site itself
A site itself can give a good first impression. Is it a blog? How lang has it been around? How long since the last post or your post of interest was submitted? Other clues you may get from the number of followers, the number of comments, the type of comments and maybe even the site's layout (be careful!).
Google PageRank
Google's PageRank is an indication of a page's importance, valued by its connectedness based on links to that page from elsewhere, especially from pages with high PageRanks themselves. This helps (it is not the only factor!) Google to sort search results, but by itself it can be informative as well! An individual rank is calculated for each page. This can be useful if you want data from a single page. If your interest concerns a whole site, you could lookup the PageRank for the site's homepage, but this ignores all links from outside that link to a any other page within the site.
Alexa Rating
The Alexa rating is based on a lot of user's actual browsing data, collected by a toolbar. Probably, the users that have the toolbar are not a perfect representation of the whole population of internet users. This may influence the results a little. Alexa Rankings are three months averages, so they change only gradually. In contrast to Google's PageRank, the Alexa rating is based on entire sites. Alexa also provides other statistics than rankings, by the way. Top 3 Alexa rankings: Google, Facenbook, YouTube. My blog: above 23.000.000. This guy's website: less than 2.000.
How to get it?
How to get the PageRank for a website? You could use Google's Toolbar, or if you're using Chrome browser (ironically) use PageRank Status from chromefans.org. The latter also gives you Alexa ratings. These are in any case accessible via alexa.com.
In daily life, we value information partially based on the 'authority' of the messenger. In other words: if something is brought by Reuters Press, we value it more than when we hear it from a 15 year old who doesn't even know how to spell correctly. If your doctor tells you to do this or that, you are more prone to listen then when the old lady at the supermarket does so. Although there's cases when this strategy doesn't work out too well, it is normally quite an effective strategy. With so much information coming at us, we simply have to use these rules-of-thumb.
Websites
In the world wide web, these notions of 'authority' are important as well, in many ways. Some users may have the tendency to easily believe whatever is written on the web (which can be a problem all by itself!), others may be more critical, taking into account the source into account when evaluating the relevance of information. Search indexers help out here a lot by trying to sort information based on the 'authority' of the source. Webmasters try and make use of this of course, but that's not what this post is about.
Estimate it yourself
This post is about wanting to get a quick estimate of a site's reputation for yourself, when your existing knowledge leaves you clueless. This can be for various reasons. Perhaps you found information and want to know how trustworthy it is. Perhaps you want to know which sites could be most effective to partner with, to buy ads on, etcetera.
The site itself
A site itself can give a good first impression. Is it a blog? How lang has it been around? How long since the last post or your post of interest was submitted? Other clues you may get from the number of followers, the number of comments, the type of comments and maybe even the site's layout (be careful!).
Google PageRank
Google's PageRank is an indication of a page's importance, valued by its connectedness based on links to that page from elsewhere, especially from pages with high PageRanks themselves. This helps (it is not the only factor!) Google to sort search results, but by itself it can be informative as well! An individual rank is calculated for each page. This can be useful if you want data from a single page. If your interest concerns a whole site, you could lookup the PageRank for the site's homepage, but this ignores all links from outside that link to a any other page within the site.
Alexa Rating
The Alexa rating is based on a lot of user's actual browsing data, collected by a toolbar. Probably, the users that have the toolbar are not a perfect representation of the whole population of internet users. This may influence the results a little. Alexa Rankings are three months averages, so they change only gradually. In contrast to Google's PageRank, the Alexa rating is based on entire sites. Alexa also provides other statistics than rankings, by the way. Top 3 Alexa rankings: Google, Facenbook, YouTube. My blog: above 23.000.000. This guy's website: less than 2.000.
How to get it?
How to get the PageRank for a website? You could use Google's Toolbar, or if you're using Chrome browser (ironically) use PageRank Status from chromefans.org. The latter also gives you Alexa ratings. These are in any case accessible via alexa.com.
Pingywebedition Q&A
Why this Q&A?
My original post concerning pingywebedition.somee.com was originally centered around reference spam in general. That post got quite some attention and raised more questions, that could only be incorporated by means of a full rewrite. I didn't feel like a rewrite, so I wrote this post as an addition, and I did this in a away that easily allows additions later on. Got another question? Just leave a comment ;-)
Note upfront: the Q&A's below are based on the understanding that I have so far about pingywebedition. Since I cannot look into their systems, maybe I'm off or missing something at some point. I will update this section with any relevant new information.
What is pinging?
Pinging is a way to notify systems (such as blog search engines) that a blog has changed. This enables these systems to only check the modified blog when updating their databases. An analogy: Imagine you want to keep track of all CD's your friends have. You visit them all and make a long list. Then one day later (or even an hour later, or a minute) you wonder whether your list still up to date. You don't know unless you revisit them all. That is a lot of work, day in day out. Wouldn't it be great if they would just call you whenever they bought a new CD? That is the principle of pinging. Of course, the cost of 'visiting' is less (just a web request) but on the other hand, the scale (amount of 'friends') is much bigger (many blogs, many pages per blog).
Can pinging be abused?
Yes, ping systems can be abused. For instance, the pinging frequency can be too big (this would be analogous to one of your friends calling you every ten minutes saying he bought something new - but didn't). Also, the source of the ping can be something other than a blog (ie product vendors) or a fake blog that is only there to promote another site (ie increasing PageRank). This type of blog is called a spam blog (or splog). Spam ping is also called sping. But if you are just running a legitimate blog you don't have to worry about splogs and spings.
Is pinging useful?
Pinging could be useful yes. Blogger (if you use the right settings) will automatically ping Google's services and weblogs.com. Wordpress has such a function built into it as well. Since many other parties will use weblogs.com as a reference, you might wonder if you need to ping more services. If you want to, you could do this manually, or try and use a tool that helps you do that. In that case however, you have no control on what's going on. Chances are you are using a scattergun approach that is far from effective and a waste of your scatter ;-).
What IS pingywebedition?
Basically, pingywebedition is a site that offers an online mass 'ping' tool. That is all it does. To promote itself however it uses a few tricks. These have actually nothing to do with its core function. More about these tricks in later questions. Pingywebedition offers you a way to 'ping' a bunch of systems at once, for a lot of websites at once as well. That could save you a lot of work...if you had 100 blogs to ping. Do you? Probably not.
Why is pingywebedition showing up in my blog's statistics?
Requests are being sent to your blog that appear to originate from pingywebedition website. This is called referrer spam. It is a trick. A quite common one as well. Initially, referrer spam worked quite well because some websites published their logs ('statistics'), including the referral urls. This would then improve the ranking of the spamming url. I think in this case however, the site owner expects bloggers to inspect their statistics often, click the url and talk about it.
Does pingywebedition spoil my statistics and can I prevent that?
Yes, pingywebedition (or referrer spam in general actually) spoils your statistics. I you are using blogger, there's not much you can do about that. Maybe you could try and push Blogger/Google itself to improve their statistics or add filters. Or you could try to use Google Analytics. This is however much less fun because far from real time. Another 'solution' is to get so many visitors that the spam counts become insignificant ;)
Why / how is pingywebedition linking to my site?
In short: it is not. Seriously. If you reached pingywebedition.somee.com directly by clicking on the link that appears in your statistics page, it may seem to do so, but try entering the url directly in your browser window and see what happens. What's going on? Well, when clicking the link from inside your blogger statistics page, your browser is passing your blog's statistics page as 'referrer'. This is normal behavior. Servercode that renders the pingywebedition website breaks down this referral url and transforms it into a link to your blog. But this link is only for you to be seen...
My original post concerning pingywebedition.somee.com was originally centered around reference spam in general. That post got quite some attention and raised more questions, that could only be incorporated by means of a full rewrite. I didn't feel like a rewrite, so I wrote this post as an addition, and I did this in a away that easily allows additions later on. Got another question? Just leave a comment ;-)
Note upfront: the Q&A's below are based on the understanding that I have so far about pingywebedition. Since I cannot look into their systems, maybe I'm off or missing something at some point. I will update this section with any relevant new information.
What is pinging?
Pinging is a way to notify systems (such as blog search engines) that a blog has changed. This enables these systems to only check the modified blog when updating their databases. An analogy: Imagine you want to keep track of all CD's your friends have. You visit them all and make a long list. Then one day later (or even an hour later, or a minute) you wonder whether your list still up to date. You don't know unless you revisit them all. That is a lot of work, day in day out. Wouldn't it be great if they would just call you whenever they bought a new CD? That is the principle of pinging. Of course, the cost of 'visiting' is less (just a web request) but on the other hand, the scale (amount of 'friends') is much bigger (many blogs, many pages per blog).
Can pinging be abused?
Yes, ping systems can be abused. For instance, the pinging frequency can be too big (this would be analogous to one of your friends calling you every ten minutes saying he bought something new - but didn't). Also, the source of the ping can be something other than a blog (ie product vendors) or a fake blog that is only there to promote another site (ie increasing PageRank). This type of blog is called a spam blog (or splog). Spam ping is also called sping. But if you are just running a legitimate blog you don't have to worry about splogs and spings.
Is pinging useful?
Pinging could be useful yes. Blogger (if you use the right settings) will automatically ping Google's services and weblogs.com. Wordpress has such a function built into it as well. Since many other parties will use weblogs.com as a reference, you might wonder if you need to ping more services. If you want to, you could do this manually, or try and use a tool that helps you do that. In that case however, you have no control on what's going on. Chances are you are using a scattergun approach that is far from effective and a waste of your scatter ;-).
What IS pingywebedition?
Basically, pingywebedition is a site that offers an online mass 'ping' tool. That is all it does. To promote itself however it uses a few tricks. These have actually nothing to do with its core function. More about these tricks in later questions. Pingywebedition offers you a way to 'ping' a bunch of systems at once, for a lot of websites at once as well. That could save you a lot of work...if you had 100 blogs to ping. Do you? Probably not.
Why is pingywebedition showing up in my blog's statistics?
Requests are being sent to your blog that appear to originate from pingywebedition website. This is called referrer spam. It is a trick. A quite common one as well. Initially, referrer spam worked quite well because some websites published their logs ('statistics'), including the referral urls. This would then improve the ranking of the spamming url. I think in this case however, the site owner expects bloggers to inspect their statistics often, click the url and talk about it.
Does pingywebedition spoil my statistics and can I prevent that?
Yes, pingywebedition (or referrer spam in general actually) spoils your statistics. I you are using blogger, there's not much you can do about that. Maybe you could try and push Blogger/Google itself to improve their statistics or add filters. Or you could try to use Google Analytics. This is however much less fun because far from real time. Another 'solution' is to get so many visitors that the spam counts become insignificant ;)
Why / how is pingywebedition linking to my site?
In short: it is not. Seriously. If you reached pingywebedition.somee.com directly by clicking on the link that appears in your statistics page, it may seem to do so, but try entering the url directly in your browser window and see what happens. What's going on? Well, when clicking the link from inside your blogger statistics page, your browser is passing your blog's statistics page as 'referrer'. This is normal behavior. Servercode that renders the pingywebedition website breaks down this referral url and transforms it into a link to your blog. But this link is only for you to be seen...
Technorati
Dear computers of Technorati: this is really me! P3C3RKJSRB7W
To all other folks reading this
So in parallel to finding my niche in this December blog month, I've been getting more and more interested in the blogosphere as a whole. I still stand behind my main point concerning SEO, saying that good content is more important than good SEO. However, getting people to your page will at one point or another be an important issue. One blog stated that the effort put in getting people to your blog will nowadays roughly equal the effort put in maintaining the blog itself. Even the best newspapers spent money on marketing, even Coca Cola makes commercials (wonder what they will come up with this Christmas!).
Marketing
So, once you have a good product, marketing does become an issue. SEO is a (small) part of it, and it should by no means be overvalued to the extend where one resides to black art measures such as referral/email/comment spamming. Apart from SEO, other marketing tools can - and perhaps even should - be explored.
I had heard about Technorati before, but never really realized what it was. Now I know (vaguely). Technorati is a search engine for blogs. It works more real time than regular search engines (Google is catching up though). Besides, Technorati adds a lot of extra 'information' (rankings for instance, stuff that's rising or falling, etc.). For now I claimed my blog, hoping it will be incorporated into their huge database. Let's see where it goes from there. I will most certainly keep you all posted on this!
PS: My blog
Nope, this blog does - in my opinion - not represent what I mean with good content (yet), just so you know. Nevertheless I find it interesting to explore various approaches of getting ones message across to the public. Especially since this (and marketing as a whole) is one of my blind spots. Given my aspirations on starting up a company and making some money from the web at some point in the future, it seemed wise to do something about that.
Less is More
It doesn't always hold true of course. Nothing does, really. But it can be an eye opener. My eyes are open yes, but they need stitches, or wooden sticks - the latter being favorable because less irreversible - to prevent them from closing again. Time can do that. That, and much, much more. Oh no, it is less, it's less that's more.
Less what?
Less different subjects (my blog, especially this month, will NOT be the best example for this :). Writing about a whole range of different subjects will most certainly get you a bunch of roaming visitors. But they will see only 1 page, 2 at most, and be gone. Gone forever. Yes. But if you focus on a particular subject or if your posts share a certain theme, chances are you will get more loyal visitors. Furthermore, your blog becomes a brand on itself, and you start being mentioned elsewhere. There might be only a handful of people Googling your subject, but if they do, you have a fair chance of being visited (because there are so few other sites about the same subject).
Writing less blog posts can also be 'more', especially if you leave out the less interesting posts. Also, when you blog too much, people can't keep up and loose interest.
Paradox of choice
The paradox of choice is something I can heavily relate to. In essence it means: more choices can result in worse decision making, or failure to make a decision at all (so: 'more is less' holds true as well). They often say that the current generation of 20/30-ers experience this paradox in their careers: too much choices make them insecure about their decisions, which leads to stress and unhappiness.
Less products
The 'less is more' philosophy is also important when selling products. Why? Well, for starters there's the aforementioned paradox of choice. More choices might lead to less sales! This is counter intuitive, but an important consideration. This can concern the amount of product categories as well as the amount of products (brands, types, colors) inside a category. A very good strategy might be to severely decrease the amount of categories (for instance: instead of clocks, frames and gadgets, sell only original Seiko watches from the Kinetic range) and modestly expand the remaining category/categories. Such a focus would also makes your shop more recognizable and easier to brand. Moreover, it saves you time and energy, which you can then spend on quality, specialization and depth.
Less writing
Yeah, yeah, I know. People are lazy. Being to the point helps to get the message across!
Less what?
Less different subjects (my blog, especially this month, will NOT be the best example for this :). Writing about a whole range of different subjects will most certainly get you a bunch of roaming visitors. But they will see only 1 page, 2 at most, and be gone. Gone forever. Yes. But if you focus on a particular subject or if your posts share a certain theme, chances are you will get more loyal visitors. Furthermore, your blog becomes a brand on itself, and you start being mentioned elsewhere. There might be only a handful of people Googling your subject, but if they do, you have a fair chance of being visited (because there are so few other sites about the same subject).
Writing less blog posts can also be 'more', especially if you leave out the less interesting posts. Also, when you blog too much, people can't keep up and loose interest.
Paradox of choice
The paradox of choice is something I can heavily relate to. In essence it means: more choices can result in worse decision making, or failure to make a decision at all (so: 'more is less' holds true as well). They often say that the current generation of 20/30-ers experience this paradox in their careers: too much choices make them insecure about their decisions, which leads to stress and unhappiness.
Less products
The 'less is more' philosophy is also important when selling products. Why? Well, for starters there's the aforementioned paradox of choice. More choices might lead to less sales! This is counter intuitive, but an important consideration. This can concern the amount of product categories as well as the amount of products (brands, types, colors) inside a category. A very good strategy might be to severely decrease the amount of categories (for instance: instead of clocks, frames and gadgets, sell only original Seiko watches from the Kinetic range) and modestly expand the remaining category/categories. Such a focus would also makes your shop more recognizable and easier to brand. Moreover, it saves you time and energy, which you can then spend on quality, specialization and depth.
Less writing
Yeah, yeah, I know. People are lazy. Being to the point helps to get the message across!
Pingywebedition: what is it?
Edit: see the Pingywebedition Q&A for more answers!
Blogger statistics peculiarities
Lately I found some strange referring sites between my Blogger statistics. On one hand, there was this website that was actually linking to me (pingywebedition somee com) and there were some domain names. I first thought these were all related to each other, and to the 'service' that pingywebedition provides, but after some research I think they can be seen as separate. However they do have one thing in common: SEO, the nasty kind (see also my preluding post about SEO).
Pingywebedition
This website was linking to my blog and a handful of other sites. The page itself offers the possibility to 'ping' a maximum of a hundred of websites/pages. What? Ping? Web edition? Although I ping computers almost on a daily basis, and I had also familiarized myself with blackberry's 'ping' app, I was rather clueless about this one. So I went on a 'pingy' journey.
I learned about 'SEO ping': to notify other systems (ie search engines) about the existence (at first) and changes (later) of a certain blog (or feed, or page). Wordpress has this function built into it. Why? Well, to get indexed or mentioned on a site. The first makes your site 'findable', the latter could improve your search engine ranking. Useful? The common consensus of the web seems to be: perhaps a little, but only when you just started with your blog/site, when you are not indexed. Blogger however, being owned by Google, makes sure your pages are on Google without any effort from your side. Bang goes the theory.
What about pingywebedition referring to my site?
Right! That has nothing to do with the pinging! What happens is: people look at their stats or publish them. If they see the referrer they might pay a visit, or blog about it. This means: links for pingywebedition, higher ranking, exposure and even some direct visitors.
Really?
Yep. Via Google I found numerous of bloggers being happy, confused or proud that someone else was referring to them. One woman even devoted a whole post to the ping web edition tool itself. And here I am, writing about it as well (although I'm neither writing down the whole url computer-readable, nor advising you to use the ping tool). Btw: the website changes the links, so each time another blogger feels 'privileged' (I wonder how sophisticated this system is - edit: read the PS below!).
What about the other referrers?
These are there also just to be mentioned. This is called referrer spam, but is done differently: the referring site is spoofed into the web request. Most likely the response to the request (ie your page) isn't even rendered in a browser. That would also explain why these only popup in Blogger's statistics (which apparently relies on the request log) and not in Google's Analytics (which requires a piece of JavaScript code to be executed in the browser).
Driving force
The driving force of all of this? Money, earned via ads on the website(s). But for ads to bring in a reasonable amount of cash, you need a lot of visitors. Whether this justifies the introduction of all this noise into the web and search engine system? That's a question everyone should answer for themselves, I for one hope never having to go down that road!
That is all.
[EDIT] PS: Wow, it's even more sophisticated than I thought! I think it goes like this: pingywebedition does NOT link to your site! The referral shows up in your blog's statistics probably by means of referrer-spoofing (see above). Only when you click on the referrer-url in your statistics page, your blog shows up on the pingy web page. How? Your blog's url is transfered as referrer TO ping web edition (this is normal behavior), which then uses this information to build the page. It's like a mirror. I have to say that's smart.
Edit: see the Pingywebedition Q&A for more answers!
Blogger statistics peculiarities
Lately I found some strange referring sites between my Blogger statistics. On one hand, there was this website that was actually linking to me (pingywebedition somee com) and there were some domain names. I first thought these were all related to each other, and to the 'service' that pingywebedition provides, but after some research I think they can be seen as separate. However they do have one thing in common: SEO, the nasty kind (see also my preluding post about SEO).
Pingywebedition
This website was linking to my blog and a handful of other sites. The page itself offers the possibility to 'ping' a maximum of a hundred of websites/pages. What? Ping? Web edition? Although I ping computers almost on a daily basis, and I had also familiarized myself with blackberry's 'ping' app, I was rather clueless about this one. So I went on a 'pingy' journey.
I learned about 'SEO ping': to notify other systems (ie search engines) about the existence (at first) and changes (later) of a certain blog (or feed, or page). Wordpress has this function built into it. Why? Well, to get indexed or mentioned on a site. The first makes your site 'findable', the latter could improve your search engine ranking. Useful? The common consensus of the web seems to be: perhaps a little, but only when you just started with your blog/site, when you are not indexed. Blogger however, being owned by Google, makes sure your pages are on Google without any effort from your side. Bang goes the theory.
What about pingywebedition referring to my site?
Right! That has nothing to do with the pinging! What happens is: people look at their stats or publish them. If they see the referrer they might pay a visit, or blog about it. This means: links for pingywebedition, higher ranking, exposure and even some direct visitors.
Really?
Yep. Via Google I found numerous of bloggers being happy, confused or proud that someone else was referring to them. One woman even devoted a whole post to the ping web edition tool itself. And here I am, writing about it as well (although I'm neither writing down the whole url computer-readable, nor advising you to use the ping tool). Btw: the website changes the links, so each time another blogger feels 'privileged' (I wonder how sophisticated this system is - edit: read the PS below!).
What about the other referrers?
These are there also just to be mentioned. This is called referrer spam, but is done differently: the referring site is spoofed into the web request. Most likely the response to the request (ie your page) isn't even rendered in a browser. That would also explain why these only popup in Blogger's statistics (which apparently relies on the request log) and not in Google's Analytics (which requires a piece of JavaScript code to be executed in the browser).
Driving force
The driving force of all of this? Money, earned via ads on the website(s). But for ads to bring in a reasonable amount of cash, you need a lot of visitors. Whether this justifies the introduction of all this noise into the web and search engine system? That's a question everyone should answer for themselves, I for one hope never having to go down that road!
That is all.
[EDIT] PS: Wow, it's even more sophisticated than I thought! I think it goes like this: pingywebedition does NOT link to your site! The referral shows up in your blog's statistics probably by means of referrer-spoofing (see above). Only when you click on the referrer-url in your statistics page, your blog shows up on the pingy web page. How? Your blog's url is transfered as referrer TO ping web edition (this is normal behavior), which then uses this information to build the page. It's like a mirror. I have to say that's smart.
Edit: see the Pingywebedition Q&A for more answers!
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engines are powerful tools. We rely on them quite often to find whatever we are looking for. Search engines try to sort by relevance and do so using complicated 'formulas' (ie Google's PageRank). Google for instance assumes that sites that are being mentioned and linked to a lot, must be more important. The context in which this linking takes place (ie anchor tag contents) is also taken into account. The ranking order can have immense consequences to the websites being sorted. Needless to say everyone wants the highest rank. In comes search engine optimization.
Fair stuff
It is in everyone's interest (you, the user and the search engine) that your relevant content is indexed, and is so correctly. Google provides webmasters with various tools to catalyze this. For instance webmasters can provide sitemaps and help Google find out what's where and what has been updated when.
Manipulation
Knowing (vaguely) the ranking formulas, one can manipulate things in ones advantage, regardless of the relevance. This may be the way to go for those websites that contain nothing but SEO text and ads, but otherwise I wouldn't go there. Of course it is important to do the most obvious things, such as getting your site indexed correctly. Next, you better just make sure you have a darn good website. If you want to get things rolling, spent the rest of your money on PR, not on SEO.
Final note
Actually this post is merely a prelude to a few concepts involving SEO that I came across when looking at my Blogger Statistics, namely SEO ping and Referrer Spam. I dug into it a little and will discuss these in a separate post.
Search engines are powerful tools. We rely on them quite often to find whatever we are looking for. Search engines try to sort by relevance and do so using complicated 'formulas' (ie Google's PageRank). Google for instance assumes that sites that are being mentioned and linked to a lot, must be more important. The context in which this linking takes place (ie anchor tag contents) is also taken into account. The ranking order can have immense consequences to the websites being sorted. Needless to say everyone wants the highest rank. In comes search engine optimization.
Fair stuff
It is in everyone's interest (you, the user and the search engine) that your relevant content is indexed, and is so correctly. Google provides webmasters with various tools to catalyze this. For instance webmasters can provide sitemaps and help Google find out what's where and what has been updated when.
Manipulation
Knowing (vaguely) the ranking formulas, one can manipulate things in ones advantage, regardless of the relevance. This may be the way to go for those websites that contain nothing but SEO text and ads, but otherwise I wouldn't go there. Of course it is important to do the most obvious things, such as getting your site indexed correctly. Next, you better just make sure you have a darn good website. If you want to get things rolling, spent the rest of your money on PR, not on SEO.
Final note
Actually this post is merely a prelude to a few concepts involving SEO that I came across when looking at my Blogger Statistics, namely SEO ping and Referrer Spam. I dug into it a little and will discuss these in a separate post.
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