Nike.com Pay Attention - Googlebot Cloaking Broken
April 29, 2008
I like Nike.com. I think it is a real neat site with a good amount of sizzle. Lots of videos and fancy flash all over the place. Nothing wrong with that in my opinion. But as far as Google bot is concerned, it’s a no-no. But hey, thats cool, adjustments can be made to make everyone happy. This is a case where cloaking is a good thing. Nike’s all flash website is a nightmare for crawlers, so they decide to just serve them up a nice simple non-flash version, so their data can still be crawled. I’m fine with it, Nike is fine with it, and Googlebot is fine with it. The problem comes in when you don’t pay attention to it. You have basically created another page that needs to be kept up regularly, and properly maintained. And if you don’t problems arise.
I often use Nike as an example of good cloaking. I show people the regular site, then show them the cloaked page and everything is fine. But today I go to take a look, and what do I see when I swith my user-agent to Googlebot?
A busted page. Google comes along to see you site and what do they get? A busted page. Not good. OK, maybe they can try to fix it before the spiders come along and that busted page gets indexed. Let’s take a look at their Google result.
It seems that Googlebot has seen the busted page, indexed it and is using that error text as the site’s description. Bad news. All the more reason to keep up with this kind of thing. Now this may not hurt Nike to bad, they are a massive global brand. When someone types in Nike and see’s that result, chances are the description will do little to deter them from clicking the link, which will take them to the correct homepage. But how about your site that is not as big as Nike? Make sure you pay attention to your good cloaked pages, your robots.txt file, and other vital site elements. Its just good practice to keep aware of what’s going on with your site.
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Alexa Attempts To Make Rankings Less Flawed
April 16, 2008
Alexa, the highly skewed web ranking system, announced an overhaul to their ranking algorithm.
We’ve been working hard behind the scenes for several months and are excited to announce that our new Alexa Rankings system is available.
Ok what does this really mean? Alexa for the longest time has had a very flawed means of determining a sites ranking. It was completely dependant on users installing their toolbar and being tracked in that fashion. Now if you didn’t have an Alexa tool bar installed, you were not counted which led to misleading rankings. Now they claim that they “aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users“.
Alexa rankings are not what everyone makes them out to be, a general positioning and ranking as a whole compared to the entire internet audience, but it is merely how well you do among the other Alexa toolbar users. this has been widely know in the SEO community for some time, but not too many outside of it were fully aware. With this new change it looks like Alexa is attempting to make their service a bit more respectable. I’ll be keeping an eye on them, and now may even give them a look to see how some of my sites are doing.
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Google jumping the gun again
April 8, 2008
One thing about me, I’m an early adopter. Anything new out, a new beta, a new product, I want to try it. Not waiting for reviews, I jump right in. So when I go to my igoogle homepage I see a neat new button.
What is this I see,a new feature, oh boy! Without thinking twice I go clicking away, full of anticipation of the new Google feature that lays ahead. What does the result of my click give me?
Oh Google why o why? Why do youtease me again and again? Why don’t you test something before you push it live? It’s just so frustrating…
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Quality inbound links from sponsorships
April 4, 2008
I read an article earlier on getting links by sponsoring a charity. I’ve got to say that this seems like a pretty good idea, but it also seems like a backdoor workaround to get some paid links. You’re not getting these links naturally due to the relative content of your site. You had to put up something on your end to get those links. Even though it may not be a straight cash exchange, you are giving some kind of valuable item, whether its goods or services. Now I’m not bashing the idea at all, I’m just curious to see how Google will look at it. I have a feeling they won’t like it because it’s only a matter of time before its abused and you see some buy Viagra site sponsoring Jerry’s Kids or something and the porn/pills/casino affiliates screw it up for everyone. Are we going to have to nofollow every single link on our site that has some kind of reimbursement attached, no matter how distant that relationship is just to be on the safe side?
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Weird text box on Google search results
April 2, 2008
So I’m looking for some information and where do I go? I go where everyone goes when they need information, Google. So I do my search, hit the button and await my results. Lickety split the page shows with my information. But wait, whats this I see? Some crazy ass blank text box at the top of the page. Google, what the hell is that? I can type in it but still can’t figure out it’s purpose. Is it some where for me to take notes? Is it a special surprise for me?
Come on big G, fill us in!
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Google Suggest showing in regular search box
March 26, 2008
Over the last few days I have seen a lot of the Google Suggest feature showing up in the regular Google search page.
I’m not too sure how helpful this really is to me. I tend to already know what I want to type before hand, and don’t need their suggestion. But it may be helpful, I think it’s too early to tell. I’m going to use the Suggest site for a few days and see how it goes. I think I will miss not having the past things I typed in show for me. There have been a bunch of times where I need to go back and do a search that I already did and its easy to just type in a few letters and see every search I did that started with those letters and that appears to not be available when using the Suggest feature.
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A couple of good posts today
March 21, 2008
Over at Web Analytics Demystified, Judah Phillips has a nice post on Key Performance Indicators. Over at SEO Book, Aaron Wall has a nice write up on why Mahalo looks like spam, or at leat it can in the eyes of Google.
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New York wants to make web tracking illegal
March 20, 2008
An assemblyman for New York today drafted a bill that would make it a crime for web companies to use personal information about consumers for advertising without their consent. Is this guy crazy? What personal information can you get unless it has alrady been offered to you? Other than generic things you can get from an ip address, all I can really find out is technical items. Is he upset that an ad company knows he is using an Apple? Is he ashamed about the size of his screen resolution? Come on buddy. Richard L Brodsky, a New York Democrat, said that he feel companies should not be able to use what’s essentially private data without permission. I still don’t understand what private data a website can get from you visiting them. Where is that software? I’d buy that. If I go to ebay and search for an iphone, is it wrong for them to serve up some apple ads? of course not. That is targeted marketing. Just like when you watch the Travel channel and see commercials for airlines, travel agencys and luggage. Would he prefer just generic ads all the time? I say again, come on buddy.
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Good job New York magazine
February 27, 2008
That was some nice link bait. It looks like their average of 1 million page views per day was shattered with the release of the Lindsay Lohan photos on Monday, with the site registering more that 40 million page views for the first two days of the week, according to ABC News. Too bad they didn’t plan a little better for the spike in traffic. Their site was crashing hard Monday morning. And I would have bumped up those ad rates a bit, maybe throwing a few more ads up there to cash in. Anyways, good job New York magazine.
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Busy busy busy!
February 21, 2008
Wow have I been busy lately! I am trying to get all new analytics code put on a dozen sites all at the same time, and trying to build 5 different websites when I get home. I get away from the computer for 5 minutes! I need a vacation.
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