Google down?
I come in to work this morning excited to be back from my one-week vacation only to be asked by JazzCat if google was broken for me. I thought he was joking but sure enough I can’t use any google services right now - adwords, adsense, search, etc.
I haven’t seen anybody else talking about it so maybe it is either a regional problem or a Sewell internal problem, but that seems unlikely. More than anything I am realizing how dependent I am on google - I am also learning that direct navigation is pretty fast, I’m not sure why I use google for so many navigational queries.
Wikipedia adds “nofollow” to links
I know this is old news but wanted to give my apologies to all of my friends who rely on spam links from wikipedia to SEO their sites - the party is over. Or is it? In my opinion it seems that yahoo doesn’t even care about nofollow tags when ranking sites - so it’s no google traffic but I think wikipedia is still worth spamming for some people for the amount of traffic the links themselves produce and the potential to do better on a few of the engines.
Quantcast - a great free tool
I’ve been playing around with Quantcast a little bit today and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed. It is a free tool that gives you some drill-down analytics for your own site and, more importantly, for your competitor’s sites.
The data doesn’t look accurate to me (some races seem over-represented and the income estimates look low) but it seems to be relatively accurate. In other words I compared a few sites that I own and know the traffic levels for and their guesses at my traffic were wrong in total numbers, but correctly ranked my sites in terms of relative traffic.
I have done a number of presentations with companies like hitwise and I really hope that this catches on since most competitive keyword and analytics research is very expensive.
via Paul Allen
Gone for a week
I’m in New Orleans for a few days before leaving on a cruise to Cozumel and Costa Maya. I have never been to a place in the US where I really felt like I was in a foreign country but I definitely feel that way here.
It’s a cool city - we’re just going to spend a couple of days having fun and trying some good food before taking off on the cruise. Jen and I just got a new office space for Vizad so I’m sure we’ll have plenty to do when we get back.
Social Shopping
Traditional brick and mortar retailers fear pureplay internet retailers for obvious reasons - the concept fo the Magic Mirror social shopping experience shows at least one way that brick and mortars may harness technology to compete for business.
Apparently this is how it would work:
1) You go to the mall and try on clothes.
2) Outside of the dressing room there are a bunch of mirrors that also transmit your image over the internet.
3) You invite your friends (and hopefully nobody else) to view the webcams and text message you comments.
4) You avoid awkward pauses from your friends (or wife) when you wear your new outfit.
What surprises me most is that social shopping hasn’t really caught on with internet retailers yet and traditional retailers are already recognizing the potential.
via Engadget
THX Opening Sound
Warning: totally non-internet retail, non-internet marketing related.
One of our employees at Sewell was in a local a cappella group, Vocal Point, and their album coming out this fall has a sweet a cappella version of the THX sounds that you hear at the beginning of a movie.
Check out Gthing’s THX post to hear it.
Google counting clicks?
Gthing has a post about Google counting clicks in the SERP’s on a few results - personally I think it’s just something that he’s got installed causing it but who knows, maybe he really did get a peek at a google glitch - we’ve seen our share of yahoo glitches recently.
3 Reasons You May Be in Google’s Supplemental Index
Google has two indexes that you can be in - the regular index and the supplemental index. Most search queries return results only from the regular index unless the term is so specific that there are few (or no) results from the regular index - then you will see some search results that say “Supplemental Result” in green after the URL and page size.
I have noticed recently that many internet retailers have a large amount of pages in the supplemental index. I recently talked to a guy who has 3K pages indexed by google but after poking around a bit I realized that only 65 of those were in the regular index - a serious damper on his success on the tail terms that us retailers love so much.
I have heard a lot of speculation about what lands you in the supplemental index but in my own experience I have only had 3 causes for getting sites in the supplemental index. Here are the major causes and my suggestions for overcoming them.
Reason 1: Your brand new
OK, I call people “brand new” a lot when I think they’re being dumb but here I am referring to your site literally being new. When I first create a site typically my homepage is indexed pretty quickly (within a few days) and a few days after that I see it in the regular index. Within a week or so all of the subpages are indexed, but they usually show up as supplemental results for another 2-4 weeks depending on how many backlinks I have.
Solution: Just be patient and try to build high-quality, relevant links. The first few times I noticed I had sites in the supplemental index I freaked out and figured that I had a huge problem with my internal site structure. Now I just know that going through the supplemental index is a rite of passage.
Reason 2: Duplicate content
Usually when I create a new site I use fresh, unique content. I have one site, however, which is an article directory. People upload articles to my site and I republish them. I am just playing with the concept because I like the idea of getting a ton of free content but, as you can see, it doesn’t do me much good. The people who upload the content to my site submit their articles to tons of other article directories so it all looks like duplicate content to the engines.
To demonstrate what I am talking about do a google search for site:bizpong.com. Pretty cool to see 7K pages indexed (yes, I know that is a blatant lie) until you realize that exactly 1 of them is not in the supplemental index - mmmmm, gulp! (you got to hear Vuitton do it)
Solution: Well, this one is pretty easy - write unique copy. If you don’t want to do that, however, you can always build more inbound links and work on your internal site structure. I haven’t played with it much but I think by employing those two techniques I could get some of the articles in my directory out of the supplemental. Economically it doesn’t really make sense, though - building good links is much harder than writing unique copy and I enjoy writing more. For you link ninjas out there, though, that may be an option.
Reason 3: Making classic beginner mistakes
OK, this is the part of my blog where I admit that sometimes I’m retarded. I’ve been doing SEO for quite a while now and I still make classic mistakes sometime (you know, like eating before a basketball game). Seriously, though, I just noticed that one of my sites is getting almost no traffic. I did a site:<mysite.com> and saw that two pages were indexed and the rest were in the supplemental index.
After looking more carefully at the pages I realized that I had the same header on each page (I was using a php include) which wouldn’t be a problem except that I didn’t even bother putting in a meta tag description so the listing in google for each page looked exactly the same. By just adding in a meta tag description I am confident that within a week all of the pages will be well-index and (hopefully) ranking well in the SERP’s.
Solution: This is a pretty easy one - if you are using a site template (you would be crazy not to with very few exceptions), make sure you have a meta tag for the description and that it is different for each page. I have seen new webmasters hard code the meta tag into the include file (usually the header) and relegate their entire site (except the home page) to the supplemental index - again, classic beginner’s mistake.
Also make sure that you have a unique title tag for each page. I haven’t actually made this mistake but I have seen others do it - the title tag is one of the few truly important on-page features for SEO and you can really leverage it to rank on strategic keywords.
If you are dealing with a supplemental index issue feel free to send me an email (preston at vizaddotcom) and I will be happy to take a look at your site. If your site has only been around for a couple of weeks I would advise you to just wait and see what happens, but you shouldn’t be dealing with supplemental issues for much longer than that on a new site.
CES Wrap-up
CES was fun but it is nice to be back. As usual I didn’t spend time at many of the high-traffic, cool booths. They are too crowded and none of them want to work with a small internet retailer - maybe some day. We focus most of our energy on finding emerging suppliers willing to work with us - we think we found a lot this year. I’ll write about a few of the cooler products as we add them to our site (but not too many - this is, after all, still a marketing blog).
I had planned on finding and taking some pictures of the new Comcast Tivo but I never got around to it - sorry Zach.
Probably the coolest part of the show for me was seeing a free 3 Doors Down concert - that’s one of Jen’s favorite bands. We also saw “O” at the Bellagio which was pretty awesome. Other than that Vegas was just Vegas…
Google having problems?
Several times over the past week I have tried to login to my Adsense account and been greeted with “Sorry, service is currently not available. Please try again later.”
I just chalked it up to routing maintenance when it happened a few days ago but the fact that the problem is persisting has me wondering if they are having some kind of major problem.