PurplePages search box

Hey, now see that awesome PurplePages search box on the right of this page! Just added it there for testing but it looks good so I'll keep it. :D

Add a PurplePages.com search box to your site :D

quantcast.com for public web analytics

Researching a competitor I found their "profile" at quantcast.com. Never heard of them, so I dug in, checking out regionalhelpwanted.com and cupid.com.

They do a "panel" analysis of web site traffic, like Alexa, ComScore, and Neilsens. But unlike those last two, they publish their results for free.

Alexa does that too, but I've always seen there data as heavily skewed. By nature, they skew heavily towards webmasters. Matt Cutts from Google pointed this out in his blog. I've also heard Alexa skews heavily toward young Koreans. Whatever.

Quantcast looks cool: they exact material that they present is curious: what web sites the users of a given domain have an affinity for. What magazines they read.

Another cool thing is that they let you put their Javascript on your site, so they can report on you with 100% accuracy. I'd *love* for all their competitors to do that!

But the don't make their methodology or sample size public, so it's all hogwash for now. I'll stick with Hitwise.

Update: looks like I'm musing in good company here.

New code? Bah.

I found myself telling one of my developers yesterday "We've been doing this for years now. If you find yourself coding anything from scratch, you're probably doing something wrong."

In that vain, props to the War of Stuff blog for the code necessary to add Digg, del.icio.us, reddit onto my blog.

Duplicate content

We have over 300 local web sites, each advertised on the radio as a local domain. But they all redirect to regionalhelpwanted.com because of 1 thing: Google.

If you have separate domain names that all have significantly similar content, especially if they are all hosted at the same IP, Google's algorithm infers that you are trying to spam the search engine, and all your domains get banned from Google. The broad rule is "duplicate content."

It does not matter that for our business model, separate domain names are completely legitimate. Google has no mechanism to make exception, and no venue to argue the merits of our case.

We learned this the hard way with Cupid.com. Can you imagine: we had tonsvof radio play, but when someone went to Google and searched for Cupid, we were not listed. Not on page 1, or 1000, or anywhere in between. It took us awhile to figure out what they had a problem with, and of course they
don't tell you, but even after we changed our system, it took 9 months for Google to list Cupid.com again.

I guess that's the downside of Google owning the search space: they make the rules and everyone else follows or sits out.

Trip to Colorado turns into Trip to Lake George, Part 2

Having just email blasted a link to Part 1, I realize I haven't gotten around to writing Part 2, about how Lake George turned out to be our best vacation ever.

I'm too tired at the moment to write about Lake George. Hosting a barbecue this rainy day has wiped me out. A picture is worth 10k words? Here's 40k or so: ttp://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=ycksfne.1c73twdy&x=1&y=-38ysc3