Google AdPlanner

Why buy a search term and link it to a page that is unreachable? No prob, if you a) have more money than Yaweh and b) you are the guy from whom we buy search terms.

A search for AdPlanner, Google's new publisher tool, does just that. Organic results include links to Toyota affiliate terms of use etc, which means this blog just might be a linkbait success.

I'll dig more into AdPlanner once I find a link to official public info, but Valleyway is already blogging about what it means to Comscore and Nielsen -- ok, they say its no threat. But maybe they were just being ironic. Oh, I can hope.

Odysseus in Firefox

I've been blogging here for 361 days. :D My first blog was about using Odysseus as a proxy server with IE for testing web pages. I shared that blog with some colleagues recently, and the balked because, you know, IE sucks. But you can use this great tool with Firefox or any HTTP tool, also.

First, download Odysseus, and run it so you can see the little Roman helmet in your system tray (Windows users). Its got a red ... feathery-decoration thingy on top. To turn that green, and thereby turn on this proxy server, right click on it and select "Interceptor."

To configure Firefox to temporarily use Odyssesus as a proxy server so that you can see, and edit, outgoing GET and POST requests, and to view the REPLY from the web server with all the headers, in Firefox choose Tools > Options... Advanced, Network, "Settings" button, select "Manual proxy configuration:" and enter "localhost" as the server and "50000" as the port. Confirm the dialog boxes.

Now, when you load a web page in Firefox, an Odysseus window will pop up letting you see (and edit) the HTTP data. Test away!

When you are all done, go back to your browser and turn the connection option back to normal.

Google hearts Cupid

In the past I've blogged about Cupid.com running afoul of Google's mystical algorithm. That's a thing of the past, now it's the first search result for the term "cupid."

Our business model of advertising on local radio means we don't have to play the PPC game or get crazy worried about our Google search results, as long as we do well for branded search. For example, if you search for "online dating", the competition to get on that page is fierce/expensive, and we just haven't engaged in that pursuit.

Today I noticed, however, if you search for "online dating" or even "dating," Google's new "Searches related to" section includes "cupid.com" or "cupid." Very cool. Nice to be finally getting our props, just in time for Valentine's day.

Google, Cupid.com hearts you too.

domainsystems.com site down?

What's up with domainsystems.com? Their site has been down all day. Not just me; even Netcraft can't reach them.

Update: Day 2, still down. Has this site been down for awhile? Not one that I've used before, but moniker.com is still pointing to it.

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.

How to tell if your website uses 301 redirects

I was at Search Engine Strategies in NYC last week so I'm in an SEO mood. It was a good conference... 90% reenforcement and 10% new stuff. Most of the people there were marketers, not technologists, which is good because they did most of the small talking for me.

One thing Search Engine Marketing people stress is using 301 redirects instead of META REFRESH or 302 "Moved temporarily" redirects. 301 and 302 are HTTP headers. Most web pages send a 200 for normal status. 404 is standard for missing page ("Help! I've lost my 404 page!"). Google and, presumably, other search engines prefer 301 redirects. Why? I guess it intuitively makes sense... they don't want to bother putting something in their index if they think it's not going to be around for awhile.

I know I've made sure both RegionalHelpWanted.com and Cupid.com use 301 redirects. We have a new product, PurplePages.com in beta, though, and I wasn't sure if we coded that correctly. So I needed to check. And I realized most SES attendees probably wouldn't know how to check if their sites use 301 redirects and would have to either learn or trust their coders, so therefore I decided to blog it. It's good for marketing people to not have to rely on coders. Good for all.

You can't just "view source" of a web page to see if it's doing a 301 versus a 302, because by the time you have a web page you've already been redirected. You need something that will interrupt the process. An intermediary browser. A proxy!

In the past I've used Achilles proxy server for this. But I grimace every time I install it or suggest someone install it because it really is crappy. Free software doesn't have to be crappy. Achilles would run for a couple minutes and hang. Awful interface. But it was enough to get the job done. Barely.

Searching for Achilles today to install it on my new laptop, I found that it still hasn't been update but someone else had made a new proxy. Odysseus is the successor to Achilles. I love it-- wish it had come out years ago.

Ummm... if you are using a Mac ( and lots of marketing people do, right?) this isn't going to help you. Feel free to read on anyways. Like I could stop you anyway.

Download it (it's free). Install it. Start it... in your Windows System Tray right click on it and choose IE Settings > Odysseus. Now all your Internet Explorer requests will go through Odysseus. Right click on Odysseus again and choose Configuration. Check Intercept Reply. You can deselect Intercept Request unless you really want to click on the Ok button a lot (although that is great to leave on when use are security testing your site). Right click on Achilles one more time and select Interceptor.

Now navigate to whatever page you want to test. If you left Intercept Request checked then you'll need to click "Ok" for every pages and cookies along the way. Notice that the window title bar will say "Interceptor - REQUEST" for every item you request, and "Interceptor - REPLY" for your response from the web server. To see the status number, click on the Raw tab of a reply. The first line with be something like "HTTP/1.1 200 OK" for a normal page.

For me, I went to HudsonValleyPurplePages.com and got the status "HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily" as it redirected to http://www.purplepages.com/?osn=1 D'oh! I immediately assigned it to a Web Developer to fix. Then as a sanity check I went to HudsonValleyHelpWanted.com and thankfully it was "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" to http://regionalhelpwanted.com/home/1.htm?SN=1&. Whew!

When you are all done, just right click on Odysseus again and deselect Interceptor to turn it off to resume normal browsing.