Interesting Stats

• Posted by Brent on June 6, 2008 03:11
• Comments (3)

I'm a huge stats junkie so I thought I'd share this with all of you who also find traffic stats interesing. I posted last week about how links from Adobe.com increased the traffic to this blog by about 1000% . The traffic was mostly referred from Adobe.com with about 62% coming from reffering sites and 18% from search engines. Here is what my referral stats looked like for 5/29/08:

And here is what they look like this week:

The traffic I have recieved this week from Adobe.com and other referring sites has dropped off significantly, while search engine traffic continues to climb. I guess this shows what a couple of quality links can do for your search engine rankings.

I was wrong about sitemaps

• Posted by Brent on April 27, 2008 16:07
• Comments (1)

I was wrong in this post. I said that using a Sitemap (as in a Google Webmaster Tools sitemap) was hurting the total number of pages Google was indexing. Well, when I removed the Sitemap on one of my sites it had nearly 6000 pages indexed . Now it has fewer than 600 . I have other sites that have fewer pages indexed after removing their Sitemaps as well. Time to add them back!

 Just thought I'd try and clear up any mis-information I may have put out there.

I'm ditching Google Sitemaps

• Posted by Brent on March 20, 2008 04:46
• Comments (1)

For now I am removing all my Sitemaps from Google. From my experience they only work to keep pages out of Google's index. See, my problem is that almost all the pages on all of my sites are dynamically generated from content provided by a database, API's, feeds, and the like. So, keeping an updated Sitemap on a dynamically generated site with 10's of thousands of pages becomes a burden, especially when the site content is provided via API and you just have no idea how many pages are on your site and what they all are. There is just no good way to keep an updated Google Sitemap for sites like this - even if automated.

 I have tried third party sitemap generators that you run and they crawl your site like a search bot, building the XML the whole way. As many pages as one site can have, it can take many many hours to build the XML to the point that it contains all of the pages. Then, a day later, there are 1000 more pages, so it needs built again. And here is the important part. If you submit a Google Sitemap and you are missing pages from your site in the file, those pages missing from the XML won't get indexed. I don't care what Google or anyone says, this is based on raw experience, and Google will only index pages that are in the Sitemap if you submit one. You can have everthing else wide open as far as no follow, robots.txt etc and they won't get indexed if they aren't in the XML.

Case in point: I recently waxed one of my Sitemaps for a dynamically generated site from my Webmaster Tools account. I hadn't updated the Sitemap in a while and so pages weren't getting indexed. Two days after deleteing the sitemap, all of the pages where indexed. I've seen this over and over again.

 From my personal experience and perspective, the only good thing about using a Sitemap when it comes to Google is using it to clear up problems you see with Googlebot crawling your site. That's it. If you don't have problems with Googlebot crawling your site, you are better off just not using a Sitemap, and let the bot run wild. Use robots.txt to block whatever needs blocked.

Another Adwords Disadvantage For Affiliates

• Posted by Brent on March 6, 2008 18:35
• Comments (0)

Google continues to roll out changes to their quality score that put affiliates at a disadvantage. I don't think they are purposefully trying to push affiliates out of Adwords. Affiliates make them a ton of money. But as always their #1 focus is on customer experience. 

 The latest post on the Official Adwords blog indicates page load time is a soon-to-come factor in their Quality Score algo. This is a fairly significant disadvantage for affililates. Most affiliate links have to be pushed through several different URL's so the click can be tracked by all parties before the final page is loaded .  Here is what it looks like for some of my clicks:

 1. Click on google.com

2. User is sent to my server so I can record the click and replace the keyword with my keword ID -> redirect to affiliate link (let's say to Commission Junction)

3. Commission Junction's page loads, records the necessary data and sends the request on to the merchant

4. The request finally hits the merchant site, but they too have a url to record the click. They record their data and finally ..

5. The true landing page loads.

 That's a lot of redirects (5 different URL's on 4 domains in one click)! That's a slow loading page no matter how many dual-cores you have pushing clicks. Crap this sucks. Profit margins for affiliates are getting tighter and tighter on Adwords.