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17 Jul This post is from from my other blog here Prior to writing my last post regarding purchasing .me domains, I didn’t realize that I also had actually not purchased the domains I thought I had. I received emails later in the day letting me know that (in essence) Open.me, Remote.me and PleaseHelp.me went to someone else somewhere else. I’m sure there’s plenty of these floating around, but if you’re curious, this is the email response that myself and others received after the transaction went through: Dear Scott McAndrew, The following domain name has failed to be registered: REMOTE.ME Error: REMOTE.ME: cannot register - already registered We will evaluate this error and retry the registration if appropriate. If we are unable to successfully register the domain name, your account will be credited accordingly. Please allow one business day for the refund to be processed. Please contact GoDaddy.com, Inc. if you need any further assistance: http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/support.asp?prog_id=GoDaddy&isc=gdbb14 Sincerely, GoDaddy.com, Inc. Once the dust settles, it will be nice to hear what exactly happened. The response that GoDaddy issued once the problem had been identified (around noon Pacific) is as follows: We knew the .ME Open Registration response would be tremendous, but it went beyond even what we had expected. As a result, we experienced some system issues in our communication with the registry. As soon as we became aware of the issue we began taking steps to correct it. It is now resolved. For our customers, if we did not successfully register the domain name requested they will receive a full refund.
17 Jul This post is from from my other blog here
At 10 am I was still able to find a few I wanted to register for future use:
UPDATE: Well, it turns out that no, I did not get any domains. While the process I went through told me that I did, the domains did not register. The email address that I had on file with GoDaddy isn’t one I check on a regular basis, so it wasn’t until this afternoon that I realized that I did not get any .me domains either. Anyone out there pick up any interesting .me domains? It’s been a busy week, and I probably would have missed out on the opportunity had it not been for Jason Baer’s digital marketing blog. Thanks Jason!
12 Jul This post is from from my other blog here It appears that Feedburner is currently experiencing some challenges returning RSS feed information. Many blogs I have check this morning are plagued by very poor performance due to this problem. Performance problems are not limited to viewing RSS feeds; as blog pages rely on Feedburner also, blog visitors are experiencing pages with excessive loading times and/or rendering problems where content is omitted or displayed incorrectly. As soon as Feedburner addresses the issue, performance on this blog should return to normal. Thank you for your patience.
11 Jul This post is from from my other blog here If you have a blog or web site and use Google Analytics as your analytics package, you may have come across a disappointing statistic: visits of no length, or 00:00:00. Here is an example of where you might come across this metric. The screen capture below is from another site I manage. This report is the Traffic Sources > Keywords report. As you can see, for several keywords I’ve registered average visit lengths of no length whatsoever (00:00:00). That doesn’t sound good. Let’s look a little closer. Keywords in rows 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 are the 00:00:00 visits. They also have something else in common. Each of these visits is of only one web page (the value in the Pages/Visit column is 1.0 for each of these keywords). Single page visits, called Bounces in most analytics packages are handled different ways by different packages. Before moving forward, let’s be clear about what a Bounce is. A Bounce, or Single Page View Visit is a visit in which the user arrives at a web page, and then leaves the web site altogether. If the user even refreshes the same page, it is not a Bounce. A bounce is someone arriving at your site, then doing one of several things such as clicking the back button, typing a new destination into the address bar of their browser, closing their browser program altogether (you get the point - basically anything but continuing to view pages on your web site). OK. So all of our 00:00:00 visits were also Bounce visits. That still seems quite surprising. None of the visits registered even a second on the site? Well, the visits may have been a second, ten seconds, or several minutes. We just don’t know, and we don’t know due to the way Google Analytics calculates Time on Site (or Time on Page). To calculate how long a user is on a page, Google needs two data points. It needs the time when a page was loaded (which in our case it has) and the time when a subsequent page was requested from the site (which it does not have). So, in lieu of that last piece of data, Google classifies these Bounce visits as 00:00:00 in length. It would also stand to reason that every visit to a web site is registered as shorter than it actually is as the amount of time spent on the last page of the site prior to exiting can’t be calculated. On a side note… If you are reviewing metrics on individual pages, Google does not include Bounce visits into the equation when it calculates the average time spent on that page. For the average time spent on site, however, it does.
10 Jul This post is from from my other blog here After Google began revealing estimated search volume for keywords yesterday the first thing that entered my mind was how close the search volume estimates I had been generating for Google based on other sources. I didn’t make a research project out of it, but instead just opened a few reports I had prepared, plugged Google keywords for which I had previously computed estimated search volume and got a general feel for how our fuzzy math held up. I am happy to say that for the most part numbers computed were roughly within +/- 20 to 25%. There were some estimates that were wildly off (by a factor of up to 2x off for a few keywords I checked) and there were a handful that were very close, but +/- 20 to 25% seemed to generally be the delta. I’m looking forward to learning more about how various tools (or estimation methods) compare to the estimated search volume numbers now being provided by Google’s Keyword tool. Have any data to share?
10 Jul This post is from from my other blog here After Google began revealing estimated search volume for keywords yesterday the first thing that entered my mind was how close the search volume estimates I had been generating for Google based on other sources. I didn’t make a research project out of it, but instead just opened a few reports I had prepared, plugged Google keywords for which I had previously computed estimated search volume and got a general feel for how our fuzzy math held up. I am happy to say that for the most part numbers computed were roughly within +/- 20 to 25%. There were some estimates that were wildly off (by a factor of up to 2x off for a few keywords I checked) and there were a handful that were very close, but +/- 20 to 25% seemed to generally be the delta. I’m looking forward to learning more about how various tools (or estimation methods) compare to the estimated search volume numbers now being provided by Google’s Keyword tool. Have any data to share?
09 Jul This post is from from my other blog here
From the Google Inside AdWords blog: Based on advertiser feedback, and our commitment to provide useful tools and information for our advertisers, we’ve now added search volume data to the Keyword Tool. … These approximate numbers are intended to provide better insight into keywords’ monthly and average search volumes than previously provided by the tool. If you’re new to Google AdWords, their Keyword Tool previously provided a visual cue which indicated search volume. If you want to check it out and your not currently an AdWords user you can use Google’s AdWords external keyword tool.
09 Jul This post is from from my other blog here
From the Google Inside AdWords blog: Based on advertiser feedback, and our commitment to provide useful tools and information for our advertisers, we’ve now added search volume data to the Keyword Tool. … These approximate numbers are intended to provide better insight into keywords’ monthly and average search volumes than previously provided by the tool. If you’re new to Google AdWords, their Keyword Tool previously provided a visual cue which indicated search volume.
If you want to check it out and your not currently an AdWords user you can use Google’s AdWords external keyword tool.
09 Jul This post is from from my other blog here
From the Google Inside AdWords blog: Based on advertiser feedback, and our commitment to provide useful tools and information for our advertisers, we’ve now added search volume data to the Keyword Tool. … These approximate numbers are intended to provide better insight into keywords’ monthly and average search volumes than previously provided by the tool. If you’re new to Google AdWords, their Keyword Tool previously provided a visual cue which indicated search volume. If you want to check it out and your not currently an AdWords user you can use Google’s AdWords external keyword tool.
01 Jul This post is from from my other blog here
From the announcement post: Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. This is undoubtedly a step in the right direction, but there’s still a good deal of ground to cover. While .SWF files will be indexed, it will only be for text content contained within the .SWF file. Content that is pulled in by a .SWF for presentation as opposed to be included in the .SWF will be indexed separately. As it is described in the Q&A post, the code which parses Flash files will essentially be acting like a user. We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. There are obvious limitations to overcome, in my mind specifically with the inability to index dynamic content (content pulled in from a database or external XML file), but this is a big move in the right direction, and its been a long time coming. Thanks to Chris ‘Ubergeek’ Hill for emerging from vacation long enough to pass this info along.
01 Jul This post is from from my other blog here
From the announcement post: Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. This is undoubtedly a step in the right direction, but there’s still a good deal of ground to cover. While .SWF files will be indexed, it will only be for text content contained within the .SWF file. Content that is pulled in by a .SWF for presentation as opposed to be included in the .SWF will be indexed separately. As it is described in the Q&A post, the code which parses Flash files will essentially be acting like a user. We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. There are obvious limitations to overcome, in my mind specifically with the inability to index dynamic content (content pulled in from a database or external XML file), but this is a big move in the right direction, and its been a long time coming. Thanks to Chris ‘Ubergeek’ Hill for emerging from vacation long enough to pass this info along.
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Following years of second-class citizen status, Flash content is now being welcomed into Google’s index. A 