Firetop

2007 seems to have been the year of web stats comparison questions for me. I don’t remember a previous year where so many people asked me which of their web statistics data tools was telling the truth. The main issue is that whether you’re looking at a logfile analysis report from WebTrends, or a client-side tracker like Google Analytics, both are correct in their own way – you just have to understand their methodologies. The main difference is that logfiles track all server activity – from browser based surfing to Googlebot visits and non HTML file downloads (PDFs), client-side scripts only run for browsers used by real people viewing HTML pages. (more…)

I’ve been thanking my lucky stars that we don’t live beside a river in Gloucestershire of late. However, this morning the serious nature of the problem was brought home to me when the Firetop server was put offline for two hours because of the rising flood waters in Gloucester - home of our dedicated server. The flood waters themselves don’t threaten the server physically, even the potential outage of power in the area is covered by back-up generators, instead support staff were unable to get into the office quickly to reboot equipment after the generators kicked in. Thankfully they won’t be going home tonight (they couldn’t if they wanted to) so things should be ticking along as normal for the foreseeable future, but it makes you realise how much the physical world does still impact on the virtual one. (more…)

Well it’s only taken six months… but finally my Google Adsense adverts have reached their $100 payout minimum, and in July I can expect to receive the first cheque for advert clicks from this blog. I have worked with many clients who have assumed that the payout from contextual advertising like Adsense must be very significant; taking the prevalence of units on websites as a sign of their profitability. However, despite the average click through rate being more than triple that of standard graphic banners, publisher earnings per CPM are quite low in comparison - it’s commission on clicks that we Adsense affiliates get (I estimate 10%), and not the entire advertiser click fee. (more…)

For seasoned SEO experts like myself this article won’t blow you away, however, I recently came across a few forum comments from people still in the dark on the subject of SEO and server IP addresses… In order to decide which search results index a website will be listed in i.e. google.com, google.co.uk or google.de, the country code top level domain (or ccTLD) comes into play. For example, if your website is hosted on a .co.uk domain, Google should assume that your content is relevant to the UK. However, what happens if you’re the UK owner of a .com TLD which by rights should me matched to the US, along with any .net or .org domains? (more…)

I should have remembered how disappointing I found Internet World to be last year at Earls Court, but with free mini seminars on offer covering SEM, PPC and Web 2.0 it again seemed to be worth a visit. Unfortunately within minutes of arriving I was reminded of why the free seminars are NOT a good reason to attend the Internet World show; over subscribed presentations causing a massive shortage of seats and some very basic topics being presented. Quite why a packed crowd was sitting listening to one guy go over slides on SEO which I could well have written seven years ago I don’t know. (more…)

Some of my more regular readers will recall that in early November I looked into the popularity of ‘Celebrity Sex Tape’ downloads. This followed a Channel Four documentary detailing the history of the top 10 celebrity sex video downloads – a documentary which I felt compelled to correct on its statistical inaccuracies (I reordered the popularity chart based upon actual search volumes not just search results). As it turns out, that blog entry is now one of my most popular; bombarded with searches for ‘celebrity sex tapes’. However, we all know what these visitors are really searching for… and it’s not the correct video download chart. (more…)

Towards the end of 2006 I wrote a short article about the legality of digital broadcasting to UK audiences using SHOUTcast; essentially it’s quite legal to broadcast music in the US - to the US - at a small license fee, however if UK residents download the stream then a separate license is needed – and at the time of writing it was believed that there wasn’t one available… (more…)

I’m getting sick and tired of seeing journalists reviewing new websites and still referring to the number of ‘hits’ a website is receiving; it’s relatively meaningless data and does NOT mean ‘visitors’. Back in 1998 I thought technology editors might wake up to this by 2006 but it seems not. A hit is recorded in a server log file for every single file downloaded per page viewed on a website - this includes images like jpegs and gifs, .txt, PDF files and page includes themselves. Just opening this blog’s home page for example causes you to make around 50 hits. To give this some perspective let me put it this way - Firetop has received 106,463 hits in August - a journalistic field day! However, the number of visits has been a lot less at 2,118 from only 1,141 unique visitors. (more…)

An update on the frustrating downtime this morning. I upgraded the server last week to include a more robust managed back-up system, this meant the folks at Rackspace had to move the server to a new location (with a new IP address). I asked them to do this at midnight this morning to minimise inconvenience for all. However… they forgot to update all of the IP addresses on the domain A records so they were still pointing to the old server IP address up until about 7:30am when I contacted the technical support staff to identify the problem. (more…)