Posted by Ian Holsman
it’s weird.. I have a couple of sites of all a similar structure, but poor bank chat isn’t being indexed by google.
It knows about the site, as it says it visited on January 10, but nothing since.
anybody know what is going on???
it was on the index for a while, but it vanished without a trace, and google’s webmaster tools doesn’t give me a hint either.
Posted by Ian Holsman
I launched 2 sites at the same time, and submitted them both in the same way, a Fishing and a Golf one. (about 3 weeks ago)
One is showing up in the google search index (and has been for 2 weeks), and the other hasn’t. Google’s Webmaster tools doesn’t shed any light either (ie.. it doesn’t say the site is Spammy.. just to have patience).
I’ve got some theories on why:
I’m sure it will get indexed eventually, but it is curious.
Posted by Ian Holsman
I launched 2 sites at the same time, and submitted them both in the same way, a Fishing and a Golf one. (about 3 weeks ago)
One is showing up in the google search index (and has been for 2 weeks), and the other hasn’t. Google’s Webmaster tools doesn’t shed any light either (ie.. it doesn’t say the site is Spammy.. just to have patience).
I’ve got some theories on why:
I’m sure it will get indexed eventually, but it is curious.
Posted by Ian Holsman
Colin on Bankwatch takes issue with winer’s latest post about google
The prevailing wisdom is if the economy goes down, advertising will go down with it, and as such google will suffer (and as a by product so will publishers).
but I disagree, internet advertising is measurable. With google adsense you can get a causal relationship between a ad-click and a product sale, as such it will be easier to justify the ad-spend on google.
Less measurable media like print, radio, and Television will have a harder time, as they don’t have as easy a method of ad spend to product sale.
So you might actually find more vendors moving to google during a economic downturn. as that spend can be justified more easily, and has a easier line between ad-spend and product sales.
Posted by Ian Holsman
Ok.. I’ll admit I’ve never used google answers before, and as such i’m not going to comment on how good or bad it was.
What I like about the decision is that Google has the guts to fail. In all the management/innovation books I have read they keep talking about ‘Fast-Fail’ being one of the core things a company needs to understand if they want to be innovative and build really good things.
Fast fail is when someone has the balls to go up to a group and say.. this isn’t working.. lets kill it now, before it soaks up more time/energy/money. The thing you want is to learn from these failures, so you don’t repeat them.
It’s a hard call to make I’m sure, as the people working on answers would have devoted a lot of time and ownership into it. but it has to be done. It’s better for those engineers to go work on another project where they could add more value.
This ties in to yahoo’s peanut-butter manifesto as well. This is what happens when you don’t do fast-fail. you end up with all your resources tied up supporting things which aren’t really working, and the terms ‘black hole’ and sunk costs gets bandied about in meetings.
So Google is doing the best thing… I’d rather see them doing lots more things like answers as they are continually experimenting…. and some experiments don’t work..
Posted by Ian Holsman
in Valleywag they ask google is partnering, and believe it’s all to do with hurting microsoft.
BS. It’s about lack of future growth (and revenue) in search .. their main revenue generating area.
so.. google’s strategy (as I see it) is simple
get more people and businesses online.
While ALL the large businesses are on line, the SMB area is severely underrepresented. and that means they aren’t advertising online either. So by partnering with intuit (and giving each intuit user a $50 adsearch credit) they are opening up a whole new segment..
This will be of benefit to everyone who feeds off the internet. .. these SMB businesses will need the services of IT Professionals..
People who use adsense on their sites will love more people competing for visibility on their sites as well.
The one question i’m not sure about it the splogs. I’m not sure if increasing the minimum bid they have to have will bid higher for their ads (but in converse the ads they show on their sites will also be higher).
So if I had a 1-200k or so to invest, I would be investing in services which can help these SMB businesses succeed.. as there will soon be a whole lot of demand for them.
Posted by Ian Holsman
Over on the adwords blog, they made a big announcement that they will start displaying the ‘fradulent’ clicks in a report.
what a waste of energy.
why?
well.. it provides no useful information to anyone.
1. First remember it tracks the clicks that google thinks are fraudulent, not what are fradulent. There is a big difference here.. What kind of assumption can we say about fraud based on the ones we catch? absolutely nothing. someone might be robbing you blind, but they are too smart to get caught.
2. Google saying it has a rate of X% means what to who exactly? There is a lack of benchmark data. Is X% high or low? does X% going up mean that they implemented a new algorithm, or some dumb robot was unleashed against your site?
3. Most importantly. How can you use this metric to determine what price you should bid at or what words you should be targeting. How does this make your job easier, or make you want to bid higher?
Metrics are good if you can do something about them. In this case it will provide a false sense of security (or insecurity) to people.
I think google has 2 options available.
It can do what amazon does, and track the money. (robots don’t have credit cards). By this I mean google gets paid when the advertiser does. If you actually buy something then google gets a cut. (Google is experimenting with this already)
Google should also increase the cost of committing fraud. Right now if I go out and write a bot to do fraud clicks, or hire some college students to do it I don’t get caught and convicted. Google needs to find one or two of them and make a public example of them. They need to really punish these people publicly to make sure others will think twice before they attempt it.
Posted by Ian Holsman
How do people find your site?
I’ve recently been interested in how people are finding my sites, and have got some interesting results
Economy Chat is about 20% google/ 2% referrals with the rest being direct links (I’m guessing RSS) and my blog is about 20% search / 20% referrals.
while
Zyons is about 2% search / 20% referrals and GypsyJobs running at around 2% / 24%.
how do your sites rank?
I’m also finding a long tail in referals.. with one or two sites making up most of the referral clicks as well.
Posted by Ian Holsman
this is a bit of a rant.. but I’m already getting prospective students mailing me and I want to avoid some of the issues I had last year.
drupal have come up a series of pages to help out prospective students.
If you are applying for a project I am mentoring.. READ THEM.
What I expect of you during the summer
I have put my name down to be a mentor in both Django and the ASF web-server projects. If you have a good idea in either of these 2 areas.. feel free to add the idea to the respective Wiki’s. (once you ping the dev-list/me)
The official ASF wiki for projects is here
The Django wiki for projects is here
once you have done that, you should subscribe to the development list of the project and introduce yourself, and your idea.
The more people who know who you are, the better. Last year we got 6-7 proposals for some projects. The people who haven’t filled in the application properly/in detail, or who never bothered pinging us were at a disadvantage to those who did.
What to expect from me.
—
ok.. this is important. If you want me to mentor your project, you better like the way I do it :-).
My main aim for mentoring this is for you to see what open source is like, and what working in a open source community is like, and for you to be part of the community in the long term.
That means: I expect you to be proactive, contribute to the mailing lists, and know when to ask for help. I try to act as a guide, not a answer-provider. I will not hold your hand. (I am too busy and overcomitted as it is).
I am more interested in the ‘people’ side of this project, not the code. Code can be fixed later on if required.
At the moment I plan to mentor at least 1 student for each project, and plan to allocate 2-4hrs a week (max) to it. This worked well last year. (where I mentored 4 students, 2 of them are still active on the development list 1 year later on.. )
ok.. still want to apply? great! do I sound like a self-important obnoxious pr**k? at least you know now ;-) and you can apply to another project instead of choosing mine.