| LED Digest 2126: Duplicate Content |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 28, 2006 Issue #2126 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ==================== --== Error Pages ==-- ~ Baruch Avraham "In the statistics of my site I see pages that do not exist on the site any more." --== Duplicate Content ==-- ~ Melissa Rood "...we need to move our website to a new domain name hosted elsewhere." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Verifying Site Traffic Claims ==-- ~ Brad Waller "...you can also build a guarantee into your insertion order." ~ Shari Thurow "As much as my colleagues like to tout the greatness of Alexa, I don't tout it." ~ Susan Geraeds "Another source could be Whois Source..." --== Real Estate Databases ==-- ~ Viggie Bala "The following site have off the shelf PHP-MySQL solutions..." --== To Bounce or Not To Bounce ==-- ~ Peter D'Aprix "Does anyone know if Earthlink has actually refined their filters..?" ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== IP Addresses and Ranking ==-- ~ Paul Harris --== Google Sued for Blacklisting ==-- ~ Steve Birk --== Sites for Mobiles ==-- ~ Valerie Beeby =========== NEW ================================== From: Baruch Avraham Subject: Error Pages Dear LEDers, In the statistics of my site I see pages that do not exist on the site any more. For example the page http://aris-titanium.com/titanium-bands.html was once aris-titanium.com/t_ring.html and it apears as being indexed as error page. More so with aris-titanium.com/paypal.asp that does not exist any more. But it apears in big numbers (up to 60 a day) as error page. Also aris-titanium.com/robots.txt comes as error page in large numbers. Does anyone knows the reason for this? And if this cause a problem with search engine ranking. I will be most grateful for any insight. Best Regards Baruch Avraham Aris Jewelry http://aris-titanium.com/index.html -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Melissa Rood Subject: Duplicate Content Hi, I'm new to the list - I hope you can help me. Foreseeably, we need to move our website from our current domain to a new domain name hosted elsewhere. A 301 redirect (as recently discussed here in the LED) would be ideal except our current host allows no access to .htaccess files, no cgi-bin, no control panel, etc. it's really basic webspace and HTML, CSS, and JS are the only tools available. Any kind of HTML link placed on the old domain would redirect visitors and bots to our new domain but we run the risk of the old site and the new site being in Google's index at the same time. Our site isn't particularly optimised yet so losing ranking is not such a concern but we don't want our new domain being blacklisted for duplicate content. How likely is it that we'll be judged to have duplicate content in this scenario? best regards, Melissa Rood http://www.playing-out.co.uk ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Brad Waller Subject: Verifying claims > [Is it possible] to verify the figures when > folks "offer" great rates to advertise on > their websites, because they get 6,000 > visitors a day... How does one sift > through claims like that anyway? - Carrie MacKenzie, LED 2125 Unless the site is one of the top few thousand sites, and you have access to some third party verification, it is nearly impossible to be sure. You can use Alexa ranking to get an idea if the site is popular, but that can't tell you the difference between 5,000 uniques a month and 50,000. It can help you if they claim a million uniques, but their Alexa rank is also around a million. Then you know that they don't know a thing and are likely reporting "hits", not visitors - let alone uniques. If you have a reasonable feel and do advertise, there are some things you can do. Serve the actual ad yourself, or include a 1x1 blank tacking pixel that you do serve with the order. This way you can actually validate the count of ads served, and you can run the data through an analytics package to determine uniques. This is after the fact, but you can also build a guarantee into your insertion order. Specify a minimum number of uniques that is 85% what they claim you will get. If you are even close, then you can be happy. If you are off by an order of magnitude, then you know that they misunderstood or misrepresented their traffic. Brad Waller http://adjungle.com - Manage and Sell Your Own Ads waller, adjungle.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Shari Thurow Subject: Verifying claims > I know you can't tell by the way they look, and was wondering if > there was any way. Would Alexia provide that information? - Carrie MacKenzie, LED 2125 Hi all- This is in response to Carrie MacKenzie's post in LED #2125 regarding site traffic. I want to dispel an immediate myth. As much as my colleagues like to tout the greatness of Alexa, I don't tout it. In order for those traffic analyses to be accurate, all of your site visitors must have the Alexa toolbar installed. Let's be honest, how many of you have that toolbar installed? I don't have any toolbars installed. Search engines can pay me to analyze my search behavior. They are not getting it for free from me. Back to Alexa. I'm sure many of you have anecdotal evidence that proves Alexa is accurate. I have equal (and probably better) anecdotal evidence that proves it is not accurate. I have viewed and analyzed Web analytics data for thousands of sites since 1997 and still continue to do work in this area. I've seen Alexa's numbers mimic Web analytics data, and I've seen Alexa not get it right at all. Conclusion? It's not accurate. So I don't use it. In reality, you don't know a site's actual traffic unless the Web site owner shares his Web analytics data with you, assuming the Web analytics software has been configured accurately. Carrie is correct for not making assumptions based on appearance. To be honest, I am always amazed that the best performing sites I create and maintain are not necessarily the best looking ones. I know how hard it is to get past appearance, and many companies (unfortunately) base opinions on appearance rather than facts. Bottom line? Sign the NDA and insist on seeing actual traffic data if it is that important to you. Don't assume anything based on appearance or anything that requires a toolbar installation. Sincerely, Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director Grantastic Designs, Inc. ~ For Free design and marketing tips, visit us at: http://www.grantasticdesigns.com/tips.html -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Susan Geraeds Subject: Verifying claims I think Alexa is the way to go, although it might not be entirely accurate it gives you quite a good indication of traffic to a web site. Just use the "traffic rankings" feature on the Alexa main page and type in the URL are you checking. It returns a traffic rank that is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews by Alexa users. Another source could be Whois Source (www.whois.sc), they also give information about a web site's blacklist status and last cache - high traffic web sites get cached more often. Susan Geraeds www.venere.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Viggie Bala Subject: Real estate database > Slick searchable databases... seem to > be a dime a dozen everywhere but I > cannot locate an off the shelf product. - Paul Dobie, LED 2123 It's not clear whether Paul is looking for a solution in CGI or PHP or ASP etc. The following site have off the shelf PHP-MySQL solution http://www.realtywebsoftware.net/. Their lite version ($49) seems to be sufficient. You can find more no. of specific solutions at http://snipurl.com/o0xf [hotscripts.com] Regards, Viggie Bala Helping Websites to Work http://www.viggie.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Peter D'Aprix Subject: Bouncing > ... many spammers forge or pretend > to be a legitimate user. - Brian Rideout, LED 2124 Brian, I had the same problem for several years. Several of my email addresses that use my domain names had been highjacked for this purpose and I too have been getting hundreds of bounce back emails a day. I was about to flag them as spam until I realized that I would be blocking legitimate emails since I would be blocking all email from the domain in the "from" field, which in these cases, was my own. I finally had to start using the Earthlink spam filter set on high which uses my own address book to allow only those emails whose addresses are in the address book to pass through. But I still had hundreds of bounced emails a day in the Suspect Folder to paw through. Suddenly about a week or so ago, these stopped coming. I still received some delivery errors, but they are usually my own and usually my own fault for making a typo in the address. And I need to know when I have made a mistake so I can correct it and make sure my email is received at the other end. Wasn't there a time when we could set our email program to require a "receipt of delivery"? Can we still? I can't find it. Before, my own mistakes got lost with the hundreds of bounced spam emails and I could go a long time before someone told me my email had never arrived. Does anyone know if Earthlink has actually refined their filters to ID emails that were not sent from the person's ISP thus rejecting the fake ones and allowing the valid ones to be received? God bless them if they have! Of course now I have to figure out what to do with all the time I have free each day. Perhaps make more posts to LED? Peter D'Aprix, Executive Editor GourmetVoyageurs - food and travel e-Magazine http://www.gourmetvoyageurs.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Paul Harris Subject: IP Addresses & Search Engine Positioning Does having a non shared IP address affect search engine position ? Paul Harris www.designaweb.biz -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Steve Birk Subject: Google sued Re: Google being sued Is the lawsuit because they were banished from Google's index, or because their rankings dropped? Doing a site:www.kinderstart.com at Google, it comes back with 29,800 results from the KinderStart site. Must have settled out of court ;-) Also kind of humorous how they filed a lawsuit against Google, but have a 728x90 Google Adsense banner at the top of nearly every page! But I guess everyone's trying to make a buck; even off a company you filed a lawsuit against... Regards, Steven Birk, Editor http://medicalcenternews.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Valerie Beeby Subject: Mobiles > You can find several HTML books that have > sections on mobile HTML programming. - Kerry Davis, LED 2125 By the time a book has made it into print about programming for mobiles, it's probably out of date, at least for most new phones. Even web pages - particularly if they've been hanging around waiting for Google to show them - can be several months old. Admittedly so are most phones - often locked in a time plan. Still, it's as well to keep up. I've been doing some research into writing for phones as my site is about making tiny graphics suitable for mobile screens. Adobe GoLive (no relation) has excellent facilities for creating mobile content. GoLive CS2 offers interactive simulators which they update for the latest handsets so you can see what you're creating. The preferred language for mobiles is XHTML or XHTML Mobile - stricter versions of HTML but not that different. WML for WAP sites is more individual, but simple. WML pages are 'cards' which are subsets of 'decks'. All is not lost, however. Mobile browsers like Opera reformat HTML and can show 'ordinary' web pages. The Opera people have some useful tips on making pages compatible at http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/dev/html/ Adobe recommend using CSS. ---------------------- "If you're designing pages for mobile devices, designing with (CSS) liquid layouts is a good way to ensure that your layout resizes to accommodate small screens." ---------------------- Good luck! Valerie Beeby http://www.purple-owl.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. "Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud." - Sophocles |
