I have officially entered the world of podcasting! You can listen and subscribe to the SEMcast on geekcast.fm, I look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions, don’t be shy!
Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away (ok it was Las Vegas, but that seems very foreign to me) some servers were stolen. Vegas is a shady place and sadly we were on the receiving end of some shadiness. At any rate, all we were left with were files and reports people had saved to their personal computers. And yet, within two weeks, and a lot of long days, we had sites up and running again with most of their data intact.
Partially the data people had saved on their machines was really helpful. Lots of database info like prices, product codes, names, and the like were in Excel files. We plopped it into a new database for the site. The rest, like what was on the home page, we retrieved from our soon to be new best friend, the Google cache. Fresher and more comprehensive than archive.org, Google’s cache had pretty much every missing page we needed to rebuild. The process went something like this:
1. Make list of missing pages (basically home page + product pages)
2. Find missing pages in Google by searching for the URL, the code, anything to get the page to show up.
3. Click on the cache link and save the page to a html file.
See the cache link by the red arrow? That shows the web page Google spidered and indexed, as opposed to the live web page you would see by clicking on the result link. Usually there’s not a big difference between what is cached versus live, but there’s a lag between Google’s last visit and a website’s most recent changes. Sometimes that lag is minutes (if the website is CNN) or months if a site is less popular.
4. Give the html files to engineers who parse out all the important data field content and put it back into the database.
5. QA everything, then set it live again.
6. Pesky evildoers find themselves thwarted by technology!
Normally the cache is useful for trying to figure Google’s lag time in updating or seeing a site that might at the moment be unavailable, but should you find some web content has gone missing, its there to help you as well.
Quite often I have a big list of keywords to add to a paid search account. One might think that the search marketing provider (Google, Yahoo, MSN) would want to make it really easy for me to add these, after all, more kwyords equals more revenue for them. And in Google it is easy (thank you AdWords Editor). However, about a quarter of the way through a long list, Yahoo invariably kicks up a securiy issue and locks me out of the account for something like half an hour. The error looks like this:
I’ve emailed my Yahoo account rep, I’ve begged and pleaded to have this stop. No such luck. In fact Yahoo contends this only happens if one or more people are logged into the account, which isn’t the case here, its just me. And no, they haven’t been able to prevent it from occurring. Annoying!
Does anyone else experience this issue?
Sadly I won’t be attending or speaking at SMX West this year. 2009 marks my mother’s 60th birthday and she is an avid dog lover, so we’re off to the Westminster Kennel Club dog show in New York to celebrate. Unfortunately its the same time as SMX West so this year I miss out! If you want to read a blog post about the dog show, I’m sure I’ll be posting one on the Viator Travel Blog once I return. I hope everyone has a great time, learn something new and have a cocktail at a networking event for me!
Viator is co-sponsoring a contest to win free tickets to Paris or Amsterdam from NYC courtesy of OpenSkies. Enter today! Honestly your odds are not shabby we have lots of tickets to give away, and really, you know you need a vacation.
As you might have seen I crossed the pond to speak at SMX London earlier this month. From talking to several UK SEOs there seems to be an impression that SMX is for more advanced search marketers, which probably explains why the boot camp track was sort of empty and the more advanced sessions packed full. The Fundamentals of Search Advertising panel was truly international consisting of me (USA! USA!), Ophir Cohen (Israel), Alan K’necht (Canada) and Richard Gregory (UK). Everybody had something a little bit different to say, but I think all the thoughts were very complimentary and I hope the audience learned a lot.
Most of the sessions I attended were fairly worthwhile, though I think it is worth noting that if you are going to attend just one search marketing event, SMX West is really where its at. SMX West is much, much bigger and more well attended and a better opportunity for networking. Also I think SMX West topics are more advanced and cutting edge. That said, I did learn things from SMX London and meet some new folks, so it was certainly worth the time.
One trend I noticed in presentations (and maybe it was just the sessions I was in) is that there’s a tendency to talk a lot about bad marketing tactics, and to do so at such a length that less time is actually spent on good ones and best practices, which I find much more actionable and useful. Telling me what not to do doesn’t really help me do anything (just helps me not do things). I concede that knowing where to draw the line is good and learning from mistakes is important, but I’d prefer to see more than half the content be about success than failure. In particular I found the Integrating Search and Display session to mainly focus on bad examples and very few actual best practices.
Enough on my opinion, I filled out my feedback form! See you all at SMX West in a few months.
Google released an SEO guide today - huzzah! While the SEO guide is very basic, it does have really good advice for novices to SEO and will hopefully serve as a great primer for folks getting started with their SEO efforts. Basic, almost common sense advice about meta tags, anchor text, site maps and content is the bulk of the guide. Kudos to Google for the clear and concise explanations and for finally giving some basic advice to the little guys who need help the most.
Am I getting political for a moment? Maybe. Bear with me.
The FCC will soon vote on freeing up white space spectrum, essentially bandwidth that we could all use for better broadband access, but the broadcasting lobby would prefer not to see that happen. This reminds me a lot of cable tv back in the day - we could be living in a world where we pay just for channels we want on an ala carte basis, or from several providers, but we don’t have that choice because of laws made hastily and foolishly in the past. Don’t let that happen with internet access.
Bring wireless Internet to everyone, everywhere.
Want more info? Check out Google’s blog post on the white space spectrum vote.
If you’re marketing to pretty much the entire world (or even just a few countries), Google’s new geographic report is so interesting on many levels. Depending on your level of conversion reporting, it can be a powerful new optimization tool. Just last week I deselected all the countries that haven’t generated sales and have significant costs, an easy win. Another fun exercise was to compare click-through rates and traffic percentages for some of our major markets. I wish the report showed a summary versus a daily total for a time period, but for the moment I am living with it.
There was only one major gaffe I sent along to Google, apparently my ads were showing in places that I had assumed could not be targeted (meaning they aren’t listed as countries on Google’s targeting list). The report detailed traffic from ads appearing and receiving clicks from places like Cuba and Sudan, which for several legal reasons is not good. When I sent along the report, it was universally acknowledged as not good, so I am sure the problem is being fixed.
In the meantime its easy to fix in Google’s campaign targeting. Instead of selecting all, just select the whole list of countries (or whichever ones you want). I think its the all option that is causing the issues, since I ceased targeting to all the problem has vanished.
Attending SMX London? I”ll be speaking at SMX London, here’s my session:
Fundamentals of Search Advertising
Day 1, Nov 4th 1-2.15 pm
I think that the other speakers will likely be covering how to get started creating a good campaign structure and other basic best practices.
I plan to complement the just getting started presentations with a presentation on how to do an initial account optimization. I”ll feature specific information about which reports to run, how to cut costs and identify where more investment will increase sales, as well as tools and features provided by the search engines to block sites, ips, etc.
So drop by and say hi, I would love to meet you!
