Diary of a Market Hacker

Network Solutions using 302 redirect on E-commerce customer sites.

February 9, 2009 – 11:09 pm
Recently a new client was referred to me.  He was having a difficult time getting his site to rank after taking over the site from the previous owner and having the rankings drop significantly.  We discovered several problems that made his situation what it is. That is, hopeless until the problem gets resolved. His site had been indexed using http and https urls at some point in the past.  He had duplicate content problems there, but that is not is main issue. When he took over the site he moved it to the Network Solution E-commerce platform. Network Solutions uses 302 temporary redirects to to divert content from https URLs to the non-secure version of the page.  While redirecting https URLs to http URLs is a good idea, it's a really bad idea to tell the search engines that it's only temporary.   Basically, what NS is doing to say "hey ...

Posted in Search Marketing Perspective | No Comments »

What about the number of back links some of these sites have? That’s helpful no?

January 30, 2009 – 12:49 pm
A friend of mine recently asked this very question.  He had been given a "Search Engine Optimization Process Summary" (impressive huh!) from an SEO company.  The summary included information about competitor sites and text on these sites home pages.  The report was a mix of partially useful information and, in my opinion, misleading geeky dribble.  Over all, it painted a very concrete picture of what the client needed to do. Unfortunately, describing "what it's going to take" is rarely concrete. The question was: "What about the number of back links some of these sites have?   That’s helpful no?". I answered in a way that would break up the concrete impression that had started to set. "yes and no.  Back link count and it's relationship to rank is not as empirical as they make it out to be.  The value a link carries for a specific term varies.   There are many factors involved.  A simple ...

Posted in Search Marketing Perspective | No Comments »

installing Piwik - Open Source Web Analytics

June 9, 2008 – 5:11 pm
I just wrapped up a couple of installs of Piwik, the open source web analytics software. I've used my share of web analytics systems from the old school Webalizer to Google Analytics to aggregate web analytics systems designed for specific business purposes. In this case I needed something as stylin' as GA without all the tie in to Adwords, Goals and other promo stuff pushed out by Google. Oh yeah, there's also the fact that I don't trust Google with my data (I don't trust a company that says it's motivator is to not be evil or anything so subject to the bottom line). I quickly concluded that Piwik was the best place to start in the middle of the year 2008 (holy shit, I'm getting old). Piwik is a tag oriented system that links to your pages with embedded image and js. At this point ...

Posted in Things that help me work, Everything else | 3 Comments »

I stuck my Drupal in my Zoop.

May 20, 2008 – 11:06 pm
I recently rounded up some of the fundamental applications and methods that I've created over the last few years and decided putting them together into a useful website that would serve me (and others) well. The problem I have with any such project, along with no immediate payout, is that I have limited time to spend on it. So, I decided to first build this marketing mash-up using a development frame work to save some time doing it the right way. I chose a lesser known php framework called Zoop. Zoop provides a lot that the others didn't and it was really easy to learn. Something I really liked was the zoop zone development methodology. The code just flowed once I learned the basics. Everything I needed, including javascript effects and ajax controls provided by Scriptaculous and Prototype, respectively, was there without ...

Posted in Everything else | No Comments »