I received an email from IndexTools informing me that my accounts with them are now free, thanks to Yahoo acquiring them.
So moving forward from here and upon your acceptance of the Yahoo! Master
Terms & Conditions and Program Terms the product will be provided to you
free of charge.
Thats great news! Although I am not sure how new sign ups are handled.
If you have not seen the press release come over the newswire then allow me to be the one to break the news and shed some light on the details. Recently I have formally accepted an executive position with Best of the Web.
Over the course of a couple weeks we had multiple lengthy conversations regarding the general aspects about the new product. After some “big brain” strategizing I was offered the opportunity to take the reins & tasked with “make it happen”.
These past fourteen months I’ve been working directly with some extremely smart and highly spirited entrepreneurs on the build-out of what we now publicly call “Local”. We have recently completed major development work and are progressively rolling out nationwide within the
With Local now a notch on my BOTW belt, Brian and Greg approached me a few weeks ago about coming on permanently. Once again we jumped back into having “big brain” strategy conversations and a formal agreement has been made.
As the press release mentioned, I will be responsible for interacting with agencies, identifying distribution opportunities, and project managing new offerings. Since we have already been working with each other for over a year these new responsibilities although challenging are a natural fit.
On a more personal note, I am thrilled to be joining such a great company. Those who regularly attend search conferences are very familiar with the genuine vibe and kinship BOTW exudes. Being able to share in this energy on a daily basis has made this past year highly enjoyable and productive.
I invite my readers to jump on Local and help spread the word of our latest web offering.
This is certainly an interesting development!
Yahoo! Announces Agreement to Acquire IndexTools’ Analytics Business
The acquired technology is expected to extend Yahoo!’s current analytics offerings by adding capabilities to deliver relevant insights and metrics for online campaigns that run across the entire Yahoo! network. Following the acquisition, the first group of customers to benefit from these enhanced tools will be more than 150,000 small-to-medium businesses marketing on the Web with Yahoo!. Additional capabilities enabling third-party developers to monitor and optimize the traffic performance of their applications are expected to follow throughout the year following the acquisition.
How Yahoo! buying IndexTools changes Web Analytics
Yahoo! will almost certainly be able to take advantage of the good work that Google has done establishing their Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) network, giving Yahoo! an immediate deployment network (oh man do I hope they call it the “YAAC” Network!) Having run IndexTools on my own site for some time I very much expect that many GAAC partners will actually prefer IndexTools for most of their deployments given the dramatically improved capabilities of the application.
For a few months now a handful of my sites can rank almost immediately in Google SERPS whenever we add new content. I noticed just the other week one of the new pages I added to a site ranked in a competitive SERP in less than 4 hours.
Now I am noticing a complete opposite effect taking place. Looking at the exact same sites, some new content is now not even registering with Google, even after a few days.
When I say not registering, the new pages are not even being indexed.
Talk about temperamental. Some pages are indexed and ranked in hours while others are getting no love what-so-ever. All things being equal, we are not doing any trickery with links.
Its strange behavior…
Update: In an IM with an SEO I was asked some questions so I thought I would clarify here. 100% unique content. No link buying nor any sort of redirect manipulation taking place. We could add two new pages to some of the site and one page would get indexed while others would not. I am seeing this on a few sites. No penalty has been given to any of the sites since our money keyword terms are holding strong and there as been no movement in the ranks.
This is kind of cool, in a Google geekish sort of way. It should be worth noting that the links displayed here are not the most viewed nor the most organically searched for pages on this site.
This is the first I heard about them. Spokeo is a way for you to track all your friends online “social” activity by using their news reader.
Profy reviews the site by writing
Here’s what’s slightly (okay, a bit more than slightly) creepy about Spokeo, however; you don’t have to invite anyone, approve anyone, or really do much of anything. Getting all your contacts set up is as simple as providing your email address and password, and Spokeo will import your contacts and start crawling the sites to find updates.
Here’s the kicker: you don’t necessarily have to be friends with the people in your contact list in order to see what they are doing on many of the sites. From Twitter tweets to Picasa photo albums (which, quite honestly, I had no idea anyone I knew even USED), whatever people in your address book are doing on the 33 sites, you will have it dumped into your feed.
Check out these social sites you can monitor (many of which I never heard of).
You’re given the option to verify your site in Webmaster Tools by either creating a meta tag or by uploading a file. I’ve now seen on a few wordpress sites that the meta tag is not being read by Google. Even though the tag does show in the html code and is placed in the right area, Google won’t validate the site.
Before I dive into this I want to give a public thanks to Cash Volume for pointing out the fact my site had been hacked.
A couple of weeks ago I noticed the traffic coming to this site phased out. I know I have not been the most active blogger but I did not think that was an excuse for the organic traffic to just die out.
A few months ago I had upgraded Wordpress to its most recent version. When I recently noticed the volume drop in traffic I thought that perhaps there were some coding errors with an incompatible plug-in as result from the upgrade.
When upgrading the site I did not really spend much time doing any quality control. I’ve been so busy working on other websites that actually pay the bills.
After quickly running down the list of plug-ins, I found the Cloud Tagging plug-in had failed. This failure had thus set into motion 1,000’s of unique urls that all pulled the content from my index page. Thus I now had 1,000’s of duplicate pages.
The 1,000’s of pages were a result of the keywords that were tagged in my blog posts that had their own unique URL. When this was working, the number of pages Google indexed was in the 1,000’s not 100’s which represent the true number of blog posts.
Because this site is just something to pass the time I did not want to spend hours upon hour’s hand editing all my blog posts with new tags. So I wrote a disallow function in the robots.txt file to prohibit the spiders from crawling any subdirectory that started with /tag/.
I then went into the Google Webmaster Console and asked them to remove all pages from their index that had /tag/. This seemed like the easiest thing for me to do.
Then something interesting occurred last week that completely took me by surprise.
I got an email via MyBlogLog user, Cash Volume. He had pointed out the fact many of my Adsense ads were displaying content that was not even relevant to this blog. They were displaying pharmaceutical ads.
He was kind enough to show me the ads in an image and then he went on to tell me that he peeked at my source code and there were dozens of hidden pharmaceutical links on all my pages.
After getting his emails I jumped into my WordPress theme and searched through all the code for this blogs theme. For the life of me I could not find anything.
I then found my way to the Wordpress core files and upon review I noticed that there were two files whose modified dates stood out from the rest. The files had been encrypted with some hash or something and I could only guess if those were the culprits. I had no idea.
At that point I just got fed up with the whole thing and quickly made a back up of some core files and directories and then deleted the entire site off of the server.
Once I had a clean directory I did a fresh install of WordPress and uploaded the files need to get this blog looking the same. I doubled check to see if that removed the spam links and it appears to have worked.
I hardly review live source code on my sites unless I am debugging a change made. I suppose this is something we should do on a regular basis.
As for why the traffic died I do not know for sure if it was hidden spam links or the mass duplicate content. Whatever it was, the new entries I had posted this past week have ranked very well in the SERPs for their respective keywords in quick time. This leads me to believe whatever penalty was placed on this domain has now been removed.
I am a bit behind the times when it comes to using Google Maps, approximately 6 months or so. While at the Kelsey SES Local Conference the Director of Google Maps demonstrated a very cool feature.
You can type in an address and it will zoom you right into that location and you can look around 360 as if you’re standing there, right in the middle of the street. This is not a satellite view! The last time I played with this type of stuff was using satellite view and all you could see were roof tops of homes and buildings. This is a much different experience and is very sweet!
I chose to stand on the corner of Marine Dr, San Francisco to look at the Golden Gate Bridge.
