Link bait and money 2 of the dirtiest words for an seo heehehe ..

Well virgin headed up by no other than Sir Richard Branson has began his assault on the UK banking sector taking over North Rock (bits of it) to become a “high street bank”

A few weeks ago I got the invite to a “Mystery Event” hosted by virgin which Sir Branson will be attending.. My first thought was what interesting link bait..

The invite criteria was basically do you blog/tweet etc.. send us your profiles and we will invite you if you have enough followers/traffic etc..

Simple ideas to get your message out to the blogging world.. The key to what made this interesting was it was invite only and no one was told what it was about.

A great way to create a buzz of course… As time has gone on virgin confirmed it was regarding virgin money and twitter is alive with the leak of info that it’s going to be a massive projection on to the Senate house in London..  Yet more link bait

The best bit about a conformation email is the following paragraph:

As we’ll be outdoors there’ll be Tea/Coffee and Hot Soup available to help you keep warm before the event takes, place but make sure you bring your coat and wrap up warm! Don’t forget your camera and smart phone so you can tweet, blog, and share photos of what you see!

As always I do what I’m told so off soon with my iphone and a coat

I love trends and this is always an interesting one… The lead up to xmas in the UK.

Here is the traffic for 3 sites.

1. The first one has nothing to do with xmas and you can see a drop off of some 80% in traffic due to xmas. 100% UK based and the site is of no real use this time of year.
2. The second site is 100% UK based with and has all year appeal but has Christmas sections but these spiked mid November.
3. Similar to site 2 this site has all year appeal but again has Christmas sections BUT has world traffic (mostly USA)

The stats and graphs show how much of us in the UK search less and less going towards xmas day.

I do of course have sites that trend the other way that sell gifts but the above sites don’t sell anything and I consider them as a good overview of UK trends.

So today I log in twitter to get the sexy new interface.. I can’t see much buzz about it on twitter so thought I better blog it here:

Here is the main screen shot:

Here is the “new” @connect (same as the twitter iphone ap)

Here is the new “Discover” which is showing trending #tags and or tweets with stories.

Enjoy playing

Stunning from google… Simply stunning..

Google have updated the new Analytics with visitors flow which a visualises the flow on your site.. Below is a little sample on one of my sites.

The options are the same as all new sections of analytics with flow vs keywords, campaigns etc..

Nothing on http://analytics.blogspot.com/  about this yet and no help doc’s other than one about how google only uses a sample of data..

For me this is great to visually show off to clients what’s working and what’s not..

Yes you can do this in excel but now you don’t need to… Conversion flows are great to show off to a client how well something is working OR that needs more attention.

Hope you enjoy playing with it as much a me..

Using google Analytics  ”new” interface on a single day view I have a massive bug regarding “Visits” vs “Unique Visitors”

I really can’t work out the numbers google is using?  Feel free to comment but this seems to be a “view by day” bug as the weekly/monthly the figure are fine.

Here is the screen shot:

You can see visit are just over half of the Unique visitors which is should be the other way around..

Simple maths shows the Page/visit is working …

Google have updated the UI of the front dashboard page in webmaster tools .

Here is a screen shot:

The really interesting thing is the “Sort: By site health” ??? interesting use of the word health….

Also google are showing the word “New” in bright yellow for domain added within (in my case) the last 3 months.. (google will need to confirm this)

I spend hours looking into site analytics, making on site changes and pointing links and testing, testing and more testing looking for impact and trends across loads of sites.

I noticed today that on Friday 22nd July google changed things which has effect the reporting in google Analytics. The impact in one case has had 523% change in traffic source.

The sample below show the difference from the reports of google.com | /imgres AND google.com

[click image to enlarge]

You can see the steep drop off of the referrals from /imgress and the mass upward trend of search referrals from google.

Just looking at referral from google you’d say wow someone has added a really powerful link and i’m ranking for everything under the sun but this is not the case when you compare with the referring charts.

So google images has either changed to now allow Analytics to reports the referral is if it from a search engine OR google Analytics has changed. In my opinion the trend line suggest its a change on google images end that’s been pushed out slowly over 3 days.

The site in question is image heavy with about 40% of all search traffic coming from image results so you can really see the effect.

So if you monitor Analytics and trend please take into account that the change happened on the 22nd July 2011 and completed on 23/24 July 2011.

Me being in the uk is Pi day for me. I know its not for you guys out in the USA because you write dates the wrong way  around but today is Pi day here!

So what have google done, well nothing bar a very cool Alexander Calder logo/doodle..

Its Alexander Calder Birthday, well 113th famed artist for making sculptures with the mobile being the most famous.

So what my loose link to pi? well You can rotate the logo.. how cool is that.

How to rotate the Alexander Calder sculpture logo ?

Look out for the move cross arrows shown below and use the left button to rotate the 3 sections of the sculpture.

I’ve been watching the new google +1 metrics in google webmaster tools as added the button to one of my sites to test and see what the pros and cons are.

The button has had 20 +1 which isn’t to bad… Its not loads but hey it’s a new thing and the site in question goes out to the general public and not a  load of SEO’s or social media types

As you can see on the 5th of July google dropped a load of the +1′s and on the 6th had a total blackout of +1′s

The funny thing is at last I’ve got data the the impact page for the 6th of July..

Ah well I’m sure the data will return soon..

I love being an seo and I do love how different all my clients are…

One client hasn’t yet given me the go ahead to fix the Missing Unique Product Identifiers for the google merchant feed after months of suggesting it.

Now what’s good about this (not for the client) is I can see the difference and effect of the Missing Unique Product Identifiers on traffic from google shopping.

Below is the graph which is showing a drop in half the referrals from google shopping.

The number of items hasn’t changed nor anything else so what has changed is that the competitors have added Missing Unique Product Identifiers to all/most items which now out rank this account.

We will be gradually enforcing this policy over the next few weeks, with full enforcement in effect on June 20th. During this time, products that do not have correct unique identifiers may not appear in our product listings. If you have products that do not have correct unique identifiers, we recommend that you make the necessary changes as soon as possible.

Please note that in the weeks after June 20th, we will begin disapproving the feeds of merchants who have a significant percentage of items that do not include the correct unique identifiers.

From http://googlemerchantblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/enforcement-of-our-unique-identifier_03.html

And here is the effect:

Note the Error type and that Missing Unique Product Identifiers is at 90% so will this feed be disapproved?

I’ve spent many hours since the announcement in May working with many clients feeds to fix this issue and all other have been affected positively.

Best of luck to those who aren’t updating