Monthly Archives: March 2006

Performancing releases Free Web Analytics Service for Blogs

Performancing , the famous site dedicated to the bloggers’ community, has just released a free Web Analytics Service for bloggers. It’s called Performancing Metrics. I’ve already installed it for SEO Principle and it has a pretty neat configuration. The metrics allow you to get plenty of information about your visitors, but also about the search engines they used to find you, and much more.
It’s a pretty neat service that they provide here. For example, you’re able to see which posts from your blog people have read, you can have a comments summary, you can see your visitors’ languages, and you can also have adsense information.

And the great news is that everything is free! I guess I don’t have to wait for Google Analytics anymore… Congratulations to the Performancing team! They already have 500 blogs which subscribed to the service. If you don’t have a Performancing account yet, you can sign up now.

Supplemental Results Issue with Google seems to be fixed

The last few days, a couple of sites that I know which had for example hundreds of pages indexed in Google were only showing a few pages in Google, with the command site:url.com. Google was displaying a message saying that some results were omitted while there was no reason for them to do so. (pages having unique title tags, search engine friendly urls etc.)
The problem was reported in WebmasterWorld and also on many other forums.

As of today, these sites that  I know are showing the same number of indexed pages as they were before the issue. Matt Cutts hasn’t commented on this issue yet. “GoogleGuy” over at WMW apparently said that he knew where the error came from and that they were working on it, but we haven’t seen anything on Matt Cutt’s blog yet.

I’ll be interested to see if people are still facing this issue, so please be kind to leave a comment if you do.

SEO: why you need to keep up with the news everyday

I’ve been away for more than a week, while preparing my return to France and taking care of a few things back here. Therefore, I wasn’t able to keep up with what was going on in the SEO world on a daily basis. It took me a few days to catch up with all the posts on SEO blogs, forums and other SEO related resources.

While participating in forums threads recently, I realized that if you’re away for a while, even a day or 2, and aren’t able to keep up with SEO readings, you can really be lost… For example if you weren’t aware of the supplemental results issue in Google, which was mentioned a few times in forums, it will be hard to understand what’s happening and also, let your client know about this issue. I faced this problem and had no idea of what was going on before seeing that others were having the same issue with their sites.

The solution when you’re travelling and don’t have access to a computer: get a good mobile to surf and also the right contract…

Are you Web 2.0 or not?

These days, it seems that people are talking about Web 2.0 more than ever. Many sites that I visit everyday just changed their design recently to look more Web 2.0, and the number of new web applications is booming.

There are just too many things going on that it can be hard for someone to know what Web 2.0 really is… I am myself sometimes confused and wondering where’s the limit between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

It’s true that some people seem to consider Web 2.0 as the use of the AJAX language only or to community sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr etc. There are actually more elements that define the new Web and some people are trying to help people understand this new era.

Dion Hinchcliffe tries to give a definition of Web 2.0 and seems to be complaining about the confusion amongst people when it comes to define what Web 2.0 is. He wrote an article yesterday called: You know you’re Web 2.0 when… , a very interesting and comprehensive piece of paper where he tries to help people see if they’re Web 2.0 or not.

Here’s his Web 2.0 checklist:

  • You can easily comment on, or preferably, actually change the content that you find on a Web site.
  • You can label your information with tags and use them to find that information again.
  • Your Web page doesn’t reload even once as you get a whole lotta work done.
  • You are actively aware of other users’ recent activity on a site.
  • It’s possible for you to easily share with others the information you’re contributing on the Web site.
  • You can syndicate your information on a Web site elsewhere on the Internet through a feed like RSS or Atom.
  • You can pick and choose the pieces of a Web site that you like and then add that functionality to your own site.
  • There are easy ways to find out what content is the most popular or interesting at the moment.
  • You heard about a new Web site because a friend enthusiastically recommended it to you out of the blue.
  • There happens to be a mind boggling amount information and a lot of people on a site, yet it seems easy to find what you want and communicate with others.
  • Everything you ever added to a given Web site can be removed easily at your whim.
  • The Web site actively encourages you to share and reuse its information and its services with others. And it even provides a license to do so.

That’s a very comprehensive list. That doesn’t mean that every site should respect all these elements, but this is a good list to understand if you are close to Web 2.0 or not… Hmmm, I think my blog misses a few web 2.0 things: should I add tags or links to social bookmarking sites? 🙂

Thank you Search Engine Roundtable

I’m finally back in France, the flight was a bit long from San Diego to Paris and I was surprised to see snow here. Anyway, I’m glad to be back and be able to see my family and friends again. I will stay a few weeks in France and then I will start a new career in the UK with whichever SEM company that would best suit my needs.

Because I wasn’t able to go to the SES in New York, I was following the news at SERoundtable everyday, as they decided to cover the events as much as they could.

I think this is the first time that we are able to get as much information from a SES conference without being there. I’d like to thank everyone over at SEroundtable for their efforts, especially Barry Schwartz (Rusybrick).

To illustrate how precious the information they provided were, you can read their last entry called Meet the Crawlers, where the audience was able to ask various questions regarding indexing and crawling to “Matt Cutts from Google, Kashual Kurapati from Ask Jeeves, a representative from Yahoo! (Tim Mayer was not present) and Ramez Naam from MSN Search.”