Top Losers from Google's Farmer Update


Last week Google introduced an update to its index which would try and remove low quality sites from the top of its results. There was a heavy focus in targeting content-farms which syndicated much of their content from other sites via RSS feeds as well as sites which were generally not useful to searchers. A company called Sistrix did an excellent job trying to quantify the results of Google’s update via its ‘visibility index’. Their visibility index is an index value calculated from traffic on keywords, ranking and click-through rate on specific positions. After crunching over a million keywords, the top losers based on Sistrix’s research turned out to be the following sites:
# Domain Change in Visibility Index
1 wisegeek.com -77%
2 ezinearticles.com -90%
3 suite101.com -94%
4 hubpages.com -87%
5 buzzle.com -85%
6 associatedcontent.com -93%
7 freedownloadscenter.com -90%
8 essortment.com -91%
9 fixya.com -80%
10 americantowns.com -91%
11 lovetoknow.com -83%
12 articlesbase.com -94%
13 howtodothings.com -84%
14 mahalo.com -84%
15 business.com -93%
16 doityourself.com -77%
17 merchantcircle.com -85%
18 thefind.com -83%
19 findarticles.com -90%
20 faqs.org -91%
21 tradekey.com -89%
22 answerbag.com -91%
23 trails.com -87%
24 examiner.com -79%
25 allbusiness.com -88%

ObservePoint: Automated Web Analytics Auditing & Site Monitoring

One of the biggest and most consistent concerns within a website measurement strategy is the quality of the data. This is especially a concern for large sites where new content is regularly added and the analytics implementation is extensive. All of the larger players in the analytics space offer professional services whereby they perform an audit of your web analytics implementation, however this can be quite expensive and isn’t always a regular activity. It is not uncommon for an audit to take north of 100 hours and with today’s consulting rates, you’re looking at a $20K price tag.

Recently I had the opportunity to test drive ObservePoint’s site auditing solution, which automates the complex tasks of web analytics auditing and website monitoring. ObservePoint is a very robust solution in that it supports nearly every major analytics provider as well as every single custom analytics variable from those providers. So whether you need to focus on an sProp in Omniture or a custom variable in Google Analytics, it’s all possible. I thought I’d highlight some of my favourite features from ObservePoint rather than just writing a massive essay:

  1. Site auditing setup time: There are no requirements for additional tagging or coding. Simply plug-in your site details, choose your analytics vendor(s), set your schedule and you’re on your way. You can make your audit more advanced by: selecting a specific user agent, adding custom filters or setting up rules to monitor specific variables.
  2. Granularity of analytics vendor variables: If you looked at the level of variables ObservePoint can monitor, you’d swear that they essentially took every single analytics implementation guide and dropped it into their system.
  3. Transaction Monitoring: The ability to monitor a series of URLs as part of a process such as signups, shopping carts, or any other transaction. Now take it a step further, use the data from ObservePoint combine it with revenue per goal data and you’ve got yourself a pretty important metric that ties site performance to dollars.
  4. The Value Ads: Alerts to email/mobile devices, ‘Silent Mode’ so that there are no extra page views in your reports, several server location options for site monitoring, live support (chat) to answer your burning questions immediately, and tag support for beyond analytics such as: DART, ComScore, Quantcast and Website Optimizer.
  5. A free Firefox plug-in to help you assess page level tagging, JavaScript, HTML, image size or CSS issues.


Mobile Transactions – 1 Trillion Dollars by 2014

According to eMarketer, the value of mobile transactions will reach close to 1 trillion dollars by 2014. eMarketer also breaks down the top activites conducted over mobile for US & Europe vs. Asian users.
  • 62% of users in Asia Check bank account balances vs. 33% of users in Europe & US
  • 41% of users in Asia make purchases at stores via mobile vs. 11% of users in Europe & US
  • 38% of users in Asia transfer money via mobile vs. 10% of users in Europe & US
  • 36% of users in Asia display digital tickets vs. 11% of users in Europe & US
  • 31% of users in Asia buy or sell stocks on mobile devices vs. 4% of users in Europe & US


Airline Twitter Statistics

Great infographic shared by Penn Olson which shows how the different airlines use Twitter. There are over 180 airlines using Twitter who average 4.1 tweets per day – Delta leads the way with almost 64 tweets a day. Jet Blue joined Twitter on May 2007 and now has 1.7 million followers. On a given day 164 tweets are directed towards United Airlines, which responds with 3.3 tweets a day. Over 50% of the tweets about United are negative.

Facebook Shares worth $14, Twitter Tweets worth $8

What is the value of a social action in online commerce? This is what a firm called Chompon hoped to answer in their latest study [PDF]. In regards to gross value per action a “Facebook Share” is worth $14, a “Facebook Like” is worth $8, a “Twitter Tweet” is worth $5 and a “Twitter Follow” is worth $2. The values were based on ‘next sale’ after the social media action and not the entire lifetime value of a customer.

Countries Where Facebook Doesn't Dominate

There aren’t many places in the world where Facebook doesn’t dominate and to prove this the Pingdom team used Alexa data to map out all the countries in the world where Facebook isn’t among the top 5 sites. The result was only 13 countries (of the 130 Pingdom examined) where Facebook had yet to conquer.

Where Facebook isn’t dominating
Country Alexa traffic rank Internet users
China Blocked 420,000,000
Iran 26 33,200,000
Japan 15 99,143,700
Belarus 11 4,436,800
Russia 10 59,700,000
Brazil 8 75,943,600
Kyrgyzstan 8 2,194,400
Latvia 8 1,503,400
Ukraine 8 15,300,000
Kazakhstan 7 5,300,000
Vietnam 7 24,269,083
Poland 6 22,450,600
Moldova 6 1,295,000

SMB Website Study: Frequent Updates + Social Media = Greater Traffic

SiteKreator, small business website builder, has just released the results of their study in which they analyzed 5,000 random websites through 2010. The results revealed that small businesses who update their site content more often receive more traffic on a monthly basis vs sites who make less frequent updates. Additionally, sites which leveraged social media in their online strategies also received more traffic than sites not using social media.

Small businesses who update their website more than five times per month have +300% more website traffic than those who do not.

Small businesses who do engage with social networks see a +400% increase in the visitors to their website as a direct result of the social networking platform