YBO Interactive Blog

Look at this email I got from Plaxo. How many colleagues do you think they can find from YBO Interactive?

Stupid emails like these make me look for the unsubscribe link (I just did!). If you are sending newsletters to your customers, make sure they won’t feel the same. Treat your customer’s mailbox with respect the same as you treat your customer with respect. If your message is not useful for your customer, don’t send it. And if you do, make sure that there is a very easy way to unsubscribe in one click, something like that:

“This email was sent to xxxxx@example.com. If you believe this message is a mistake and would like to remove your address from our system please click here ”

Don’t make your customers hate you just because of your newsletter. It is not worth it.

At the recent Web 2.0 expo, Matt Cutts presented on “what Google knows about spam…”

I watched the 9 minutes video and it is quite interesting to hear it from an official Google representative. After all, everything we know is based on urban legends…

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I found a really nice research article made by the Psychology Department of Wichita Sate University, about The Effect of Website Typeface Appropriateness on the Perception of a Company’s Ethos or  in other words - which font should you use to make your users trust you more.

It makes perfect sense that there are fonts that are more trustworthy, but I never thought about a research proving it. But then again, this is the reason that I’m blogging about it, and they have proved it…

It happened lately a few times that I asked customers to make changes on their website and got the answer “the company that built our website said that it is impossible”.

I heard it even on simple requests like removing the company name from the pages <TITLE>. Not mentioning META tags, ALT tags, nofollow links, 301 redirects, and many others requests that were simply rejected.

So I made this list.

This is what I want from web development companies that are going to work with my customers.

1. Configurable <TITLE> tags: I would like to set the title of every page myself. I don’t want the company name added to the title automatically and I don’t want the title to be the anchor text of the link from the main menu (I may want that, but let me choose). I need full control on title with no exceptions.

2. Configurable Meta <Description> tags: Most companies will let you do that through their CMS, but some that I have seen never heard of it.

3. mod_rewrite: Let me decide how I want the URLS on site to look like. In some cases, instead of having this URL http://www.example.com/product.php?action=7&id=8 I may want this one: http://www.example.com/blue-car-with-sun-roof

4. Nofollow links: I need the option to set links on site to nofollow. This may include links on the main menu or links that appear on every page on site.

5. ALT Attributes: It should be possible to set ALT Attributes to every image on site.

6. H1 H2 H3: Let me add any HTML tag I want on my page. Especially Heading tags.

7. Crawlability: site must be fully crawlable, with no javascript links that block the flow.

8. Javascript: In some cases I will still need the ability to add javascript code. Whether it is Google Analytics, or other e-commerce tracking codes, many CMS systems I saw do not allow javascript. The ones my customers use need it.

9. Editable Footer: I will need to edit the footer for many reasons. Mostly for adding tracking codes that should appear on every page on site, and in some cases adding links or graphics. Don’t show me a fixed footer with sitemap and privacy policy links. Let me change it.

10. Dedicated IP: This is a hosting issue, that in many cases comes in the same package. Dedicated hosting is a big advantage. This means that our site is the only site that has our IP address. I don’t want to get search engine penalties because of adult sites running on my machine.

11. USA hosting: I know that hosting in India is great. I really do. But my market is in the US, and my site should be where my customers are. Both in terms of SEO and network aspects. My site should be rocket fast both to my customers and to Google.

12. LAMP: Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP is my favorite. CMS built on these machines just makes me happier. I can’t explain this one. It’s a matter of belief.

13. Standards: Standard site according to the world wide web consortium is an advantage. I’ll be actually very surprised if anyone will say yes to this one.

14. Firefox: That is the easiest request. I saw web sites that belong to web development companies that can not be viewed with Firefox. How stupid is that?

15. Flash: I don’t like flash websites. Neither does Google.

If you have any additions to this list please comment…

Hitwise Reports that Google has 67% of All US Searches. They also say that Yahoo has 20% and MSN has 7%. Is it a surprise? not to most of the people I know.

I didn’t see the details of the survey made by HitWise, but I guess that if research would be made only with users from Silicon Valley, the Google percentage would be higher, for the simple reason that technology oriented users would rather use Google than any other Search Engine.

So who is using msn and Yahoo?

I think that most of the users using msn are the ones that got their computer with Windows and Internet Explorer, and have no idea how to change the default search engine in their browser. In fact, they don’t even know that it is possible.
Yahoo is a different story. There are still people out there that think that Yahoo is the Internet. They open their browser, go to Yahoo.com and then, they type the address of the domain they want to go to (sometimes IN THE SEARCH BOX). Don’t get me wrong, not all Yahoo users are “computerly challenged”, the thing is that Yahoo was there first (almost), and quite a lot of people know how to use it, like the way it works, they like the content, the channels, the email, and see no reason to go anywhere else.

What can you learn from it? If you’re running a Pay Per Click campaign for a company that sells Enterprise Wireless LAN, Google is your place and all the rest are waste of money. The IT managers looking for your products are in Google. On the other hand, if your page is an Acropolis Audio Tour, You should definitely pay attention to msn and Yahoo. Your customers are waiting there as well.

I was asked by one of my customers to explain why removing the company name from all his pages titles is a good idea. It just didn’t make any sense.

As you can see in this list of Top Factors for Google Search Engine Ranking, the most important ranking factor on a web page is the <TITLE>.

A web page with the title “Johnny Depp’s Aquamarine Gemstones Shop” will rank significantly lower for the keyword aquamarine gemstones, then a web page with a title “Aquamarine Gemstones” assuming all the other ranking factors are the same. Google might get the impression that this page is also about “Johnny Depp”, “Johnny Depp’s shop” , a “Gemstones shop” or an “Aquamarine shop”. Keyword Focus is very important when optimizing titles. The less words you have around your keyword, the better. In most cases, your potential customers won’t search for your brand name, but more likely search for your product description. The ones that search for your brand name already know you, and know how to find you. Adding your brand name to the product description will be a total waste energy that won’t bring any good.

On any internal page it would be the best to have a title with the product description without a company name. Having said that, Home Pages are different.

I would put a company name on a Home Page <title> simply because a Home Page is not like any internal page on site, it has more importance than all the rest especially in terms of branding. In terms of look&feel, your company name simply belongs there. SEO is very important, but it is just another part in the marketing puzzle.

The first thing I would do when optimizing a new site is to remove the company name from all titles. It is not always easy to convince your customer that this is the right thing to do, but once they do it, it takes a very little time to show them that it works.

And it works great.

Warning: Search Engines like Google don’t ‘like’ big changes. Changing all titles of a site can cause damage. The advice that appears in this post is very good for new sites, or sites that have very little traffic and want to grow. If your site already has a lot of traffic, it is recommended to change the title of new pages (if it’s a blog, do it above a certain %postid%), and keep the old pages untouched. In any case, the best would be to consult an expert before doing big changes.

Google up inurl:wp-content/1/ [Warning: just google it up, don’t visit any of the site in the search results. They are full of activeX viruses!]. This is what I see now:

What you see is a list of sites that were hacked through the latest WordPress Vulnerability that allows hackers to insert spam into your blog.

This is just great. WordPress is the most common blog software out there, and at this minute there are over 90,000 website that were spammed (still counting…) I’m sure that most of these sites owners never heard of this exploit and some of them will probably never will. The damage is enormous. This exploit made them look like spammers in Google eyes, and Google like Google - She never forgets anything. If you are a spammer, you are out of the index in one second.

In my opinion, the best way to deal with these hacks is Active Network Scanning. This kind of services are usually provided by an external company that scans your site for vulnerabilities on a daily basis (like Hacker Safe, but better). Once a new vulnerability is discovered to the world, it is automatically added to their scanning system and is tested on your site. This can definately help you sleep better.

Life shows that there is no way your web site can be safe. It is just the nature of software that it is full of holes. If only you scan your website for vulnerabilities, at least you know about it on time and hope there is something you can do about it…

Important comment: if you are not in this list, it does not mean that you are safe. There are lots of other URLS that were used for this attack… This IS fun!

update: (April 12 2008): Checked again the list, and it seems like most of the hacked pages were removed from Google’s index. It DOES NOT mean that the vulnerability is fixed, it just means that Google had identified that these pages as pages that should be ignored and removed from the index. This is semi good news for those that were hacked and afraid their ranking will go kaput. Just semi because they are still vulnerable and will surly be attacked again in the next wave…

It seems like the number of WordPress vulnerabilities is growing constantly. The most popular blogging software that exists is becoming a huge security hole. In fact, this post is written with Wordpress and it feels less secure than ever. This makes me think about moving my blog to blogger or wordpress hosting site, instead of fighting the patches on my own server.

If you would ask me what is the best Google Analytics resource, I would’nt think twice before sending you here. However, for the problem we had we found something different. I’m using Google analytics quite a lot on every site I work on. Recently we had a problem at one of my customers sites, where the marketing people working in that company were browsing their website all day, searching in Google their website keywords again and again, and made Google Analytics reports become unreliable. There were so many visits in the reports that were not real customers but our own staff, that we didn’t really know which part of the report was real and which part was our own tracks.

Like in every crime scene, we just needed our guys to put on gloves before touching everything…

The solution was very simple.

1. We created a file called disable_analytcis.php

<?php
SetCookie(”disable_analytics”,”1″ ,time()+91536000,”/”);
echo “Yuhu!, Google analytics is disabled!”;
?>

2. In the site footer, next to the Google analytics code, we added this:

<?
if (!empty($_COOKIE[’disable_analytics’]))
{
echo “Google analytics is disabled”;
}
else
{
?>
//put google analytics code here…
<?
}
?>

That was easy. The hard part was to send the link to disable_analytics.php to all the sales and marketing in that company and ask them to click on the link. They ALL wanted to know exactly WTF is going on here… are we spying on them? yes? no? what do you mean Google keeps track??? anonymous? who authorized this…

Once everybody got their cookie, our statistics cleared up. Real client analytics emerged and logs turned useful again. When you do it on your site, make sure your cookie gets to all computers, home computers, laptops and any computer that you don’t want to track.

update: (Thanks Pieter!)
Google offers cookie based filters, as described in Google Analytics Help Center:
Create an Exclude filter to remove data from visitors with this cookie. Follow these instructions to create a filter with the following settings:
Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: disable_analytics
Case Sensitive: No

I guess you all heard about goolag, the new Vulnerability Scanner that uses Google as their engine. I think it is fantastic. There are very creative people out there, Very. The thing is, I’m not so sure if I would trust them to keep me safe. I think that if you are looking for a commercial service, you should look for a vulnerability scanner that is running by a commercial company that is working for this only. I can’t depend on volunteers that update the open source software, to wake up in the morning, clean the empty cokes and pizza trays off their keyboard and keep me safe. For a personal family site, or for a non commercial site, this is fine, but if you need a real vulnerability assessment I think you should pay for your pleasure and have your network scanned by people that do that for living.

How cool is that! I think it is brilliant.

You have to admit that this is very creative, Very!

Will Google block it?
Do they care more about their gmail user experience or the income from this ad?

I’m not sure…

(found this image here)