YBO Interactive Blog

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)

Last week I got myself a new Sandisk Sansa Clip mp3 player (this is the model I got). I was very happy on the way back home, and when I got to my laptop the trouble started.

Every time I tried to connect it to my laptop, it was dinging like a new USB device was connected, but I couldn’t see anything in “My Computer”. I have tried everything, but nothing helped. When I called Sandisk support I was shocked - they solved my problem!

They asked me to unplug the USB cable, lock the device, push the round button in the middle of the Sansa player, and while holding it, plug in again the USB cable… and it worked!!! How stupid of me not to think about it!

Why am I writing this?

Because if only those SOBs would add a user manual to the tiny mp3 player with a troubleshooting guide, that would save me so much time and energy, but they didn’t. They probably save the trees, or save their money. All that beings said, a manual would help only if I would RTFM, which honestly I’m not sure I would…

I actually can’t remember when was the last time I read a manual of an electronic device I got. My kids like to play with them, they like to rip off the high quality paper booklets, but not more than that…

So in case you got a Sandisk Sansa MP3 player and can’t make it work, lock it and while connecting the USB cable, push the button. You can’t RTFM because there isn’t any FM.update: I heard that upgrading Windows Media Player to version 11 might help as well, but never tried it myself. I do my best to stay away of Microsoft updates…

This is the model I got . I think this tip works for others as well, but I’m not sure.

Did this article help you? Add a comment at the bottom of this post (we love new comments!) , or maybe add a link to this post in your Blog, Digg, Del.icio.us, etc (We love links even more… ).

Last week was first SphinnCon Evar, how lucky are we to have it here in Israel. Did you see me behind Barry on the 4th picture? I AM FAMOUS

The event was excellent, very VERY interesting people spoke up, and I personally felt that the discussion was more ‘casual’ that usually it is - people felt comfortable to ask interesting questions and answers from panelists were great.

The only problem with the event was the T shirt - the XXL T shirt I got is barely a Medium…

Here are some more pictures taken by Yos from RankAbove and some terrible quality movies I took , on youtube.

Small Business SEM has an excellent post about the SEO Success Pyramid.

“…the best SEOs don’t talk to their clients about rankings; they talk about the process of making great web sites that earn traffic and convert visitors into customers. They talk about the process of creating great content that attracts links like bees to honey…”

I agree with that, it is sometimes hard to make people look at the whole picture, but once they do, they like much better what they see.

This image (from that post) makes it very clear:

How old are you? If you are under 30, look at the list of Top 20 websites run by people under 30 . Wouldn’t that be nice if you can get your website in that list…

It is quite inspiring, and maybe surprising to see in the list sites like wordpress that makes $56M a year and Digg that makes $31M. The list is long, read it slowly, stare 5 minutes at every item and think: Why didn’t I think about it!

Does your website suppot Apple iPhone?

iPhone Dev Center explains how easy it is to create a WebClip Bookmark Icon for iPhone users.

To specify a bookmark icon for all pages of a web site, place a PNG
image named “apple-touch-icon.png” at the root directory of your web
server - similar to the “favicon.ico” for site icons.

To verride the site bookmark icon on a specific web page, insert a
<link> element similar to <link rel=”apple-touch-icon”
href=”/customIcon.png”/> within the <head> element of the page.

Yesterday, I spoke to a marketing communication manager who said, “We are just about to build a new website, so we don’t need SEO at this time…”

I have heard this sentence too many times lately, and I think it’s about time to write an answer.

Anyway, that company has a great website. It has 300 pages, 2,500 unique visitors per month, and it is in the top 20s on Google SERPs. It has PR5, and 35 incoming links from websites in their industry. The only problem they have is that “their website is ugly”. I think they are right. I’m not sure if ugly is the word, but it looks old fashioned and definitely needs a face lift. So they have decided to put it down and build a new one.

How clever is that? Putting it down and building a new site is a huge mistake. HUGE.

It is very simple. The day they kill the old website and Google web crawler gets error code 404 (Page Not Found) on their 300 pages site, all their ranking will go kaput. The 2500 unique visitors they have today will go down to 0, and the keywords they managed to bring to top20, will disappear.

And now, they have a new website to start everything from the beginning… How cool is that?

There is a right way to do it, rebuilding websites is a legitimate marketing need and can be done easily without loosing traffic, or ranking.

The first thing to do is research. We need to find which pages perform the best and which keywords have good ranking on our old site. Finding these keywords and pages is the key to make the transition smooth.

Now, for every page in the old site, we’ll find it’s equivalent in the new site, and we’ll add a permanent redirect (301) to that page so that the search engines understand which page in the old site is replaced by a new page.

The new pages should have a similar content to the content of the old page to maintain the same traffic. It doesn’t have to look the same. The colors or graphics are meaningless. The text, images, titles, url and other factors are important, but not the graphics.

Now that our main traffic sources are forwarded to the new site, we need to take care of all the other pages. The only easy way to handle a large amount of redirects is htaccess. Here are a few htaccess examples , but as usually happens with examples, it is very likely that the one you need isn’t there… htaccess should be used only if you really know how to do it, because if you don’t, your whole site might stop working.

Only when we see that the search engines have updated the 301 redirections to the new pages and the traffic is going directly to the new site, can old pages be removed.

In fact, sometimes it is recommended to keep the old pages in place, since other sites may link to internal pages or people may bookmark pages and look for them sometime in the future.

At the end of the process, every URL on the old site should lead to a URL on the new site. You should monitor your logs and verify that there is no 404 errors. If there are 404 errors on some URLs, rebuild those URLs or add a 301 permanent redirect to htaccess.

There are many more issues that should be take care of when rebuilding your website and the most important one is the structure of the new site, URLs, titles and links. But this is a topic for a new thread.

I found this excellent piece of art that made me smile…

In case you were wondering what SQL Injection means, it is a trick to inject SQL command as an input possibly via web pages.

As seen above, the kid’s name is Robert’);DROP Table STUDENTS;–

Now, if you run a login form that has a user name and a password, usually the sql query behind this login form looks like that:

SELECT * FROM STUDENTS WHERE NAME=’$name’ AND PASSWORD=’$password’

Now, if someone is trying to perform an SQL Injection attack, take Robert’s name and put it as $name, and the SQL query will look like that:

SELECT * FROM STUDENTS WHERE NAME=’Robert’);DROP Table STUDENTS;–‘ AND PASSWORD=’$password’

It is quite easy to protect your system from SQL Injection on the coding phase but usually web programmers tend to do a bad job regarding security.

I’ll write some more about this issue soon…