It seems that search engine are digging through Twitter more and more
. In the past few days a came across a few episodes which made me think about how much search engine are considering Twitter content as valuable enough to be included into their own search results.
Let’s take a look at Bing first. Try looking for Al Gore this query on Bing: the very first result will be it’s Twitter page with is real time twits. This entry comes also before his personal website. This has been also confirmed by a public statement from Bing published on its community page.
Something interesting happens with Google as well. A few days ago I posted a link to one of my websites I found and I wanted to share with my Twitter followers. Analytics record show the following as the very first visit on the website right after the link was published on twitter:
216.200.55.83 invx.com [01/Jul/2009:02:49:01 +0200] “GET /a HTTP/1.1″ 404 136 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” “-”
Clearly the page was just being crawled by Google. The link has not apperead anywhere else and it is not a fronpage or entry page for search engines on the website.
This it’s just another proof on how important Twitter is becoming in terms on search value. It’s not going to take long before Google itself will either buy or create its own real time search tool.
A new search engine has just been launched and it’s time to update our analytics software.
Google hasn’t released any major update to automatically recognize traffic coming from Bing into Google Analytics but I guess it is not gonna take too long.
In the meantime we can easily tweak Google Analytics just playing around with our tracking code.
In order to add Bing as a search engine we need to use the addOrganic function: _addOrganic[domain, search query]
AddOrganic Function: how it works
The addOrganic function has two parameters: domain and search query. It basically tells the Analytic engine to consider some referrals as proper search engines, hence appearing on keyword statistics.
This two parameters are embedded in every search query we forward to a search engine:
Google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=[searchquery]
Yahoo:
http://us.search.yahoo.com/search?p=[search query]
So let’s take a look to a standard Bing query:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=[search query]
As you can see, the right AddOrganic sintaxy would be the following:
pageTracker._addOrganic("bing.com", "q");
We just need to add this line right before the trackpageview() call into our Analytics code.
I think there’s an obvious update on the way but if you are already getting some decent organic traffic from Bing just add this line and see what happens.
Ever wondered of managing redirect without Google getting to know about it?
We can actually play around with CSS in order to redirect pages and traffic. Since this trick will involve only CSS, we can be pretty sure of going unnoticed by search engines still achieving what we want.
This trick still uses Javascript in some sort of way. But the good thing about it is that CSS code does not get analyzed by Google.
Now, just think about all the possible SEO exploits this trick can have…!
We just need these three files:
redirect.htc
<attach event="ondocumentready" handler="redirect" />
<script language="JScript">
function redirect() {
window.document.location.href = 'http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com';
}
</script>
Then redirect.xml
<?xml version = "1.0"?>
<bindings xmlns = "http://www.mozilla.org/xbl" xmlns:html = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<binding id = "redirect" applyauthorstyles = "false">
<implementation>
<constructor>
//
var elem = this; // maintain a reference to the bound element
window.addEventListener('load',
function()
{
location.href='http://www.xxxxxxxxxx.com';
},false);
//
</constructor>
</implementation>
</binding>
</bindings>
index.html code
<style>
body {
behavior:url("./redirect.htc");
-moz-binding: url('./redirect.xml#redirect');
}
</style>
This is a good example on how versatile Analytics is. If someone though putting out Analytics would have been only to get on a massive amount of date (even if users are allowed to keep their statistics out of Google’s sight), I guess it just a great added value to Google’s brand as it’s getting closer to other big analytics names like Webtrends or Nedstat.
Anyway, this article explains in depth how to start tracking article campaigns on Analytics. Since sending press releases around has become a standard practice in web promotion strategy, this one will help you out in case you need to get exact figures about that traffic.
Big news for Google on his Adsense program for Publishers. This time a new entity comes into play, third-party advertisers. Still unknown rates and CPC…
Will be Google able to guarantee decent rates and quality of the ads? Who will be these so called big advertisement brands which will start spreading on the Adsense network!?
However it seems that these new ads will be “expandible” when mouse rolls over them and will be available in flash and standard image format. No need to twek your adsense code though because the feature is already available for all the text/image ads. Only text ads won’t be affected by the change.
The full article is available at the official Google adsense blog.
While it seems that Google just wants to open up, I guess it will ruin the quality of the ads and CPC rates, what do you reckon?
