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by: Queen of Search
I’ve been reading the WebTrends data for one of my clients and I continually find robots everywhere in the hit results. I’m working with the engineer to create filters and custom reports, but it’s insane how much traffic is coming from robots. None of the visits going to the site are real people. In order to tackle this problem – I’ve decided to update my education and conduct some Google research.

Some of these robots are designed to scrape email addresses and harvest them for spamming later. Most of the emails are used when renting email lists. If you’ve ever purchased an email list you know there is a huge variance between prices. Now you know where the cheap list providers get their email address, from the bad bots.

Last month an article came out naming the six web robots responsible for 85% of the email spam.

Some robots are designed to copy entire sites. Simply put, robots are never seen by the user, so they add no value.

There are a few ways to prevent web bots from accessing your website; change your htaccess.txt file and/or architect a high-tech robots.txt file. Web crawlers and bad robots will read the robots.txt file and use this file to know “where to go”. These are the devious web crawlers; web crawlers accessing the “don’t crawl” files using the robots.txt to know where to go.

I’ve heard horror stories about people creating the wrong type of robots.txt file. One person accidentally reversing the meaning of the robots.txt file. In other words, he/she entered in all the directories that he/she wanted the search engine spiders to index.

I found this old, but great resource when searching for solutions: How to keep bad robots, spiders and web crawlers away

If you continue to have problems, just write a letter to the spambots. Think Artificially.org wrote a funny blog post that’s a good read.

When conducting my research, I had to go to the Wikipedia.org and check out their robots.txt commands. Notice how they speak to the bad web crawlers telling them to slow down or they’re out. I also like the comment, “Friendly, low-speed bots are welcome viewing article pages, but not dynamically-generated pages please.”

When everything is said and done, study, learn and test to find out what works for you and your website.

by: Anne Haynes

There is a lot to be said when it comes to PPC, it’s not just clicks that need to be measured, capturing data around bounce rates needs to be collected as well.

Landing pages and user experience is “the” thing with Google these days. You can’t just say,” Oh you need a landing page with your PPC campaign.” Now, you need a micro site; something that keeps the user on a site to get the most out of your efforts.

Let’s face it, Google Analytics happened for a reason – for the small boutique agencies that can’t afford to invest in enterprise analytics packages, their data is golden to Google. Google reads your gmail account to serve up contextual Adsense ads while you are reading your email, why wouldn’t they read your Google Analytics account and tie it to your Adwords campaign?

Let’s say there is a performance issue with your hosting company. PPC traffic is sent to a landing page or micro site and the page and/or site goes down for a few moments, how does this impact your cost per click? Once your site has been flagged as having a poor landing page or micro site, who is to say you can even make it back into a reduced cost per click environment?

I haven’t seen any data on any of my questions and I look forward to testing.

Do you have data on this matter?

by: Anne Haynes

Since my post on November 24th: Anne Haynes in SERPS

My linkedin profile shows up on Page 1 of Google.

Additionally, after this post the article in the Los Gatos Weekly comes up on Page 1 of Google as well.

Notice the increase in Google referred traffic:

by: Anne Haynes

Something is up??? I have major traffic changes in November - first day December….

Wow, still thinking about it, but something is up. Am I a writer or what? Your thoughts?

by: Anne Haynes

In the SEM world you can’t know everything and while I claim to be on the cutting edge, my colleagues keep me up to speed on the industry and how to better increase conversions for clients.

Today, I had a demo with Voicestar and wow this technology was really cool. The service generates local and 800 numbers for a Web site, print advertisement, rich media advertisement, and pay-per-click. Google tested out click-to-call back in 2005 and yardley.ca blogged about it first (within my quick search) and now all that is left is a message from Dean Collins.

While the service looks awesome and goes full circle with different media channels, the pricing and analytics integration is labor intensive. Pricing this service for clients will be tough especially if a client already has a local or 800 number on their Web site. There is a five day lead time to integrate this number into the Voicestar system and from a client perspective five days is too long. Additionally, if anyone has worked with telecommunications service providers and paperwork, five days can really be six or seven.

From an analytics perspective, all services offer their own analytics through their custom CRM systems. When will vendors and technology providers understand that flexible tracking is essential to sales within the Internet industry? Set-up is one thing, but normalizing the analytics data is extremely labor intensive, making conclusions and recommendations with several sources in another.

There is a reason why Interactive Agencies will always have a place in the Internet industry. Agencies’ are the only place where everything ties together; Thank you Google, Yahoo! and MSN for pay-per-click analytics, Thank you PR Web for providing analytics, Thank You Voicestar for providing analytics, Thank you Burst Media for providing analytics, Thank you Kintera Sphere for providing analytics, but when will there be a product enhancement to integrate every service providers’ analytics? Every service out there provides analytics and I just want 1 FEED.

Bottom-line, Agencies’ have no problem with building relationships, but when will technology providers streamline analytics? There is labor in everything; talking to clients, talking to internal staff, talking to vendors, it just goes on and on and in order to do things “right” without over inflating costs, agencies need technology that support the needs of their clients.

On the Voicestar note, they have cool analytics ;check out this tie into all media marketing channels. But really, notice that PPC is not a shoe-in. In my professional opinion, Voicestar must be used on a Web site (hopefully organic optimized pages) and/or within print to be effective.

While I think I’m dead on here, let me know what you think. I would enjoy thoughts on this topic, especially if you work for an agency.