JLH Design

Publish or perish is a term used in academia used to describe the notion that one must publish on a consistent basis to sustain their career and prestige within their institution and among their colleagues. The concept was no more apparent than tonight in a monthly review of this site’s statistics. I offer you this small snapshot:

The trend is not what you’d like to see in the normal development of a site. Notice that uniques, visits, and pages are all down by at least 50% this month compared to last month, this after a reasonably steady natural growth rate.

Upon further inspection the search engine traffic is right where is normally is, reader’s per post is within normal range, but the large disparity is that “other sites” category. The normally (normal for me anyway) largest source of traffic which is other sites, type ins, bookmarks, social media, etc.

Admittedly posting and quality of content has been down lately as other pressing needs and sites have become more important than this small blog but trend is an important lesson in web publishing. If you’re (by ‘you’ I mean I) are not putting forth the effort to publish new and compelling material you’re also not spending enough time on promotion of the material. What can be more of an example than a loss of nearly 100,000 pageviews in a single month? Blog type formats may be more susceptible to this as the content tends to be timely in nature and rely much less on search engines supplying the visitors than normal information or commerce type sites.

In all the ongoing discussion of Google search results, links, optimisation, etc I think what’s often lost in the discourse is a less than concrete concept of passion. When I write or publish something that I’m excited about I get passionate about it and I want to share that passion with other readers. Saying something you believe in isn’t enough you want others to hear it. Given the flakiness and uncontrollable nature of search refers I tend to promote ideas I’m passionate through other means and that can be seen in the site’s stats. It’s not all about Google when it comes to a site’s readership, involvement and ultimately conversion it’s about engaging the audience and bringing them to the site first.

I half expect to see next months search referrals to be down as well. With 100,000 less pageviews this month that’s 100,000 less chances for someone to be inspired to provide a link and share the information. Negative link acceleration on a site can be the death knell for it in the natural rankings and those tend to lag reality by a few weeks. It should be noted that the lack of publishing really started (or stopped as the case may be) in June and continued in July, only now is the fall out being able to be seen and graphed.

I’m not making any promises on being more engaging on this site in the near future but I have made a mental note of the affects of passionate involvement and hope to further cultivate that in other projects.

Cuil.com debuted it’s search engine.  I’m not going to declare it the next Google killer or a total failure based one day’s results, however I did find this interesting.

If you visit their section for webmasters they have:

If you would like Cuil to crawl your site and have it included in our index, please let us know

Where the “please let us know” is a link to an actual email address.

I doubt if many remember this but Google used to actually use email back when they were young (and not billionaires)

Before I am too quick to judge cuil’s capabilities I’ll keep in mind Google’s once humble beginnings.

I’ve been flattered with interviews, received recognition on Google’s webmaster blog, mentioned on industry leading sites like Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land, linked to by Matt Cutts, and even made the BigList.

But Today I have I arrived. My fame is now official.

I have an insane cyber-stalker.

Please, I beg you, please, go read my #1 fans’ site by John H. Gohde (screenshot). Apparently somewhere he got the impression that I was an SEO. Okay, so he doesn’t have his facts straight, but it makes for good comedy. He spends most of his day searching for [JLH] on Google to see where I rank. I never knew of my desire to rank for JLH until this very moment when I was trying to follow his posts.

I don’t know this guy from Adam other than he was one of a very few banned from Google groups for being abusive to people. I see he’s on Sphinn now, I expect the mods there will have their hands full once he settles in and starts rambling and attacking people.

If they’re shooting at you, you know you’re doing something right. (The West Wing - the Midterms)

I can’t think of someone I’d rather not like me in the online world more than someone who manages to get themselves banned from both Google Groups and Wikipedia. That puts me with some good company.

On a very personal note.

I lost one of my closest high school friends late last week. We’ve lost touch for one reason or another. I last spoke to him in October. I’ll remember every word.

I did some calligraphy in high school that still hangs in my parents house and it rings so true today. So sorry, I don’t know the author, but here is the poem.

Before It’s Too Late

If you’ve a tender message
Or a loving word to say
Don’t wait till you forget,
But whisper it today.
The tender word unspoken,
The letter never sent,
The long forgotten messages,
The wealth of love unspent.
For these hearts are breaking,
For these loved ones wait,
So show them that you care
Before it is too late.

Sean Korte will be missed. My heart is very heavy.

Update 7/23/08:

The full obituary has now been published:

Sean M. Korte, 39, passed away Thursday, July 17, 2008 at his home in Shawnee, KS. Memorial services will be 2 p.m. Saturday, August 2, 2008 at the Atonement Lutheran Church, 9948 Metcalf, Overland Park, KS. Graveside services will be 2 p.m. Friday, August 1, 2008 at Fremont Lutheran Church Cemetery in Red Oak, IA. Sean was born February 18, 1969 in Red Oak, IA. He graduated from Aquinas High School in La Crosse, WI in 1987 where he avidly played football and wrestled. After high school Sean attended Saint John’s University in Collegeville, MN and later joined the United States Navy and served proudly for five years as a Gunner’s Mate Second Class. After his service in the Navy he pursued his love of cooking and had attended culinary arts school. Sean was an avid outdoorsman and tried to spend as much time as possible camping and hiking. He is survived by his parents, Dr. Stephen and Judy Korte, Shawnee, KS; his grandmother, Mary C. Korte of Arkansas City, KS, a sister Stephenie Korte, Louisville, CO; two brothers, Jonathan Korte, Lawrence, KS; Jason and wife Angela Korte, Lafayette, CO; two nieces Antonia and goddaughter Lauren Korte. Numerous aunts, uncles and many, many cousins will miss him greatly.

Earlier today Dave Naylor outed the little known twitter fact that you can get a non-nofollowed link by adding a web address in your “One Line Bio” of your profile.

Like:

For a resulting profile page like this:

It’s not going to last long as internet officer on-the-spot Matt Cutts has spotted it and taken action to stop the flow of link juice to people:

Since Matt is so interested in helping out twitter he may want to mention that some of their “capacity” issues may be due to Google crawling the non-canonical versions of URLs that exist throughout the site.

Notice the same page is indexed twice in Google. One as twitter/johnweb and as twitter/JohnWeb, same content, same spelling, just different cases used.

I guess we’ll see who twitter is more interested in pleasing, it’s users by reducing the server load with a simple url canonicalization fix or Google with their cure-all rel=”nofollow”, by which is fixed first.

In case you missed it “Bergy” Berghausen announced that he is leaving Google and moving on to pursue a career path in the legal profession.

His goodbye is here:

Hi folks!

I am extremely grateful for the time I’ve been able to spend
monitoring this group–responding to questions, watching threads,
reading all the new “Introduce yourself” posts, and being consistently
amazed at the speed with which some of our users can type.  This has
become my home online and holds a very special place in my heart,
though with great regret I must announce that my time monitoring this
group in an official capacity has come to an end.

I have made a very tough decision to leave my position at Google to
follow my calling to join the legal profession, and today is my last
day on the job.  It’s been a wonderful time, and I would like to thank
all of you, especially beussery for his great attitude and Flash
expertise, webado for her untiring dedication and mod_rewrite
expertise, and Autocrat for his sense of humor and for his rocket-
speed ascent from being an occasional poster to the second most
frequent in a matter of a few weeks.

It’s been a lot of fun spending time with you here.  Also, this isn’t
exactly goodbye either, since I will definitely be stopping by without
my big blug [G] and contributing in my personal capacity when I’m not
reading about contracts or rules of evidence.  :-)

So, thanks for helping each other–keep on posting!
-Bergy

Good luck Bergy and thank you very much for your all of your help in webmastering issues!

Okay, the title may be jumping to conclusions but please help me understand this.

I noticed an odd referral today in my stats for this blog. It was for the search term [ip address 74.6.8.94], it seemed a bit strange so I checked it out.

The IP address 74.6.8.94 belongs to Inktomi Corporation:

Every one of my single post pages contain a little plug-in that shows the user’s IP address, like:

So it would make sense that the IP address of the crawler would be added into the text of the page and returned for search results.

The ODD thing however was that this search referral was from Google, with the Yahoo! IP address.

The Google Search for [ip address 74.6.8.94]

Returns one of my pages at the 10th spot, and clicking on the cache of that page shows the Yahoo! address stored in the cache:

To be sure this isn’t normal behavior the following thumbnail is for a cache of another page showing the Google IP address 66.249.65.100:

So the question I have is how does a Google cache get taken showing a Yahoo! IP address? I’m sure there is a logical explanation that I am just missing but I am hoping that somebody out there can explain it to me.

Added After Initial Posting

After I initially posted this I thought it would be a good idea to see if this one page was an anomaly or if other indexed pages showed the Yahoo! IP address, apparently the one I showed above is the only one. Note that the other two URLs shown are this post and the home page which were already updated in the index when I went back and checked.

I have been quite busy with other stuff and have been quite derelict in my duty as a blogger. Hope to find more time/inspiration/desire in the near future.

In the meantime….

• Google, PLEASE fix the Webmaster tools so that the statistics regarding home page crawling, the cache links, and what Goooglebot sees are at least close to reality. I realize you’ve got limited resources with only a few hundred thousand computers and all but at least set aside some computing time to push fresh data weekly on a Monday at 1:00 pm or something. The GWHG is inundated with people who get the wrong impression of their sites performance based on this data. Considering that probably only a very small percentage of the confused masses actually find their way to the GWHG I would say that your tools are statistics are actually hurting more people than helping. At some point when a tool becomes harmful it really ceases being a tool. If resources are a problem then I suggest a disclaimer placed within the webmaster account stating that the statistics provided are not up to date and generally wrong and for amusement only. People respect the quality of Google’s index and expect a certain amount of quality with their other offerings, webmaster’s tools while innovative and well intended, are doing more to harm that reputation than help it.
• There was a Sebastian siting. I wish he’d finish taking over the world or whatever he’s doing, I miss his presence.
• You should consider joining Adam Lasnik’s Question of the Day room over at friendeed. While not search related at all it provides some good entertainment and insight It combines Adam’s elegant style as a writer with the preciseness of a programmer and his philosophic outlook on things,
• While you are at it join me on friendfeed.
• Or Plurk
• Or Twitter
• Or Facebook
• John Mueller lasted a little over three days without posting on his vacation. He is incredible.
• Barry can’t find the source of the spiders.
• Speaking of spiders, and I was, example.com has a robots.txt that includes:

  • User-agent: *
    Disallow: /

  • Yet Google has indexed over 15,700 URLs for the site. A fine example of how robots.txt is a crawler directive and not to be used to limit indexing of content and how ineffective a 404 is at removing indexed content. (there is money to be made in that last statement, maybe I should write a post about that?)