Skyrim is a technical and artistic masterpiece, but you don’t need us to tell you that. The title is expected to pick up just about every game of the year award up for grabs in the next few months, but more importantly for Bethesda, the game also appears to have been a huge financial success as well. According to Valve’s Jason Holtman, Skyrim is the “fastest selling title in Steam’s history”. And just to be clear, Steam has quite a bit of history having launched officially all the way back in 2003.

In addition to the millions of digital sales, Bethesda also claims to have shipped (not sold) 10 million retails copies of the game. Given the success of the series I think it’s safe to say at this point we can expect another Elder Scrolls game in a few years. 2013 can’t come soon enough. 

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Pushing your PC to its limits has obvious inherent dangers; overclocking your CPU can definitely bust your rig if you push it too far. That being said, reasonable overclocking doesn’t actually carry too much risk – normally. Right before Christmas, one overclocker’s Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 mobo crashed, then burned (literally) in the midst of a lightweight stress test. After he posted the video on YouTube (the fun stuff happens in the last 20 seconds), Gigabyte looked into the problem, and apparently, it wasn’t a case of crap luck. Yesterday, Gigabyte’s Chinese branch announced the faulty CPU VRM is a widespread issue and recalled the GA-X79-UD3, GA-X79-UD3 and G1.Assassin 2 mobos.

There’s another option if you aren’t an overclocker and don’t want to hand over your Gigabyte board, however; an emergency BIOS update. Be careful, though. TechPowerUp reports that while the patch will throttle the CPU when it’s stressed to protect the VRM and keep your board from frying, the throttling also puts the brakes on any adventurous overclocking attempts. If you’re a limit-pushing tinkerer, send your mobo back to Gigabyte and the company will replace with a new, defect-free one once acceptable replacements are manufactured. No matter which option you choose, the GA-X79-UD3, GA-X79-UD3 and G1.Assassin 2 models are now covered by a lifetime warranty for this particular issue. The affected products are also being pulled from store shelves.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, Gigabyte blames the problem on a mixture of poor PWM components and bad firmware.

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Posted by Dr. Pete

With the end of 2011 in sight, I thought it would be a nice time to reflect on the good old days. Remember the good old days? Back then, men were Real Men, women were Real Women, and SERPs were Real SERPs. Good, decent, God-fearing SERPs had 10 listings – no more, no less. You could count them on your calloused fingers after a hard day’s work, and you knew that all was right with the world.

Then Google got fancy, like some city boy wearing $100 pants and a man-purse. Now, decent folk everywhere are subjected to images, news, videos, and coffee shop listings, when all they want is a good, old-fashioned link. Worse yet, you can’t even count on a SERP to add up to 10. No sir, I don’t like it.

It’s getting harder and harder for SEOs to count rankings the old-fashioned way. While we need to let go of rankings as our only metric, being able to count a SERP reliably and consistently is still an important SEO task, and it seems to be getting tougher every day. I’d like to give a few examples of SERPs that don’t add up to 10, and discuss how to cope with Google’s new math.

What About the Children?!

Sadly, even the children aren’t safe from Google’s new math. Here’s a Google SERP for “Muppets” (logged out and with the “pws=0” depersonalization parameter added):

Let’s say we had never seen a vertical search result before, and we just counted them the old-fashioned way. These numbers are in red. If we skipped the “Top References” section (since the headline isn’t linked), we’d end up with 13 results for this SERP.

Of course, you and I know that vertical SERPs are different, so we’d be smart enough to skip Showtimes, Videos, Images, and News, right? That count is in orange, and we'd end up with – hold on – only 8 results. So, what’s missing? Well, it looks like the video results do count – even though Google owns YouTube, those are still external links. Using the green counting method, we end up with 10 results, as expected.

What About My Friends?!

These results were depersonalized – what if I add in personalization, and with it, social signals? Surely my friends will save me from this counting conundrum! Sadly, they only add to the mess. On a search for “muppets” while logged in, I get an extra listing:

Although the logged-in SERP varies a bit from the example above, the social listing is an add-on. Even by our SEO-savvy green counting method, it’s #11. Fortunately, you can currently tell these apart by the “…shared this” indicator at the bottom, but expect social results to evolve dramatically over the next year. When counting your SERPs, trust no one.

Is Anything Safe?!

But wait, it gets weirder. Let’s look at a SERP for good, old-fashioned pizza pie. This one is also depersonalized, but it’s localized to Vero Beach, FL (I discovered this one by accident, based on the location of one of my hosting companies):

Just for comparison, let’s count them the old-fashioned way (in red). If we lump in everything, we get 16 results. Obviously, we’re smarter than that, so we’ll cut out the Images and News results. That count (in orange) is 14, still 4 over our sacred 10.

The savvy SEOs among you will immediately recognize that the top results have addresses next to them – these are integrated Places results (a 7-pack, in this case). Problem solved, right? Let’s remove those Places results and, sure enough, we get (in green) – wait a minute – 7? That’s right, this page has 7 organic results.

Hold on: 2 of those Places results have Google Maps addresses and not their own URLs. Those must not be “real” results. Subtract those 2 from the orange count and we get – tada! – 12. Ok, wait a minute, I’ve got it now. Domino’s and Pizza Hut both have mini site-links – they must actually be organic results. Add those back into the green count, and we’re up to – crap – 9.

Won’t the Code Save Us?!

This counting thing isn’t turning out to be so easy after all. If we can’t tell which listings are technically “organic” (not Places or vertical) by looking at them, maybe the source code can help us. There are markers in the code, but they’re tough to tease apart. The most telling markers are currently as follows:

(1) The <h3> Wrapper

Each listing’s link is wrapped in an <h3 class=”r”> tag, but that header doesn’t seem to distinguish between Places and organic results. Even expanded site-links are wrapped in this <h3> tag, so it seems to be purely a design convention.

(2) The “cd=” Parameter

In each listing’s Google cache link, there’s a parameter called “cd=” which counts up with the listings (cd=1, cd=2, etc.). At first glance, “cd=” isn’t very reliable, because it seems to tag vertical categories on the left-hand navigation as well (“Images”, “Maps”, “Videos”, etc.).

In the example above, though, something interesting happens. The first 3 listings are tagged with cd=1, cd=2, cd=3, but then the next listing to get tagged is the Wikipedia entry, with cd=8. The rest of the listing each have a cd= parameter. This suggests that only the top 3 Places listings (in this example) are being counted the same as regular organic results. Finally, 3 + 7 = 10.

Will the Madness End?!

Sorry, but it probably won’t. Google has been experimenting mad-scientist style with the SERPs in 2011, and I only expect that to continue. We’ve got little choice but to adapt and do our best to keep metrics consistent. It’s entirely likely Google could even apply the “infinite scroll” approach used in Google Images to organic listings, killing SERP pagination as we know it.

While it’s fun to dig into the inner workings, the reality is that we need to take a broader view and stop relying only on rankings. Rankings will become tougher to measure and personalization is only going to get more aggressive. If you aren’t already training your clients to look at their organic traffic, unique keywords, organic conversion, and deeper metrics, it’s time to get started.

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A great idea that might be just a little ahead of its time 

For those of us with pets, the animal is nearly as much a part of the family as any human. Losing that pet—whether it runs away, becomes lost, or is stolen—can be as tragic as losing any other member of the family. 

Implanting a microchip in your pet might help you recover it, but only if the animal shows up at a facility—such as the pound or the Humane Society—that’s equipped with a scanner. Snaptracs, a division of the mobile-technology behemoth Qualcomm—promises a much better solution: A $100 GPS device that attaches to the pet’s collar, so you can instantly locate your pet anywhere on the planet (there’s also a $8 per-month subscription fee after the first month). You can add up to nine additional pets to the subscription plan for $1 per month, plus the cost of each Tagg tracker. 

Tagg: The Pet Tracker consists of battery-powered GPS tracker that attaches to your pet’s collar, and an AC-powered base station. 

Tagg: The Pet Tracker represents a number of impressive technology achievements; unfortunately, it also has a few limitations that can render it practically useless. We’ll explain how the device works, and then we’ll discuss our real-world experience with it. 

The Tagg hardware is, for all intents and purposes, a cell phone stripped of a mic, speaker, and keyboard. The Tagg tracker is incredibly small and lightweight (just 1.5 ounces, including the collar clip), and it’s relatively rugged (as it must be to fit on a dog or cat’s collar and survive the abuse that an animal and the elements will dish out). The Tagg tracker is rated water resistant in up to three feet of water for up to 30 minutes. The antennas are hidden in pair of curved, flexible wings that follow the contour of the pet’s neck. 

Once you’ve charged the Tagg tracker’s battery on its AC-powered base station, you clip the tracker to your pet’s collar. The Tagg tracker or the base station will then push status reports over Verizon’s cellular network via SMS and/or email. Once you log into your Tagg account on the Web from a PC or your smartphone, you can also ping the tracker and it will report the pet’s approximate location with an icon superimposed on a satellite map.

Tagg will send you an alert when your pet moves outside the 75-yard radius of its home zone (the area in blue). 

In order to preserve the Tagg’s battery life, the device goes into an extreme low-power state whenever it’s within wireless range of the base station, and the bulk of the cellular-network communications occur on the base station during this time. As soon as the Tagg tracker can no longer detect the base-station’s signal beacon—when the animal moves outside a 75-yard radius of the base station—the Tagg’s cellular chip switches to full-power mode, establishes a direct link to the network, and sends an alert that the pet has moved outside the designated Home Tagg zone. You can increase the size of the Home Tagg zone, but not decrease it. In order to reduce false alarms when you take your dog on a walk, you can push a button on the Tagg tracker and put it into “trip” mode. This enables you to move the pet any distance outside the Home Tagg zone without producing an alert. The Tagg tracker’s LED flashes blue in this state, and it will reset itself as soon as it comes back within range of the base station. 

The system is capable of sending a number of other messages, too. It will report when the animal is within range of the base station, when the Tagg’s battery is low, when it’s fully recharged, and even when the Tagg becomes detached from your pet’s collar. You can also activate a tracking mode from the website that will automatically locate your pet every three minutes for up to 30 minutes. Like we said, the technology is very impressive. How it works in the real world is a whole other matter, which we’ll tackle now. 

Real-world Testing 

 Okay, I’ll drop the royal “we” here, because the rest of this review is based on my personal experience with my dog (a full-grown, 80-pound mutt named Dixie) and my daughter’s family’s dog (a nine-month-old, 50-pound Catahoula). Both dogs live on the same 10-acre parcel of land in northern California. Dixie is an outside-only dog; my daughter spoils Sally by letting her sleep inside the house at night. The two dogs are fast friends who love to play together, but Dixie has a bad habit of jumping our barbed-wire fence to roam the neighborhood. 

As you can see from the screenshots on this page, the Home Tagg zone covers a lot of territory; a circle roughly two acres in diameter. Dave Vigil, Snaptracs’ president, tells me they could make the Home Tagg zone smaller, but they won’t because they want the Tagg to remain connected to the base station as much as possible. This preserves battery life, and it reduces the number of alerts you receive. As Vigil explains it, “My neighbors know my dog, so I’m not too concerned if he gets into their yard.” I’m not so sanguine about Dixie wandering off my property; because if she gets into my neighbor’s yard, she might eat his chickens. That’s a life-threatening menu for Dixie, and it’s not because she’s allergic to chicken. 

The other problem I encounter is that Dixie spends most of her time with Sally at my daughter’s home, which is on the opposite side of our property (Snaptracs’ satellite maps are old, because my four-year-old home doesn’t show up on them). That means she’s nearly always outside her Home Tagg zone, and I’m barraged with alerts. It also kills the Tagg’s battery life. Where Snaptracs claims the battery should last as long as 30 days, I’m lucky if Dixie’s lasts seven days. I partially solved this issue by moving the base station to my daughter’s house, but now I get alerts whenever Dixie is home. 

But the biggest problem I have with Tagg: The Pet Tracker is that the Tagg has repeatedly fallen off Dixie’s collar.  Snaptracs sent a second Tagg because the company thought the original might have a manufacturing defect, so I took the liberty of putting it on Sally’s collar so I could track both dogs. I’ve had the same problem with this second unit. I’ve never seen them fall off, but because I usually find them in stiff brush, under low tree branches, or by the fence, I suspect those wing-like antennas are getting snagged and yanked off the dogs’ collars. The last time it fell off Dixie’s collar, I’m pretty sure it was because Dixie and Sally were roughhousing, because I found the partially chewed tag buried in the dirt (see photo below).

Sally mistook Dixie’s Tagg tracker for a chew toy. 

I’m away from home a lot, and my dog’s escape antics are a real problem, so I really hoped this product would work. But as impressed as I am by what Snaptracs has achieved, I just can’t recommend buying the company’s device and service. Your mileage may vary—especially if you have a more sedate pet—but in my experience, Tagg the Pet Tracker would be more aptly named Tagg: The Tagg Tracker, because I used it far more often to locate the detached GPS device than I ever did my wayward mutt. 

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Posted by adamf

Now that the holidays have passed, we’re back in full swing at SEOmoz. I’m happy to offer another product announcement for PRO members. We’ve just shipped phase one of our support for Universal Search results, which includes data about local (a.k.a. places) results in Google search results. Whether it's a 7-pack or a blended result, if you care about local SERP results, it's often a pain to find out where you stand. We aim to help.

If you're not sure why visibility in blended or enhanced results are important, I highly recommend reading Dr. Pete's eye tracking study. His experiments nicely show that universal results that break up the page or results with enhanced elements can draw people's focus, even from strong organic results at the top of the page.

As I noted, this first phase rolls out local results for Google. In the coming weeks we plan to add other types of results, including video, images, shopping, news. We are also looking to incorporate site links (1-box results) at some point. We debated whether to wait until we had the other types of universal results in place before launching, but decided to ship in this limited fashion so we can get some feedback from all of you to help us make it better as we build more capabilities.

Here’s a quick rundown of what we've added:

See Which of Your Keywords Contain Local Results in the SERP

The first change you may notice is on the Ranking Overview page. If we saw a 7-pack or blended local result in the SERP for one of your keywords, you'll now see a small pushpin icons just below your ranking for that engine. There are two different states of the icon. If you are not in the universal result, you will just see the pushpin, but if you are included in the result, it will appear with happy little lines above it:

If you are in the competitive rankings view, you will see the vertical result show up in the column with your site's ranking. 

A Quick Look at the Details

While in the overview, you can learn more about what is contained in the local result by hovering over the icon. This will offer up information including where the vertical is on the page, how many results it contains, and also a list of the results shown in the order presented:

More Information on the Rankings Detail Page

To see even more detail, click on the keyword or the "view ranking history for more details" link in the tooltip. Here, on the ranking details page, you will see universal results added to the ranking history graph, so you can see where universal results have been included over time and in which position (sorry, I don't yet have historical data for this sample campaign):

If you scroll further down, you will find the SERP overview, which includes blended and enhanced results alongside the organic results we saw in the SERP. As with organic results, your and your competitors' results will also be highlighted in color, so it's easy to get a feel for the overall visibility of you and your competitors on a search engine results page.

Here you can see a result where the local 7-pack pushes down what would normally look like a really strong #3 organic result below the fold:

Conversely, you can also see when you are dominant at the top of a SERP, which is common for branded terms:

For reference, here's what this looked like in the original SERP:

What's Up Next?

Our plans going forward are to push out support for more universal search types. Our order of priority at the moment is:

• Video
• Images
• Shopping
• News
• Site Links

We'd love to hear from you if you think this is out of order, or if there is a different type of result that you think is more important than the rest of these.

I’ll publish a quick follow-up post when new result types are added.

Please Let Us Know What You Think

As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated. If you have thoughts about how this could be better, please share a comment in the post or add a request in our feature request forum.

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Posted by TastyPlacement

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Are you competing in a high-stakes PPC market with bids in the $25 to $40 range? If you are, don't simply fight your competition head on; if you do, you'll end up paying premium prices for clicks you might capture for far less. There are several shrewd approaches you can employ to side-step your less-vigilant competitors. We've learned a few valuable tricks that can earn you valuable clicks for less-than-premium prices. The techniques begin with carefully monitoring PPC activity throughout the day to discover low-competition time slots in the PPC bidding and striking while your competition snoozes.

Getting Started

The types of campaigns for which these techniques will work will be high bid environments with smaller but determined competitors. You want to look for competitors bidding for terms in the $20-and-up range, but whose campaigns are not fully budgeted to run at the maximum number of available clicks. Specifically, we want to look for competitors' ads that don't appear consistently or whose ads disappear later in the day. Smaller competitors tend to fit this model fairly often. An illustrative keyword example we see in our local market of Austin Texas is "Personal Injury Lawyer". We know the bids in that space are $24 to $30 depending on the time of the day–but we see some advertisers drop out at various times of the day. For illustration, we'll examine Google's Adwords system, but these principles will apply to any PPC program.

Identify Your Competitor's Ad Schedule

Google's Adwords system has a scheduling feature that allows advertisers to run ads during particular times of the day, and even enter positive or negative bid adjustments based on times of the day.

Here's the catch: the Adwords system only allows the scheduling to be made in increments of 15 minutes, as shown in the screenshot below.

So, if your PPC competition is employing the ad scheduler, it become fairly easy to identify when they stop running ads by running test searches throughout the day at 15-minute intervals. Once you've identified a competitor using the ad scheduler, you've just found a soft spot–your bid competition will be lower during the times of the day when that competitor isn't bidding on ads. If you can identify more than one competitor, then you've found and even more favorable environment.

Identifying Competitors' Under-Budgeted Campaigns

There is another way to determine soft spots in PPC bidding: look for under-budgeted campaigns. You can identify your competition's under-budgeted campaigns fairly easily. An under-budgeted campaign is one where the advertisers daily budget will not supply the maximum number of clicks available to that advertiser. So, say a competitor is paying an average of $20 per click for a particular keyword; assume further that their daily budget is only $60–yet there are ten clicks available to that advertiser.

That advertiser has only budgeted enough to purchase three clicks, so Google is forced to economize ad delivery–and it gives advertisers only two choices: standard delivery and accelerated delivery.

Standard delivery means that Google will spread the ads throughout the day. In practice, Google might show an ad every third time a keyword is searched. Accelerated delivery means that Google will simply show an advertiser's ads every time they are triggered by a search query until the advertiser's daily budget is exhausted.

There lies the opportunity: if your competitor is employing the accelerated delivery method with an under-budgeted campaign, that means their ads will eventually stop running at some point during the day. You'll know that your competitors are employing accelerated ad delivery if their ads show consistently in the morning (in 99% of cases, advertisers set their time zone correctly so a Google Adwords "day" begins in the morning) but their ads disappear at random times in the afternoon from day to day.

Outsmarting the Under-Budgeted Competitor

So, how can you capitalize on a competitor that employs accelerated ad delivery? Say your competitor is fighting hard for position one for a particular query and will not yield on their bid price in order to stay on top (that's a fool's approach, as we'll see). You can force your competitor to exhaust their budget more quickly by simply raising your bid as high as you can without dislodging the competitor from position one. Google's bid price calculation system takes care of the rest: Google adjusts the actual cost-per-click to be based on the dollar amount needed to exceed the "next ranked ad." If the next ranked ad (you) has a higher bid then the ad that got the click (your aggressive-bidding competitor) costs more. Thus, you can knock your competitor out earlier in the day while at the same time increasing their cost-per-click. Be warned though, you will, of course, be raising your bid, so you could potentially wind up paying more for clicks you do get.

Now to Enjoy the Lighter Competition

With your competitor's budget exhausted in the later hours of the day, the competitive bidding for a particular keyword/keywords thins significantly. If circumstances line up properly, you can lower your bids in the afternoon hours and enjoy far less expensive clicks, and better click-through rates (and, ultimately, higher quality scores). There are two ways to approach lowering your bids in the later part of the day.

The first approach employs the advanced "bid adjustment" feature in the Adwords ad scheduler described above. To use the bid adjustment feature, log in to your Adwords account, click on a campaign, and then click the "Settings" tab. From there, scroll down to the Advanced Settings section and select "Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling" and then click on "Edit" in the "Ad scheduling" subsection. This will reveal the ad schedule pop-up window (shown below). At the top of the pop-up window, you want to click "Bid adjustment" mode. You can then set specific time periods on specific days and apply a percentage multiplier to lower your bid. In the screenshot below, we've adjusted our campaign from 4pm to 7:30pm to adjust our bids to 72% of the standard bid. At all other times, our bid prices stay at the standard bid prices we've selected. There it is, we've just adjusted our bids downward to enjoy the lighter competitive market we've identified that takes place during later hours of the day.

There's a second approach to lowering bids later in the day that is a bit less elegant, but still effective. The second approach involves simply creating two ad campaigns: a first campaign scheduled to run during the earlier, more competitive hours of the day, and a second campaign with lower bid prices that is scheduled to run from say, 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. The advantage to this approach is that you'll have separate analytic data for the separate campaigns. We prefer this second technique for specifically this reason.

We hope you've learned a bit from this article. While a bit Machiavellian, the techniques we've outline can help in competitive markets, and certainly the lessons here can be transposed into your daily PPC activities.

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Computers are getting smaller. Processors are getting smaller. Why shouldn’t hard drives get smaller, too? Don’t worry – IBM’s working on it. Late last week, the company announced that its researchers had “successfully demonstrated the ability to store information in as few as 12 magnetic atoms.” In comparison, it takes close to a million atoms for current HDDs to store a bit. Apparently, being dense is a good thing!

We’d paraphrase the technology for you, but we’d probably butcher the technical details, so here’s a description straight from the horse’s mouth:

The scientists at IBM Research used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to atomically engineer a grouping of twelve antiferromagnetically coupled atoms that stored a bit of data for hours at low temperatures. Taking advantage of their inherent alternating magnetic spin directions, they demonstrated the ability to pack adjacent magnetic bits much closer together than was previously possible. This greatly increased the magnetic storage density without disrupting the state of neighboring bits.

If your head isn’t spinning yet, IBM’s press release has even more details. Or you could just watch the video above, which outlines the technology pretty effectively.

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Posted by willcritchlow

In the real world, things go wrong. While we might all wish that everything we did was "fix once, stay fixed", that's rarely the case.

Things that were previously "not a problem"(TM) can become "a problem"(TM) rapidly for a variety of reasons:

• someone changes something unrelated / without realising it would impact you or just screws up (e.g. deploying a staging version of robots.txt or an old version of a server config)
• the world changes around you (there was a Google update named after a black and white animal a while back)
• the technical gremlins gang up on you (server downtime, DDoS etc.)

In all of these cases, you'd rather know about the issue sooner rather than later because in most of them your ability to minimise the resulting issues declines rapidly as time passes (and in the remaining cases, you still want to know before your boss / client).

While many of us have come round to the idea that we should be making recommendations in these areas, we are too often still creating spectacularly non-actionable advice like:

• make sure you have great uptime
• make sure your site is quick

Today, I want to give you three pieces of directly actionable advice that you can start doing for your own site and your key clients immediately that will help you spot problems early, avoid knock-on indexing issues and quickly get alerted to bad deploys that could hurt your search performance.

#1 Traffic drops

Google Analytics has a feature that spots significant changes in traffic or traffic profile. It can also alert you. The first of these features is called "intelligence" and the second "intelligence alerts".

Rather than rehash old advice, I'll simply link to the two best posts I've read on the subject:

• Here on SEOmoz by Rebecca Lehmann - 7 essential google intelligence custom alerts
• Over on Blueglass by Annie Cushing - stay alert with google analytics

This is the simplest of all the recommendations to implement and is also the most holistic in the sense that it can alert you to traffic drops of all kinds. The downside of course is that you're measuring symptoms not causes so you (a) have to wait for causes to create symptoms rather than being alerted to the problem and (b) get an alert about the symptom rather than the cause and have to start detective work before paging the person who can fix it.

#2 Uptime monitoring

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realise that SEO is dependent on your website. And not only on how you optimise your site, but also on it being available.

While for larger clients, it shouldn't be your job to alert someone if their website goes down, it does no harm to know and for smaller clients there is every chance you'd be adding significant value by keeping an eye on these things.

I have both good and bad reasons for knowing a lot about server monitoring:

• the good: we made a small investment in Server Density in May last year (and scored our only link from Techcrunch in the process)
• the bad: we've been more enthusiastic users of our portfolio company's services than we might have hoped – some annoying server issues have resulted in more downtime for distilled.net than I care to think about. To add insult to injury, we managed to get ourselves hit with a DDoS attack last week (see speed chart below)

There are three main elements you might want to monitor:

1. Pure availability (including response code)
2. Server load and performance
3. Response speed / page load time

Website availability

There are two services I recommend here:

• Pingdom's free service monitors the availability and response time of your site
• Server Density's paid service provides more granular alerting and graphing as well as tying it together with your server performance monitoring

Here's what the Server Density dashboard looks like:

And here is the response time graph from pingdom:

You can see the spike in response time during the DDoS attack and the lower average response time over the last few days after we implemented cloudflare

Incidentally, you may not have noticed (it had passed me by until Mike gave me the heads-up the other day) that Google rolled out site speed to all analytics accounts without the previously required change to the GA snippet so you can get some of this data from your GA account now – here's the technical breakdown from some of Distilled's pages:

#3 Robot exclusion protocols, status codes

This was the most ambitious of my ideas for SEO monitoring. It came out of a real client issue. A major client was rolling out a new website and managed to deploy an old / staging version of robots.txt on a Saturday morning (continuous integration FTW). It was essentially luck that the SEO running the project was all over it, spotted it quickly, called the key contact and got it rolled back before it did any lasting harm. We had a debrief the following week where we discussed how we could get alerted to this kind of thing automatically.

I went to David Mytton, the founder of Server Density and asked him if he could build some features in for you lot to alert when this kind of thing happens – if we accidentally noindex our live site or block it in robots.txt. He came up with this ingenious solution that uses functionality already present in their core platform:

Monitoring for any change to robots.txt

First create a service to monitor robots.txt – here's ours:

Then create an alert to tell you if the MD5 hash of the contents of robots.txt changes (see a definition of MD5 here):

If you copy and paste the contents of your robots.txt into an MD5 generator you get a string of gobbledegook (ours is "15403cbc6e028c0ec46a5dd9fffb9196"). What this alert is doing is monitoring for any change to our robots.txt so if we deploy a new version I will get an alert by email and push notification to my phone. Wouldn't it be nice to get alerted in this way if a client or dev team pushed an update to robots.txt without telling you?

Spotting the inclusion of no-index meta tags

In much the same way, you can create alerts for specific strings of text found on specific pages – I've chosen to get an alert if the string "noindex" is found in the HTML of the Distilled homepage. If we ever deployed a staging version or flipped a setting in a wordpress plugin, I'd get a push notification:

Doing this kind of monitoring is essentially free to me because we are already using Server Density to monitor the health of our servers so it's no extra effort to monitor checksums and the presence / absence of specific strings.

#4 Bonus – why stop there?

Check out all the stuff that etsy monitor and have alerts for. If you have a team that can build the platform / infrastructure, then there are almost unlimited things you could monitor for and alert about. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• status codes – 404 vs 301 vs 302 vs 500 etc.
• changes in conversion rates / cart abandonment
• bot behaviour – crawling patterns etc – given how disproportionately interested I was in the simple "pages crawled" visualisation available in cloudflare (see below – who'd have guessed we get crawled more by Yandex than Google?), I feel there is a lot more that could be done here:

PS – today is the last day for early bird discounts on our Linklove conferences in London and Boston at the end of March / beginning of April. (There's also a sign-up form on that page if you want to make sure you always hear about upcoming conferences and offers). I hope to see many of you there.

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“We’re happy to announce that the Minecraft project on LEGO CUUSOO has passed the LEGO review and we are now developing a concept that celebrates the best aspects of building with the LEGO system and in Minecraft,” the Lego team announced on its community blog. “We can’t wait to show it to you—but it isn’t ready just yet. These things take time, so we appreciate your patience. More details are to come.”

Hopefully there are little Lego Minecraft zombies! Once Minecraft Legos hit the street, Mojang has promised that its 1 percent royalty will go to charity.

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