Ever curious to know if someone is searching your name on Google ?

The habit of searching people on the net has become very popular. If you are going to meet someone (blind date, job interview, …) one of the first thing to do is search their name on Google to get more information about them, right ? In fact, many people like to search their own name. They even have a name for it - Ego Search, Ego Surfing, Self Googling, Identity Googling, and on…
I guess that wanting to know about others who search you is sort of a Reverse Ego-Search

Assuming you don’t have access to the internal Google query databases, there’s not much you can do. Luckily, “Not much” is greater than nothing !

Here’s the Reverse Ego Search recipe:

1. Use your Google AdWords account (or ask a friend to use his).
2. Create a Campaign and add an Ad Group for each name string you want to track.
3. Use the “Phrase” match option on the strings you input, so that you won’t get ad impressions on close but different queries.
4. Use Regional Targeting mechanisms to even further fit an ad to a geographical region.
5. Point the ad to your site so that if your ad gets clicked you can obtain more information on searcher.
6. Track impressions through your AdWords account stats. Each impression means someone searched you.

Don’t forget to limit the daily spending to a few cents !

Now you can know exactly how many times your name was searched.
You can know when (date not hour) people were searching for you.
You can know where from (region not exact address) you were searched.
If the searcher clicks on your ad than now you can also know his IP = better pinpoint.

This, of course, can be applied in all the other SEM platforms (including Facebook, I guess).

Cool, a little.

Short reminder: Joost is “a system for for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer TV technology, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa).” Taken from Wikipedia, and see more details on the Joost site.

Looks great and promising but currently the content was not that great. I couldn’t find anything I could bear to watch for more than 2 minutes. While running it consumed about 60% of my CPU.

Joost is worth a spin and worth tracking as it builds.

It may sound obvious, and you may recognize all the engines listed below, but how often are you really using them ? My bet is that 95% of online users just go straight to the obvious option without considering other engines that will yield much better results for their search.

Here is a list of the sources I can think about, classified by the vertical or attribute that characterizes them.

Soon enough I’ll linkify them to make the list more convenient. Please put a comment below about more engines and services that you think are missing.

This script measures the search volume for a specified keyword per day for each of the 3 major engines: Google, Yahoo, Live.  The measurement is in “exact” numbers.  Here’s what it gives for the keyword: “testing”:

How does it do that ?

There are some tools that measure similar things but their granularity is much more coarse.  Google’s Keyword Tool gives a measure of the volume per month and on a scale from 0-5. Yahoo’s overture tool gives numbers for a single specific month of the year.  Compete.com, comScore, HitWise and such estimate the traffic based on a large user panel (several million users), or take their data from ISP logs.

Note that if you run several queries you can see that the Google’s volume share is a constant 57.83% which is a textbook number for Google’s search share.  Hmmm…  This means that this tool either obtains and estimate of the overall search volume for the 3 and divides accordingly, or obtains an estimate for any single on the engines and extrapolates accordingly.

Here are the pies that show the seotraffic.cgi results for two queries: “testing” and “games”.  Look similar ?

Also note that the results from checktraffic.cgi does not change from one day to another !

There are several ways I can think of, that this can be done:

1. Dogpile: dogpile.com the meta-search engine has a search spy applet that reveals a sample of the search queries it sees.  Possibly, this tool milks and accumulates the spy’s output.  Now you need several keywords for which Google published the exact volume and by comparing that volume to the one found on dogpile, an estimate can be given for any keyword based on the volume in dogpile.  Then extrapolate to the other 2 engines.

2. Yahoo overture: overture is Yahoo’s  keyword suggest tool that includes search volume numbers for January 2007 (if you use this one).  It would be simple enough to take this number and divide it by 31.  Problem is that I checked it and the numbers don’t fit ?!

3. Same as number 2, but using the subscription based web-tracking systems, instead of the free overture tool.

I wonder which of those is true.

In any case, the checktraffic script is a highly inaccurate and can be misleading. Use it with care.

When you start doing SEO work on your pages, you wanna know as soon as possible when the Googlebot came to visit. It’s even more relevant when working on pages that have not been modified for a long time, and by now all the bots know they should revisit as late as possible.

Here’s some code that will generate an alert by email, whenever the Googlebot comes along. Actually this will track and alert a visit from any bot as long as it first accesses the robots.txt file.

It patch here works by triggering a php script called botalert.php whenever anyone tries to access robots.txt. All the php script does is send an email to a destination you specify. That’s it.
The Foolowing must be true:

• Apache
• Rewrite Engine on
• PHP
• ‘exec’ enabled on server
• read/write permission to .htaccess in documentroot

To make these alerts happen you have to perform these 2 steps:

1. Add a RewriteRule to the .htaccess in the server’s root.
2. Upload the botalert.php code to the server’s root.

Step 1

Edit the .htaccess file in the server’s root directory. Put in this directive:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule robots.txt botalert.php [L]
</IfModule>

Step 2

Put this code in a file named botalert.php and place that script in the server’s root directory.

<?php

$pats = array (

	 "#(Googlebot)#i" => "Google"

	,"#(Slurp)#i"     => "Yahoo"

	,"#(Moz)#i"       => "unknown bot"

//	 put more patterns as you like...

);

$domain_name = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];

$alert_email = "MY-EMAIL-ADDRESS";

foreach ($pats as $pat=>$botname) {
  if (preg_match($pat,$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
    exec('echo "'.$botname.' came to visit" |mail -s "bot alert on '.strftime("%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S").' from '.$domain_name.'" '.$alert_email);
    break;
  }
}

header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");	// unless you do have robots.txt, in which case do: passthru('robots.txt')

?>

HostGator haven’t stressed a few things worth mentioning:

1. It may take the company from which you bought the domain up to 10 work-days to do the transfer, for no good reason.  This has nothing to do with the amount of time it takes the new DNS settings to propagate through the Internet.
2. New domain names can be moved only after 60 days have passed from the domain purchase date.

I had to transfer a domain from Yahoo after I’ve decided to ditch them.

Not knowing these two factors left me hanging with a canceled account on one hand, and waiting 9 days to pass until Yahoo finished “processing” my request.  I called Yahoo’s support to get things moving faster, but it made no effect on the guy.  These delays depend on the company from which you bought the domain and will vary depending on their nastiness.

In any case it’s a good idea to separate your domain management from your hosting provider.

So when you want to get your space it is natural to first try and google up information on the companies you like. I tried that and was swamped with tons of information and reviews and coupons everywhere.

After spending a few long minutes reading those reviews, these are my conclusions.

• It’s easy to annoy a web hosting customer. For that reason ALL the companies have bad things written on them. This doesn’t mean that they are all bad. There’s no choice but to look at overall long term reputation and to read into the negative reviews to see if it’s just a case of someone getting offended by a sleepy support-person or whether it’s a more serious claim.
• Focus on the negative talk. It’s funny to note that review sites that are affiliated with a web hosting company will never include any bad reviews on any other company at all. And vice versa: If a page contained negative slander on a company, then there’s a good chance (about 100%) that this site is not affiliated with anyone. This means that reviews by affiliates are bias and worthless, while slanderous posts are much more trustworthy.
• 99.9% of the review sites you will stumble upon are bias. Practically ALL of the web sites out there that are dedicated to providing reviews on hosting packages are bias and partial towards the company that pays most in referral commission. Take that into account.
• Look at hints for bias in review sites’ domain name. Avoid review sites that have the words “reviews”, “top”, “top10″, “best”, “official”, “review”, “coupons” etc along with the name of a specific host or with the actual word “hosting”. For example: web-hosting-reviews.com, top10-hosting.com, bluehostreviews etc. They are usually tailored reviews and are most probably a complete waste of your clicks and bandwidth.
• Look at hints for bias in the links pointing out. Avoid sites which do not contain simple links such as www.HOSTNAME.com. If you see www.HOSTNAME.com/track/?xyz-whatever and such, than there’s a good chance this link is an affiliation link and if you use it to buy a hosting package than the owner of that link gets a referral commission. This is generally ok, but when you mix opinions and marketing you usually get an undesired result.

This is relevant to wordpress-2.3 and maybe to future versions.

1. Reset password for admin.
2. Choose theme - note that each time you change the theme, you’ll need to redo the mods for Feedburner stats.
3. Upload theme heading picture.
4. Put your personal favicon.ico in the blog root dir.  This may help.
5. Update blogroll.  At least chuck out the default and put a link to mine…
6. Update about page.
7. Throw first default post and comment.
8. SEO the blog - the one and most important thing is to change the ‘post name pattern’ so that your post title will appear in the URL thus improving ranking.  Go to Options | Permalinks and under Custom type: /%postname%/
9. Change title and tagline to something other than default under Options | General.
10. Change default comment policy under Options | Discussion: remove “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” and “Force admin approval” of comments if akismet not active.
11. Add auto ping to Technorati http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping  in addition to the pingomatic engine, under Options | Writing | Update Services
12. Upload  plugins:
    1. tinymce advanced
    2. sitemap
    3. video
    4. feedburner
    5. stats
    6. akismet
    7. cache
    8. table
13. Activate and configure plug-ins under the Plugins tab.
14. Configure the Plugins under Options | Plugins and under Options | Manage.
15. Setup feedburner stats for advanced analytics of your blog.  This is done through your feedburner account.  Redo this each time you change the theme.
16. Setup additional users if needed under Options | Users

This actually sucks from two reasons:

1. Domain parking can actually hurt your domain cause it actually turns it into an MFA.  And if Google puts a mark on your domain it’s probably better to just ditch it than to try and pull it out of the Google hell.
2. They don’t rev share.  My domain is making money for them.

Other than that GoDaddy’s seems cool.

For a long time now they claim that “myspace” is the number one general (”All Category”?) search term, by far. Infact Hitwise claim that myspace related searches take over 1.5% of all the searches in the US !!!

The prefix reads:

“The terms listed below are ranked by volume of searches that successfully drove traffic to websites in the Hitwise All Categories category for the 4 weeks ending September 29, 2007, based on US Internet usage.”

“terms that have successfully drove traffic to websites…” - does this imply that Hitwise counts the volume of HTTP GETs with the ?q= pattern in the Referrer field ? It has to be so. What might be even more interesting to Internet marketers is how many high-volume search terms were unsuccessful in driving traffic which means there’s room for marketers to work…

Note that Google’s Keyword Tool gives different volumes, but their stats include the whole world not just US users (right?).

Myspace is relatively low (makes no sense), youtube is relatively low, craigslist and ebay seem to be in the right spot (Adding the other 2 “big” engines still won’t give the volumes that Hitwise estimates for those terms.)

Analytics can be very tricky !