Webmaster tools - is it accurate?

I have been puzzling over the data in webmaster tools and I'm now wondering if the data makes any sense. Here's the case that has me doubting its basic accuracy.

There are a lot of searches on my site's name which is a term that I created. There are dozens of searches on variations of the site name. Here are a few for example from the top ten terms for my site listed in Webmaster tools.

The site is SpellingCity.com. There are searches for:

spellingcity
spelling city
spelling city.com
www.spellingcity.com
etc etc etc

Here's an actual piece of data from Google Webmaster Tools with monthly data regarding the key phrase search query: ""www.spellingcity.com""

Impressions 140,000
Visits 22,000
Click thru rate. 16%
Average position. 3.2

Questions.

1. As far as I can tell, my site is always first on google when you search on "www.spellingcity.com". I'm also 2nd -5th (with different pages from the website). Why would they think that on average I'm around 3rd?  Are they averaging all the different pages on my website or just averaging the first time that my website appears for this search?

If people typed my actual URL into the search box, aren't they looking for my site? I mean if someone actually searched on "www.spellingcity.com", I would assume that they are trying to get to my site but are using the search bar instead of the address bar. I assume that they use the searchbox instead of address box is a sort of lazyman's way to not having to typed it accurately or completely.

Here's the questions: Where are the other 84% clicking through to?  Did they change their mind and not come to my site?  Why? Google has pages from my site as the first five results so I would just assume people would come to my site. Are they saying that 84% didn't go to the first instance of my site?

 There is of course the paid search possibility.There are some people placing paid ads next to this search.  For instance:

Spelling City Games - Get Spelling City Games | ask.com

Search for Spelling City Games 
www.ask.com

Spelling City Games 

Search for Spelling City Games
Find out more on Yahoo!



My conclusion: the data is just way wrong or I'm totally misinterpreting it. Or maybe ASK and Yahoo have unlimited budgets to snatch my users on the way into my site.  


Any ideas?


John, aka the Confused Mayor of  SpellingCity.com

www.yahoo.com

Are they really getting 84% of the clicks of people who put my site's URL into the search box?  THAT's ANNOYING.  But frankly, I just don't believe it.   It just makes no sense to me.

SEO Directories, Honey Pots, & Google - Are they smarter than the local cops?

I was jsut on a well-trafficked directory where scads of people are talking about how important it is to get listed in directories for seo purposes.  It makes no sense to me since directories, created for seo purposes, are probably of NO value. Here's how I think think about.

Wouldn't Google monitor the lists of directories created for SEO purposes and demote the value of their links to zero. Or, if they are asking people to buy links for seo purposes, to actually have them count negative?

Put yourself in the shoes of Google, why wouldn't you maintain a list of directories that only exist for seo purposes and NOT consider those links?

 Better yet, create you own directory for seo purposes, keep track of who submits to them, then consider those sites as potentially spammy sites. Your local cops create these honeypots by leaving purses in parked cars with videotapes to catch would-be thieves.  Isn't google at least that smart?

Blogging and social media

When I first started to blog, blogging was the hot social media. The old ones were yahoo groups and forums.  Today, the discussion of relationships between social media and blogs could be endlessly long. My point for today is just a simple one about the ease of integrating social media in blogs.

First, adding "gadgets" to blogs has gotten really easy. This blog is done with Blogger, it's just as easy with WordPress: Click Design and you'll get to click to pick a new gadget.  

By default, you are in the Basics menu.  The social media icons are not today considered basic.

I clicked on Featured and found some more commercial gadgets such as the the Amazon deals. Scroll down and you find two social media selections.  

One, the one that i picked for this blog, is a share icon for Facebook and a Tweet This for Twitter.

   There was also an "add this" for doing a larger number and trackable implementation of social media.  Layal readers will know that I'm a big Add This fan although I think their stats are underwhelming.

That's todays show folks. If I had a blog about blogging I might quote or paraphrase this post there.


del.icio.us

Viral Lift Calculation from Addthis

I'm unimpressed, or at least confused, by Addthis' analytics. I'm new to Addthis.com and generally, I like the breakdown by service, some of the ability to look at timeframe , and the overall presentation.

But the table about effectiveness should, in this user's humble opinion, provide this: 
- why not allow people to pick a specific time period so they can compare March vs February?  Or March 2015 vs March 2014?
- overall statistics including: number of page views, number of shares, percentage of people who shared on each page
- the value of these shares which is what they call the viral uplift

I would think that the columns information that I'd like to get are:
- page impressions of the addthis.com gadget
- number of shares - total or by service
- the percent of shares
- number of click throughs from the shares by other users
- the percent

Instead, there's just this viral lift concept which I think is just the last point. I think.
I'll go ask this question on their forum and see what they say....
I've posted it but, I'm not sure that I did the signature right. Probably, I'll be banned now...sigh.
http://www.addthis.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2

Note - I can't find my post and haven't tried logging in again.
Generally, our sites took over direct management of our social media icons ourselves.
We lost the viral uplift calculation but we never figured out how to use it anyway.

Add this.com viral lift

I've started using addthis.com on VSC and I'mconfused by the concept of viral lift. And i quote:

Viral lift is the percentage increase in traffic due to shares and clicks. Essentially, viral lift shows you how viral your content is – if your shares are getting a lot of clicks, your viral lift percentage will be high.

The AddThis Analytic’s viral lift feature is a valuable tool in making editorial decisions and tailoring future content.  It allows you, as a publisher, to see what shares are sending the most traffic back to your site. If you head into your analytics dashboard, you will see that we flag a page as viral if it’s generating more clicks than shares. Then head into the Content tab, sort by clicks and you can easily see what content is really resonating.

End quote. I'm confused in that I feel that if content has a high share to visit ratio, it's already worth flagging it as having some viral potential. In fact, if people are sharing it, its a GREAT thing. A second question is whether the shares generate cliks. This could be driven by the quality of your page title, image , and meta description which is what shows up on a Facebook share.

Add this!

When you run a website, there's so much to do.  Actually, if you run a website, you can do as little or as much as you want. Let me tell you about my experience running websites. First of all, I don't run them by myself. We are no up to 30 people working on these sites.

There's also so much to do. Our priorities:
1. Customer service. Answer the phones. Well! And find out what issues our users are having and resolve them.
2.  Build great new content and services.
3.  Maintain our advertising and SEO efforts.
4.  Try to be current with all the cool new stuff like social media, social bookmarking etc etc. You'll notice that this blog still pops up some outdated icons at the bottom of each post (I often delete them). I see a blank form, technorati, delicious.  We finally, on one of our major sites; VocabularySpellingCity.com, put up an Addthis.com on every page on the site. Addthis give some pretty cool stats and should be easy to update in case Twitter and Facebook don't remain the big dogs. Hard to imagine but then, they just arrived in the last three to four years so we'll see.

So pop over to some of our pages on VocabularySpellingCity and share or tweet the pages, would you? thanks.

Word Lists

Capitonyms - New!
Compound Words
Contractions
Dolch - Sight Words
Geography Lists
Homophones, Homonyms, etc.
Literature Based Word Lists
Math Vocabulary - New!
Monthly Holiday Lists
Phonics & Sight Word Curriculum 
Possessive Nouns 

Sequential Spelling Program

Sound Alike Words
del.icio.us

Facebook like this page, FB like your FB page, Facebook Share

I think I finally understand this. The icons here are from a typical page on the Time4Learning website: http://www.time4learning.com/education/third_grade.shtml .

The F icon there is a "share this page" icon. It will place on the user's Facebook home page some info about this page from our website. Specifically, it'll put up a user comment, the page meta title, the page metadescription, and an image from the page. This is different than the following two cases:

Facebook Like this page. Many websites have FB likes that have the user "liking" that specific page of the website.   If you click on them, you've liked the specific page (or post in this case since we're in a forum).

Facebook Like set up to Like their Facebook Page.  This is how the likes are set up on the home page of the Time4Learning website. A person who likes any of the Facebook Like icons on these page becomes a friend of ours on Facebook. It's very different than liking the page. For instance, they get updates on their Facebook page from our Facebook page.  Visually, I don't think there's a way to know the different between the two.

Facebook Sharing - What content gets chosen?

I've just been running some tests about how the Facebook share icon works in terms of what image, title, and message it picks up. I'm pretty sure that when you put a share icon on a webpage, as we've done on so many of the T4L webpages, here's one for example:
http://www.time4learning.com/secular/index.shtml
the share icon picks up the page title, the meta description and the first image on the page. Here's a test: 

 
However, I've been trying to figure out how Facebook picks the image. In this case, it gives the user a choice of 12, all of which can be found on the page. The first one is an odd choice, it's not the first image on the page. It might be the largest. It's not the one that's closest to the top in the center either.

Sign of the Times - Another first

I needed to sign a document emailed to me and return it. I printed it but I couldn't seem to get my durn HP gadget to scan it into my computer. I finally got frustrated, pulled out my phone, turned on the flash, took a picture of it and emailed it to myself.

Big Google Update

It's early 2011 and the NYT and other major press have all been abuzz about a major Google search engine algorithm release. "The biggest update in five years!" I've heard.

So with bated breath we keep checking our SERP.  So far, nada. No big increase in position (which we had hoped for), no loss of position (which we feared).

I had hoped in the removal of the algorithmic sites which are made for Adsense generating menus and topics by formula and ordering articles for $11, my sites would rise.  Sadly, no visible progress and no loss of ground either. It's exciting to have SEO on the front pages but ultimately, a little anticlimatic for me.

Adsense - Trying to Help with Context

I'm involved in a very large website which runs Google Adsense. I've noticed that on same pages, we don't succeed at getting contextual ads.  I'm trying to figure out what to do about this since I think the non-contextual ones earn less (less dollar per click, lower click through rate).  OFten, I don't even get an ad served up on these pages. 

List page not getting contextual ads!

 There are three reasons that I can think of that this"list"  page is not getting enough context. Some are easily solved, some are not.

1. The URL is not SEO-friendly. (see A) All the other pages on the site have SEO friendly URLS but on this huge site, 50 million monthly page views and over a million pages or word lists, we designed to manage our resources and did not implement a look up table for SEO friendly URLs. This is unlikely to get solved.

2. The text on the page, especially near the top, does not give much context.  In fact, looking at the code, I see:
We're  using some sort of standard text for the meta keyword and description. It's probably the same across all one million list pages.  It's really long too. The title tag seems to be picking up proper context by providing the grade level, school name, teacher name, city, and state.

I guess that this could be fixed by putting the words: "vocabulary list", "teacher", and "school" into the title tag. And the keyword and description should also be customized for these pages with this data. On the other hand, the page does have the school name and teacher name on it. This is not really less contextual custom text than are found on the other school pages, it's just that the balance is different since these pages have these long word lists which to a search engine, are so much gibberish. 



3.  The page is marked "do follow, don't index."  I wonder if that affects contextual ads?

School Page: Good success with Contextual Ads

In contrast, the teacher and school pages do have more relevant custom text on the page, they have SEO-friendly titles, and they are "do follow, do index".  For example, here are examples of teacher and school pages both of which have very nice and appropriate ads.

Another mid-term potential project is to allow teachers, parents, and students to put up more comments on their pages which would ultimately provide more original text (user generated) which would endear us to the search engines.

Or, if I let kids put up too much graffiti, I might get in heap of trouble.

Teacher Page, Getting Contexual Ads!

Am I loser if I'm following more than followed?

I run a small online education company and so far, I have had one of our teachers (ie a freelancer) manage our Twitter account.  I looked at the account this week for the first time in awhile and saw that we had about 650 followers and were following around 900 people.

I feel like we're a loser.  We are following more people than are following us.  What do you think? Other than the fact that this is a pretty small number by our standards, shouldn't we have attracted more followers than we're following?

getting the hang of social media

I talked to some people including hearing a talk this week about the tricks of building a community around social media.  So I tried a give-away.  Cool, in less than 24 hours, 200 comments on Facebook.  I think I'm getting the hang of this facebook thing.

SpellingCity comment got 200 comments!

Google Adsense, Burst Ads, Move to DoubleClick

Does anyone know about any good articles on this topic? 

About half of my Google Adsense ads in 300 x 250 box on my site are showing survey ads. 

Google Adsense has it's own stream of Burst  survey ads with no filtering whatsoever. So these are ads that Burst sold advertisers and which Google places. We have no way of knowing what the ad rates were as Google hides all that from us on a per impression or even a per network source basis.

These network flows and the filtering capability are something new that we have been working with over the past 3 weeks. One of the difficulties is that the previews in Adsense do not accurately reflect the set of running ads. The Burst ad stream was new on January 1 as were a number of other Adsense ad streams. It takes a while to sort these things out, especially with this being a brand new set of functionality and ad flow in Adsense. 

Google Adsense is not as easy to optimize as it was one month ago. It is essentially a brand new product in terms of control and optimization. They are moving everyone towards a DoubleClick optimization model and level of complexity.

Forums online

Forums continue to boom! These online discussion forums seem to be alive and well for indepth discussion, it's the quick chatter that seems to have moved to big time social media.

Despite Facebook & Twitter, the useful online forums continue to buzz and be useful for sharing info on a variety of topics. When I have a question, be it on parents discussing online homeschool education on non-religious homeschooling, the forums are the places that I'll go to to get thoughtful in depth expert discussions.

Facebook has groups and specialized areas but the in depth discussions seem to be on the discussion forums and boards. Twitter too has a lot of volume on many topics but not much depth.

The technology or forum software for the forums seems to be moving towards Vbulletin 4 and Ning groups.  Php forum and Yahoo  groups seems to be in rapid decline as forum hosting technologies.

BTW, I'm involved in managing forums using an array of technologies for the forum discussions, some a lot more successful than others.  I have two discussion forums using Vbulletin 4.0, one on Joomla, one using BuddyPress on a WordPress site, and then four different Facebook pages.

There's also a high school homeschool student discussion forum but it's only available to Time4Learning members (BTW, this comment is new added in 2016). It looks, btw, much like Facebook but uses some proprietary software.

The key to many of these forums is skilled attentive moderation to stimulation that discussion, encourage the newbies, manage the personalities and inevitable rifts, and keep the forum discussions jolly and moving.

Another key to forums is technology and keeping them updated with single sign on using the social media logins and adding features like maps to locate other members and easy posting of pictures and videos.