Web Pages ala Goldilocks, Too Big, Too Narrow Just Right for Google

With Matt Cutts twittering about Google incorporating website load times  into rankings and Google providing a tool to measure how your website is viewed by different browsers, it might be time to reevaluate your site.

Interesting Ecomm Data

Blatantly stolen from my boss’ blog and edited for my own nefarious purposes.  Just so much good data that is so hard to find normally…WARNING: some ChannelAdvisor horn tooting to follow.

“We spend a lot of time at ChannelAdvisor following the various datapoints and thoughts around e-commerce and today Forrester research (Sucharita Mulpuru is the analyst) came out with a joint report/survey with the great folks at Shop.org (I/we are an active member FYI).

The headlines of the report are good news for internet retailers:

• Forrester sees e-commerce growing at 17% y/y in the US (This is good because comscore is starting to talk about 14% and maybe lower).  I’m an optimist and think that in early 09 the pundits will update the data to be more like 20%
• This puts e-commerce at $208B for 2008, up from $174 in 07
• e-commerce represents 7% of retail.
• search engine marketing (what I call paid-search) drove 35% of sales and is still the top channel for retailers
• 65% of retailers are experimenting with social networks
• Forrester is predicting that growth will be driven by the computer, CE, auto and apparel categories.
• Retailers spend $.50/click on average for paid-search and see $8.47 in incremental revenue (that’s a weird metric)

I downloaded the report and what’s neat is that shop.org/Forrester are finally seeing and reporting on the multi e-commerce channel trends we’ve been talking about for years.  For example, they have this figure from the survey section that covers the top channels for retailers (note these would be larger retailers, primarily with brick-and-mortar operations as well I would assume):

Another interesting datapoint they have from the survey is they asked retailers for a variety of e-commerce channels what the cost per order for the channel is and the average selling price.  I’ve found that most retailers like to look at channel costs either as a ROAS (return on ad spend) or an ‘Effective Take Rate’ (ETR), which is more of a cost of sales kind of model which helps for margin-planning/forecasting.  So I took the Forrester data and splatted it into a spreadsheet to calculate the ETR.  I also added eBay and Amazon as marketplaces with their ETR’s and ordered the channels from lowest ETR to highest and this is the result: (Amazon/eBay are highlighted to indicate I added them)

The only datapoint on here that looks unusual to me is the CSE data, usually we would see this more in-line with paid-search so I’m going to go look at our data and see if there’s anything noteworthy there. ( editor’s note: while that percent does seem high to me, I would expect it to be in the 20-22% range)  Not to toot our own horn here, but my guess is the retailers surveyed aren’t watching their CSE programs very closely or using ShoppingAdvisor to optimize their CSE channel.

If you’d like to learn more, there are several news items out today covering the report:

• InfoWeek
• AP
• CNBC video “

Crackers Using Your Own SEO Techniques Against You

This, “ IFrame exploit takes advantage of web site query caching. Web sites often cache the results of search queries that are run locally. These search results are forwarded to search engine providers (think Google or Yahoo), who use the information to generate their own search results. Hackers exploit the system by typing a query immediately followed by the text of an IFrame. This data (including the IFrame) is then passed to various search engines and displayed if a user searches for a relevant keyword. When the user visits an apparently legitimate document, the IFrame activates and attempts to complete whatever instructions it has been given. 

The major advantage of an injected attack versus an embedded one is that an injected attack requires no direct access to a web site’s server backend. Instead, it takes advantage of the company’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices and poisons the results that are fed back to web surfers. The first wave of injections targeted ZDNet Asia and torrentreactor.net. The attackers shifted away from these two domains quickly and branched out into other web sites. One key purpose of the attack was to advertise the rogue antivirus product developed by the RBN (Russian Business Network), XP Antivirus.

XP Antivirus is a cute piece of work. On the surface, it seems to be an ordinary anti-virus program, and it makes all the usual claims one would expect regarding its ability to keep a system clean and virus free. Once installed, however, XP Antivirus actually creates a set of registry keys that it will detect and flag as malware installations once a scan is run. The only way to remove these threats from the system, of course, is to buy the XP Antivirus software package. Additional IFrame were eventually added that pointed to downloads for Spyshredderscanner and MediaTubeCodec, both of which attempt to download additional malware into a system.

 —Ars Technica

“Google acknowledged that this was a known attack vector, and confirmed that they are indeed working on ways to manipulate and “sanitize” links provided by them in an effort to minimize the effect of incidents such as XSS on indexed sites. They also share our opinion on the reality of XSS and its affects on web browsing: “Google recommends that sites fix their cross-site scripting vulnerabilities as a priority. These can be abused in a number of ways, including bad interactions with search engines. Google is helping by reaching out to affected organizations. In addition, Google has internal processes to block abuses when the situation warrants.“

MSN Live Serving Up Google Adwords in Its SERPS

From Raven SEO:

Live Search is offering a new way for AdWords customers to get click-throughs — their own natural SERPs. They appear to be indexing AdWords ads from Google’s own SERPs. Doing a search on Live for colorations paint (at the time of this writing) will give you AdWords ads in the third and fourth natural result. I can only assume this is unintentional and is simply a bug in their crawler. Regardless, it’s a little embarrassing.

Jeff: It’s not a mistake….its the holiday season! A season of giving…better to give than receive, right Steve Ballmer?

http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/53/live-search-is-returning-google-adwords-ads-in-their-natural-search-results

Top #5 Position on Google Without Being Cached?

Google Google is showing that the last time they cached my blog was 22 October, yet for a post that went up just a few hours ago, I am now #5 for the term  “10 top most popular costumes” . Interesting. I’m hoping that smarter people than I comment with an explanation!