Frustration with Google Analytics

We are a pretty savvy organization with a few people who spend hours a week trying to discern some truth from Googles analytics. The reality is it’s really hard for us to find much real truth from analytics.

1. We have some flash pages. Somehow, google fails to track people through the iframed flash pages so our data is inaccurate in cases where people look at our demos. Of course, the demos are key to our sales pitch.

2. Often, we can’t reproduce the same historical data two times. I don’t know why. But given how much human error there is in pulling these reports, we’ve started requiring all significant findings to be verified by researching it multiple times. Somehow, Google’s sampling technique seems to provide data that varies by 25% and 50%! At first, I didn’t believe but we can reproduce variations with all of us watching it on the big screen. Same analysis, just different results. Weird.

3. How goals set up in Adsense PPC and goals set up in Google’s analytics for CPC related to each remains a mystery to us. We’ve never been able to reconcile the data from the two systems.

We’ve talked to Google’s people who call us periodically (we’re a big enough adsense buyer to get random cold calls from Google newbies) and so far, we’ve not much any real progress on these issues.

Google PageRank – A bit useful, very misleading

Here’s the fact. The green bar labelled google page rank is a little bit useful and can be very misleading.

How is Google PageRank Useful?
1. It is a good indicator of  the general position with Google. Green means ‘go.’  No green, means that it is either a brand new site or a problem site. It’s time to study it.
2.  Communication. When Google went on their kick to stamp out paid links and link advertising, their way of communicating with websites prior to dropping their position in the search engines was to drop their visible page rank.  I know people’s whose page rank went from 6 to 0.  All of a sudden, they were paying attention to the guidelines.

How is it Misleading?

As best I can tell, the visible Google page rank is a simple count, arbitrarily time-delayed of incoming links. It counts SPAM links, multiple links on a page, multiple links from the same domain, and totally irrelevant links all the same.  As such, it is often not at all correlated to the real weight that Google assigns to that page.  But, being lazy and it being there with the Google name on it, we often all fall into the habit of relying on it. Shame on us.

Homeschooling Info for each state

I’ve been very interested to learn about the different approaches to education in the states and how many different sources of info there are on learning about them. I found a good list with homeschooling info on almost all of the states.  Here:

State Homeschooling Info

• - Alabama
• - Alaska
• - Arizona
• - Arkansas
• - California
• - Colorado
• - Connecticut
• - Delaware
• - Florida
• - Georgia
• - Hawaii
• - Idaho
• - Illinois
• - Indiana
• - Iowa
• - Kansas
• - Kentucky
• - Louisiana
• - Maine
• - Maryland
• - Massachusetts
• - Michigan
• - Minnesota
• - Missouri
• - Mississippi
• - Montana
• - Nebraska
• - Nevada
• - New Hampshire
• - New Jersey
• - New Mexico
• - New York
• - North Carolina
• - North Dakota
• - Ohio
• - Oklahoma
• - Oregon
• - Pennsylvania
• - Rhode Island
• - South Carolina
• - South Dakota
• - Tennessee
• - Texas
• - Utah
• - Vermont
• - Virginia
• - Washington
• - West Virginia
• - Wisconsin
• - Wyoming

Learning about writing great keyphrases

Google advices people to study their choice of words carefully since some keyphrases can teach you about success, others are in education in writing failure.  Here are some catchy phrases which while they might interest people, tend to confuse the spiders.  There’s a before and after list for your learning pleasure:

Before:

Writing Resources

• Elementary School Online Writing Instruction
• Four Types of Sentences and the Effect of Punctuation
• High School Writing Overview
• How Graphic Organizers Help Students Master Writing
• How Writing Rubrics Improve Writing
• Middle & Secondary School Writing Overview
• Paragraph Writing Secrets: The Four Essential Elements
• The Writing Process: The Steps to Writing Success
• Writing Prompts Motivate Your Child’s Writing
• Writing a Better Book Report

After:

Time4Writing provides some useful resources for people teaching or learning to write:

• Elementary School Online Writing Instruction
• Types of Sentences
• High School Writing Overview
• Graphic Organizers
• Middle & Secondary School Writing
  
• Paragraph Writing
• The Writing Process
• Writing Prompts
  
• Writing Book Reports

Personalized Search – How many levels?

I’ve heard and experienced the effect of personalized search.  So, for instance, if I google a term like online homeschool  while I’m inside my igoogle account, I find that this site: http://www.homeschoolonline.org comes up first.  

But, when I logout of my own igoogle account, I find that this site is third.

Here’s my question. Is Google also logging my IP address and providing some level of customization based on preferences exhibited by that IP address?

I”ve also heard that google customizes for IE and Firefox based on some algorithmic-based differences of interest between these populations. What do you think?

Backlink Checking

I’m trying to compare two sites when I don’t have access to Googles Webmaster tools for either of them. So whats the best  backlink checker tool (free):
http://www.backlinkwatch.com/
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
http://www.seoelite.com/
Yahoo Site Explorer  is free and quite accurate.

Learning Domains & SEO

I was recently approached to purchase domain called Learning Time dot com.  How much would such a domain be worth? Other domains that I have considered.

Math City
Learning Games Learning Games Learning Games Learning Games (four variations)

How to decide which domain can bring home the bacon and which ones will just such $9 out of pocket, year after year?

Analyzing a website for acquisition

1. Revenue – What are they, where do they come from, whats the algorithm for visitors to revenue. Automatic or sales required.
2. Content – How many pages? Dense or small pages. What’s the actual focus of the content? How have they organized it? For instance, a site about cars could be organized by brand, type of car (sports, sedan, van, truck, etc), country, parts of cars (engines, interiors, wheels). This makes a huge difference in terms of site utility. Why does it make sense?
3. SEO – Page construction, what terms have been pursued, source of links, increasing or decreasing position.
4. Site design & navigation – What are the main sections? What is promoted?
5. Site stickiness & appeal
6. Community or newsletter
7. Page design
8. Brand – memorable & appealing?

Did you hear that they cancelled summer school in California?

The webs amazing

I had two little experiences this weekend that reminds me how awesome the web is.

1. I looked up a friend that I hadn’t spoken to in 25 years.  Took minutes.

2. I started looking around at joker collections.  The truth is that I have a world class private joker collection which I’ve started to put up online.

Learning the Vocabulary of SEO

I’ve been working with a new colleague to teach him the language and methods and vocabulary of SEO. I’ve been playing with different educational methods. I created a course on how to blog for his benefit which taught him a new language and vocabulary. We’ve been doing a worked example in which we contrast todays vocabulary flash games with yesteryears vocabulary flash cards.

I’m trying to push the idea that learning today is different than before. 

The vocabulary is new. Here are some new vocabulary topics:
GRE Verbal Tips
Improve Through Active Learning
Analogy Vocabulary
PSAT Vocabulary
Synonym Vocabulary
Connotative and Denotative Vocabulary
ESL Vocabulary
Learning Dolch Words

I only wish that I had a better mastery of the vocabulary of homeschool curriculum so I could teach them the online tricks.