dougandrews.co.uk

I’ve enabled Google Benchmarking for ww.selfcateringhols.com, my personal blog as well as this more work orientated blog and to be honest I’m quite shocked at the results of the benchmarking.

Google categorises your site as small medium or large but doesn’t tell you which category your site falls into. The beauty of having access to the stats for multiple sites is that you can (as long as they fall into different size brackets) work out which one your site falls into.

I was never under any confusion with my blogs - they receive very little traffic really, which is why I was blown away  by the fact that this blog receives 217% more traffic than the benchmark small blog. Even my personal blog, which is written primarily for friends and family, and which has days without receiving a single visitor is relatively close to the benchmark. This must mean that there are an awful lot of sites out there getting little or no traffic. Bear in mind these stats only compare with other sites which have opted in to the program, so we can forget the millions of splogs out there as I doubt that the owners are really interested.

I was unsure as to which category selfcateringhols fell into until I did this comparison - it is so heavily over the benchmark that I assumed it was still categorised as small but on the verge of falling into the medium category. I was wrong, which again was a big surprise, as this tells a story of a lot of commercial sites out there receiving a lot fewer visitors than I had expected.

We’ve had two new properties added to our site in the last couple of days : American Luxury and New York Away From Home. Demand was immediately strong, with multiple enquiries coming in within hours of the properties going live.

Because we work closely with our owners we were already in contact with them regarding inconsistencies with their property listing. Further communication raised alarm bells and we started to look into the possibility that we were being scammed.

I cannot prove anything definitively but have asked the respective ‘owners’ of the properties to contact us directly by phone, something they have avoided doing. Until that time we have disabled these properties.

What we found was that the properties in question were listed on multiple websites (this is as to be expected), with the same telephone number (which goes to an answermachine) but with different contact names.

The names used were the following:

• timothy smith
• rick freeman
• brian smith
• rick anderson
• brian timothy
• alex k jeffery
• brown jeffery
• brown anderson

The web addresses were the following, some of the links lead to dead end pages but they showed up in google results:

• www.usavacationhomes.biz/property/41.php
• www.world-vacation.com/viewadvert.asp?id=6347
• www.arkadia.com/usa/real-estate/for-rent/united-states/new-york/new-york/CA-T9747/
• www.locations-de-vacances-online.com/locations_details.php?recordID=100097
• www.gastgeber.net/17478.htm
• www.rentalsexpress.com/vacation_rental_property/unitedstates/newyork/newyorkcity/apartment7350.html
• www.holiday-home.com/2789_d.aspx
• www.vlbo.com/2637/
• www.properties-worldwide.com/r/US132860/rent-2~site~~c~p~sess~263473344.htm
• www.landorproperty.com/PropertySearchDetails.aspx?PropertyId=1264
• www.vacationrentalslisted.com/RentalPrintVersion-2117.aspx
• www.vacation-rentals-byowner.com/Manhattan-manhattan_luxury_homes—11710_.html
• www.worldcondos.com/viewdetails.php?id=449
• www.ourholidayrentalhomes.com/i-hrh-us-ny100-en.htm
• www.10000vacations.com/rentals/product_desc.php?id=712
• www.worldvacationrental.com/24291.html
• www.holiday-home.com/2818_e.aspx
• www.fastvacationrentals.com/vacation-rentals-new-york/rental-id-433.html

The above is not proof of a scam, I can see possible explanations, but as we’ve been unable to speak to the owners directly we’re left to make assumptions. Our gut feeling is that it is a scam - I’ll eat humble pie if we’re proven wrong. It’s worth noting that I think all of the above websites involve contacting the owner directly, do so at your own risk!

Meanwhile we have a lot of demand for New York, so we’d love to hear from any genuine property owners looking to let out their apartment.

The above is a snapshot of the traffic to my site resulting from my post on a phishing email - the lows are the weekends, the highs Monday morning when they have obviously posted a fresh batch of their emails.

It’s interesting to note the diminishing returns - presumably given that Spam emails by their nature are not targeted specifically but just sent out to as many people as possible the market starts to get saturated quite quickly with people having already received the email in previous weeks and they’ve either acted upon it or taken the decision to bin it.

This process may have been hastened by the decision of one of the visitors to my site to send a link to my post to the senders of the email. I’m guessing they’ll give up on the template they have been using and will simply start off afresh with something different soon.

After getting a whole load of phishing emails posing as being from google adwords and being advised by google not to click on any links in emails sent by them I today received an email from google adsense inviting me to participate in a survey (click on the link).

So that’s ‘don’t click on any links in emails from us (unless they’re from us)’  is it? It sounds like I’m Google bashing but we have the same problem - I get spam/phishing emails sent from me (apparently) to me

I am surprised though - Google has the resources to ensure that the link is posted on the site and that you should go there directly. The problem of course is that your return rate will drop significantly in this scenario. It’s a no win situation.

Google have a new report (still in Beta) which is quite interesting - it allows you to add your site data to the general community so that you can then compare your stats against those of the other contributing sites, all anonymously obviously.

Within the general community you can narrow things down by selecting the category most appropriate to your site; within each category there is a minimum of 100 contributing sites.

It’s a great tool, the only thing that I don’t like is that Google makes a value judgement on your site and categorises it as small, medium or large. I think this relates to the amount of traffic your site receives. The stats to which you are benchmarked against are those of similar size (i.e. so if your site is categorisd as small you will see benchmark stats from other ’small’ sites). The problem is that Google doesn’t tell you which category your site falls into, so you can look at your stats and they might be showing x% more visitors than average, but you don’t know if that makes you a big fish in a small pond (i.e. you’ve been categorised as a small site) or whether you’re actually performing well in the medium or larger size categories.

In the last week I’ve started to get a number of emails from Google Adwords asking me to reactivate my account or variations on a theme. They’re phishing emails but very well done, it took a bit of investigation. Here’s the last one I got:

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does,
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.

———————————————————————————-

Dear Google AdWords Customer,

Your ads have stopped running because we were unable to process your billing information.

We will reactivate you account after you update your billing information.

In order to reactivate your account, please sign it to your account at
http://adwords.google.com/select/login, and update your billing information.
Once your account is reactivated and your billing information has been processed,
any your ads and campaigns can begin running immediately on Google.

Advertise your business on Google
No matter what your budget, you can display your ads on Google and our advertising network. Pay only if people click your ads.

———————————————————————————-
The Google AdWords Team

I did notify Google and got an auto-generated email saying that they weren’t responsible (true enough) and never to click on a link in an email but go directly to the site if in doubt.

Things to look for:

- they’re being sent to any number of domain registered email addresses i.e. email@selfcateringhols.com, email123@selfcateringhols.com etc, so check if the recipient is the email address to which the account is registered.

- if you open the email, go to file > properties and then click on the details tab you’ll see the email source code, check out the return path:

Return-Path: <floridaregionflag@yahoo.com>

it’s obviously too early to say if the latest round of economic woes in the banking sector will hit sales directly, but the distraction appears to have had an immediate effect on visitor numbers. Visitors to selfcateringhols.com are extremely cyclical: Monday is our busiest day of the week declining to a week low on Saturday. Sunday leads to Monday and so on. For the first time this year we saw more visitors on Sunday 16th March than we did on Monday 17th. It’s difficult to make a direct comparison because we were expecting a moderate increase due to marketing efforts during the week. As such Sunday saw a 3.22% increase on the previous Sunday, while Monday showed a 7.52% drop. No great surprise, it remains to be seen what the longer term effects will be.

Inbox: 594 new messages, of which 498 were Spam

Spam folder: first thing it was at 2579; by the time I worked through my Inbox it was at 2654; by the time I’d got to the bottom of the list it was at 2667. There were 2 false positives, about average.

It used to send my eyes funny scrolling through the Spam folder so have a technique I use now which makes it less onerous:

- start at the top  of the list (if ordered so that most recent messages come in at the bottom)

- have the ‘preview’ option turned off, so you just see the titles

- use the arrow keys to work down the first page; when at the bottom, press ‘page down’ and then ‘page up’.

- repeat the process  till you get to the bottom of the list

- empty the Spam folder

In this way your eyes do not have to cope with scrolling, you can take your time as any new messages come in a the bottom so they will be checked last anyway.

The search results in Google now are typically VERY good, which is why I was so surprised to see a bad Spammy site at number 1 in the search results. Going back a few years there was a period of time when the results were plagued with this kind of stuff but I haven’t seen anything so bad ranking so well for a long time.

See the search results page

The number one result leads to a site which has a load of other links. Of the links I clicked a high proportion were ‘under construction’, error 404 pages or went to a site laden with sponsored links disguised to look like real (i.e. contextual) links. Surely there’s a better result to display than this?

Today I received an email from an owner, here’s an extract:

“we have used several web holiday agency sites over the years and this year we have tried out some new ones, some with enormous success. of the new ones we tried to get going two have been marked by a complete failire. yours is one of those sites.”

This is terrible news, what could have caused such a complete failure?

The reason was that the owner was experiencing technical problems and “despite emailing you about this problem we have had no assitance to resolve the problem.”

It has become cliché to hear ‘your call is important to us’ and similar whilst on the end of a never ending telephone queue, but without wanting to sound cliché: all enquiries are important to us, which is why we have invested a lot to ensure that ALL emails, messages and calls received are answered in a timely fashion.

So why did this owner not receive a response? Because we can only answer emails that we receive, but email being email there is no guarantee that it will ever be read by the recipient - In this case we simply did not get the owners’ email.

Because of the levels of Spam received we now auto delete any email sent to a non-existent selfcateringhols email address, so any typo and we will not get it.

Of the emails sent to legitimate email addresses, we get approximately 1,000 Spam emails a day. We go through all of these on a daily basis, but it is not exact and there is always the potential for a legitimate email to get deleted along with the Spam.

Email used to be great, but it now has severe limitations and the main problem is that people do not always understand these. We have been using now our own site based messaging system for a number of years which gets around this problem: contact us via the site and we are guaranteed to receive it, which means you are sure to get a response.

There has always been a certain resistance to using it for one reason or another, but a recent report by hitwise showed that there is a trend now to send email via social networking sites rather than normal email.

This I think is positive as it will help people get used to the concept of internal site messages. Email has had it’s day, the levels of Spam means people (or the companies that manage your email) have thrown up all sorts of obstacles to receiving emails, thus making it relatively unusable.

To make communication workable the obstacles need to be removed, so guaranteeing receipt, whilst avoiding the ensuing avalanche of Spam. Site based communication does this, the sooner that people get used to it the better.

We will continue to make every effort to ensure all emails are dealt with as effectively as possible but to be sure of getting a response PLEASE send us a message via the site.