dougandrews.co.uk

April 10, 2008

Google Benchmarking

Filed under: Resources/Tools — admin @ 9:28 am

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.

April 8, 2008

Warning: vacation rental scam, New York

Filed under: Selfcateringhols — admin @ 5:47 pm

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:

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.

April 4, 2008

Diminishing returns of a Spam email

Filed under: Spam,comment — admin @ 8:20 am

diminishing returns of a spam email

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.

Google emails

Filed under: comment — Tags: , , — admin @ 8:01 am

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.

April 3, 2008

Google analytics Benchmark reports

Filed under: Resources/Tools,comment — admin @ 8:17 am

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.

Google Adwords phishing emails

Filed under: Spam — admin @ 8:00 am

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>

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