Conversion Matters

When I was travelling a while back I got an email fired to me about “a new, free tool for automatically analyzing URLs for a comprehensive range of SEO issues”.

I was going through my old emails (kinda - still need to properly sort them, anyway..) and I just checked it out.

What to say? What to say?  It has a massive fucking ugly advert (in Comic Sans?) and it looks like something I would have tried to make in Photoshop 4 years ago.

Also what it analyzes is really boring and mostly to with speed of page.

Anyway it’s here if you want a look.

Disclaimer: Regular readers (do I have any?) may ignore this; I think you know what I’m doing..

Actually she’s no one.. Sorry to dissapoint.

You have just misspelt Justine Ezarik.

Who is Justine Ezarik?

She is often known as iJustine I believe?  She is a life blogger/vlogger or something..

I don’t really know.. She’s someone for geeks to drool over as far as I can tell.

She’s is pretty hot I guess, so drool away..

I hope this was more useful than my twitter rant (I actually really like Twitter now by the way).

I’m never really sure what to write about these days, so I figured it was about time I checked my logs to see what people were looking for, I mean hell, it’s what the gurus suggest (damn I was looking for a relevant link but couldn’t find one; still I’m sure that’s what they suggest)!

What the hell is a madlib site?

Madlib, or mad libs as Wikipedia refers to it, was a children’s game where you had to come up with alternative words and then fill in blanks in a story. Something like that anyway, I’ve never played it, I’m not American.

How does this relate to a website? The idea is usually implemented in such a way that one can spin large amounts of legible, legitimate (? - we’ll get to that later) content from a small amount of content.

So for example, the title of this post is ‘Are Madlib Sites Whitehat?’. If you wanted to ‘madlibify’ that title you may come up with something like this:

Are (Madlib|Mad Lib|Mad-Lib) (Sites|Websites|Blogs) (Whitehat|Blackhat|Grayhat|Illegal|Legitimate)?

1. Are Madlib Blogs Whitehat?
2. Are Mad Lib Websites Illegal?
etc.

Now you could fire this through your madlib function and you have a load of unique titles for a small amount of input.

Take this idea further, and you can see how it could be used to create 100 blog posts instead of 1 blog post. Or alternatively, let’s say you have a massive database driven website, you might ‘madlibify’ what would otherwise be static portions of each page to hopefully get more pages indexed.

Madlib sites are almost certainly not whitehat

Nearly every method of content creation that involves some kind of automation is pushing or breaking the limits of what search engines consider to be legitimate, whitehat content.

I think it’s a pretty safe bet to assume that if a search engine engineer came across a blog of yours with 100 very similar posts they would nuke it regardless of how unique/readable/whatever the content was.

Depending on your goals, it may be a fine option, makes a change from the usual scraping at least.

If you are genuinly interested in a fully fledged system involving madlibbing/content creation/automatic posting/blog farms etc I’d take a look at datapresser.

Please.  I’m trying to travel around Europe not moderate comments!

It really fucks up the writing editor.  I wondered what was going on just now…

I’m off to Europe for a month next week, and consequently I’ve been looking for travel insurance and it’s really the first time I’ve had to look for insurance - Aside from student insurance for uni!I figured it would be pretty pointless searching for ‘cheap travel insurance’ or something similar as all I’d get would be a load of hyper-optimised crap.Consequently I thought I’d give the aggregators a shot. I tried MoneySuperMarket, confused and something called SquareMouth.

SquareMouth

SquareMouth, weird name by the way, where who I looked at first. It was super quick getting my quote but they were ridiculously expensive? One was £307.80 ?!?! That’s almost as much as my month long interrail ticket!

So they ruled themselves out instantly.

The site reminded me of an OS Commerce site or something too, maybe a directory, I’m not entirely sure but it feels pretty dated.

Confused

I was pretty annoyed with the confused website.

Firstly, the quote form was in a popup. How unnecessary is that? I’ve got about 50 tabs open. I LIKE having it all in one window.

They also insisted that I had to give them my email address, “no we’re not spammers, honest gov”. Yeh so I’ll be expecting lots of ‘reminders’ about their ‘great offers’ and other crap.

The email thing was particularly annoying as the other sites I looked at didn’t ask for my address.

Their tab indexing was all over the place! Yeh so, maybe you should try tabbing through your quote forms next time you change the order of the questions…

Some people have a phobia of using the mouse - it’s trackpad at most here…

MoneySuperMarket

Onto the most offensive site but also the one, ironically I’m likely to get my travel insurance from.They have the most god-awful quote button I’ve ever seen. Did they get a 3 year old chipmunk in on work experience week? I could have puked a better button myself. It’s like < blink >BUY OUR QUOTE< /blink > but worse.

Check it out:

These pictures don’t actually do the badness enough justice, I can assure when it’s flashing every half a second it’s the worst eye sore.

I can’t believe that such a massive, successful(?) company can employ designers/project managers who think that kind of button is decent and is going to help increase conversions.

What the fuck were they thinking? Have they just come back from 1999?! They might as well add a background .wav file or something too..

All things said and done though, their quotes were by far the cheapest and they’ll probably be getting my business.

Inspired by a post over here I present 500 keywords people have used to find this site for your general amusement and amazement!

adam taylor
setting up a blog
conversation matters
harry potter porn
adding google analytics tracking to 1shoppingcart
the big social media marketing myth
1shoppingcart google analytics
google analytics tutorial
conversion matters
google ecommerce
setting up google analytics
facebook dying
google analytics 1shoppingcart
google analytics ecommerce tracking
tesco compare
checkout conversion rates
google ecommerce tracking
seo trends
tesco compare advert
google analytics utm:t
harrypotterxxx
harrypotterxxx.com
adam taylor facebook
beginners guide to making money online
facebook is dying
google analytics howto
http://www.shepetivka.org.ua
is facebook dying
setting up blog
starting a search engine
harry potter porn”"
analytics _udn site
exclude social media filter
google analytics e-commerce tutorial
google analytics ecommerce
google analytics ecommerce tutorial
google e-commerce tracking
relative vs absolute links
tesco price comparison advert
adam taylor”"
checkout conversion rate
Continue Reading…

I bashed up a quick mad-lib perl class for use in some future scripts. If you don’t know what mad-lib is it’s basically a function that when given an input such as us:we:i:them:she:he will select one. Given a whole block of text with multiple parts to be ‘mad-libbed’ it can crank out many chunks of readable, unique content.

#!/usr/bin/perl
package madlib;
use Moose;

## Fields for madlib objects
has 'phrase' => (isa => 'Str', is => 'rw');
has 'debug' => (isa => 'Bool', is => 'rw', default => '0');

## Function to select a random word from the phrase
sub madlib() {
my $self = shift;
if ($self->debug) { print "Phrase = ".$self->phrase."\n"; }
my @words = split(/:/,$self->phrase);
my $length = @words;
if ($self->debug) { print "Length of \@words = ".$length."\n"; }
my $rand = int(rand($length));

return($words[$rand]);
}

return 1;

=head1 NAME
madlib - A class to perform 'madlib' function.

=head1 SYNOPSIS
use madlib;
my $object = madlib->new();
$object->phrase("some:phrase:to:madlib");
$object->debug(1) # to get some debugging output
print $object->madlib();

=head1 DESCRIPTION
This class provides the ability to 'madlib' a phrase/string to create unique content variations.

=head2 Methods
=over 12
=item C
Returns a new madlib object.
=item C
Returns a random word from the specified phrase.
=back	

=head1 AUTHOR
Adam Taylor - http://www.conversion-matters.co.uk.

=cut

Won’t do much on its own but used within some other systems it could be quite useful. I’m thinking directory submission, social bookmarking etc..

(Yes it displays wonky; apologies…)

I was in the shower and an idea popped into my head, not something I’ve heard explicitly talked about before. I can only assume this is due to one of the following:

1. It could be a completely rubbish idea
2. It may be being used by sneaky people who don’t want it revealed
3. It could be a unique and creative idea not thought of before (unlikely but one can dream.. ha!)

Eitherway, I don’t have the required skills to test the technique so I’ll just talk about it and let other people decided whether it’s awful or not.

I saw a tweet by Lyndoman about a piece of link bait he’d written on the subject of credit cards that hit the front page of digg.

Then my brain went on a random path of thoughts, something like:

‘eh front page digg -> wonder how much he makes -> maybe he should bait and switch or use social media to promote his own affiliate sites; could make some nice extra dough -> hey, how about bait and cloak?’

Introducing Bait and Cloak

I imagine someone has already thought of this idea but it’s just possible that it has never been executed; the time and effort required to pull it off would probably off-put many black hats who might be tempted to try it.

What’s the frigging idea Adam?!

Everyone’s heard of bait and switch I assume: essentially writing link-bait and then 301 redirecting to another page. The problem is, if people notice, some of them get a bit pissy with you.

The bait-cloak idea’s simple:

• Start a blog
• Write quality link bait for 3-6 months on various topics: credit cards, gambling, travel etc.
• Start redirecting the post to highly targeted, niche affiliate offers to googlebot (based on IP of course) and to people who arrive via Google.

After many successful front-pages, the domain should have built enough trust and authority to be able to rank for these offers.

Also this way people visiting from ‘citations’, or from Digg/Stumble etc. still see the linkbait but others see the affiliate offers.

Someone would no doubt notice eventually, but if you keep it quite niche/long tail you could probably keep this going for quite a while (long enough to turn a profit I reckon).

Give it a go Lyndoman or Graywolf - I know you love the link-bait and the shadier side of SEO ;).

Good idea/rubbish idea? Your thoughts welcome as ever..

A fair few weeks ago I wanted to see if I could still code any Perl, which I’m glad to say [I think] I can, so I decided to port a little php script to Perl. For some reason I can’t access the original post/script anymore, but it was deStone’s delicious referral spammer - if you can get the link to work, your computer is better than mine!

So all it does is load up a list of keywords, go through each of the associated tag pages and then visit each site with any refer URL you want to promote.

It’s pretty pointless, I can’t imagine too many webmasters still look at old school stats packages, but I could be wrong.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;

&main();

sub main {
	my $throttle = 10;
	my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
	$mech->agent_alias( 'Windows IE 6' );

	## get our list of keywords from the dictionary file
	open (KEYWORDS, '/Users/adam/Documents/Perl/dictionary.txt');
	my @tags;
	while () {
		my $tag = $_;
		chomp($tag); push(@tags,$tag);
	}
	close (KEYWORDS);

	my $url;
	my $result;

	## grab del.icio.us url for each tag
	foreach my $tag (@tags) {
		print “$tag\n”;
		$url = “http://del.icio.us/tag/” . $tag . “?setcount=100″;
		print “$url\n”;
		$mech->get( $url );
		$result = $mech->content;
		&process($result, $mech);
		sleep($throttle);
	}
}

## scrape del.icio.us for urls
sub process {
	my $result = $_[0];
	my $mech = $_[1];

	my @urls;
	my @links = $mech->links();
	foreach my $link (@links) {
		if ($link->url() =~ /^http/g && $link->url() !~ /del.icio.us/g) {
			#print $link->url() . “\n”;
			push(@urls,$link->url());
		}
	}

	&ref_spam(@urls);
}

## hit up each site with our url to promote as the referer
sub ref_spam {
	my @urls = $_[0];
	my $mech = $_[1];

	my $promote_url = “http://www.test.com”;
	$mech->add_header( Referer => $promote_url );

	foreach my $url (@urls) {
		$mech->get($url);
	}

}

[I’m aware it displays a bit messed up - you’ll have to deal with it.]

This no longer works for me ‘cos I’m in halls and would need to add proxy support, but I think it worked ;)!

Play around with it if you want; I’m not advocating any particular uses for it or being massively helpful on how to run it - deliberately.

I’m sure it could be improved upon - to use proxies, threads or made more OO but I only hacked it up to check I could still code Perl.

Here’s the dictionary file and the perl script (rename to .pl).