malcolm coles

I am the first to admit when I don't know something. Alright, I'm not. I probably try to cover up it. But instead of claiming that there is something wrong with something (eg the google keywords tool), I'm going to ask who can explain this data to me.

Here's a screenshot showing "impressions" for my blog - that's the number of times my blog appeared in search results for any queries - from June 18 to July 18. The data is what Google shows you in its Webmaster Tools service.

As you can see, I was trundling along at nearly 50,000 a day, nearly wholly driven by people searching for "Youtube UK" and my post on the demographics of UK Youtube users appearing in position 6 to 10. Then the number of impressions falls off a cliff:

Impression data, June to July

Staring at specific days, here's June 20th. As you can see my bog appeared in position 6 to 10 of Google's results 40,500 times that day for a search on "Youtube UK".

Data for June 20

Now on July 12th, it only appears 260 times in that position.

Data for July 12

If we use Google Insights, we can see that there hasn't been a significant fall in searches.

Searches for "Youtube UK"

So what explains the wierd data ...? If the searches for that term haven't collapsed, why have the impressions?

I don't really care - I get no benefit from it. I just want to know what the hell's going in ...!

Update

So one of the reasons for the graphs above is that the second one is for "you tube uk" and not "youtube uk". Oops. So here's the correct data for "youtube uk" on July 12":

July 12 correct data

Here's the overall data for 21 June to 26 July:

Overall data - 21 June to 26 July - high, low, high again

And here's the data for 26 July:

Youtube UK searches - I'm back ...

Who knows what all this means - the search volumes haven't gone anywhere. But in the middle, I stopped appearing for the thousands of "youtube uk" search term and then I came back again. Odd.

The internet is full of advice to use Google's keyword tool to work out what search terms to optimise for. Here's why you shouldn't do this - and what you can use instead.

On the face of it, Google's tool looks promising. You put in a keyword or search term you're interested in (perhaps because you want to know what words to use in a headline or what tags or sub-category names to use in your navigation). You get a list of related keywords. And you can see how many searches there are for each one. You then know which are the most popular - and can target those.

Except you shouldn't do this. Here's why.

Karen Gillan

Let's start with Karen Gillan, who plays Amy Pond in Doctor Who.

Logged out

If you use the keyword tool when you're logged out, you see this - and a warning to "Sign in with your AdWords login info to see the full set of ideas for this search" (the tool is free - but you have to register and log in to see all the data):

Karen Gillan logged out

(All these screenshots are based on google.co.uk searches (though see the warning at the end of this post) with a phrase match type - ie any searches which includes the words shown in the quote marks in that order.)

Logged in

Log in, and you see this:

Karen Gillan logged in

Annoyingly with a phrase search, the straightforward term you entered ("Karen Gillan" here) isn't showing.

But more importantly, as you can see by comparing the two screenshots, the logged out version of the tool didn't show you the most popular search term with the phrase "Karen Gillan" in - namely "Karen Gillan underwear" (nice).

Logged out again ...

You can force the logged-out tool to show you the result for "karen gillan underwear" by searching for that specific term:

Karen Gillan underwear - logged out

Comparing logged in and logged out

Now, fair enough, there was a warning to log in to see all the relevant keywords. But if you've been paying attention, you'll have noticed something a bit odd about the search volumes

Logged in:

• Karen Gillan underwear - 1,900
• Karen Gillan pictures - 590

Logged out:

• Karen Gillan underwear - 9,900
• Karen Gillan pictures - 3,600

The numbers aren't the same. But I suppose they're at least out by about six times each, so the same order of magnitude ...

Only, that's not always the case.

Jennifer Aniston

Let's look at Jennifer Aniston.

Logged out

If you're logged out, you see these results:

Jennifer Aniston logged out

Logged in

If you log in, you see these results instead:

Jennifer Aniston logged in

You should notice two things. First, "Jennifer Aniston pregnant" is at number two when you're logged in, with 18,100 searches a month. This search term didn't show when we were logged out, but fair enough, there was that warning to log in to see the full set of results.

But, secondly, the numbers don't match again. When logged out, "Jennifer Aniston's hair" was shown as having 60,500 searches a month. When logged in, there are only apparently 12,100 searches a month.

Logged out again

Again, you can make the missing search terms appear when you're logged out if you know what they are by typing them in the box. If we do that, we get this for "Jennifer Aniston pregnant":

Jennifer Aniston pregnant - logged out

Comparing logged in and logged out

To sum up, we're looking at these numbers:

Logged in

• Jennifer Aniston pregnant - 18,100
• Jennifer Aniston hair - 12,100

Logged out

• Jennifer Aniston pregnant - 49,500
• Jennifer Aniston hair - 60,500

It's not just that the numbers are different, they are in a different order. When logged in, the tool says people search for pregnant 1.5 times as much as hair. When logged out, hair is 20% more popular than pregnant.

What Google News thinks

To make matters worse, if you go to Google News and start typing Jennifer Aniston's name, you see this in the Autosuggest feature - which is supposed to show you what people are searching for right now:

Jennifer Aniston - Google News autocomplete

There's no mention of hair, and "Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt" is more popular than pregnant - even though when logged in, the keywords tool told us that people were twice as likely to search for her pregnant (18,100 searches) as with Brad Pitt (9,900 searches).

Katie Price

Here's a similar story.

Logged in

This is what you see when you search on Katie Price's name logged in:

Katie Price logged in

Logged out

And here are the logged out figures for two search terms.

Katie Price and Peter Andre:

Katie Price and Peter Andre - logged out

Katie Price video:

Katie Price video - logged out

Comparing logged in and logged out

Compare the figures again:

Logged in - the same:

• Katie Price and Peter Andre - 14,800
• Katie Price video - 14,800

Logged out - one is 50% higher than the other

• Katie Price and Peter Andre - 40,500
• Katie Price video - 27,100

When you're logged in, the tool says the search volumes are the same. When you're logged out, it says there's 50% more searches for "Katie Price and Peter Andre" than there are for Katie Price video.

What Google News thinks

Go to Google News, and you can see that the current second most popular Google Autocomplete is Katie Price pregnant - behind "Katie Price and Peter Andre" and with Katie Price video nowhere to be seen.

Katie Price Autocomplete in Google News

When you're logged in, though, the number of searches for Katie Price pregnant is negligible:

Katie Price pregnant - logged in

Which means that the term people are searching for right now, according to Google News, isn't even worth looking at according to the keyword tool.

What all this means

You can't trust the logged-out version of the tool, as it doesn't show you everything.

The search volumes you see for a specific search term are different when logged in or logged out. I've seen a supposition that, when logged out, you see total search volumes but when logged in you see searches that triggered an Adwords ad. This would make the logged-in version of the tool useless for SEO, as what it's showing you is determined by PPC budgets (when the money's spend, there are no more Adwords ads, so those searches are ignored). Alternatively, it's just a bug as suggested here. Either way, the data is screwy.

However, you shouldn't trust this data anyway, even if it was unscrewy, as the Adwords tool doesn't show search volumes. It shows "the approximate 12-month average of user queries for the keyword on Google.co.uk and the Google Search Network". This basically means it's counting EG adwords panels on parked domains as "searches" - and inflating the search volumes.

Even if you did trust it, for the search terms above, which do tend to be fairly newsy, I'll give you, the Adwords keywords tool isn't reflecting what people are searching for now.

To sum up - the data's odd, inconsistent, and out of date. Don't use it.

Well, what shall I use?

To decide what to optimise pages for, I tend to use a combination of Google Insights, Google Autocomplete for web searches and Google Autocomplete for News. The latter have their issues (such as these).

But by plugging what you see from the Autocomplete data into Google Insights, I think you get a much better picture of what people are really searching for. If you're up to APIs and stuff, rather than copying what you see, you can automate the autocomplete discovery. Or you can use this awesome keyword discovery tool that does the same thing (hat-tip to @rishil).

There was a curious end to tonight's Dragon's Den when presenter Evan Davis uncomfortably turned to the camera and said:

Why not tell us what you think of today's programme by joining the conversation on Twitter.

Dragons' Den

I'm not sure it looks like much of a conversation, though ...

This is what the Dragons' Den Twitter account looks like an hour after the programme finished:

Dragons Den tweets - no conversation

Leaving aside the hashtag confusion, they don't seem to have actually replied to anyone's tweets. A blanket "thank you" to people for their comments doesn't quite seem the same as the "conversation" promised in the programme itself.

Google's extended its Adwords sitelinks recently. And they also appear to be allowing advertisers to play around with formatting - it seems you can now have funny pointy arrows (first one) or even ticks (bottom one) before each one ...

Ticks and arrows on Adwords sitelinks ...

Is this new or did I miss the news?

iDosing is the made up internet craze where teenagers download digital drugs in the form of MP3 sound files and get high. Or something. I'm not making it up - the Sun and the Mail have reported it. Google News shows a time stamp of an hour earlier for The Mail's story.

Now, if you want to understand how journalism works, compare and contrast ...

A teenager high on iDosing

Videos on YouTube

The Mail

Videos posted on YouTube show a young girl freaking out and leaping up in fear, a teenager shaking violently and a young boy in extreme distress.

The Sun

Videos posted on YouTube show a young girl freaking out, a teenager shaking violently and a young boy in extreme distress as they listen to the sounds.

Flocking kids

The Mail

But there has been such alarm in the U.S. that the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has issued a warning to children not to do it.

‘Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places, spokesman Mark Woodward said.

The Sun

There has been such alarm in the US that the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has issued a warning to children not to do it.

Spokesman Mark Woodward said: "Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places."

News9.com from a few days ago

"Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places," said OBNDD spokesperson Mark Woodward.

A willingness to experiment

The Mail

He added that parental awareness is key to preventing future problems, since I-dosing could indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs.

The Sun

He added parental awareness is key to preventing future problems, as iDosing could indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs.

Newson6.com from a few days ago

The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics said parental awareness is key to preventing future problems, since I-dosing could indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs.

Schools in Mustang

The Mail

Schools in the Mustang area recently sent out a letter warning parents about the new trend after several high school students reported having physiological effects after trying one of these digital downloads.

The Sun

Schools in the Mustang area recently sent out a letter warning parents about the new trend after several students reported experiencing physiological effects after listening to the downloads.

Newson6.com from a few days ago

Recently Mustang Public Schools sent out a letter warning parents about the new trend after several high school students reported having physiological effects after trying one of these digital downloads.

A ship's horn

The Mail

some sound like a ship’s horn being repeated again and again whilst others are more abrasive and resemble cheap synthesizers being played very fast.

The Sun

Some sound like a ship's horn being repeated again and again whilst others are more abrasive and resemble cheap synthesizers being played very fast.

Binaural beats

The Mail

Dr Helane Wahbeh, a Naturopathic Physician and Clinician Researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, said: 'Binaural beats happen when opposite ears receive two different sound waves.

The Sun

Dr Helane Wahbeh, a Naturopathic Physician and Clinician Researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, said: "Binaural beats happen when opposite ears receive two different sound waves.

NPR.org from a few days ago

Dr. HELANE WAHBEH (Naturopathic Physician and Clinician Researcher, Oregon Health and Science University): ... Binaural beats happen when opposite ears receive two different sound waves.

Not similar to cocaine or ecstasy

The Mail

‘But when you listen to these sounds with stereo headphones, the listener senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it's coming from the inside of the head.’

But Dr Wahbeh denied there was any possibility that someone could experience similar effects to cocaine or ecstasy.

She said: 'We did a small controlled study with four people, and we did not see any brain wave activity shifting to match the binaural beat that people were listening to.’

The Sun

"When you listen to these sounds with stereo headphones, the listener senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it's coming from the inside of the head."

But Dr Wahbeh denied there was any possibility that someone could experience similar effects to cocaine or ecstasy.

She said: "We did a small controlled study with four people, and we did not see any brain wave activity shifting to match the binaural beat that people were listening to."

From npr.org a few days ago

But when you listen to these sounds with stereo headphones, the listener senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it's coming from the inside of the head. ...

NORRIS [interviewer]: Now, based on your research, is it possible that listening to these tracks might lead someone to experience something tantamount to the effects of taking cocaine or ecstasy or even Viagra?

Dr. WAHBEH: We did a small controlled study with four people, and we did not see any brain wave activity shifting to match the binaural beat that people were listening to.

Two iDosings, please.

There have been several attempts to work out how many people are paying to access the Times website now its gone behind a paywall. My estimate is: 46,154 a day. Update: Tom Whitwell, assistant editor of the Times, says in the comments below that this figure "*spectacularly* underestimates" the actual number of visitors to the new site.

Restricted

To work this out, I looked at how many people commented on two similar stories - one on the Times site (now paywalled) and one on the Guardian site. As you can see below, from screenshots captured at 1.45pm yesterday, the Times had had 4 comments in almost exactly 2 hours. The Guardian, on its similar but slightly later story, had had 117 comments in 90 minutes.

So if we take the number of readers of the Guardian's website - 1.8 million a day according to the most recent ABCes - multiply that by 4/117 (the ratio of comments on each story) and then multiply that by 90/120 (to allow for the fact that the Times story had been online longer) we get:

1,800,000 x (4/117) x (90/120) = 46,154 readers.

Comparing Guardian and Times comment numbers on similar stories

Some assumptions ...

Obviously, there are a bunch of assumptions built into here, so 46,154 has a somewhat spurious level of accuracy.

Propensity to comment

It's probably not true that the same proportion of readers comment on Times stories as Guardian ones. Finding comparable data was hard, however, as the Times seems to have removed the comments from all its old pre-paywall stories, so I couldn't see how many comments Times stories got pre-paywall compared to the Guardian.

Growth of comments over time

The number of comments probably doesn't grow in a linear way over time - but comparing stories after 90 minutes and 2 hours seems close enough.

Comment bait

The stories aren't exactly the same so may not have motivated people to comment in the same proportions.

But you'd be surprised how hard it is to find stories on newspaper sites with the same sort of angle published at the same sort of time and which allow comments. These were the most comparable stories I could find.

And it's not as if other Times stories have loads of comments, as this screenshot of the homepage at 5.10pm yesterday shows - after 3 hours there are only 4 comments about Joe Cole signing for Liverpool and just 6 comments after 3hrs 40 mins about Cameron calling the Lockerbie bomber's release "utterly wrong".

Few comments on other stories

Comparing this figure with other estimates

15,000 paying subscribers

This figure of 46,154 is higher than the 15,000 paying subscribers since the paywall went up that Beehivecity claimed over the weekend - but you'd expect this as existing Times+ subscribers (ie those who joined Times+ before the paywall went up) can also access the site. They will count towards daily unique visitors -  but won't count as extra paying subscribers.

I can't find a figure for Times+ subscribers, but I have this vague memory of about 60,000-odd of those. This story, from October 2009, claims Culture+, a version of TImes+, "has attracted 90,000 active members" (whatever "active members" means).

Either way,  if you subscribe to The Times newspaper 7 days a week, you get free access to the websites. So all this would explain why there are more than 15,000 daily viewers of The Times paywalled sites - because  people are getting it free as part of their other subscription packages.

2/3 drop

The FT, on the other hand, reported at the weekend that:

Visits to The Times’ website have dropped by two-thirds in the weeks since News International, the media group controlled by Rupert Murdoch, began to implement its paywall strategy, according to new data.

However, the decline has been gentler than the 90 per cent fall in traffic some researchers expected.

Now, 1.2 million readers used Times Online a day according to the last ABCes before it pulled out - so if its traffic had dropped by 90% it would be looking at 120,000 a day.

But even this figures sound too high to me, knowing what else we know. And Hitwise's figures seem a bit odd - the last lot in particular failed to distinguish between home page traffic and those that gone any further beyond the paywall.

So what do you think? I wrote once that, if anyone can charge for content, Murdoch can. But maybe even he can't ...

Photo credit

Twitter has - finally - improved the email it sends to people to explain that someone is now following you. The old email told you how many followers they had, how many they followed and how many tweets they'd sent.

The new one, designed like the hovercard that appears when you're logged in on twitter.com and hover over someone's name, also gives you their location and bio. Quite why it's taken Twitter this long to include the bio info, I don't know, as it's fairly crucial in deciding whether to follow someone back. But Hooray.

The new email

Twitter's new email notification about a new follower

The old email

Twitter's old email notification about a new follower

A hovercard

A hovercard for @DBansky

Unless it's just a test of course  ...

Having enjoyed the genius that is the Old Spice social media / YouTube campaign, I idly wondered how quickly someone would grab the silverfishhandcatch.com domain - apparently very quickly.

The link to the video below was tweeted by @oldspice at about 8am UK time. Silverfishhandcatch.com was registered at 7.30am - so about 2.30pm UK time, or a mere 6.5 hours later.

Silver Fish Hand Catch . com

Here's the video:

And here's what on earth I'm on about - read this, which is an explanation, and then this, which analyses its popularity.

Silver fish hand catch, as Isaiah Mustafa would say at this point.

Google tries to answer some questions itself, like how many horns a unicorn has. More usefully, it can tell you stuff like how many metres are in a yard or when sunrise is in London.

It also seems willing to try to tell you celebrities' dating status, although it appears to be quite rubbish at it ...

For instance, look under the pictures with this result and Google says Angelina Jolie's spouse is Billy Bob Thornton - but she hasn't been married to him since 2003. And she's adopted a squillion kids with Brad Pitt since then.

Angeline Jolie - with Brad Pitt now

Although Google still thinks Jennifer Aniston and Brad are together - sweet (again, look under the pictures).

Jennifer Aniston - all alone still

Jordan and Peter Andre are divorced - Katie Price as she now is married Alex Reid recently. But Google's totally, like, OMG, I'm not having that.

Katie Price and Alex Reid - car crash. But married.

Katy Perry is engaged to Russell Brand, not dating Travis McCoy.

Katy Perry - can't see it myself

I suppose Elin Woods is still Tiger's spouse until the divorce comes through.

Elin Woods - soon to be rich

But Nicole Kidman is not married to Tom Cruise - he's with Katie Holmes now. Poor little Katie Holmes (poor big Katie Holmes from Tom's point of view).

Nicole: didn't have to keep quiet during birth

Back to the drawing board with that one, I think ....

One way to keep your website pages out of Google's index is to use a robots.txt file - this tells search engines where they can and can't go (which folders are "disallowed").

Bing has quite an extensive one, telling other search engines not to waste their time ploughing through its search results.

Unfortunately, when Bing launched www.bing.com/social (Bing's combined search of Facebook and Twitter updates) back in June, it forgot (I presume) to update its robots.txt file (which had previously, and still does, disallow results from the more limited forerunner -  bing.com/twitter).

As a result, a search for raoul gazza gascoigne in Google returns Bing social search results pages at the top.

Bing search results pages are, er, top of Google's search results

And while Google's site search operator isn't that accurate, it appears to suggest that it has indexed 168,000 pages of Bing search results in the last month or so.

A lot of Bing social pages are in Google's index

None of which explains why Google considers a search results page from one of its competitors full of recycled tweets and updates to be the most relevant results ...

The Sun decided last week to run a story about the false rumours circulating about Steven Gerrard:

SEX slurs claiming England's World Cup hopes were undermined by a player's fling with a teenage girl are a sick HOAX, The Sun can reveal.

Thousands of fans have received texts and emails saying captain Steven Gerrard had got wife Alex Curran's 16-year-old sister pregnant.

But the lies are blown apart by one crucial fact - model Alex, 27, does not even HAVE a sister.

(I love the justification here for running a story about a rumour: people are receiving texts and emails. Makes it sound link some sort of conspiracy as opposed to people just emailing their friends ...)

Anyway, I don't know what Gerrard's lawyers made of this story but they might want to have a word with Google. If you get as far as typing Steven Gerrard into Google News, the auto complete function throws up this list ...

Google's autocomplete for "Steven Gerrard"

Unlike the Sun's story, the list isn't peppered with provisos that none of this is true.

The Guardian has poked some fun at the Edinburgh Fringe website for banning people linking to it in its terms and conditions. This is more than a year after I revealed that most newspapers banned deep links, as did brands like Apple, Royal Mail, Channel 4 and, er, the Association of Online Publishers (most of those subsequently removed the offending clause after I pointed it out).

All that culminated in the hilarity of my attempts to get the Royal Mail to post me the paper licence they insisted I needed to link to them.

But here are some more sites that still think they can - or should - ban people linking to them in their terms and conditions of use. YOU ARE ALL CLOWNS.

Independent: "Third parties must not deep-link to, or frame or use other techniques to enclose any part of the Website."

Vodafone: "You, and any persons you allow to use the Service or the Content through your access to the Service, are not allowed to: -  ... include or create links (including deep-links) to or from the Content and/or the Service;"

Ticketmaster: "You also agree not to deep-link to the site for any purpose, unless specifically authorised by Ticketmaster to do so."

TimeOut Tickets: "You also agree not to deep-link to the site for any purpose, unless specifically authorised by TimeOutTickets.com to do so."

Kent Online: "You also agree not to deep-link or frame to the site for any purpose, unless authorised by KM Group."

News International jobs: "Illegal and/or unauthorized use of the Services, including ... linking to the Website is prohibited."

Anglo Irish bank: " Any unauthorised linking to this Site is also strictly prohibited. Please note that ... linking to it may be in breach of statutory or common law rights which could be the subject of legal action."

The new Times website: "Illegal and/or unauthorized use of the Services, including ... linking to the Website is prohibited. " (Well, there is a paywall I guess ...!)

Easyjet: "You are permitted to provide and maintain a Link to the easyJet Website Homepage only at URL http://www.easyjet.com. You may not direct the Link to any other webpage contained within the easyJet Website.

Jimmy Choos: "Unless authorised in writing by JCL, JCL expressly prohibits linking of any part of this Site to or from any other Sites (including so-called "deep-linking")."

Thanks to Chris Coltrane for pointing out the Guardian link.

The government is to close 600 websites in order to save £100 million it was announced last week - including the lovechips.co.uk site run by the marketing department of the Potato Council to encourage us to stuff our faces with fat-soaked portions of starchy foods with no real nutritional value.

Chips: fattening

Poking around a bit, it soon became clear that:

1. The government is lying about the saving
2. The people who commissioned this website are idiots.
3. This website should have been shut a long time ago for lying

The government is lying about the saving

The lovechips site is run by the Potato Council, a division of the Agriculture & Horticulture Development Board (AHBD). (I like the Potato Council website - at the bottom it says "If you can read this your browser is standards complient". I don't really like it - as well as being bad at spelling, it's awful.)

Anyway, the AHBD  is funded by a statutory levy on producers, growers and processors. Although its chief exec's £150k salary (plus £30k bonus) used to be paid by Defra, this arrangement was stopped after 2008 according to the last annual report.

Which means that (1) the government has no real power to shut the lovechips site and (2) if it was shut, any saving would benefit AHBD and not the government at all - so it could not form part of any efficiency saving that could go towards reducing the budget deficit.

The people who commissioned this website are idiots

Love chips website

It might be AHBD's money, but it's still a waste of money. For instance, here is a page to find a chip shop in London. Apparently there are 5 chip shops in London (Update: there are 6 I see. Lambeth is listed separately to London).

There is also the lamest game ever. Honsestly - I challenge you to find one lamer than this.

In some ways they are getting value for money, as if you go to lovechips.com you can see the whole site all over again. Actually, they are framing the .co.uk site - so as you move around the .com version, the URL at the top stays as lovechips.com, making it impossible to copy any URLs to link to. Try it. (They're not really getting value for money - I was kidding).

A chip on my shoulder about their poor SEO

If we do a site: search on Google, we can see how their pages look. As you can see, the HTML titles of their pages (the bit of meta data that the website owner sets and which Google shows in its results) are mostly meaningless. Pages like "Scotland" look fairly ridiculous in Google's results - who would imagine you would click a page called "Scotland" and get a list of chip shops?

Then there's the page called "Chip Inspector", which has some chip films, none of which appear to involve inspectors.

Anyway, I'm not really sure of the point of the lovechips site. But the people who built it also built the Love potatoes site and did some SEO on that:

"Allies Design worked with GPMD [some other agency] on a Search Engine Optimisation strategy which we implemented through the design and content of the site. Within just 5 months of launching the new site, we'd more than doubled the number of visitors through Google every month."

I'm not going to comment on the meaningless of this statement (EG was it from 1 to 2 visitors?). But you'd have thought that they would set up the HTML titles properly so that the pages looked sensible in Google (and so that Google could work out what they were about). Maybe I do them an injustice and they gave some very clear rules but the potato people couldn't get their heads round them? Or the Alt text for images, which is also very poor. Or the fact that meta descriptions are missing from nearly all the pages?

Either way, I'm not sure how both the design agency and GPMD persuaded the potato lot that they should both have a design / build credit link at the bottom of every page. Or why they felt they would want one.

One measure of its success would be traffic I guess. I'm not fan of the accuracy of Alexa's data, but it will have to do for the lovechips site. Apparently it's the 2,553,642nd most visited site in the world. Which given this blog is the 136,515th according to Alexa is pretty lame.

Oh, and as for the lies ...

According to the lovechips site, chips are healthy:

Chips are rich in vitamin C which scientists say can help fight off cancer

There is also a panel that says "Click here to find out why chips have all the goodness of potatoes!" However, according to the Food Standard's Agency's Eat Well site:

Potatoes ... don't count towards our [five-a-day] daily fruit and veg portions ... And although potatoes don’t contain much vitamin C compared to other vegetables, in Britain we get a lot of our daily vitamin C from them because we eat so many of them.

Conclusion

So there we have it. It lies about the nutritional value of potatoes. The people who commissioned it don't know or care that hardly anyone visits it. But shutting it down won't save us a penny.

Google frowns on keyword stuffing - the practice of loading lots of words you want to rank for in places like your HTML title. (The HTML title isn't visible on the page - but it's what Google shows in its results for each page. Hence Google's objections to people trying to manipulate it). Actually, it doesn't just frown on it, it gets quite cross about it:

"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google's search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

To fix this problem, review your site for misused keywords. Typically, these will be lists or paragraphs of keywords, often randomly repeated.

Channel 4 in Google's results

Now let us look at the title tag of Channel 4's Big Brother page:

<title>Home - Big Brother - Channel4.com - Big Brother, bigbrother, BB, BB11, 4oD, Live Stream, Live Streaming, Live Feed, Channel 4, Channel4, C4, housemates, house, Ben, Caoimhe, Corin, David, Govan, Ife, John James, Josie, Mario, Nathan, Rachael, Shabby, Steve, Sunshine<title>

Erm, could they try to fit any more words in there?!

Anyway, just because it works for them, I wouldn't recommend trying it yourself ...

Update: As @rishil points out, they may well have just mangled the code that generates their keywords and Title tags rather than doing it on purpose.

I usually try to avoid any discussion about the difference between blogging and journalism (it's less painful to debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin).

But in Labour MP Tom Harris's defence of newspaper paywalls, he draws a distinction, arguing that blogs are:

"amateur affairs, offering plenty of subjective opinion and the occasional interesting fact, spun in a particular direction."

Which made me laugh. Substitute "professional" for "amateur" and you surely have the description of many newspapers ...

The iPad doesn't do Flash. This means that, if you want to look at Google Analytics on your iPad, you can't obviously change the dates you're looking at - as the date range setting, pictured, is a Flash file.

The date range in Google Analytics won't load on an iPad as it uses Flash.

You can still change the dates manually, however. Look at the URL when you first go into Google Analytics. It will look something like this:

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/?reset=1&id=XXXXXX&pdr=20100502-20100601

I've obscured my ID for (maybe misguided) security reasons. Anyway, the key to changing the date range on your iPad it to manually edit the pdr= value at the end, which shows the from and to date ranges, in the format YYYYMMDD.

So, if you wanted to change Google Analytics to show just one day, the 2nd of June, you'd manually edit the URL to:

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/?reset=1&id=XXXXXX&pdr=20100602-20100602

I've changed both the from and to values to 20100602.

Google's Matt Cutts says that the search engine has taken action to improve search results for people searching in the UK. In an update to his original blog post on the subject from last August he says:

Google UK Serps

In the last few weeks, engineers have launched more changes that should do better at returning (for example) UK websites for searches done in the UK.

If you still see mismatches (e.g. searches in the UK returning sites from Australia or wherever), feel free to leave a comment with the search query and the mismatched domains that you see.

See examples of the previous problems - where irrelevant sites from non-UK countries were turning up for searches that were clearly looking for local information - in this blog post and this one. These issues followed earlier problems with US maps showing up for UK sites (see here and here).

Despite Matt's claim, I'm still seeing some sites with prices in dollars for my search on "replace suspension cost".

Although a search for used car document check is now much, much better with mostly UK results (plus one Brazilian one) in the top 10 - I had previously described this search as being like the league of nations.

Modern Toss

Completely unrelated to my usual blogging, but if you like Modern toss, then there's an exhibition on in East London ...

Apparently it's going to involve a three ton marble fly; two eggs in a cage fighting over a pin; a talking, stuffed bird moaning about sitting on a twig and Mr Tourette’s incisive summing up of the international banking crisis ...

The exhibtion is on at Maverik Gallery, 68-72 Redchurch Street, E2, 22 June – 4 July 2010. Even more details here.

I was invited to a preview of the Times / Sunday Times paywall last night, which revealed some exciting things they're planning. In between starting this blog post and finishing it, the new sites went live at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/ and http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/.

The launch threw up a number of questions - which no doubt they'll be mulling over and working on. The biggest one for me is why users would want to pay for two different websites covering the same subjects?

What's on offer?

The plan is to replace the current site - timesonline.co.uk - with two new sites, one for The Times and one for The Sunday Times.

£2 a week (or £1 for an individual day) buys you access to both sites. There isn't an option to get just one site.

The Times proposition

New homepage for The Times

The Times won't try to be a news wire - it'll be offering fewer stories on its home page than most online newspapers with the aim being to enhance those stories.

Alongside the news / business / sport it will have opinion, arts and life sections.

Without the need to chase search engine traffic or page views for advertisers, the idea of covering fewer stories but in a better way sounds appealing.

Here's an article, for instance, with an information graphic and tabs to let you explore the history and different aspects of the story without leaving the page. This package of content is brilliant - it works much better as an experience than lists of related articles or auto-generated tag pages.

Times article with infographic and tabs

The Sunday Times proposition

New Sunday Times homepage

The Sunday Times site will look very different to the Times's. It will have the sections people know from the paper. So, again there is news, sport and  business - but also culture, style, travel, In Gear and the magazine.

The site won't be updated much during the week - though the aim is still for it to function as a 7-days-a-week site.

But instead of trying to compete with the Times sites for news, it will offer readers the ability to browse and explore Sunday's content over the week, concentrating on galleries, videos and interactive graphics. Here's a gallery - you don't really get a sense of it from the screenshot but there was a lot of interactivity on the Sunday Times site:

Sunday Times gallery

Why two websites?

The decision to replace the current timesonline.co.uk site with two brands and two websites - thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk - has obviously meant some thinking about how they work together.

They seem clear enough that they are two products - a daily news site and a site that you're meant to browse all week.

But it was interesting that the reasons they talked about for this were the different editorial teams, the "different but overlapping audiences", the different values of the newspapers, and the different reasons why people buy the Sunday paper vs the weekday paper.

I get all that for print products that are published on different days.

I'm just not sure why this needs to translate into two different websites that aren't physical products and can be accessed easily on the same day ...

The Tuesday question

Take a Tuesday when I'm reading the online Times Arts section to decide what film or play to watch.

If I want to use the Sunday Times interactive culture tool (which looked great and even lets you remote control your Sky+ box) to explore reviews and book tickets then I need to go to a physically different website and browse to this tool. There's not even going to be a link to it. I don't get why they don't just make the tool available on the Times site as well ...

Or if I'm reading news about the BP oil spill on Tuesday on the Times site. How will I know there is an amazing interactive infographic on the Sunday Times site explaining what has happened so far?

Where there's overlap in subject matters, the content and functionality are split  across two sites. And there's no eaasy way for users to find out what's on the other site without going there and looking - which surely people aren't going to bother to do on a regular basis on the off chance there might be something there?

The Sunday question

The Times site isn't going to get updated much on a Sunday, unless there's breaking news. So it will be interesting to see how it covers Saturday's news when they do get round to writing about it - particularly sport.

Take the Champion's League final last Saturday. In print, the Times would have analysed it in its Monday paper edition, and the Sunday Times would have done a match report.

Online I'm not sure what will happen. It doesn't seem to make sense to split this content across two websites, though. Will the Times site publish a match report online, or will this just be on the Sunday Times site? Having two match reports seems a bit odd. But reading the analysis on the Times without being able to easily get to the Sunday Times match report seems odd too.

Should they let people subscribe to just one site?

I like the different approach they are taking on the two sites. And having them as separate sites might make sense if they were comptitors or if you could subscribe to just one - but you can't.

Given you have to take both, when they have overlapping content, why physically separate it? Why not just have one sport section or one culture section where you can see the differing Times / Sunday Times take on things?

It strikes me that there is either sufficient distinction in the audience for the two brands that you let users subscribe to just one site. Or the audiences cross over so much that you combine the two sites in one and think about what makes most sense from the user's point of view.

Forcing people to subscribe to both sites but keeping them entirely separate, with no cross linking, seems a bit odd.

How will people access the site?

There were, as you can imagine, several questions about how the paywall will work in practice.

Only two pages will be accessible if you're not logged in - the homepage of the The Times site and the homepage of the Sunday Times site. If you click on a link to a story, a box appears telling you to sign up or log in.

Here's the box:

The Times paywall: no further!

And here's what you see if you click to sign up. (As I've said before about paywalls, I think they're going to have to get this to work a LOT harder):

The sign up page needs to work harder

If you clicked on a deep link to a story, you are redirected to the homepage where the box appears (I think this sounds odder than it will be in practice although the page load speeds are a bit slow at the moment. To see it in action, click here (a deep link) and then wait for the overlay to appear ....). If you log in / sign up you are then redirected to the URL you were after.

The same is true of search engines, too - so Google won't be able to access the pages, which won't appear in Google's news or web search - with one small caveat. Google will be able to see URLs that are shown on the homepage but as it sees a login box if it tries to crawl the URL, I'm not 100% clear what happens then.

What are you getting?

There will be a 4 week period after the launch of these two new sites (a launch which was said to be "very imminent" - ie today!) where the current site and the new sites will exist together. Last night I thought they said there wouldn't be a paywall so the new sites will be fully accessible so people could see what the sites were all about. But you can't get past the homepages at the moment.

All three sites will be updated, and you'll be able to browse around the new Times and Sunday Times sites to see what they look like.

After 4 weeks, the paywall goes up and you'll need to pay to access the new sites. At that point, the old site will stop being updated. Confused? We were a bit!

As things stand, this means there will be the paid-for Times Archive, spanning 1785 to 1985. Then the current timesonline site will sit on the internet, not being updated from the end of June but with old stories still accessible. And the two new sites will run behind a paywall for any new content.

Although this seems a bit weird, I don't suppose it matters too much ...

Marketing the sites

What will be interesting to see is how they encourage people to sign up once the paywall is there - how will they show people what they'll be getting if they sign up?

There was no discussion this evening of tours or free trials or anything. I'm sure they've got something planned.

To sum up ...

Overall, they seemed to have some interesting views on what each product is and how it will work.

And I do understand the distinction they were trying to draw between a daily news site on the one hand and a weekly site on the other.

But when the daily news site is actually only 6 days a week, and covers much of the same subject matter as the weekly site ... and when they're offered as part of the same subscription with no option to just get one ... that's when I start to get a bit confused.

Have they projected their internal structure onto the websites they offer customers at the expense of the user experience?

Or do they have a much better grasp of what their audiences want on different days and in different modes?

Only time - and The Timeses - will tell (< sorry).

The Times and Sunday Times have made a video about their new paywalled sites. Here it is (roll your mouse over it to make the play button appear).

Here's what I think about the paywall plans.