malcolm coles

My iPhone autocorrects "Van Persie" to "Van Perdue". Clearly the ever-injured Arsenal and Holland striker isn't well known enough at Apple HQ.

Van Persie to Van Perdue

If as a result you end up searching for Van Perdue (because you don't notice and so don't undo the autocorrect), Google asks if you mean Van Persie.

Van Persie to Van Perdue to Van Persie

To sum the process up:

• You try to seach for Van Persie on your iPhone.
• Apple changes this to Van Perdue.
• Google asks if you meant Van Persie.
• You click and finally get to results for Van Persie.

End to end process sorted.

If you add "nofollow" to a link (in the HTML code), it tells search engines to ignore the link - so the site you link to gets no SEO benefit from the link. The BBC has now lived up to its promise to provide links without nofollow to people who blog about its TV programmes (Update although see the points in the comments about the redirects ...).

Last December, I pointed out that:

Shownar is a BBC site that tracks online buzz about BBC shows. Despite being paid for by the licence fee, it's pulling the wool over bloggers' eyes by claiming that, if you link to it, it will link back - but it's nofollowing the links.

The BBC replied that:

Shownar will be retired in a few weeks. The good news is the version we are creating for bbc.co.uk is going to be backed by the moderation support that means we should be able to remove nofollows for those non-commerical blog posts that are significantly about a BBC programme.

The old Shownar

It's now followed through on that with its about to go live Buzz service, explained here (cheers to Martin Belam for the spot):

We've built a tool that finds where on blogs, Twitter and other online communities people are discussing BBC programmes, and presents links to them on the relevant programme page.

If people are talking about a programme, a section called 'Buzz about this programme' appears on its programme page. Clicking on the links in that section will take you to online conversations about that programme.

As to how the links work, that's explained here - the bit about nofollow reads:

We use an automated system to find our blog links which means if you link to a BBC programme page and your blog passes our external link guidelines we will usually link to it. This opens us up to possible abuse with people linking to us just to boost their page's search positioning. To counter this we add a nofollow tag to pages we've looked at and decided are not fully relevant within the context of the programme (find out how we judge relevancy here). We don't put this restriction on relevant posts, so if the post is very much about the programme and not trying to gain search positioning it does get the authority from us.

Please note we only check blog post relevancy during office hours and it may take a while to get through any backlogs that have built up. So if your blog is recent, relevant and has the nofollow tag it may just because we've not checked it yet.

Anyway (1) well done the BBC (this presumably counts as part of its promise to double monthly clickthroughs to external sites) and (2) I must go and write about some BBC programmes (don't forget this tip to get links from the BBC to your Twitter page) ...

As far as I can tell, the new service isn't live yet as I can't find it anywhere on the BBC site. Let me know if you spot it ...

Want a job as SEO manager at the Daily Mail? Check out their robots.txt file (just don't tell them you saw it here ...). In the middle it says:

# August 12th, MailOnline are looking for a talented SEO Manager so if you found this you're the kind of techie we need!

Daily Mail's robots.txt file contains an SEO job advert

Genius! You could also contact Mail Online MD James Bromley on Twitter.

For those who don't know, the robots.txt file is how you tell search engines which pages they can and can't crawl on your site to include in their index.

In the past it was worth occasionally checking out newspapers' robots.txt files as they listed the URLs of stories that they've had to withdraw for legal reasons (or joke Polish editions). Sadly, they don't seem to do that so much these days (and they'd get lost in the Mirror's massive file). Plus there's no easy way to check if they've been updated - Google Reader's ability to track changing webpages doesn't work with robots.txt files. Boo.

If you liked this post, I've got lots more about SEO (try this story analysing Google's keywords tool). I also blog about newspapers a lot - such as the Daily Mail (this story was popular recently on iDosing) and lately a lot about the Times paywall.

This is the sort of SEO issue that I'm always a bit worried about blogging - in case it's been going on for ages and I look really stupid. But here goes.

It looks to me that if you do a search for some term (EG football) and the name of certain big brands/sites, Google has started to treat most of the first page as if you had searched for that term and done a site:bigbrand.com search (the site: operator will make google show results only from that site).

So before, if you searched for Guardian football I'm fairly sure you only saw a couple of results from the Guardian. Now if I do that search, all 10 of the first page of results are Guardian pages (click any of these pics to see them bigger, though most are only the first 7 results or so so they're not too big):

Guardian football results

And if I search for Sky Sports, I see 9 web results for the skysports.com site (even though BT and Virgin offer Sky Sports channels) plus 3 skysports.com news results, one for wikipedia and none for anyone else:

Sky Sports results

If you search for Apple help, I'm seeing the first 9 results for the Apple website, then one page from mactricksandtips in at 10th:

Apple help results

Likewise, if you search for Amazon TV, the first 7 results are all from the Amazon site:

Amazon TV results

I'm sure it didn't use to be like this - I'd expect these searches to return two results from the obvious site, and then the rest of the page be other sites (or occasionally subdomains of the main site).

If it is a change, and not just a glitch, it is surely a massive boost to certain brands ... (if you likes this post, you might like this one on the google keywords tool and its (lack of) effectiveness as a keyword research tool).

I pointed out last week how awful Google Trends UK was - because it was full of American results. In some good news, Yahoo's trending list seems a lot better (although it doesn't give much in the way of explanation of how it's put together).

Here's the Yahoo trending list from uk.yahoo.com on monday night. They all look very UK, including Corrie and Man U vs Newcastle...

Yahoo: trending topics

And here's the Google trending list at the same time, featuring a plane crash in America, David Hasselhoff's roasting on a US comedy show, a US TV show (Weeds), and a film that's in, er, America.

Google's trending list

Please, please fix it.

As I've written elsewhere, there's some confusion over at the Times marketing department about how the paywall works. The basic idea ought to be that if content is behind the Times paywall, people might pay for it. If it's not, they won't.

Before you agree to hand over your money, here are 11 bits of the new Times site you can access for free, despite its new paywall ...

1 The main category pages

At first glance, you can't get past the home page of The Times - click on the any of the categories along the top header (News, Opinion, Business etc), and you're told to log in.

Times top categories

But you can still see what's in the categories by using the back-door listings view. Here are the URLs to check the stories in the following sections: News, Opinion, Business, Money, Sport, Life, Arts.

2 Sub-section pages

OK, not that exciting so far. But use a URL of the right form, and you can even sneak through the paywall and check out some sub-sections further down. You just change the ending, so here are the URLs for:

• Football: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/?view=list&section=Football
• Travel: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/?view=list&section=Travel
• Health: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/?view=list&section=Health

But actually, it gets better than that ... If you were on the home page, and tried to click to the Football section via the top menu like this:

Home page mega dropdown menu

You'd be told to log in.

But, conveniently, you can access some subsection pages via hacking some URLs to include /public/.

So here's the public version of the football page (this is on http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/football/ - but it's the same page as the unreachable http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/football/):

Times football page

There's also an accessible version of the cricket page and the River Cafe recipe page, even though they're deep beyond the paywall.

3 Free stock market information

Want to know what's happening with the FTSE 100?  See a graph just 15 minutes old, together with info on key movers and sector changes. There are also figures for currencies and commodities and bonds:

Stock market info

Don't like the FTSE 100? You can click the links along the top to see other indices like the Dow Jones or Nikkei225.

4 Guides to countries for doing business

The Business City Guides section has guides to countries if you want to do business there, covering the economy, infrastructure, workforce and business costs - such as Switzerland and Malaysia.

5 Young Photographer of the Year

The 9th Times Young Photographer of the Year is available to anyone, it would seem, including tips for budding photojournalists.

6 Summer with a twist

Summer with a twist: free

Suggestions for things to do this summer (sponsored by Courvoisier). With a twist.

7 Monthly science quiz

It's not very interactive, but here's August's science quiz, for instance.

8 Enter competitions

You can enter the competitions at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/competitions/ - such as the Times travel photo competition.

Times travel photo competition

You can also win tickets to the Barclays Premier League game of your choice.

9 Mapping British Business

OK, this one's on the http://www.mappingbritishbusiness.co.uk/ URL (and sponsored by Lloyds TSB) but it's got the Times header and colour scheme - and the articles themselves are on thetimes.co.uk URLs, such as:

• Interview: Adrian Bowles, chief executive of Helius Energy
• Driving Longbridge along the road to recovery

10 Need to know

The Need to Know page (sponsored by Accenture - there may be a pattern here ...) is available to anyone (as I mentioned in the intro). There's a video and a heat map so you can see which stories are most popular.

Need to know: heat map

11 Search for things for sale

On top of all these, you can also search for:

• Jobs
• Obituaries
• Cars for sale
• Holiday deals

Fresh from pointing out the problems with Google's keywords tool, here's why they need to sort out the list of hot UK search topics in Google Trends. Here's the top 10 at 5pm on Friday (surely the best time to blog, no?).

1. 

   Google Trends: UK hot topics. All very US.

   gm ipo - an American company is selling shares.

2. elias abuelazam - a Michigan, America, based serial stabber.
3. call of duty black ops - I'll give it this one.
4. border security bill - the passing of a US bill by Obama.
5. javier mascherano - they can have this.
6. iowa flood - it's a flood. In Iowa. In the USA.
7. wifi - Er, not sure.
8. us retail sales - Retails sales. In the USA.
9. terror babies - Stupid US conspiracy theory.
10. steven slater - A flight attendant who went off on one. An American flight attendant.

It's like this every day. Please fix. (And if you thought this was bad, check out Bing XRank's problems)

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.