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Archive for July, 2009

How US traffic is vital for UK newspaper sites 1

July 30, 2009

On average, US traffic to UK newspaper sites is 36.8% of the UK traffic. The figure for the Telegraph is slightly higher (44.5%) and for the Mail it’s a massive 62.5%.

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Five changes I'd make to the new Web User beta design 0

July 29, 2009
webuser-header

Five changes I’d make to the new Web User beta design. Well, they did ask …

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Alexa data: how accurate is it - using audited ABCe figures to check? 3

July 29, 2009

By making use of ABCe data, we can check what Alexa says with the official audited data for UK newspapers. As the table shows, it’s OK but not brilliant.

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Ofcom: we need action not research on broadband speeds 0

July 28, 2009
ofcom-broadband-speed

Ofcom has revealed that people don’t get the broadband speeds they pay for. Well, duh. Here’s a timeline of how we already know that. Their research isn’t groundbreaking or new or revealing something for the first time, as is being claimed. What we need is action: ISPs should be forced to publish a typical range of speeds rather than an upto speed that no one can get.

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Michael Jackson's kids made the Daily Mail the most visited UK newspaper site in June 5

July 27, 2009
Traffic leapt from May to July

Figures from Compete.com, which tracks American internet use, show that, of the 4.7 million unique users that the Mail added from May to June, 1.2 million were from the USA, and foreign searches for Michael Jackson’s kids also drove the Mail’s growth.

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9 sites who don't know that www.domain.com ISN'T THE SAME as domain.com 6

July 23, 2009
non-www

You may not know it, but the www version of your website is not the same as the non-www version.: yourdomain.com/page is NOT THE SAME PAGE as www.yourdomain.com/page. It’s treated as a different URL by search engines, for instance. And if someone leaves off the www (on a link or when they type a URL), they may not get any page at all unless you’ve set your server up right.

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The importance of a 404 status code on your 404 page 5

July 23, 2009
ABCe: not found

The ABCe website demonstrates the importance of returning a proper 404 status code, as this search at google for abce demonstrates.

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Delia Online relaunch slices her traffic in half 1

July 21, 2009
delia-pageviews-alexa

The relaunch of Delia Online has cost Delia Smith half her web traffic in the last 4 weeks, according to stats from Alexa.

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New google sprite: July 2009 0

July 17, 2009
New google sprite (left); old google sprite (right)

Google has updated its ’sprite’ – the one image it uses to render all its graphics. If you’re not sure what a sprite is, it’s a way to speed up page loads by downloading just one image, and then using CSS to just show the relevant bit.

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Guardian wins newspaper URL tweet war 4

July 16, 2009

Other people have tweeted (or retweeted) the Guardian’s URLs 328,288 times over the last 4 months – way more than any other UK newspaper.

The FT and Times have more followers on Twitter than the Telegraph and Mail – but they’re not tweeted about as often. The Telegraph is in second place: 120,731 tweets have included a link to one if its URLs. The Daily Mail is 3rd with 95,851.

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10 people who better pray their boss isn't on Twitter - S/HE CAN SEE YOUR TWEETS 2

July 15, 2009
boss5

Do people realise that anyone can see their profile unless they lock it? Here are 10 tweets about the person’s boss from the last week – they’re all from accounts with more than 50 updates, so they should have worked out what’s going on …

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Trinity Mirror stops selling followed links - Christian Science Monitor starts... 4

July 15, 2009

Trinity Mirror has stopped selling paid links without the nofollow tag. Christian Science Monitor has started.

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Can you help keep my newspaper Twitter account data up to date? 2

July 10, 2009

I recently counted all the official national newspaper twitter accounts. It took a long time. So I want the figures to update automatically. Here’s what I’ve done so far. Can you help me do it better?

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Google predicts Ashes win? 4

July 09, 2009

For some reason, Google’s showing a title of “BBC Sport – Cricket: Ashes 2005″ for the BBC’s cricket page, which is of course all about Ashes 2009.
This is despite Google’s cached page having the correct title: “<title>BBC SPORT | Cricket | England</title>”. Maybe Google thinks we’re going to win again? Or maybe QDF stands for [...]

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Newspapers on Twitter - how the Guardian, FT and Times are winning 4

July 06, 2009

National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across all their Twitter accounts – with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers in the top 10 newspaper accounts. The Guardian’s the clear Twitter winner, as it’s place on the Twitter Suggested User List means that its GuardianTech account has 831,935 followers – 78% of the total …

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New design trend: Logos that change to show you they're a 'home' link 5

July 03, 2009
Amazon logo changes to show it

Three’s a trend. And five’s a default. Four examples of sites whose logo is a link to the homepage – and who make this abundantly clear by changing the image on mouseover.

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I'm sorry I suggested newspapers turn off their RSS feeds ... 4

July 03, 2009

OK, newspapers shouldn’t turn off RSS feeds. I was wrong.
The point I was trying to make was that there didn’t seem much point having RSS icons in your header (Express) or by your search box (Mirror), or offering a brilliant RSS mashup feature (Guardian), or having RSS icons by each section of your news area (Independent) etc etc – but not doing anything to educate people about what they could do with all this.

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Delia Smith relaunch gets worse ... 1

July 02, 2009
deliasmith.com has vanished - so broken links and no SEO benefit.

I recently pointed out that the Delia Online’s relaunch was a right cock up. They’ve now made things worse …

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Is Trinity Mirror selling followed links on its ic network? 12

July 02, 2009
icCheshire home page - is one of these a paid link?

Is Trinity Mirror selling keyword-rich links on its ic Network without using the nofollow tag? Don’t tell Google …

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Three's a trend: reviewed hit back against reviewers 1

July 01, 2009

Anyway, three’s a trend. So here are three people hitting back at bad reviews in the last week.

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