Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain

Morning... I thought , because I am now getting more traffic via Google I should explain this blog series again - a lot of new visitors for some reason end up on one of the blog pages.

The blog is detailing the sites developement from the start, I had no previous experience with web developement CSS PHP or CMS's before I began. I thought this "site diary" would be useful to other people like me who would like to build a site (they can learn from my mistakes ). In combination with the FAQ it also provides a way to make the sites function/goals etc more transparent to regular users. Most info about the site you might want is either in this blog or the FAQ.
 

OK four hours ago I said I was going to give a detailed report.....

Just over a week ago my average hit count was about 40 new visitors a day, In the 4 hours that I have been sleeping I have recieved 27 just from Google search, 20 from the  Mozzilla Firefox addon that I created and just over 20 visitors from various other links and sources.  the average hits a day this week has been 184  So the site is growing nicely. On a side note the Firefox plugin has now received 1268 downloads.

I do expect that figure to drop dramaticly after everyone is bored of the new phone releases, probably back down to about 50.

I think I am gaining a better understanding of how Google works, these are my thoughts -

• The front page plays an important roll in the way the site is indexed
• First in is best dressed.
• Any changes Google detects are updated very rapidly but real results take about a week to manifest (visitors /improved ranking)
• Google does not in general have bias
• Your site name can have a big impact - the search is about people
• If you have a lot of content the Google bot will rape your server.
• One piece of content can effect the whole site

The front page on this site is the most well indexed, nearly every article on it shows up in the first 100 results if you search for the key words.

These are the last 10 searches that brought people to the site and their rank, If you duplicate the searches the results may vary depending on which region you are searching from.

I don't think Google has bias other than "first in best dressed" . The searches that link in the top 10 results are often higher in rank than the big blogs like Gismodo and Endgadget even though they have similarly titled articles.

The specific article iPhone 3G S vs Palm Pre vs HTC Touch Pro 2 was published before most other blogs did a spec comparrison. When I wrote it I was trying to think of a new unique article, I did a search for "iphone vs palm pre" then other variations - there were no specific results. I narrowed the search down to items published in the last week then the last 24 hours still no " VS" type articles so I published one real quick.

As a result this one piece of content has effected my whole site ... more traffic flows to the better articles and the issues lists after people have looked at the comparrison table.

Your site name and meta data can have a big impact - If you do a search and you see my site it looks like this on Google

HTC Touch Pro 2 - User Review | Not As Cool As It Seems

User review of the HTC Touch Pro 2 listing some issues and problems with the device. ... Pros: Improved UI with some nice touches and integration; Improved responsiveness ... Cons: Stylus is not magnetic like the other recent HTC phones ...
www.notascoolasitseems.com/.../htc-touch-pro-2-user-review - Cached - Similar

 All the product listings are the same  " product name | Not As Cool As It Seems " I think people who are researching a product see the site name but think  "Oh!?    WTF is wrong with it ? " then come to the site to check it out., this was unintended but it works out well.

Dealing with malicious users - OK I recieved an e-mail asking, in an impolite manner, why I hated a particular company. The e-mail pointed to certain product listings on the site.

I don't hate any particular company, I try to be impartial,  only listing the issues users submit that I can confirm by research  or that multiple users have reported to the issues submissions forms . The products in question total about 40% of all the submissions I have recieved to date.

I had anonymous voting enabled, set to only permit one vote per IP on each product each week. Products with issues can be highlighted on the front page by users voting to increase a products visibility if it has issues.

Someone managed to spam votes/comments and remove the companies products from the front page, it took me 24 hours and their second spam run for me to figure out how they did it. My first thought was anonymous proxies , but that would mean they had to changet the proxy each vote - too slow for the speed of the spamming.

They were using TOR which changes the exit point each page load and therefore the IP.

So to any of you who might want to use TOR or another anonymizing service I apologise, access to the site via these services has been blocked.

Thats all for now , I am hungry.

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