BBC NEWS | UK | 'Special bullets' killed Menezes

BBC NEWS | UK | 'Special bullets' killed Menezes

Are Landing Page Widgets a solution to low conversion rates on generic keyword phrases?

Are Landing Page Widgets a solution to low conversion rates on generic keyword phrases?

Until I can figure...

...what happened to my blogroll I'll post these links here.

London Residential snippets

London office gossip

Alexa - high watermark?

I'm not going to post these every day from now on, largely because I suspect that at the end of seven days visiting my own blog fairly relentlessly, this is as good as it gets - unless it somehow attracts an audience.

However, the 1-week Alexa rating is up again - to 258,586.

Adsense update

Now getting relevant ads on the blog - commercial property, business lets, commercial property investing - all that sort of thing is coming up nicely.

The banner isn't very prominent, and this isn't about money, but it will be interesting to see what sort of CTR the ads will generate, if any...

Technorati

I've claimed this blog via Technorati and was interested to see that it has a rather more realistic ranking there, as follows:

Rank: 2,763,138 (No blogs link here yet)

However I am not sure how the link-counters work: there is a link to this blog on another established blogspot blog. However it isn't in the body of any posts on that blog, just on the blogroll...

In the course of doing this I have also embedded a Technorati search box into the blog. I shall follow up and add the Technorati rank to the list of monitored metrics.

Alexa ranking, indexing update

The official three-month average figure has been updated again, adjusted up to 1,936,670.

Meanwhile the one-week average, which is clearly on a daily refresh, has now reached 288,328.

If you haven't already guessed, I have the Alexa toolbar installed on the machine that I use most often.

Alexa's rank is based on "a combined measure of page views and users". Google analytics (which I installed only on Tuesday, so it's short a couple of days in the analysis) shows 69 visits and 131 page views. That's enough to get the site into the top 300k, apparently. Most of those will I think be me. Google analytics shows a number of entries from elsewhere, but I can't help wondering whether some of those are to do with the locations of the third party site tools that I have been examining the site with (for example, spider simulators etc).

Something that will not surprise seasoned Google-watchers is that the home page for the blog, having been in the index yesterday with a cache date of 8 March, has disappeared again, but I'm glad to say that the site hasn't been totally removed - a single previous post about the BBC is still coming up (as the only entry) on a Google site: search.

If one spends any time at the forums where they worry about this sort of thing, such as WebmasterWorld, one sees endless variations on the "where did my new site go?" posts from concerned site builders and owners. What tends to happen is that unless the site is a really horrible spamsite, the pages come back into the index reasonably quickly.

%22 and the BBC news feed

I've been getting some non-property-related ads coming through via Adsense. In fact I haven't yet had any property-related ads.

This is due I think to the kind of material that has been coming through at the top of the blog via the BBC news feed based on the incidence of the word "property".

I tried creating feeds based on a couple of more specific searches - "commercial property" and "real estate". Running the searches on the BBC site, with the quotes, worked to find the exact phrases within the text. However when attempting to create an RSS feed based on that search (which replaced the quotes in the string with %22), it returns all stories with either word in it.

For the time being therefore I have replaced the (too wide) "property" search with a news feed based on the word "mortgage".

NB Alexa 1-week rating is up again to 316,984. It must be updated every day.

Indexed!

According to their webmaster tools, pages from this site has now been included in Google's index. First cache date was 8 March. Three pages were included: the main page and two somewhat odd ones: http://property-commercial.blogspot.com/search/label/Alexa and http://property-commercial.blogspot.com/search/label/blogs.

None of the individual post pages is yet indexed. The two odd ones I suspect have been included by virtue of links appearing on some Technorati pages.

The Alexa 1-week rating has risen again to 453,054. This seems to be updated more often than I would have thought.

Google search RSS, updates

Google news and blog searches have automatic RSS feeds, I've added both a news and blog search for "commercial property" and they seem to be search-engine friendly feeds.

I've also combined them in a FeedBlendr search, which has replaced the previous FeedBlendr version of the Google Reader feed.

FeedBlendr still seems a little flaky to me, in terms of what it returns and how quickly it updates.

Replaced the Widgetbox version of the Nestoria feed with one from the source itself; this now works fine so I guess it was a problem with Widgetbox...

Spoke too soon

It seems that today is Alexa ranking update day!

The official 3-month average has risen to 4,454,217 - and the one-week average is up to 744,310.

So over the past week this site has risen to sit comfortably inside the top million sites...

PS I've removed the widgetbox Nestoria plugin for now; I was getting weird messages and the page never seemed to stop loading. Going to come back to Nestoria via their own API. Incidentally doing this has stopped the loading problem that I had.

Google crawling activity

From Google's excellent webmaster tools suite. A little bit of posting and content-adding seems to have whetted the crawler's appetite.

Still no pages in the actual index itself however.

Alexa ranking

The 3-month average hasn't changed (not sure how often it changes - monthly?) and that's still the number displaying in the Alexa toolbar, but the 1-week average is now 1,246,007.

Nestoria update

Ed from Nestoria posted a comment on an earlier entry letting me know that they have made available an API which allows users to consume/regurgitate their data in a way that is perfectly search-engine friendly. Tech details of the API here.

1. That's very interesting and I'll certainly have a go at using it although I'm not a developer by any means
2. I'm very impressed that Nestoria are so on the ball that they pick up a new no-mark blog and take the time to comment on it.

Smart people make the web worth while.

FeedBlendr trick update

Here's the deal.

If you use Google Reader, it offers you a really simple way of putting your shared items into your blog/site. There are however two problems:

1. It seems to put the items in your shared feed in the order that you added them and not in the order that they were originally published. You might like this, but I'd prefer them in order.
2. The text of your items can't be seen at all by spiders. That bit of your page is all script. No lovely free spider food there then.

However, if you blend the feed in FeedBlendr three things happen:

1. It sorts them into chronological order putting the latest at the top. Yay.
2. The text looks more like it could be seen by those spiders. Yay.
3. You go from a maximum of ten items to a maximum of five. Small boo.
   

The last is not really a disadvantage as you can create as many FeedBlendr feeds as you want, making each one more specialised.

I've tagged the feed in question as "Blended Goo", and relegated the original Google Reader output ("Property Roundup") to the bottom of the page.

PS1: updating the feed doesn't seem to be updating the blended feed immediately. Hmm

PS2: I'm not totally confident about what is and isn't seen by particular SE spiders; will have to wait for indexing and look at the cache for the page.

Update and observations

More additions:

• Picked up the new Nestoria feed from Widgetbox, customised for Richmond
  
• Added in theRatandMouse feed

Observations
Having run the blog through as search spider simulator I find that apart from my headings and my own blog posts, the only parts of the content that are picked up as text are the BBC content, the RatandMouse headlines, and the BBC feeds mashed up in FeedBlendr.

Obviously the idea is to get some content which will be search engine friendly, so I will try blending some currently non-friendly feeds via FeedBlendr to see if it will

Further amends

Two more small things today:

• Added site to Google Analytics
• Added Edgeio listings panel

The first will take a day or so to start being populated with data. The second looks like a bit of a washout initially. I made my "board" a classified housing board, and linked it to all other Edgeio housing boards available, but it is not as of now showing any content at all.

Update to property blog

Changes (made yesterday)

• Changed name of blog to Commercial Property News
• Added BBC RSS feeds covering "property" and "housing"
• Added FeedBlendr feed on side panel
• Added Adsense
• Added validation code for Google Webmasters access

So far, the BBC stuff looks good and relevant and *might* have its text picked up by any spiders. The FeedBlendr needs tweaking as it is picking up some irrelevant material, but I am going to leave it for now. Adsense looked better in the preview panel than it does on the site, still not picking up relevant ads yet.

Metrics

Alexa Rating: 5,843,221

Google Webmaster info

Site not indexed, but has apparently been crawled in the past 3 days.

Welcome

This is a blog on which I shall be attempting to use some technology to do some aggregation of news relevant to the commercial property market.