Kevin Rose has a good rant on why Google needs Buzz…
In a nutshell, his premise is that google knows they missed the boat on real-time search and is going to do what it takes to get this one right…
Kevin Rose has a good rant on why Google needs Buzz…
In a nutshell, his premise is that google knows they missed the boat on real-time search and is going to do what it takes to get this one right…
..brings out a who’s who of online real estate companies. Don’t miss out on the comments!
…the folks I talked with at RE Connect were pretty underwhelmed.
… CribQ’s rental search with their own data.
…the most innovative web services award for Estately!
A few weeks ago I moved the Rain City Guide servers over to new servers. Starting a few days before I moved the site over, I noticed a drop in the amount of traffic that coming to RCG as measured by Google Analytics:
The fact that it started a few days beforehand didn’t really surprise me since I had been having trouble with the host (hence the move!).
However, the huge drop that Google Analytics shows is almost entirely from a drop in search engine (think: Google) traffic:
It’s not pretty, but I figured it was a reality and just part of the consequences of moving the site from one server to another and I figured Google would hopefully start sending lots search traffic again over time. But here’s where it gets weird.
The ONLY indication I have that our search traffic has decreased is Google Analytics… All other indications are that the traffic is just about the same.
For example, Quantcast total daily visits from the same time frame (which, just like Google Analytics, uses a bit of javascript I installed in the footer of the site):
Diving deeper into the search terms I can see that for terms we used to rank really well for, like [moving to Seattle], Google Analytics said we dropped to only one person visiting us from that search term yesterday:
But, I simply can’t believe that for two reasons:
For those wondering, I didn’t touch the Google Analytics code when I moved servers. Nor did I install any caching or other plugins that would be related to this in any way that I can think of…
And finally, just to show you that the issue really is only related to search engine traffic, both the direct traffic and referring traffic have remained pretty consistent throughout this time period:
So finally…
My questions for the 4realz community:
UPDATE:
After only 14 hours or so of a fix (thanks to an idea I had inspired by a comment below), the search engine traffic on RCG as measured by GA has had a nice bump:
(Notice the jump at the right of the chart… That’s today’s traffic from search engines)
At least for one of the WordPress blogs that I run, all evidence points to the fact that the existing tracking code went bust at some point in mid-May! Obviously, if you’re also noticing that GA is measuring a drop in search engine traffic, as some others have mentioned in the comments, then try upgarding to the latest javascript code.
Galen makes his first move since his new found riches… Congrats to the Estately team.
All the talk about Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google reminded me that I hadn’t checked to see if Microsoft has made any improvement to their search results in quite a while…
I know one term doesn’t make a rule, but I’ve found the term [Seattle Real Estate Blog] to be great for testing out the search engines over the years. Over the past three years, Google has always delivered relevant results for the term, while it used to be full of spam for both Yahoo and Microsoft. It’s interesting to note that Yahoo has made great strides over the past few years, while Microsoft is still lost in the dark.
Here’s the top five results by search engine:
Google [Seattle Real Estate Blog]:
All of these are great blogs and worthy of being in the top five.
Yahoo [Seattle Real Estate Blog]:
Again, all of these are great blogs worthy of being in the top five for the search results.
MSN Live [Seattle Real Estate Blog]:
There results are horrible. Two spam sites, two sites with no content, and one page with a few links. There are some great real estate blogs in Seattle, but Microsoft can’t seem to find them as their search algorithms are still so easily gamed by spammers.
Scoble thinks Microsoft should buy up Facebook and keep it closed to all but their search engine. Personally, I think they’d find a way to screw that up.
UPDATE: NYTs says Microsoft is getting ready to PAY people to use their search. How sad.
Long-time Rain City Guide contributor, Galen Ward, announced that Estately just got $450K in angel funding! Congrats Galen!
The Estately team is used to operating on a shoe-string budget, so it will be interesting to see what they accomplishes with this money!