Tag Archives: google

Direct, referral or organic traffic

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Just trying to get my head around the ‘Direct’, ‘Referral’ and ‘Organic’ traffic classifications in Google Analytics. Basically ‘Direct’ is where there is no referrer header, e.g. user typed URL into address bar, clicked on link in email, etc. ‘Referral’ means some website referred the traffic, e.g. a link in an article on another website. ‘Organic’ means that one of a predefined set of search engines referred the traffic in response to a search.

Not sure how Google AdWords traffic is classified… I expect that would be ‘Referral’ as it’s not ‘Direct’ and not really ‘Organic’ either.

Interviewing at Google

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I’m sick and tired of seeing Google’s bullshit “this stuff matters” advertising as part of their latest privacy policy update (which I’ve been doing my best to ignore).

As I was complaining about it I thought I’d try and find some examples of their hypocrisy. I’m fairly sure I’ve seen articles before where people said their job for a Google interview was to process gigabytes of web logs. If you’re data-mining web logs to *spy* on people on the one hand and then telling people you’re protecting their privacy on the other hand then you’re a lying sack of shit really, aren’t you?

Anyway, I didn’t find what I was looking for in a big hurry and I don’t really have time for this, so I’m giving up on my little fact finding mission and just going back to ignoring the whole thing.

However, during my web search I found this article, My Job Interview at Google, which seems like a fairly content rich article. I’m particularly interested in the resources that the guy linked to in his post. So figured I’d swing by my blog and make a note so that when I have some free time (hey, could happen) I can go over that post and read the reference material.

Google webmaster tools

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I decided to have a look at the Google Webmaster Tools. I’ve setup accounts for jsphp.co and www.progclub.org. So far I’m not very impressed at all. Maybe it’s because the accounts are just new, but there is basically no data in any of my sites, so it’s not very useful at all. I guess it’s just wait and see if data ends up being loaded or not.

Programmers’ Club

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Due to my blatant SEO hacking ProgClub has finally made it to page 3 of search results for programmers’ club. Go team! :)

ProgClub aspires to be *the* Programmers’ Club. So first we get page 3, then we get page 1, then we get first result. Sound like a good plan?

You can help by blogging about ProgClub or linking to our Programmers’ Club page from your blog or your web-site. The text of your link should be “Programmers’ Club”, and you should link to the http://www.progclub.org/wiki/Programmers’_Club page.

p.s. We’re on page 2 for good programmers’ club and we’re on page 2 for the programmers’ club (page 1 in Australia: the programmers’ club).

p.p.s. I posted some more information on how I went about the SEO process.

p.p.p.s. I followed up with some more commentary about the best way to link to ProgClub.

Help, I’m being raped by Googlebot!

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Friggin’ Googlebot is crawling all over pcrepo, even though I told it NOT TO DO THAT. My robots.txt file has been updated to disallow svnro for most of the day. Google really should have a facility for web-masters to be able to force a reload of robots.txt in Googlebot. They’re going to hit me thousands of times before this is over. :(