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Did the July PageRank update come early?

Wednesday, June 30, 2010, 10:50 AM
Business by John (Article #270)

It sure looks like Google started updating PageRank Toolbar numbers around midnight last night. The update appears to be ongoing at the present time (10:44 am US Eastern time).

UPDATE

It's increasingly looking like this was a partial flush oft he PageRank Toolbar numbers caused by a change in the index upstream. Something related to all the tinkering coming from the Google Caffeine project.

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Servers handling "Pending Delete" .COM domains failing

Sunday, June 27, 2010, 3:55 PM
Business by John (Article #269)

Something is up with the servers handling the "Pending Delete" .COM domain names today. Whatever the cause is, the pending deletes didn't become available for purchase at their normal time, bwtween 11pm and 1:15pm U.S. Pacific time.

Even now, approaching 2pm Pacific, responses on domains made available are sporadic at best.

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GoDaddy finally cleans up its checkout process

Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 5:20 PM
Business by John (Article #264)

GoDaddy has finally gone and done it. At long last, they've fixed a lot of what is wrong with their checkout process.

The #1 thing I now love is there is the option to permanently point all your future registrations toward your name servers -- long overdue, and good riddance to GoDaddy's fugly parking pages.

Overall, the process is quicker, with fewer nags. The last remaining nag, to renew your upcoming domains, can be seen as a feature. It doesn't bother me enough to be a black mark.

The only downside is that some checkouts with certain coupon codes seem to prohibit using PayPal. Sucks. But, again not bad enough to be a black mark.

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Early release of expired domains is rare

Monday, January 18, 2010, 1:06 PM
Business by John (Article #261)

The last weekend I started compiling data on how expired domain names are handled. Here are the highlights:

1. While a lot of registrars do hold onto higher quality domains, the percentage of total expired domains that scored well in my analysis (respectable in-bound links, domain uses real English words, etc) that the registrars actually held onto themselves was surprisingly low.

2. More domains made it out of the auction period than I would have expected. In fact, of those expired domains with a PageRank of three and at least one inbound link from a ranked website, about two-thirds coasted through auction without a big.

3. Very, very few domains were released early. Of the approximately 2000 expired domains included in the analysis, only three were released within two days of their expiration.

Now this is all very preliminary. So, don't get married to any of this not-really information. But, I thought it was interesting and worth sharing.

[NOTE: Added on January 19.]

Having tweak my analysis tool quite a bit, I've determined that the quick drop rate is somewhere below five percent.

The one thing I have to say is that the people at various stages of handling the death of a thousand cuts that is an expiring domain are good at what they do. The whole system has that slightly too mysterious quality that any good racket requires. It's hard to determine when a name will drop. Notification of a genuine delete -- the last stage where the name becomes immediately available to be registered anywhere -- held onto until as late as possible.

Based on the domains that are thrown overboard early, the domain registrars know exactly how well any domain performs while in expired status. If a domain drops early, you should take that as evidence that it has nothing -- no link juice, zero visitors, not enough value to even waste the electricity to keep a "this domain may be for sale" pitch up and running on the URL.

What I'm very interested in now is seeing how the better domains (any domain with a PR greater than 3, a single inbound link, or any real traffic besides domainers) move through the pipeline and become honestly deleted.

At some point the damned things do have to drop into the public pool of domains. And even hunting for domains manually, I've found some winners. So, its not so much a cut-throat business as it is a slightly dreadful business amid a tsunami of data.

We'll see.

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Blaming someone else -- twice

Friday, December 11, 2009, 8:41 AM
Business by John (Article #252)

Here's something no one will ever tell you about business: sometimes you're going to have to blame someone else. In American culture it's generally unacceptable to push blame onto others. We're hesitant to even consider blaming someone else, because frankly the tendency to blame others is one of the diagnostic criteria for being a psychopath. So, we're told that functional adults take responsibility.

The problem is that sometimes it isn't your fault. Worse, sometimes someone else really, really does need to eat shit for their mistakes. In a client relationship this is difficult to navigate. You have to be with a client for a long time before trust barriers come down enough that the assignment of blame can be done without suspicion that you're simply shirking.

I mention this because with a recent client they have had some trouble receiving emails from one of their clients. In both instances of trouble, I've had the ugly duty of blaming their client's mail system.

The first instance was because their client's mail server was misconfigured and identifying emails as having originated with an unregistered domain name. My mail server rejected the emails for looking spammy.

Then they send me an email saying they can't open attachments from their client. Well, it turns out that their client's system is giving all the attachments malformed MIME types (sending them as application/octet-stream instead of the appropriate format).

I cringed at the second chance to blame the other guy. It's not something you want to do. It's not good form in a business-to-business relation to find a third party and blame them -- let alone twice.

The new mail server configuration had its bugs. Don't get me wrong. We had to migrate a lot of stuff from their old system, a system that was somewhat hacked together almost ten years ago and was begging to be update. So, there have been things in the process that were my responsibility to fix. Not that points are accumulated for taking responsibility (they aren't, trust me), but you still like to know you've been honest about your own failures before you run off blaming others.

So, I sucked it up and sent out the second email explaining what was wrong and who was at fault. Strangely, this was a case where a workaround was easier to implement on my end than it was to demand that the third party make a full fix on their end. While blame might need to be assigned, the solution was simpler on this end.

I enjoy being direct and honest. But, there are times where it can be cringe-inducing. That said, at the end of the day if everyone wants to know what happened, blame has to be assigned.

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Second lesson I've learned about AdWords

Saturday, November 7, 2009, 11:52 PM
Business by John (Article #249)

When pricing keywords, start low and keep your eye on the average position.

I have a couple keywords where the estimated first page bid is astonishingly higher that the price I actually need to pay in order to get an average position between 1 and 2.

That said, the bid simulator is honest about this fact. It says .05 a click for my top keyword gets me 594 impressions in a single week, while .20 gets me 650 impressions. A 10% performance gain for a 300% price increase!! Man, I have heard such low bang for your buck since the last time I looked at a high-end video card.

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First lesson I've learned about AdWords

Friday, October 23, 2009, 8:21 AM
Business by John (Article #247)

I've been tinkering with Google AdWord just to see if it is worthwhile. I won't render a verdict on that for a while, but I have already learned at least on things:

Use the Phrase Match for keywords (keywords in quotes) instead of the Broad Match.

Broad Match pulls in roughly related keywords. I was checking my web logs against the keywords I had received a click on for my main website business website, and found that using Broad Match I was getting clicks for things like graphic design. GFX isn't really my business. Yeah, I understand the relationship between web design and graphic design, but they're not the same thing. And in my case, I tend to be much more focused on being a web developer or a web programmer. Selling generally graphic design -- which extends far beyond a logo and colors for a website -- is not my sales pitch.

It's a simply thing to fix in AdWords. And if the broad matches are beyond what you're selling, it's a good idea to adjust them and not spend money on clicks that aren't selling what you're selling.

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Fair use wins big with animated ethnic slur fest

Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 11:36 PM
Business by John (Article #239)

Finally, for the luv of gawd, can we please put to rest the moronic notion that parody author owe royalties to original authors??!

I understand that Fair Use is a debilitatingly simple concept. You see, if I remake a work in a meaningfully different way, such as a parody that insults an ethnic group in ways the original author would find vile, I probably don't owe the original author squat.

Now, I was pretty sure when I took 400-level Commications Law in college that this was settled. Parody is protected. Period. And, big surprises here, the courts agree because every US court has always agreed with that interpretation. Jeepers.

But, rights owners a mean lot. To brutally paraphrase Upton Sinclair's famous line, it's hard to convince a man he doesn't have rights to content when his living depends on believing he does.

Seriously. Get into a shooting match sometime with an aggrieved rights owner. It's obnoxious. Also, they are the most self-sure critters roaming this planet (OK, maybe cats are a little more self-sure, but you get my point).

I don't know what it says about modern culture when we celebrate the perpetuation of established case law as a big victory. I guess. A win is a win. Especially when the enemy is this radicalized and fundamentalist.

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Stop blaming the internet for the death of newspapers

Tuesday, March 17, 2009, 11:22 PM
Business by John (Article #238)

Stop it. Here's what really killed newspapers:

1. AP Copy. Every newspaper on earth is about 60-80% frickin AP copy. It sucks, because people want more local content. Instead, they can expect their local newspaper to resemble every other newspaper on earth, which in turn are all running stories 24 hours later than every website on earth that also runs AP wire copy.
2. Costs. Printing presses are expensive.
   
3. Pay. Writers at all but the top tier papers work for nothing. I've known people who were years into the newspaper biz who were making barely better than minimum wage. If you're gonna make crappy pay, disappearing to some other medium (blogs) or some other occupation (fry cook) seems like a winning proposition.
4. Respect. When was the last time anyone said anything nice about any newspaper.
5. USA Today and the New York Times. The big, essentially national newspapers, were already pushing down other newspapers for a looong time before the internet came along.
6. Quality. Read the Washington Post. It is the nasty bit of political bootlicking know to humankind. It's a joke! Why would anyone want to read some politician's BS when they can just turn on CNN or C-SPAN, or better yet, just log on to the internet and look at cat pictures?

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Coping with the USPS outage

Thursday, December 11, 2008, 3:24 AM
Business by John (Article #232)

Nothing against the general notion of applications failing elegantly, but screw that!

We've started compiling and caching postal rates server side. Does that compound the problem for the USPS? Probably.

First, any orders that get a clean postage quote, those quotes go right in the DB for later re-use. Second, when the system can punch one through, it is sneaking a few spare quotes for random weights to random ZIP codes.

Yeah, that's right -- I'm cheating!

Right now I don't care. I have one goal: get through February without having to eat shit because the post office can't do its job.

Third party APIs

I've read a few articles about the USPS outage, and one recurring dumb thought people keep posting is a sort of "depending on third party APIs is dumb" meme.

Sure, I understand that any dependence on a third-party API is an invitation to trouble. But, really, isn't the entire concept of a postal system sort of a third-party app? Aren't you kinda depending on them to do a lot of things?

Beyond the quote itself, you depend on the USPS to:

1. Show the hell up.
2. Take the package.
3. Transport the package to some place far beyond the horizon.
4. Through multiple way points transfer the package to said far-off place.
5. Show the hell up there.
6. Not break too many of your packages while repeating this process relentlessly six days a week, every week, every year.

I've read a few discussions about the dependency aspect of the Webtools API, and I think the sort of down-my-nose-at-you view some programmers have about third-party APIs displays complete ignorance of the facts on the ground when it comes to shipping.

Most important fact: the process is entirely third-party after you slap some packing tape on the box and hand it to some dude wearing a blue uniform.

And, yeah, at most small businesses you're going to know said blue uniform guy, thereby providing a bit of a buffer against the third-partiness of it all.

But, the underpinning flaw in the logic of 'don't depend on third part APIs' is that an interconnected society engaged in global trade is nothing but several billion third parties constantly interfacing in the vague promise of survival, some return and mayeba little happiness.

To act as if one fairly minor quote system is really the linchpin in this is to sort of ignore the other 99% of the process.

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