The Disadvantages of Speed: Finding Exact Match Domains in Drop Lists

I recently wrote a post on the advantages of speed specifically dealing with the ability to find exact match domains. One of the disadvantages of speed is that of the classic hammer problem. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Because lookup speeds are very fast, I made the assumption that I could just pound away. Eventually, though, that led to some insurmountable speed problems and would force more horizontal scaling. Because the lookups were so fast, I assumed that the number of lookups could be egregiously large without greatly damaging performance. I. Was. Wrong. It hit me over New Years Eve night that I had been looking at the problem all wrong. The lookup data was structured in a way that required the massive lookups. Subsequently,...

Google Analytics Style Keyword Suggestion Query Builder

Hey folks, just wanted to show off the new advanced keyword query suggestion builder for GrepWords. We decided to build a keyword suggestion tool modeled directly after Google Analytics Advanced Filters. Most of you are probably aware of what the GA Advanced Filters look like… In Analytics you can drill down through dimensions using containing, begins with, ends with, and RegExp. You can create multiple layers of filters to get down to that perfect result. Well now you can do the exact same thing in GrepWords. Here is a quick video showing it in action… The tool is only available to paid subscribers because it really does traverse our entire 80 million US language keyword database on the fly, no caching involved. Click below to see a full screenshot...

Adding Keyword Data to Google Analytics

Here is a quick little Chrome extension I had thrown together to get keyword data added into Google Analytics. [Install] At present, it has the following features on the Organic Keyword Traffic section of GA, you will see 4 additional columns with new data… CPC: The estimated cost per click of the keyword in google adwords Search Volume: The estimated monthly local (US) traffic for the keyword Traffic Value: The value of the traffic you received (CPC*Your Traffic) Estimated Rank: The estimated rank of your site in Google for that keyword over the previous 30 days For this tool to work, you will need an API Key from Grep Words. I am thinking about adding in SEMRush as well, but it is a bit more expensive than GrepWords. If a lot of you use it, let me know...

112 Things Not to Name Your PHPMyAdmin Install

phpMyAdmin is an incredibly powerful, useful tool for rapidly creating and managing mySQL databases. However, given its ubiquity and that it grants access to your database(s), it is often the target of widespread exploits. Unfortunately, most webmasters don’t secure their phpMyAdmin. First off, you should read through this to get it secure, but you should at least do the simplest thing: name it something different from what others name it. Below is a list of common names for phpMyAdmin folders that exploit bots regularly scan for…

A Simple Solution to the Non WWW, WWW Question

One of the most shocking things a webmaster learns upon entering the world of SEO is that they need to choose between either the WWW version or non-WWW version of their URL. As annoying as it is, not doing so can create huge duplicate content and PageRank dispersion issues that hamper your rankings. However, what we rarely discuss is how to choose which of the two to use. The answer is fairly simple. Determine which version has the most inbound, external links across all its pages and then use that as the canonical version of your domain. If the sum of all the mozRank of links pointing to your http://domain.com/* version of your site is greater than the http://www.domain.com/* version, then you should choose the non-WWW. Well, here is a simple tool that does just...

Relevancy Modified MozRank: A Smarter Metric for Rank Analysis

We have been working for a while now on our own internal correlation study in partnership with Trident Marketing and Fuzzy Logix. In working on this project, time and time again it shocked me how crude our current ranking metrics are. We finally have good raw data from sources like SEOMoz and Majestic SEO but we have only begun to scratch the surface of how Google uses these types of data to organize and create search rankings. In the same way that SEOMoz identified a simple statistical modeling technique known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation as a likely candidate for how Google models topic relevancy, we have been looking for similar statistical techniques that Google is likely to use in turning raw link data into metrics more suitable for ranking pages. The...