The patent says: “User dialogue (eg from role playing games, simulation games, etc) may be used to characterise the user (eg literate, profane, blunt or polite, quiet etc). Also, user play may be used to characterise the user (eg cautious, risk-taker, aggressive, non-confrontational, stealthy, honest, cooperative, uncooperative, etc).”

Sue Charman of online campaign Open Rights Group said….

“Whenever you have large amounts of information it becomes attractive to people – we’ve already seen the American federal government going to court over data from companies including Google.”

And no I wouldn’t want to be giving my profile out to Google or any other corporation.

I could easily see this information as being open to subpoena, even hidden subpoena.

I try to use Google not logged in these days. It looks like we might have to go back to the days of regular cookie dumping.

Alas, those of us on fixed IP’s (not massive corporate firewall) can be pretty tightly profiled just off of IP.

The total information that Google owns about most of us is scary stuff.

• what we search for
• what sites we own/manage (AdWords, Analytics)
• at least part of our financial records (AdWords/AdSense)
• our weblogs (for those using blogger)
• what videos we watch (YouTube)

Add personality profiling to this – and you’ve just entered the Matrix.

Nod to Threadwatch: Google Profiling Technology.

Very useful information. DNJournal also publish a number of interviews with top domainers (people whose primary economic activity is buying and selling domain names).

Imagine my curiosity when I came across this piece:

Just 2 years after entering the industry, AL-Ghanim has amassed more than 12,000 quality domains, including jewels like media.com, multimedia.com and fm.com. He has thriving websites like mp3.tv, dj.net and oxide.com and he has just purchased a major ICANN-approved internet registry that will be located on another showcase domain, i.net.

No wonder domain industry forums are buzzing with questions about “Elequa”, a childhood nickname the 32-year-old internet phenomenon uses for his online identity. They want to know who he is, where he came from and how he assembled one of the world’s most impressive portfolios almost overnight. They wonder how he seems to be everywhere at once and almost always in the right place at the right time. How is it possible?

Easy really…he never sleeps. AL-Ghanim is a self-described insomniac who naps only an hour or two each night. While you are sound asleep, he is busy transforming his vision for his current projects into reality. AL-Ghanim says he is so excited about his work he simply can’t gear down long enough to spend much time in bed. Fueled by that adrenaline rush, he has worked around the clock to cram four years of effort into two years on the calendar. Is it any wonder he is racing far ahead of the pack? Answering the common question, “who is Elequa?” is not as simple….the lines begin to blur and you have to ponder the composition much as you would an abstract painting.

He is a businessman, an internet visionary, an artist and sculptor.

By applying all of those skills to the domain industry canvas, he has become the world’s most prolific “domain artist”.

AL-Ghanim’s Future Media Architects, Inc. (fma.com) is a holding company for his masterpieces. However, you need not bother approaching FMA to buy a piece for your own collection. AL-Ghanim says he does not sell domains. That alone tells you how different his approach is from most others in the industry. “My model gives me an opportunity to enjoy utilizing domains for my own purposes and creativity.&rdquo

….His mp3.tv sponsored Italy’s national championship Ferarri racing team. Seeing his logo emblazoned on a car roaring by at 200 miles per hour is a perfect metaphor for the full-throttle approach AL-Ghanim is applying to the domain business.

AL-Ghanim also attracts attention from jealous competitors. One recently posted in a forum that anyone could accomplish what AL-Ghanim has if they had enough money. The critics conveniently ignore the dozens of internet entities that had more than enough money in recent years, yet failed miserably. AL-Ghanim personally formulates the concept for each FMA website and then painstakingly develops them into something special. Perhaps the critics should ask themselves if they could paint like Michaelangelo if only they had enough money.

What can one say? A hero of our time.

The sections in bold are highlighted by me. Okay Mr. Jackman, who are you writing about Saladin, Zorro or a domainer (a guy with a computer buying domains)?

This piece dates from 2003. We are now in April of 2007.

Let’s start our fact-checking by having a look at the home page for Elequa’s company Future Media Architects fma.com.

Mmmm. Attractive to look at.

What does the text on this page have to say Future Media Architects:

Future Media Architects is an Internet development company with a global presence. We develop our own Internet properties, Internet Portals and Technology. We do not develop for third parties. Future Media Architects is committed to pioneering an improved Internet. We wish to establish a digital world free of clutter focused on a bright, promising, and inventive future.

Our world-class domains , which include media.com, fed.com, ibiza.com, cool.com, music.tv, mr.com and thousands more… are not for sale.

Immpressive.

Let’s revisit Al-Ghanim/Elequa’s accomplishments for this period of time.

multimedia.com

spam page

fm.com

spam page

dj.tv

spam page

media.com

spam page

fed.com

spam page

ibiza.com

spam

cool.com

spam

music.tv

spam

mr.com

spam

Mr. Jackman, your “visionary, artist and sculptor” is no Michaelangelo. He is buying domains with Kuwaiti oil money and hoarding them for the future. It may turn out to make economic sense (the prices for high end domain names in 2003 were depressed) but it’s not a very inspiring story.

Poor quality handling of prolific typein traffic.

By the way, careful about visiting these domains. You’ll find that you will face a popup for each domain which looks like this:

Ron Jackman, your article is a raspberry.

This ladies and gentlemen is your introduction to the domain industry.

If anybody has a robust Toronto based proxy I could use, I am still looking.

I would like the Toronto proxy to work with both Google and Yahoo search.

• to look good
• to include clickable links which work in both Acrobat and Mac OS X preview
• to be navigatable from the table of contents and/or index

The only PDF I’ve ever owned which got all of these things right (apart from a couple of manuals from Apple for high end programs like Final Cut Pro – if Apple couldn’t get it right for a $1000 application there’d be no hope) – is Aaron Wall’s SeoBook.

SEOBook is the best selling and best book on SEO. What’s great about SEOBook is that is based on real world experience and Aaron has no particular axe to grind in favour of any single SEO technique. A lot of the other books about SEO are written by either programmers or people selling SEO software or link building networks.

The other good thing about SEOBook are the attractive green graphics and professional appearance of the document.

Not only does Aaron’s SEOBook look great bit it is fully navigable. Aaron has added a great index as well. SeoBook is basically the ideal PDF book.

So I turned to Aaron to get instruction on how to easily create such a great PDF document, by doing a search on his weblog at SEOBook.com.

I struck gold. An entire post devoted to the subject of PDF formatting

Unfortunately the sad truth is that Aaron went through hell – over 50 hours of work to get the internal navigation working after a reedit.

I’ve left Aaron a question on the entry. I hope he has a better solution now. I don’t have 50 hours to format documents. It looks like another task which needs to be outsourced before I even begin it.

It’s a pity as I would have really liked to be able to create good looking and properly indexed PDF’s quickly inhouse. Maybe Aaron has come up with a better solution in the meantime and will drop me a line.

I’ve been searching for a way to easily turn flash off yet keep my computer stable. With the amount of Flash video turning up on the web, I am not as tempted as I used to be to just rip the Flash code right out of my plugin folder.

In any case, for work reasons, I have to keep Flash around just to see what other people are doing with their sites.

Until two weeks ago, I still hadn’t found anything lightweight to kill Flash in either Safari or Firefox, my two primary browsers. But good things come in twos. There are two great plugins to kill Flash, one for Firefox and one for Safari.

Amazingly enough, neither have destabilised my browser.

Minus the flashing lights and used car salesman in the side bars, I might even start liking the web again.

Firefox

I was trying to deal with a javascript problem in Safari while working over an invoice in the excellent Freshbooks. I was wondering if there wasn’t a better javascript browser under OS X. I found this lovely performance graph over at Macintalk.com.

Osx-Browser-Performance-Test

*

There was a lot of talk about web browsers, quite boring really, unless you are a geek or a web developer. But there was one gem in there:

I keep trying to leave Firefox, but I can’t browse any more without the noscript extension. Even on Linux, Firefox is a dog, but noscript is just too good to browse without. (At least Firefox is a universal binary now). Noscript disables all javascript by default and allows you to easily turn it back on on a server by server basis. Adblock is good, but lots of browsers do that now. noscript seems to be unique.**

Here is a link to NoScript.

Most media sites seems to be programmed by horned devils these days. There must be seven scritps running per page. Frankly even our own sites have too many (2) javascripts running. Frankly 90% of these scripts are useful to the people who wrote them but no use to the visitor. They slow down page loads but even worse they cripple the visitors computer, causing CPU loads to spike for minutes at a time. Even my dual processor G5 2.5 GHz regularly shows processor load of 30% to 80% just browsing with Safari or Firefox.

But turning off all javascript all the time isn’t a very good option for somebody who uses productivity sites, like our project management system or Statcounter or our current photo solution.

I had never realised there was a tool out there to allow the user to selectively allow scripts for certain sites and turn them off for all other sites.

Even more astonishing than ScriptBlock’s script blocking capabilities is its ability to block flash. With just a simple checkmark all flash is gone from Firefox unless you click on it:

No-More-Flash-Os-X

All past flash blockers I’ve looked at for Firefox have been buggy and top heavy.

Lightweight Flash blocking in Firefox at last!!!

Safari

If you are looking for lightweight flash blocking in Safari, look no further than SafariBlock. If anything Flash is even more pernicious in Safari than in Firefox as Flash well and truly cripples Safari. A single Flash page lurking somewhere in a background tab and your computer is brought to its knees, difficult to even switch between tabs to find the offending animation.

Safari-Block-Flash

Flash in Safari gone as well.

Yes, I did donate. And if you hate Flash, you should too.

* Frankly I don’t find Omnniweb as fast as that nor Firefox as slow as that. But this test was performed with just a single page open so it doesn’t really reflect real world browsing. At lesat not for me. I rarely have less than ten tabs open.

**I don’t agree with the poster about Firefox. The web development extensions are a godsend. But for speed reasons, Safari has become my default browser. I have keyboard shortcuts to switch back and forth between the two browsers and stay on the same page.

I’m glad you asked! Cutline has been constructed so that images that do not have classes applied to them will still be styled. In fact, they’ll receive the same styling as any image that receives the right class, meaning that the image will be right-aligned with a frame. Oh, and text will wrap around the image, just like it does here. See? You don’t even have to go out of your way to be fancy with Cutline, and that’s how we like it.
Update: As of September 28th, 2006, Cutline has been revised so that unstyled images no longer receive default styling. This is a move that I hated to make on many fronts, but I also realize that it’s just really inconvenient to have every image styled by default.

It’s not that tough to add a class to an image tag however. I much prefer my system built on wrapping the image in an h5 tag, and styling the h5. Here’s an example.

Anne

Why? This way you can add centred captions to your image.

Syntax is h5 > a href > img > close a href > br > text > close h5.

CSS for the above is:

div.entry h5 {font-size: 10px; font-weight: normal;
margin: 0; padding: 0; margin-left: 4px; text-align: center; clear: both;}

h5 img {}

div.entry h5 a, div.entry h5 a:visited, div.entry h5 a:hover
{text-decoration: none; color: black;}

Highly recommended.

*Unlike most people, I actually really dislike this theme and find it quite primitive. I suppose that makes it a better starting point for somebody wishing to build something more sophisticated.

The guy over at SiliconCloud.com which is just a two-month old weblog went through Jakob Nielsen’s old lists and a couple of other lists floating around out there and chose twelve items which web designers/owners are still doing.

Here’s just one example: Forms.

From Silicon Cloud’s 12 Ways to Irritate Your Visitors:

7) Unnecessary Questions – Ensure that the subscription form to your ezine or newsletter spam contains at least 36 questions more than needed. Why stop at the username and email address when you can ask them for information such as their mailing address and at least 3 different phone numbers (home, work and mobile). By adding other pointless questions such as age, sex, hobbies, religion and inside leg measurement is a sure-fire way to prevent people ordering your product or subscribing to your mailing list.

From Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Web Design Mistakes 2005:

7. Cumbersome Forms

People complained about numerous form-related problems. The basic issue? Forms are used too often on the Web and tend to be too big, featuring too many unnecessary questions and options. In the long run, we need more of an applications metaphor for Internet interaction design. For now, users are confronted by numerous forms and we must make each encounter as smooth as possible. There are five basic guidelines to this end:

• Cut any questions that are not needed. For example, do you really need a salutation (Mr/Ms/Mrs/Miss/etc.)?
• Don’t make fields mandatory unless they truly are.
• Support autofill to the max by avoiding unusual field labels (just use Name, Address, etc.).
• Set the keyboard focus to the first field when the form is displayed. This saves a click.
• Allow flexible input of phone numbers, credit card numbers, and the like. It’s easy to have the computer eliminate characters like parentheses and extra spaces. This is particularly important for elderly users, who tend to suffer when sites require data entry in unfamiliar formats. Why lose orders because a user prefers to enter a credit card number in nicely chunked, four-digit groups rather than an undifferentiated, error-prone blob of sixteen digits?

Forms that violate guidelines for internationalization got dinged by many overseas users. If entering a Canadian postal code generates an error message, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get very little business from Canada.

Frankly, Nielsen’s advice is far better and more detailed.

Anyway our friend Thomas over at Silicon Cloud, then went on to post his own linkbait article to Digg. It took. Far more interesting from an SEO perspective, than the recycled twelve errors is his own account of his Web 2.0 manipulation:

Step 1 was to post the article into the Digg site. This was fairly easy as we already had a Digg account. Once our article was in digg on the diggall list we sat back and watched what happened next. Quite quickly a few people ‘dugg’ the posting and within about 15 minutes the post had 10 diggs and appeared as the next level of popularity in the cloud view. Things were going well. All this was helped by the first comment received on the article which was almost as funny as the article itself. Thanks James.

I have to agree with reader James’s comment – the most annoying current practice on the web is to break long articles up into multiple pages, making it slower to read them and harder to reference them (i.e. over at Silicon Cloud). Why do commercial site owners do this? To increase the number of ad impressions and clickthrus. Strangely it has the opposite effect on me. I will avoid sites which will slow down and attack my browser or make me click through three or five pages (SEOchat.com, anybody?) to read what is a 1000 word standard article.

For those actually interested in usability issues and the various plagues that site owners and web designers unleash on us the hapless users (instant remedy Firefox and AdBlock), here is a list of most of Jakob Nielsen’s top ten no-no lists. I’ve bolded the three that I find most useful and still actual (it includes one from 1997!).

• The ten very worst Web design mistakes of all time
  Summary based on the main elements of the other lists.
• Web design mistakes (1996)
  My first list. Luckily, many of these mistakes have been fixed by now.
• Mistakes of Web Project Management (1997)
• Web design mistakes (1999)
• Web design mistakes (2002)
  With cartoons.
• Web design mistakes (2003)
• Web design mistakes (2005)
• Good deeds in Web design
• Top homepage usability guidelines
• Most violated homepage guidelines

Read Nielsen and weep. The errors of 1996 in large part, persist.

Takeaway lesson: Web 2.0 is doomed to fall to the spammers shortly if the ramparts are not built high. The number of trackback spam and blog spam I get even on uncoy.com is astonishing and a nuisance.

Spammers and cloakers – Web 2.0 has arrived – on your marks, get set, go.

* Thomas Clay is also the creator and owner of Whatbooks.com – another fine example of search engine manipulation – it’s a review site of best selling books only: Tom Clancy, Stephen King, John Grisham, J.K. Rowling – you get the drift. Thomas is holed up in the Cotswolds which is in the south of England. For some reason the Brits are a good deal better at more subtle and long lasting manipulation of search engine results. I attribute to the life-long vow of hypocrisy and dissembling which is British society. Manipulation of the social atmosphere just comes naturally.

review updated 1 June 2007 to cover current services and software status!

This is a comprehensive review of the full version of WebCEO 5.6, a.k.a. the Professional edition. There are two other versions of WebCEO, a Small Business edition and a Free Edition. The distinctions between different WebCEO versions can be found on this page. Basically, the Free Version can’t do much while the Small Business and Professional Edition are almost indistinguishable. The Professional Edition makes creating self-branded reports easier and spiders the anchor text from backlinks.

WebCEO Ad: It’s more or less correct
Check bottom of the page for cost-benefit analysis

Normal price for the Professional version is $389, promotional price (about twice a year) is $249. Normal price for the Small Business Edition is $189, promotional price is $149. The Free Edition is free. Well not really anymore. To keep even the Free Edition up to date and the tools functional, a user has to subscribe to what WebCEO calls Search Engine Pulse updates which run from $149 for 600 days to $30 per month.

Full pricing can be found on this page. The pricing model is a lot more confusing than it needs be.

The promotional versions are promoted at $226 and $186 discount but that includes some SEO certification courses which are not at this point widely recognised as an industry standard. I did the basic courses back in 2004 when it was still in the form of a guidebook and was not surprised or overwhelmed by the content. Aaron Wall’s $80 SEO Book or Brad Cullen’s free email course available at SEOElite.com (just sign up for the trial of SEOElite to get it) 7 Days to Massive Traffic offer more current and advanced strategies than one will find within WebCEO training materials.

I am going to go through the WebCEO toolbox one by one and compare them with the free tools I use and the pay tools I own or have tried.

• Keyword suggestion tool
• Optimisation tool
• SEO Editor
• Submission tool
• Ranking checker
• Link popularity tool
• Auditor
• Uploader
• Monitoring
• Traffic analysis

Skip to History, Pricing or Conclusion.

Keyword Suggestion Tool

My general comment on this tool is that it is a quick way to get a feel for a section of the marketplace and how competitive that section is, but that the tool is unreliable. It offers some great information – number of searches per day, KEI, pages with keyword (Google), pages with the keyword in title (Google), number of external links to the first ranked page (Google), number of external links to the second ranked page (Google), Alexa traffic rank for page 1 and page 2, the top two bid values for Overture and the Google page rank of the first two pages.

Given the poor quality of Google’s revealed external links, it is a pity that the external links come from Google and not Yahoo. It’s also a pity to only have access to these indicators for the first two sites, as my personal experience is that there can be a sharp drop off in level of competition right after the first two sites. From the WebCEO Keyword Competition Analysis, you’d never know. There is another tab – View Competitors – which gives the user the top 10 Google results with Page Rank. SEOChat offers the same thing for free but SEOChat is so overburdened with ads and other nonsense it is a pleasure to have the Google results with PR in a clean interface. For some reason the WebCEO View Competition Google results did not always return Page Rank and I was obliged to reload the results a couple of times. I haven’t had that problem with SEOChat’s PR search.

A more serious concern with the WebCEO Keywords Tool is the quality of sample returned. I work in local and niche markets primarily and the results returned from the WebCEO find keywords function were less than adequate. To begin with, often Daily Word Searches are simply indicated as less than 10. WordTracker and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) return exact counts down to 1 or 2/day. There is a big difference between 1 search/day and 10 searches/day. On the other hand, for high volume terms, WebCEO returns a large list far faster than either WordTracker and Overture tool, along with a quite useful preliminary competition analysis. On my sample real estate term, WebCEO returned about 16 suggestions in comparison to about 60 suggestions from the Overture tool. While WebCEO argue that they are saving you the $240/year for WordTracker – this is simply not true. Any serious SEO will be using WordTracker and Overture tools whether they own WebCEO or not.

Personally, I find the Digital Point side by side version of WordTracker free and Overture Keyword Suggestion tool to be faster and more useful than any of the above. The Google suggest tool which displays terms in order of frequency of search in Google can be very useful as well. While not quantified, these are suggestions based on real Google searches and not hypothetical data from metasearch engines.

For quick analysis of competition, I also have been using Jim Morris’s Nichebot keyword analysis. Nichebot offers the top fifteen Google SERPs with Page Rank and backlinks (Google). But Nichebot’s keyword analysis has been broken for the last four days. Forget about NicheBot at this point.

Normally for more in depth analysis I use WeBuildPages Top Ten Google Analysis(there are about three versions on their site) which has the advantage of using Yahoo! for backlinks – but all of them are broken as well. After much trouble this weekend – I have a few projects active at the keyword stage right now – I finally found that a combination of the SEOChat PR search tool and WeBuildPages Cool SEO Tool gave me an even better idea of the level of competition on a given keyphrase if with a little less convenience than the currently broken all-in-one tools.

This weekend emergency search for alternative to Nichebot does underscore a significant advantage of WebCEO. It isn’t a free online tool that breaks. It is a piece of commercial software on your desktop which is updated regularly and should always work (apart from a day or two of waiting for the update in the case of a major API shift at Yahoo or Google).

Optimisation tool

The Optimisation tool I found to be very slow and not to give results which were particularly useful to me. I’m tired of hearing about stop words in my title tags – I’m going to include them whether WebCEO likes or not. I’ve already moved all the javascript that I can to external files. And no, I’m not going to start in on alt text stuffing at this point either.

On the other hand, in the Professional Edition, WebCEO will give the same silly stats for one’s top four competitors for one’s keyphrase which could be useful for detecting invisible and tiny text on their websites and then reporting them to Google or Yahoo! for spamming the engines. It also does a nice text of your robots.txt file to make sure one hasn’t inadvertently made an error here which will prevent Google from spidering one’s site. There all kinds of keyword density stats offered for those who like them.

I don’t think I would use the Optimisation Tool very often. My client’s pages are written by people for people using the natural and justified amount of keyword repetition. The real game at this point as all the Threadwatch SEO crowd knows is in off-page factors – at least for Google. This keyword density analysis might be more useful for the automatic page generating crowd to check up on their own bots.

I would find this tool more useful with a clearer focus on automatically detecting illegal actitivities in the top ten of the SERPs for a given keyword.

SEO Editor

The SEO editor is absolutely fantastic. It gives you immediate access to the title tag, useful metatags like description and keywords, all of the heading tags on your pages, the alt tags (offering you a chance to quickly add text), every link on your pages. It even has a find and replace function.

There are two caveats however. It works on complete html documents. Most of my new websites are either developed within a CMS or use SSI heavily. There are not many complete html documents left for me to use this otherwise outstanding SEO editor on. I’ve tried it on my SSI stubs (which do have metatags for keywords and description and unfortunately the editor chokes without the doctype, body and html tags which are safely stored away in includes. For anybody who does write complete HTML pages, the built-in editor is a godsend for SEO. Hélas, I don’t think there are many such people left among the Threadwatch crowd.

The built-in SEO editor is a very good idea, whose time has passed. Happily enough its full-functionality is available in the free edition – whose users are those most likely to be working with conventional websites stored locally.

The second issue is that the editor also changes the line endings from Unix format to Windows format. As my primary web development machine is a Mac under OS X (Unix) and our servers are LAMP (Linux), changing line endings is a major nuisance.

Submisssion Tool

The Submission Tool is divided into two parts – Auto Submission for Search Engines and Manual Submission for Directories.

The Submission Tool is a solution in search of a problem. Websites are not launched (or shouldn’t be) any longer by submitting them to the search engines. They are launched by including a link to the new website in an existing frequently spidered site (a weblog for instance).

The manual submission tool for directories could be very useful if it held set key directory submission components readily formatted for each directory and if the list of directories were far more comprehensive. There are only nine non-regional directories (when I say regional I mean regional – German-language AllesKalr, French Voila, Indian Indiaranking, Polish Onet, Welsh Dairectory) in the list – DMOZ, Galaxy, Gimpsy, Jayde, Joe Ant, skaffe, wow, Yahoo, Zeal.

Apart from the regional directories, the paragraph above contains all the useful material from the Submission Tool – direct links to the directories’ own submission guidelines. If there were far more directories listed and if the submission pointers for each directory could be more comprehensive, including more end user information on things like the free inclusion options, this could be a very useful tool.

On the other hand, given the recent devaluation of directory links, perhaps it would be best to stick to these nine general directories and the regional directories. But there are some fine smaller directories with strict submission standards like SiteReviewer.net.

Ranking Checker

I’ve been hard on the last couple of tools. But now we come to the crown jewel of the WebCEO suite – the WebCEO ranking checker. No one and I mean no one produces such pretty ranking reports as WebCEO. With the Professional Editions, these reports can be customised in one’s own company name with logo at the top and include unlimited keywords. The Free edition is limited to checking a not very useful 5 keywords at a time but is otherwise the same as the Pros get.

Rankings can be checked historically against previous, first and best. Flipping between the different results is very quick. Custom subsets of results can be created. Ranking can be scheduled on a daily, weekly or montly basis. Different subsets could be scheduled which might make the 5 terms limit in the free edition more bearable as well as avoid a SE IP ban for too many requests in a set period.

WebCEO also includes the widest set of search engines I’ve ever seen from a ranking tool. As well as the dozens of local Google, Yahoo and MSN local in all of their local, language and world-wide iterations (ie. Canada English worldwide, Canada English from Canada, Canada French worldwide, Canada French from Canada) – there are another 200 regional search engines all up-to-date. There are seven German-language search engines included. This diversity is absolutely fantastic as some regional search engines are big players in their home market. In the Canadian market an example of a very strong regional engine was Sympatico until it became part of MSN and shares very similar results (previously Sympatico was a unique combination of Yahoo! and Google results).

An incredible bargain comes again from Digital Point which has quite a complete online ranking checker available for free (donations accepted). While not up to the historical detail of WebCEO, all the basics are there. I used to worry that the free ranking checker at Digital Point would collapse or disappear but it’s been in place for years now and only improved with time. One advantage to the online ranking checker is that your IP won’t be banned nor does it occupy processor cycles on your computer while checking rankings.

Link popularity tool

I really liked this tool. Similar to the Ranking reports, the Link popularity reports are quite beautiful.

The link popularity tool does track historically. It gives one very quick filters that one can use on the data once collected (excluding one’s own domains for instance for better legibility). While the data collected is not as comprehensive as that of industry standard SEOElite (no PR or Alexa ranking of incoming sites), the WebCEO ranking tool is much easier to use and understand than SEOElite. The overview of what links show up in which search engine’s backlinks command is excellent and unique (the backlinks command from Yahoo! and MSN are very competitive these days).

Reports from this tool, like for the Ranking Tool, are very easy to email and excellent for client consumption.

In the professional edition, WebCEO will cough up the anchor text for each link and give some nice charts on frequency of keyphrases.

In terms of the competition, SEOElite is stiffly priced at $167 – I recommend looking around for a deal: a few marketers offer 25% or more off. For those on a budget, Aaron Wall has done the SEO community a great favour by buying and releasing as freeware his Back Link Analyzer. Personally I found the presentation and reliability of the WebCEO Link Popularity Tool much higher (although also a nominal beta). Aaron’s tool runs much faster though. Like Aaron’s Back Link Analyzer, SEOElite is also quite buggy (not true anymore in version SEOelite version 4 – go ahead and try boldly). The overpriced and clunky and partially SE banned, Optilink doesn’t get a look in here anymore. In terms of online tools, there is an excellent free backlink checker at Linkvendor which will also supply anchor text. But Linkvendor will not keep historical data or trends.

Auditor

The WebCEO auditor is a tool for checking your website for problems. The WebCEO auditor is incredibly thorough. It checks for:

• broken links and anchors
• missing images
• slow pages
• missing metatags
• missing alt, height and width tags on images
• stale content
• redirect status

The auditor will work across all editions, although the Free version is limited to just 30 pages of one’s site. Usually that is enough to catch onto any major and pernicious errors. For 30 or 50 pages at a time, the Auditor is very quick. In the unlimited version, the Auditor can take a long time. One of my websites coughed up 5000 objects and ties the WebCEO auditor down for half an hour. Switching projects to view a full report for a large site takes a few minutes which is just too slow.

While the report produced for the auditor is comprehensive and comes in two versions – CEO and Webmaster – it could be better conceived for efficiency. I don’t particularly like working with them.

One can get better value out of the WebCEO auditor by using it as the last tool in a comprehensive website review (there will be far fewer errors and much more manageable reports). I would recommend starting with a thorough going over of links with Tilman Hausherr’s incomparable Xenu Link Sleuth. Xenu Link Sleuth will check your site faster than anything else out there (it will run up to 80 concurrent threads on your site) and produces customisable and easily readable reports like lightning. It will even produce quite useful sitemaps. Run Xenu Link Sleuth (tutorial) again and again until there are no more broken links and redirects left.

After Xenu Link Sleuth, I recommend running CSE HTML Validator Lite on your whole site (link direct to downloadable free version). It’s much faster than the page by page official online W3C and WDG HTML Validators. There is a professional edition of CSE available ($129) as well which I have demo’d but didn’t like as well as the free edition, as it is not as intuitive to use and most of the vaunted additional problems found were design decisions and not actual errors.

After a thorough audit with these two tools, WebCEO auditor can very usefully provide the final quality assurance and troublecheck. Considering how difficult and time-consuming, it is to audit websites by hand all three of these tools are a great blessing and huge timesavers. Kudos to WebCEO for providing an SEO sensitive auditor.

Uploader

The WebCEO uploader is a very good barebones FTP client. It works quite brilliantly with a dual pane window. The Uploader will also allow you to directly edit any page on your server locally with immediate save to server.

I didn’t have a Windows FTP client (the ThinkPad is a recent addition) and am very happy with the one I have in WebCEO. The Uploader is fully functional in all editions.

Very nice inclusion.

Monitoring

The monitoring service

The basics are free (http every two hours). Additional services (more frequent monitoring) become very expensive. I haven’t used this service. In principle, monitoring is a nice addition to the package.

Basic uptime monitoring is available for free from various online services. The paid versions are considerably less expensive than the WebCEO monitoring. Two minute monitoring which would cost $50/month per website with WebCEO can be had for $10/month per website elsewhere. I can only recommend using the free service from WebCEO if you are already using WebCEO.

Traffic Analyis

I haven’t used the WebCEO version. I am a happy user of Statcounter . For $29/month I can have all of my projects in a single interface with 15 million page views and a log of 25,000 hits divided equitably between my projects giving me detailed stats on the latest visitor trends (now free for 500 hits per website – a great deal – May 2007).

Statcounter also offers a client login interface where the client can monitor his or her own project. I also keep server logs with AWstats which gives me adequate long term statistics.

To use the Hitlens service would cost my clients hundreds of dollars per month. More controversially, I’ve also signed up some of my clients for Google Analytics so we will have more and better stats for free. For now Google Analytics is too slow to respond to be worth the trouble of consulting the stats there but I expect this will improve.

Glancing over the Hitlens demo project, I don’t feel the presentation in Hitlens lives up to the rest of the WebCEO suite.

History

I’ve been using WebCEO since March 2004. I’ve owned the Small Business Version for a short period and the StartUp edition for the rest of the time. I’ve gone through versions 4, then 5 and now 5.6.

One of the reasons I didn’t make it a mainstay in the ealier iterations was that WebCEO is very slow under Virtual PC. But for the ranking checker the speed was liveable with my dual processor G4.

The real reason I decided not to continue to use WebCEO is that like lotso from SearchGuild in each of the major upgrades, the WebCEO managed to lose my data version. What is worse is that it was more or less deliberate policy.

Well frankly, I don’t care if the two databases are not compatible. It’s up to the engineers to come up with a transitioning program to rescue our data and reformat to be compatible with the new version. And it doesn’t matter if that delays rollout on the new version for a month or two or three. But instead, I remember the version 4 being brutally cutoff (no more functionality) and left with the option of hand entering all my websites again with all of their keywords. And the total loss of my historical tracking data. Just when I was settled in as a happy WebCEO 4 user in June of 2004 I received this notice:

Web CEO 4 will stop functioning on Friday, June 11 because it is not compatible with version 5. We will spend the whole Friday and weekend completing the transfer of information to the Web CEO 5 Datacenter. Therefore you will have to save your reports and projects before June 11 or they will be lost.

Which led to the following web page:

1. You CANNOT use Web CEO 4 and Web CEO 5 together on the same computer. The new version and the old version are incompatible. Moreover, as soon as version 5 is released, version 4 stops working, and we will not support it any more.

2. In version 5, we have changed the database format used for saving your reports history. The new database format is more reliable and safe, but unfortunately is INCOMPATIBLE with the database format used in version 4. So, you must SAVE your previous reports before installing Web CEO 5, as they will be lost after the upgrade.

But in the end, I did go to the trouble of reentering my principal clients’ data and subsequently decided to take advantage of the Celebrating Version 5 special and upgraded to Small Business Edition in August of 2004.

Imagine my dismay when the Canadian search results were very different for a couple of weeks from the actual SERPs. The problem existed with both Yahoo! and Sympatico. I couldn’t send the (promised) regular reports to my clients because they were wrong. After a few weeks waiting for a fix, I finally gave up on the WebCEO Ranking Checker which was my primary reason for upgrading to SmallBiz and requested a refund.

In fairness, WebCEO were very kind and courteous throughout the whole process of persistent errors and refund. Support angels is a fair description of Marina, Julia, Joanne and the other angels over in the Ukraine.

Recently I bought a ThinkPad for my web business as Virtual PC is just no use at all on a single processor (in my case a Powerbook). Which persuaded me to give WebCEO another whirl. It behaves much better on a well powered PC (PIII 900) than it ever did under Virtual PC.

I did lose my database once more in all of this testing. I lost about two weeks of data including lots of set up for each of my clients. My research in the help files revealed that there is a special database backing up program installed with WebCEO. Therein the user is sternly warned that he or she should regularly back up his or her database if there is important information involved.

I don’t know who the engineer with the careless and arrogant attitude towards users’ data is, but whoever he is, he should be fired immediately for letting down the entire WebCEO project and all the angels. Given my past tribulations with transitioning between versions, to lose a database again is totally unacceptable. The WebCEO database should be backed up automatically by the program every time it is started and every time it is shut down. Five or six historical versions should automatically be kept on the hard drive if necessary. Reversion to the previous save should happen automatically with a single notification.

Had I lost my database at the beginning of this testing process I don’t think I would have bothered with the review but it happened towards the end.

The sanctity of users’ data is issue number one and feature number one for any piece of software. WebCEO continues to fail this test. I would like to see them address data security in the next upgrade. I would also like to see a major upgrade take place without any need for users to reenter their hard-earned data.

Pricing Policy

The pricing policy and packaging around WebCEO are ludicrous. The page on pricing is necessarily four screens long to cover all of the possible variations – with training, without training, different versions.

Particularly obnoxious right now is that this $249 to $479 software package (depending on what prices one counts for the full Professional Edition with training) comes with only 90 days of updates to the Search Engine Pulse service. Effectively that means that your three hundred to four hundred dollar purchase dies in three months.

To keep using it, you have to spring $99 for 300 days or $149 for 600 days of Search Engine Pulse. This is totally unacceptable. A package this expensive should come with at least a year of free support.

Frankly, the Small Business Edition should be done away with and a year’s worth of search engine updates should come free with the Professional Edition. The price should be about $200. And all of the hype around the training should be dropped to promote a serious SEO tool.

Conclusion

So my conclusion is that there are some nice tools here. I would use the Keyword Suggestion Tool (as one of several options), the Ranking checker, the Link Popularity Tool, the Auditor and the Uploader. I would put a value on these services as separates as follows:

But there must be more respect for the integrity of users data. I would also like to see the pricing and search engine update issues resolved to a far more transparent (honest) model.

This review was the wining entry in the Threadwatch November 2005 contest for best WebCEO review. The contest was judged by Nick W.

For another in-depth and honest review, see Cornwall’s WebCEO review from the same contest.

You can find another straight WebCEO review over at Toni Allen.

Now this is a curious business model. Buy one of the best web anlytics software suites in the world. Repackage it and release it for free on your own servers.

I checked the terms of service. They don’t seem to suggest that Google is free to use their data for their own analysis but I haven’t looked carefully enough – I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.

I am very happy about this as I had been very unhappy with my stats package from my existing host and the otherwise excellent statcounter (paid version) doesn’t give good historical analysis (the last week or ten days are very well covered on the other hand).

As it is javascript-based, I suspect Google web analysis won’t help with spiders either.

For server side stats, we are recommending AWstats. Much more complete than Webalizer in terms of referral and far ahead of Analog, the principal free competition. Client side stats aren’t worth considering as downloading server logs is just not efficient.

As the departed Rudl used to say – automate everything you can!

This turmoil has focused my attention very clearly on Google and things which might help with Google ranking and indexing. One of those is Google Sitemaps.

For the past several months, Google have offered webmasters and siteowners a sitemap system where you tell them what web pages to scan yourself. You do this by generating an XML sitemap and uploading it to your website in the root directory (ie. http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.gz).

Many webmasters have found significant improvement in the indexing of their site by Google once they submitted their sitemap.

Google offers their own tool, a script in Python which will scan your directories and create a sitemap. There are several problems with Google’s tool:

1. It is difficult to install.
2. It is difficult to configure (command-line).
3. It scans your website locally.

There are several problems with local scans. First, there may be many files on your server that you do not want to share with the world (that are otherwise not linked on the web). Second, it doesn’t work for dynamic sites (which do not have static .html and .htm files).

So the logical thing to do is to look for an alternative. There are three choices:

1. ready-made online services
2. programs to install on your own computer
3. programs to install on your web server

There are any number of online services, most of which are scams to get innocent webmasters to create links back to their own domain (it works by forcing you to have a graphic and a link from your homepage – or in the worst case – every page of your site). None of them offer enough configuration parameters to make them a useful tool.

There are lots of pay tools out there, some of which are better than others. But Google sitemap software will probably be like link checking – the best software is simple and free. Fortunately there are already two good free options out there, very different one from the other.

One is a PHP tool called phpSitemapNG. It is much better than the name sounds. It can be installed and configured in about five minutes (very good for a PHP script) and the installation instructions are very detailed and useful. phpSitemapNG offers a simple but useful configuration interface. A remote script has two benefits. First, it doesn’t tie up one’s own computer or internet connection to run the progam. Second, a remote program can be scheduled to run automatically via a cron job (beyond the scope of this article).

There are unfortunately a number of problems with phpSitemapNG which may or may not affect one’s use of it. The URL filter does not seem to recognise wildcards. The edit interface has trouble with websites of 1000 pages and more. These problems apply to my own use unfortunately where I need both wildcards and have more than a 1000 pages to manage.

The second tool is called GSiteCrawler- written by a certain Johannes Mueller who notes straightforwardly:

When I found out about the Google Sitemaps (www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps, in beta), I needed a generator for my Websites. Seeing that there were no Windows-Based generators available (at the time ;)), I created my own.

And he did a very good job. The tabbed interface of GSiteCrawler is extremly elegant and the program runs very quickly. Complicated configuration options are easy to manage. Groups of files can be changed in batch mode.

At the end of its run, GSiteCrawler will even upload the finished sitemap automatically.

There are still two reasons to prefer phpSitemapNG.

1. It can run automatically and subsequently ignored once configured.
2. You don’t have a Windows computer.

For somebody with larger sites not easily handled by phpSitemapNG and who uses Windows anyway, I would recommend giving GSiteCrawler a try. GSiteCrawler is also easier for non-technical people to manage. For smaller sites which are updated frequently I would recommend taking the trouble to setup phpSitemapNG. phpSitemampNG should improve rapidly as the source code is available as GPL and it is constantly updated.

Now is the time to put up a sitemap. I had not bothered with Google Sitemaps right away as there were no evidence if they helped or not. Now that evidence exists. Moreover, the early Google sitemap software was not very good. Now there are two very good and free tools in GSiteCrawler and phpSitemapNG.