Charlie Cook's MArketing for Success Insider's Club

Search Engines

Marketing or Intrusive Snooping?

By Charlie Cook   |   December 17, 2004

Yahoo is now using something called “Web Beacons” to track Yahoo Group users around the net and see what you’re doing and where you are going similar to cookies. Yahoo is recording every website and every group you visit.

Take a look at their updated privacy statement : http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy About half-way down the page, in the section on cookies, you will see a link that says web beacons. Click on the phrase web beacons. That will bring you to a paragraph entitled” Outside the Yahoo Network.” In this section you’ll see a little “click here to opt out” link that will let you “opt-out” of their new method of snooping. Once you have clicked that link, you are exempted. Notice the” Success” message on the top of the next page. Be careful because on that page there is a “Cancel Opt-out” button that, if clicked, will *undo** the opt-out.

One note: before doing the above, make sure you LOG IN to Yahoo with your Yahoo account name. Otherwise, it may not take effect. – Contributed by Lorraine Carol

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More On Alexa Rankings

By Charlie Cook   |   December 10, 2004

Alexa rankings are really just a snapshot — the data they collect is only from people who have downloaded the Alexa toolbar. As they travel the web and visit sites… the toolbar collects the data and uses it for the Alexa rankings. I have a client that was successfully able to improve his Alexa rankings drastically just by having everyone in his company install the toolbar at work and at home, have all his relatives install it, and set his site as the home page. He ended up with a great Alexa ranking.

Discovering that they ‘combine’ sites and data they think is similar really surprises me… and coupled with the fact that their stats only represent Alexa toolbar users – pretty much nails the coffin lid shut on any usefulness this has in my opinion. Nice to have a good ranking if you are marketing your site as a portal, or are looking to sell the site — but other than that — not sure it’s worth even paying attention to. In fact, I only go there and look when somebody asks me about it.- Tracy Sabattis, Mannix Marketing, Inc.

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Alexa Site Rankings URL Oddness

By Charlie Cook   |   December 10, 2004

Many web site owners check Alexa to see how their and their competitors site ranks. Until now I thought it provided valid information. Now I’m not so sure.

This past year when I’ve gone to Alexa to check the improving ranking of MarketingForSuccess I’ve noticed the information for my site listed under “todaysinspiration.com” a site I have no affiliation with and which in fact doesn’t even exist yet. After numerous inquires I got the following response from Alexa.

“When Alexa crawls the Web, it merges together sites which we think have the same content. When we merge two or more sites, we combine their traffic to form one ranking and list them under the domain with the most traffic. With tens of millions of domains on the Internet, our automated procedures for determining which hosts are serving the same content may sometimes be incorrect and/or out-of-date due to ownership or content changes. We will separate the sites during our next update of the service. ”

If site rankings represent combined information what’s the validity of Alexa’s rankings?

– Charlie Cook

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