End of year search engine statistics

Internet traffic

It's the 31st of Dec 2007! 11 hours to go.

We thought we'd release our Internet traffic results for this year – (between you and me) that’s only one month of traffic, since we launched in Dec.

We are all pretty impressed with the internet traffic we’ve been able to get in just one month. On the other hand, we have all been working very hard on getting Internet traffic going so our clients get results!

Our main search engine www.clickfind.com.au got the most results with 3,013 unique visitors up till 31 Dec 12:20PM, which resulted in 11,002 page views. (view Search Engine Traffic Report for clickfind for more information)

Our two othergreat sites dedicated to Bartercard and BBX received understandably less traffic, but still nothing to complain about;

http://bartercard.clickfind.com.au got 276 unique visitors and 4,661 pageviews. When comparing the traffic to our main site, it appears that Bartercard clients view more pages. (view Search Engine Traffic Report for Bartercard Businesses for more info from Google Analytics)

http://bbx.clickfind.com.au got 27 unique visitors and 273 pageviews. We’re extremely happy with these online marketing results, we can thank our internal team and the team at www.pacificfox.com.au (Brisbane Website Design agency). (view Search Engine Traffic Report for BBX businesses for more details)

We’re looking forward to a new and exciting 2008! And double our list of 4,060 Australian businesses, 10,827 products and 1,612 services.
Why not add your business to our Australian Search Engine and receive some of that traffic today!

Happy New Year Australia! Let it be a peaceful one!

Forum to discuss Australian Search Engines

We've just created a community on http://www.orkut.com/ on which we can discuss everything related to Australian Search Engines. It's open to everyone, and any Australian Search Engine can be discussed.

http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=45774806&refresh=1

--- Orkut BTW is yet another website owned by Google, its got a bit of a weird name, but I like the interface and the way things work...

Anchor text optimization

We've just launched some new advanced SEO functionality on our Australian Search Engine, and it's quite exciting.

We've been working together with some SEO experts and have taken some ideas on board, one of them being "Anchor text optimization".

When we designed clickfind we decided to go for a very controlled environment and look and feel - making all the pages look the same, so that information will only be the deciding factor for users.

A disadvantage of this is that users are not able to control the text that links to their website. Anchor text plays an important part in SEO, and we’ve therefore implemented some advanced functionality that allows the user to specify up to 3 words they want to use for the anchor link text.

To make sure it does not get abused, we will monitor its usage and have limited the words to a maximum of 3.

Existing users of clickfind will find this functionality under
- My account
- Business listing
- Advanced SEO
- Anchor link text

Any questions or suggestions, please let us know ;-)

Online Marketing

In the past few weeks we’ve been really stepping up our marketing plans for the new Australian Business Directory and Search Engine.
One of the campaigns we we’re running was with http://www.adclicks.com.au which is owned by http://www.permissioncorp.com/

Please note: This blog entry is to share our experience with them. Your experience with them could be different than ours.

This online marketing campaign is just one of many, we also run Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, Yahoo Search Engine Marketing and many more…

We closely monitor all of our marketing campaigns with Google Analytics to see what results we are getting.

We started getting suspicious of Adclicks when their web statistics showed close to 7000 clicks. A click is obviously someone opening our site, that someone can be anybody, and they can open the site many times. We realize this and they acknowledge this, they’re saying that this is why are so cheap. We have no problems with this, however, when we show only 400 or 500 actual clicks hitting the site instead of the close to 7000 they are reporting, we start to get suspicious!

We created some weird campaigns like “DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD” and “Do not click here!” to do some testing. Funny enough these campaigns had more than 4 views and a couple of hits within a second of creating them. It just doesn’t make any sense. When we ask for an explanation, we get to hear about Bounce Rates and other stuff, but a bounce is someone actually hitting the page and creating an entry in the web statistics, which is not the case!

We tried to get our money back from these people. Normally there’d be no need to claim the money back, but their lowest entry campaigns cost quite a bit, so we gave it a go anyway. No luck. Eventually we gave up and are just running the campaigns to the end. Traffic from them has shown no increase and is still WAY different from what they are showing.

More than 7000 clicks, not one sale, and no searches performed either, this was money wasted, and much better spend on a charity…

Hackers/crackers

It seems some hackers/crackers/spammers (whatever you want to call them) have been scanning our server and trying to find some holes.

Luckily our system detects these requests and writes a detailed report. We've contacted the perpetrator at revisedcode@revisedcode.com and are waiting for a response to see if he/she has a good argument for trying to attack our Australian Search Engine.

Some of the URLs scanned were:
http://209.97.223.207:80/forums/chat/messagesL.php3
http://209.97.223.207:80/phpMyChat-0.14.3/chat/messagesL.php3
http://209.97.223.207:80/phpMyChat/chat/messagesL.php3
http://209.97.223.207:80/chatroom/chat/messagesL.php3
http://209.97.223.207:80/chat/messagesL.php3
http://209.97.223.207:80/mails/README
http://209.97.223.207:80/horde-3.0.9/README
……

There plenty more entries, I can only assume they are looking for somewhere to SPAM. This is one of the reasons why we only allow users to contact our clients when they have a valid account.

The offending party is host.revisedcode.com or http://www.revisedcode.com/

Then there were also entries for the following;
http://209.97.223.207:80/stats/awstats.pl
http://209.97.223.207:80/cgi-bin/stats/awstats.pl
http://209.97.223.207:80/scgi-bin/awstats/awstats.pl
……

I can only imagine that’s to find a hole on the server.
The offending party is host.jdssimulated.com which is very odd indeed.
We’ve emailed the offending party at jobs@jdssimulated.com

And last but not least, someone trying to flood the server with countless requests, lucky for us anyone making countless requests one after the other gets denied access.

Possible leech attack from IP address: 211.215.134.172
Date and time: Dec 26, 2007 1:18 PM
Page requested: http://www.clickfind.com.au/business/listing.cfm?businessIdentity=xxxxx Number of requests made to this page: 51
First request made at: Dec 26, 2007 1:17 PM
Last request made at: Dec 26, 2007 1:18 PM
Average time between requests: 1.47058823529 seconds
ReverseDNS: 211.215.134.172

Made it back safely

We all made it back safely. The ride was excellent!

Thanks to those who donated generously!

And if you haven't donated yet, now is your chance http://www.everydayhero.com.au/australian_search_engine

Charity fund raiser for Surf Lifesaving

We're going to hop on the push bike this year and do a full 330 K from Eatons Hill to Maryborough!

We're raising money through the following link
http://www.everydayhero.com.au/australian_search_engine

Please dig deep to sponsor us. It only takes a few seconds.

Spread the word and send to as many people as possible.

Thank you very much.

Sponsors of this event are Australian Search Engine www.clickfind.com.au and Executive Results Boot Camps

Photo of the route

Following is a link to a photo of the route

We plan to do 160K the first day and 160K the next, but that might be wishful thinking ;-) Either way, we'll have to do it in 3 days, as we've got xmas parties to attend!

See route

Departure

FYI: We'll be leaving on Saturday the 22nd 5:30AM

Note: at www.clickfind.com.au we'll also donate 50% of the subscription fee to Surf Lifesavers, that could be up to $120 per subscription we will donate! This will run till the end of Dec. 2007

You can list your business for as low as $19.95 - 100% of monthly subscriptions will go to Surf Lifesavers.