I Just Heard Moves

Well I've bitten the bullet and moved http://www.ijustheard.com to the same server as http://ectopia.us in the hope that it will cope better than my server at the load.

It seems my half gig importing of the site caused problems though as I've just been slapped on the wrist and told not to import it again. When I did the import the first time Apache came back with a proxy error, so I did it again and got the same error but the content all seems to be there. I think it was the repeated attempt that irritated them. For which I can't blame them and have apologised.

Now to see if the traffic builds again as it did before Christmas.

Experiment Update

Aaron Stanton helped remind me that I hadn't updated on the I Just Heard experiment lately, here's a current dump of how its going.

If you put I Just Heard followed by pretty much anything else into yahoo search then it comes up as the #1 result. On Google its maintaining its position but doesn't have quite the same coverage.

Though having said that, the actual queries that get to the site are far more to do with the content than they are about the site. Which is a good thing. There's about a thousand page impressions a day or so at the moment but you can discount about 20% of those as being from sites that want to get on your stats page (casinos and adult contact sites mostly). I Just Heard doesn't have a stats page so it isn't harmed by them, though the server was being killed by them hitting the monthly pages until I reduced the result from the whole month to just one day.

The advert which is on most pages did enhance the google result for them and for the search terms that they wanted but that's one advert that's on almost all pages.

The major sponsor I have, who's a client already, are getting value on their site because they get a related news item on their main page. There's a reasonable rate of click through happening from that though.

It is proving the robustness of Zope and CoreBlog though, there's over 65,000 stories on the site now. I have to periodically reindex the Catalogue so the search works but I doubt anyone but me actually uses it to search its own content.

The Google Adsense revenue is climbing but I'll never be rich on 25 cents a day. The Amazon search I added is getting used but no product selling as yet, its been about ten days. From the pattern it doesn't look as if there really will be, I was surprised the Search got used at all.

SEO and I Just Heard

You might have cottoned on to the current experiment I'm having with improving search results for particular searches and the I Just Heard site in that my first aim was to get the phrase I Just Heard to the top of the list in a reasonable amount of time and without spending money or considerable effort.

So, to get it on the three majors Google, Yahoo and MSN took around 6 weeks to two months, with Google holding out the longest as there was a site with lots of old links holding it back.

Well that was fine. The next stage was to see if we could leverage the inward links that I Just Heard had garnered for another group of words, an advert say.

Just to emphasise, this is done completely with content, there's no duplication of content (other than what the news engines duplicate), no farming of links other than notifying the 12 major blogging aggregators and the site is useable and useful in and of itself.

Ok, that said, 'I' has a client that has some holiday cottages for rent in the Loire valley and they had the immense problem of getting noticed in what is a sea of similar sites with similar language. 'I' had done a good job with the copy there was sufficient difference to pick up what could be picked up but I also thought it made an excellent subject for the I Just Heard experiment and so offered to host for no cost the advert on all the I Just Heard pages.

Up until this week nothing seemed to be happening, there was some increase up the page rank from being listed by one of the holiday agencies but Google at least didn't seem to be picking up my links.

Then I changed the advert copy just a little and added the URL of the site in plain text. I did the link: search today and finally Google had picked up the link and showed I Just Heard. Then I did a straight forward search 'loire cottage' and it came up #4 in Google (life being what it is its now #6). That was very interesting.

What became even more interesting was when I tried Yahoo. Search for 'cottage loire valley' picked up her client's site as the #1 result. Scratching my autistic itch and searching for 'cottages loire valley' returned the site as #4 in the list and then making that same itch bleed I tried 'cottages in loire valley' and the site was nowhere to be seen.

There's a bunch of still tentative conclusions that come out of this.

• Google is hampered by aged links holding older content higher in its search returns.


• Yahoo provides better contemporary results but has words such as 'in' affecting indexing to a large degree.


• Express the base url in plain text as well as just a link.


• MSN Search is hopeless.


• There were around 45,000 separate news items for the search engines to index, each of them included the advert.

From those results we've adjusted the language of the advert just a little, we'll see over the next week or so if there are any changes, and whether there are or not I'll record them here.

BBC opens RSS feed to all uses

The BBC are about to allow (in licencing terms) anyone to take their RSS news feeds and aggregate them themselves without restriction (other than acknowledging the source I imagine).

So from May I think I'll be trying to factor in feeds from BBC News into I Just Heard as well as adding Yahoo News alerts.

The one additional thing that RSS should include, especially for news feeds, is an element for an image link so that you can get the image for the story along with the headline and description.

By the way, I Just Heard is getting on average over 300 page impressions a day, that's not including RSS aggregations from bloglines, newsgator and technorati etc.

Lil' ol' me, on the other hand, gets about 20 views a day max but add the livejournal in on that and its much higher than I'd have expected.

Too much I Just Heard

The site I've been using to experiment content only sites (and rapidly changing content at that), I Just Heard came a cropper this week. So much mail came in to the site that the POP for one hadn't finished before the next one started and it became completely glued up.

I've also updated the CoreBLOG on the server to 1.11 so I guess i'll have to put back the fix I did for it to delete the mail on the mail box when it does get it.

The Experiment

The I Just Heard site is a bit of an experiment to see whether with pure content and the meagrest amount of promotion you can get to 'own' a phrase.

So each automatic posting on the site begins with the words I Just Heard About and ends with a link to the main story of The rest of the story. Before beginning if you looked for IJustHeard all mashed together then you got to the site fine. The domain has been around for a while and it did have a squishdot site on it. If you looked for I Just Heard, however, it was nowhere to be seen.

Now its number two on the Google list but reported by a directory of blogs, not a direct link in itself. I hadn't registered the site with the directory directly I guess they picked it up from blo.gs or somewhere similar that I do ping to on every update.

Search.MSN.COM has it at around number 3 or 4, but cached with the page that was there before the site changed last week.

But the big winner is Yahoo! (the exclamation is just trademarking you understand not elation), where I Just Heard gets the top two results with the new content.

This is with just a week of the new site and the automatic postings. It could be that Google is discovering the original source of the posts and discounting them in the indexing, or that because the main site just holds one day of postings, because there are so many, though the date archive has all the postings and they're all discoverable by the robots.

With another week I'm hoping that the experiment will show that continuous content is the fastest way to get good results out of a general search. But, this doesn't really do anything for page rank as there aren't enough sites linking to it.

I hadn't really expected to make any inroads on 'The rest of the story', I assumed that Paul Harvey would have the monopoly on that, it turns out it isn't a complete monopoly but I Just Heard hasn't made an impact there on Google, nor Yahoo.

I think I'll leave it for another week before trying the next experiment which will involve opening the site up for others to post directly (I expect very few of those), or to add their own queries and at the same time making a modest investment on AdWords.