December 2017 update (blocking levels down some). June 2016 update (blocking levels a little higher). There’s now a significant number of users that use ad-blockers, estimated at about 15% in the US (according to PageFair), and that number grew quickly in 2015. Extensions like AdBlock Plus, NoScript, and Ghostery are incredibly popular (#1, #4, and #6 amongst the […]
UPDATE Nov 2019: After 3+ years of running this service I’ve decided to stop running it, as this kind of spam is pretty rare now and not worth the maintenance from my side or the user’s side. Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback and helped ID spammers! If you have a Google Analytics account […]
Thank you everyone who came to my talk at WordCamp. Here are my slides: Though if you missed the talk it may be easier to follow along with the original hack cleanup guide it was based upon. Please feel free to reach out with any follow-up comments or questions you might have, and see you next time!
So you’ve been hacked, now what?? In my last post on WordPress security, “How Secure is WordPress“, I suggested hiring a professional ASAP when you’ve been hacked. I’m sticking with that advice — especially if your site is important to your business, better to let someone that has experience cleaning up these kind of messes take care […]
Update July 2018: I have developed a method for supporting DNT in Google Analytics. You may have seen the “Do Not Track” option in your browser — perhaps you even have it set to “On” yourself, but do you know how many of your users have it set? “Do Not Track” is a simple HTTP request header […]
Let’s face it, WordPress is a big target for hackers. It’s used by a huge number of sites, powering > 20% of all websites by many estimates. Builtwith reports 20% of their sample of 1.7M sites use WordPress, including 11% of the top 10k sites. Anyway you slice it — that’s a lot of sites, and […]
Recently while looking at some AdWords conversion data a friend and I were discussing how to present acquisition costs to a client. We knew that PPC was contributing more than just what was showing in the basic Google Analytics reports, but weren’t sure what the best way to present the value assisted conversions to the […]
(7/22 Update on SSL at the bottom) I was very interested to read this article by Gene McKenna from Groupon that was posted to Search Engine Land last week, as were a lot of people. This article says that when Groupon de-indexed themselves from Google that 60% of their direct traffic to long URLs (i.e. […]
Update 8/7/2014: Google has now announced HTTPS is a ranking factor! Only a month after my original article below! Does that mean that the “not yet” I describe below has now happened and you’re missing out if you don’t switch?? No, not really. The advice below is still valid and the weight of this ranking factor […]
After reading this article looking for a clear provable case of negative SEO from Rand Fishkin from Moz.com this week I’ve been thinking about negative SEO, what people really mean by it, and my own run-ins with it. Does Negative SEO even exist? My opinion (which I think is a pretty common one) is that […]
