So, here I was on vacation again in Shanghai, China at a local supermarket looking at a book when I see the exact image seen on the left.

Now, the book was talking about extra-terrestrials and how they maybe came in ships like these to abduct things–and as an example of a “外星人” ship, they decided to use Star Trek’s Enterprise D ship–probably from some kind of Chinese search which elicited this terrestrial human ship. I don’t know why this was used, but I found it quite ironic to see.

Oh, and the book interested me in the first place because it was all about dinosaurs with pictures.

Yeah, don’t ask me why aliens and dinosaurs had a relation here, but there you go on a random China thing.

Bookmark To:

EpikOne has a good chart to show how close Google Analytics is to be compliant with some basic web analytics standard definitions by WAA.

The only thing I would note is that GA has a strange definitional change between “visit” and “entrance” depending on the section you are in.

Bookmark To:

Although I am still in Shanghai for vacation at this point (will not be back until October 5th), I thought to note some reflections of mine (purely business-end) from the SMX conference:

• My SMX Nanjing presentation (you have to fill the form out to see it unfortunately), though I believe went well, should have been entirely in Chinese as the conference had 90%+ Chinese there. Oh well, live and learn.
• Stephen’s Noton’s last minute presentation from Adverted on internal linking was very well done and should be given high consideration to learn more on.
• Jose’s (林思吾) presentation on web design from awoo was a huge breath of fresh air considering how ugly many Chinese websites look (please keep in mind this is from a non-Chinese perspective).

A last thanks to Inway Ni for getting the conference up and running and for having me speak as well. Hopefully the next conference in Xiamen (March 2009) will be even better too.

Bookmark To:

CNET has a great article about the issues and problems with the SEO world today on white, gray, and black hat SEO techniques. Just read it.

Bookmark To:

Prescient article by SEO Black Hat in terms of major authority sites beginning to further contain and suck in all link power for their PageRank:

The first example of a black hole site was the wikipedia. The internal links formed a network that passed link juice from one page to another allowing obscure articles with no external links to rank number 1 in the SERPs. This #1 ranking begets natural links from external links. When a webizen wants a quick reference, they consult Google and link to one of the top results. This causes more link juice to flow into the black hole and the body’s trust becomes more and more massive over time.

[...]

For massive sites with a tier one level of Google trust, there is virtually no benefit to linking to any external sites without a link condom. That whole “link out to authority sites” mantra of yesteryear’s SEOs does not apply to black holes.

He’s absolutely right in that there is no need to link out when everyone already links to you.

This all interestingly makes the authoritative sites into a whole new class of websites, ones that get to be above the rest of everyone else in terms of Google’s “laws,” but more importantly, ones that become leeches on the “PageRank society” by no longer providing external links to anyone else. Of course, that’s only if you believe that is what is going on and if you believe search engines should rank by link popularity.

But I don’t.

Bookmark To:

I will be in China for SMX Nanjing 2008 roughly around the topic of advanced site tuning and wanted to give a heads up on this in case anyone wanted to reach out and contact me in advanced or afterwards.

Bookmark To:

Google Analytics provides those with some backend knowledge (in this case JavaScript) to modify any potential deficiencies of the web analytics program. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that sometimes Google Analytics will leave out some major international search engines such as Naver (the largest search engine in Korea) and throw it into referrals.

Fortunately, you can customize the script for having multiple search engines via the way the GA Experts and Yoast has done. I decided that it would be far more useful if I could update the script and remove unnecessary content that would be useful for both myself and my clients.

Below I have added the script and would love any help in adding additional major international search engines by country into the international search engine script.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Google Analytics has some basic search engines automatically in there: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Ask, Altavista, Netscape, CNN, Looksmart, About, Mamma, Alltheweb, Gigablast, Voila, Virgilio, Live, Baidu, Mynet, Excite, Alice, Yandex, Najdi, AOL, Club-interet, Mama, Seznam, Search, Wp, Onet, Netsprint, Google.interia, Szukacz, Yam, Pchome, Terra, Kvasir, Sesam, OZU, Nostrum, Ekolay, Ilse
• I took out duplicates such as Google Netherlands or Yahoo France since those are automatically captured already.

To add the script into your site I believe the correct way is to show it on the backend is as follows:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(”%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”intl_custom_se.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-XXXXX-X”);
get_intl_custom_se();
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Bookmark To:

Watched the History Channel again talk about how the Chinese, being the first to develop gunpowder, were able to modify the type of mixtures to produce both slow and fast burning chemical explosives (Not a surprising thing from what Americans learn in elementary school history).

What I had no idea about was that the Chinese produced short-range flamethrowers, that though it was more psychological than useful, the Chinese flamethrowers were often used on the front lines of Chinese military lines during the Song Dynasty.

The Chinese were able to produce many innovative and completely new inventions in the military arena (and others as well of course). Other weapons included the triple crossbow, a 25 foot long crossbow used for long-range weaponry that could fire a mile away. It was mounted on a pivot for accuracy and mobility to hit a specified target.

The most surprsing? Chinese landmines in the 13th century–timed landmines similar to those used in Vietnam thousand years later.

Keep in mind the Chinese ability to innovate and invent when China begins to reach the top again.

Bookmark To: