My last post was on the randomness of how a search let me to find out about other people discussing one of our companies.

I love random stories. It is truly odd how on the internet, everything is interlinked.

So - another story.

I was going through iBegin Geocoder’s stats when I noticed a forum post that kept sending us traffic. Turns out they were using us for ZIP Code latitude/longitude. Since we had recently released US Zip Code centroids for free, I registered on the forum, quoted that specific part, and said hey - since you are using iBegin already, why not just use this downloadable file. I posted in an as non-spammish way as possible.

Checked back the next day, the post was gone, and I was warned. I PMed the moderator, explaining that I was confused. He was pretty prompt, saying that a lot of first-time posters are spam, he will take a look at it.

The next day the post was restored and the moderator PMed me. As I viewed the skin design the site was using (remember, we do skins via vBSkins.com), I clicked on who had done their skin - Relivo. Imagine my surprise when I found out that not only were they using our Illacrimo WP theme (interesting considering they are a ‘design’ firm), the bastards had removed the accredition link on the bottom (something we do not allow).

So I tried to contact them, but of course, their bloody contact form was/is broken. But lo and behold, they are hosted by HostGator (the owner is a friend of mine), and their domain is registered via NameCheap (whose owner I also know).

Anyway - that is where the story stands for now. I still have to get them. And I will. But it is interesting how randomness can be so tied together.

I’ll have a post soon on how we use free themes to push our brand - in the meantime, you can preview our next freebie: GossipCity.

UPDATE: Seems like word travels fast, and Relivo has quickly updated the site. If a staff member did add it, why did no one question where it came from? Anyway - things got resolved purty quickly.

So I was perusing over some stats for iBegin Source, and saw that the last person who had downloaded our data had come via ‘local business data‘

Looking in the results, I noticed a post on Webmaster World titled “Good Source For Local Business Data?

Lo and behold, it redirected to this page, which had been posted roughly 24 hours ago. And lo and behold, someone had mentioned iBegin.

This was both amazing and frightening. Amazing that not only had Google indexed it so fast, but there were now other people mentioning iBegin. But frightening too - there was no easy way for me to know iBegin had been mentioned. This was especially crucial as tennis_fan28 was slightly incorrect - it wasn’t 50k for the full US, but 40k (not that big of a deal, but accidental mis-information). It wasn’t picked up on blogs. There was no link for me to find it on referrals. BoardTracker (imo the best bulletin board search engine) missed it by a mile. The only thing that would have caught it would have been Google’s advanced search option (where you can specify the date-range of when something was first found). Unfortunately this has two problems: 1) it finds a lot of junk/redundant stuff (eg anything on the ibegin.com domain new to Google) and 2) it only works for *new* pages - a forum thread started a while ago but with a new mention of iBegin would pass through.

Anyway - what eventually happened was I posted in two separate threads where iBegin was mentioned, and the next day the threads were gone. Turned out they had been flagged for review - and I don’t blame them, it did seem very convenient. The posts were restored the next day - anyone try to crawl Superpages.com? and Good Source For Local Business Data?

For those that don’t know, ‘edge cases’ are something that only happen in extreme cases. Rare, but also cause a bit of headaches.

So I was looking at the Stumble Upon reviews of CSS Basics (a site we own), when I laughed at the last page.

On the bottom is a ‘Next »’ even though it is the last page. Clicking on it takes you - nowhere. But what is more disappointing is that the page doesn’t even have 10 reviews (it is suppoused to be 10 reviews per page).

A small thing, not a big deal - but really that shouldn’t be happening.

If you read my blog regularly, you know I am in love with our iBegin Weather weather widget. It is a great way for us to build up deep links, build brand, all while doing something super simple and super light (the stress on the server is there - but we have enough experience with caching and what not that it loads fast and intelligently).

So I laughed really hard when I saw this: The Enterprise. That’s right - the weather is ’sponsored’ by Seafood Sam’s - way to go guys

We have over 2,500 unique sites actively using our weather widget. Google reports 20,000 backlinks (not bad for a site launched in mid-May).

The widget strategy is a great way to build up traffic. But it shouldn’t be your primary feature.

I read an excellent post on structured vs unstructured data in the local space.

The problem about local data is an impossible human problem. People think differently. What is beautiful to me could be ugly to you. What could be a kebab to me could be a skewer to you. A car could be a piece of trash, and so forth and so forth.

On a related blog post, there was a discussion on building a better database. I’m not sure what Yellowbot was doing there (they just use Localeze data), but I am glad they were.

The entire argument of using a tagging system as your ‘base’ is shortsighted. Mostly because (as I explained) - people don’t see things similar. My previous examples were more generic - it gets even more confusing at the local data level. Is it a ‘gas station’ or a ’service station?’ A ‘doctor’ or a ‘medical practitioner?’ And so forth and so forth.

We were doing tagging in local space before anyone else (over 18 months now). You can see that users have taken it upon themselves to tag. Yet the same user can use different words when tagging an identical business (’dry cleaners’ vs ‘laundry’ - even when they provide the exact same service).

Our team has been slogging through the categories used in iBegin Source for roughly the last month, and I’ve never come across a bigger headache. Our task was relatively simple - merge, rename, prune the categories so that they are simpler to user and more obvious. But the breadth of business listings is enormous. Even getting it to 10,000 categories is a task not for the feint hearted (talk about constant cross referencing to possible matching categories).

So - where do we end?

The core data needs structure. At iBegin we had originally attempted extremely loose categories - 8 in total, tagging to control the rest. Even that caused problems - what about the establishment that is a restaurant until 10 pm, and then exclusively a bar from 10 pm to 2 am? And tagging was great in two ways - it allowed users to participate in a simple way (adding a word or two is relatively trivial), and it improved our meta data (the most important quality in local search). Multiple categories (eg the place is both restaurant and a bar) + tagging = where you want to be.

So whats the conclusion?

Categories are needed from a top-down level in order to classify businesses properly. A user based system cannot work because too much freedom leads to a mess that cannot be properly organized (much less properly monetized). Tagging on top is a great way to build up a taxonomy - cheap meta-data creation that augments your core classification.

I’ve posted about being hot one second, and then not for the rest of eternity, and just want to dredge up this example again:

slowly dropping until irrelevant.

Just a lesson - just because something is cool/hot for a while doesn’t mean you’ve built anything sustainable/long-lasting. Frappr was cool, and spread like fire, but once people realized that it wasn’t really useful, they dropped it.

A burst of activity is good, but you really need to take a long hard look on why your website will be popular 18 months from today.

I had recently posted about how we had changed from ForumTemplates.com to vBSkins.com. One of the issues I hoped to be fixed was the domain name - banned from Google/etc, the new domain was to let us back in.

And results are already in.

Currently ranking in at #25 for ‘vbulletin skins’ and #11 for ‘vb skins’, the SE traffic is already trickling in. And Yahoo is even better - vBSkins.com sits at #9 for ‘vbulletin skins’ (with ForumTemplates.com at #8), and #3 for ‘vb skins’

The domain change has helped tremendously - no more are we generic ‘forum templates’ - you know what you are getting before you click on the domain.

And another interesting tidbit - #12 for vbulletin skins was a site called vbskinstudio.com. I saw it was parked, saw it was for sale for $75, and while I wrote this post, I purchased it. According to Yahoo, it has 38,000 backlinks. The domain will now be promptly redirected to vbskins.com, generating even more traffic to the domain, with a very minimal investment.

Not to mention vb-skins.com is also likely sending me (inadvertent) traffic.

Moral of the story? A good domain helps, and be on the look out to buy defunct sites that can send you traffic you want.

I read Himmelstein on G’s Local Biz Referral Program with interest. I find Marty’s musings very thought-provoking and much more deeper than 99% of local-search talk out there.

But I also feel the need to disagree (to a certain level) - some things touted as positives have a negative side to it.

First off, Google’s Business Referral Program is rather cunning - pay $10 to get a business hooked onto Google. Utilize college students (ie people with lots of free time and bad at valuing time vs money).

First off - $10 is a pittance. Think of the customer acquisition costs the cellphone companies go through. Heck, web hosting companies are paying $65 comissions for web hosting accounts that pay $10 a month. The program itself is skewed - you only get $2 when a businss referral is approved, and then $8 when the business itself verifies the information. All this trumpeting of ‘Google pays for referrals’, and the fine print shows that it ain’t no cake walk.

Next up - decentralization. Not a good idea imo. You need structure and organization when dealing with businesses. Imagine you are a popular pizza joint that serves a lot of college students. Suddenly you have a dozen students a day trying to get you signed up with Google. Is that going to make you happy or annoyed? And think of the college student - he goes to thei pizza joint, asks about Google Local, and the business owner angrily replies “I’ve already been asked”. Ants (to use that analogy) are so successful because they work in a very organized and intelligent manner. You can’t just unleash people with zero direction and expect to have everyone happy.

Continiung on - structured content. This is where I will admit that if anyone can understand data, it would be Google. But different people have different viewpoints on the same thing. Back to the dis-organization - without a succinct focus on what is acceptable (and what isn’t), you can be diluged with data you can’t deal with. With data providers, even categorization is a huge headache - identical businesses want themselves categorized differently. Throw in business-specific data and you have a huge headache dealing with it properly.

Further along - completeness. The demographic everyone talks about reaching to are students. Last time I checked (and I was a Student less than three years ago) - students are damn poor. Which means the areas they frequently operate in is relatively small. Furthermore, places with students are usually pretty well covered - what about places that don’t have an active student population? Even excluding students, the last mile is far easier to deal with around a university campus than most other places.

Lastly - updates. If there is anything difficult about business data, it is keeping it updated. What matters is what the businesses who do sign up with Google do in a year - do they remain involved, or don’t bother?

I don’t claim to have the solution to the problem of connecting offline businesses online. I also think Google’s plan could be a lot better.

Just wanted to take a moment to pause and note that we now have tracked over a billion pageviews on our Blog Top Sites. All with a load of 0.35 at peak hours (on a dual dual-core server).

At the same time, we have barely scratched the surface of what we can do with Blog Flux.

It sure has been a while. As always, things keep happening at lightning speed.

I’ve talked about personal balance before (you need time away from work), but it seems like I can’t even follow that myself. From 8 am to 6 pm, and then back at it from 11 pm to 2-4 am, it seems like one day blurs into the next.

One of the things we had been grinding out (and finally released) was vB Skins. I had posted earlier about ForumTemplates.com and how it was going nowhere (when it came to Google). At that time Yahoo saw 800k backlinks - that number had since increased to 1.75 million. At that time Google saw roughly 155k backlinks - that number has again increased 235k.

And yet nothing. A painful penalization. So I went ahead and plunked $5000 and bought vbskins.com

There were of course other reasons in changing the site. The domain no longer fit (we just did vBulletin, not IPB/phpBB/vBulletin as we did originally). The design was crap - I actually lifted it from CSSFill (a semi-defunct site we own). And the code-base was absolutely terrible - another horrible experience in outsourcing (when we were smaller) that resulted in me having to go in and patch things up. The new site was (of course) all built in-house, and it shows - much nicer design, much more robust backend, smarter ordering system - superior in every way.

The lesson here is obvious - buying a domain that was previously parked is like playing with fire. Google not only ‘kills’ the domain when it is parked (nevermind they generate at least 50% of all domain parking revenue), but even when its up, when it gets links, when people find it useful - it is still knocked out.

We also have some huge organizational changes happening in-houses (in regards to a few of our divisions) - that should be interesting to talk about (when the time comes).