24 replies to this topic

[Rizla]

Hi Jill, Glad to be aboard!

Yes that is what I was refering to... These days I tend to write a key-phrase page in MX and run it through the page critic and at the same time comparing it to one of the high ranking pages of the competition.

Once fine tuned and the critic shows my page to be better then Im on the the next key-phrase.

As I said previously, I haven't lost one WPG page to date but the Smart Pages fell off quickly with Google.

Hope that clears the fog ;-)

[Matt B]

As I said previously, I haven't lost one WPG page to date but the Smart Pages fell off quickly with Google.

OK, so you'll be prepared then, if your WPG pages are found, penalized and dropped. Right?

It's not the best long term strategy, IMO. Personally, I don't understand why you can't just create good content pages, and add them into the existing site, rather than take a chance at a penalty.

[qwerty]

I'm not certain that Rizla is referring to WPG "doorway pages" (or whatever they're calling them). These may just be regular pages that are being checked with WP's Page Critic function.

[Matt B]

I'm not exactly sure what Rizla' is referring to either, if they were simply pages checked with the Page Critic, then there wouldn't be cause for worry.

However, checking back thru the thread, Rizla agreed with Jill that these are WPG - generated pages.

[qwerty]

I know, Rizla agreed with Jill, but then wrote

These days I tend to write a key-phrase page in MX and run it through the page critic and at the same time comparing it to one of the high ranking pages of the competition.

I think we've got a bit of a communication breakdown here. Rizla, could you please clarify what you meant?

[Jill]

I assumed that the WPG pages were integrated into the site. The purpose of using WPG was to simply get the "right" keyword density, etc.

Surely, everyone knows that you don't create pages like that and invisibly link them, or not link them at all, right?

Jill

[compar]

We use Webalizer -- a freeware program -- on our web server and provide it to all the clients we host. I have always been impressed with the data it reports. You can configure it for a variety of differnet ways to view the data.

If anyone would like to see a live Webalizer report feel free to look at the statistics for our Company Website. Click on any month to see the detailed daily information.

[Kal]

I use Hitslink for some clients and is pretty cost effective although I have to say I've found their customer support pretty hit and miss.

You're telling me! I signed up 2 clients for the paid version of HitLinks after trialling the WPG freebie and found it lacking. But when I submitted their form to cancel the account, the company that owns HitLinks (different name) kept charging my credit card for 4 months, despite numerous emails, faxes and calls to the credit card company. It finally took an email to WPG to get some action - apparently all the email addresses listed on the HitLinks site were "broken" and I had to pass messages to them via WPG staff .

Luckily I got all charges reversed thanks to my cc company and apparently the HitLinks crowd were put on the "watch" list by my cc company's disputed payments dept. Just a warning to others!

[viz]

When was that Kal?

I use Hitslinks for a number of clients and pleased to say haven't experrienced that sort of grief. In fact over all I've been pretty happy with the service. The only issue has been some slowness to support requests.

I think the company that ownes Hitslink was sold to Net Applications last year and when that happened the service was pretty lousy there for a while. But at present seems OK and I've never had problems at all with my credit card payments.

[Randy]

Similar to Bob, I use Webalizer as our main stats program. Everbody else we host gets that as a default too. It's a wonderful little program, though it does have a couple of shortcomings. Most notably it doesn't provide you with an easy way to track visitor movement throughout your site. So it's a bit difficult to tell if you have a certain page or pages which isn't having the desired effect.

I supplement Webalizer with Urchin for a more detailed view on our own sites and offer it as an add on for folks we host if they want that type of detail. Urchin is another wonderful little program which gets me down to the nitty grity details and thankfully can be set up to work right alongside Webalizer. With it you can track how visitors are moving through your site. I review this detailed info every day, but once a week or so I can scan the data and get a good idea of exactly what's happening. Then it's only a matter of figuring out why.

In addition (can you say Geek? ) I also recently installed some Live Support software by OmniSupport on four of our sites for testing purposes. A pretty cool side effect of that one when you're in Live mode is that you can see exactly which page each visitor on your site is currently view, how long they've been there, where they came from and track them all the way through the site.

Another benefit of this Live Support system (which is what I wanted to test originally) is that sales have been in an upwards trend on all of the sites, especially the ones which are naturally more complex. With the hours we staff the Live Support feature, roughly 70% of our visitors have the opportunity to ask a real person a question and get an immediate answer. And they're using it too! Can't complain about the cost of that one either... It was $99 for a year I think, though now I kinda wish I'd purchased a lifetime license.

Randy