Mingtiandi

Alexa Bricked Up in China

December 28, 2009 – 10:22 pm

 

As part of our continuing series on sites blocked in China, we are sad to announce today that Alexa.com is now being censored by the Great Firewall of China (GFW). Access to the site from China was first reported as interrupted on 27 December 2009.

For those of you unfamliar with the service, Alexa provides independent rankings and ratings of websites around the world.  While not the most reliable of measures, they do provide an independent means for judging the popularity of sites. Alexa achieves its rankings by anonymously registering the surfing habits of volunteers who install the Alexa toolbar.

There has been no word from the Chinese government (there never is) as to why this seemingly innocuous service is being blocked, nor any confirmation that it is indeed being blocked. However, users in Shanghai and other parts of China are unable to access Alexa, while users in other parts of the world can.  This also means that users in China who have installed the Alexa toolbar will no longer be able to have any of their traffic registered with Alexa.

The upshot of this move is two-fold:

• Users in China will have to find some other means of comparing website traffic (or access Alexa through a proxy)
• Sites located in China or who depend on users in China for a significant amount of their traffic (like RightSite) will see their Alexa rankings drop dramatically.

Since Alexa’s site contains no content other than rankings of sites, and since it is big enough to run its own servers and not share IP addresses with other sites, we are going to surmise that someone in the government was not happy with the way that the company was gathering its data.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Alexa launched a Chinese version of their site on October 15th of this year.  As services and sites in English are much more likely to be overlooked by the censors than those operating in Chinese, I would suspect that this development is somehow related to the authorities choosing this time to block this service that was founded in 1996.

Alas, since RightSite had only recently broken into the top 50,000 sites on Alexa worldwide, we are taking this news a bit hard.

 

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Gaining Ground on Google

December 4, 2009 – 10:49 am

While the site that my company runs, RightSite.asia, is an industrial property website, our company’s core purpose is online marketing.  The service that we provide for our users is Internet-based promotion and that’s why RightSite’s online marketing is critical to our mission.  If we are successful at making RightSite popular on the Internet, then we have the means to help our users find more deals on the Internet. You can think of it as a specialised online marketing service for members of the industrial asset management community.

So it was a big milestone this week when I received a Google Alert that showed five new entries on the Internet related to RightSite. I have these Google Alerts set up to track information related to a number of topics on the net and I use the RightSite.asia alert to track our success at spreading the word about RightSite. The alert works by gathering the results of an Internet bot that automatically searches the Internet for new entries related to the keyword that I select, and then sending me an email with the results of that search. You can set these alerts up for various time intervals, but I have this one set up for daily reports.

So the upshot of all this boring tech stuff is that there were 5 new entries found on the Internet on that day about our company. Since my usual alerts show only one or two new links, this means big progress.  I’m sure Tiger Woods generates a few more hits than that, but I have no intention of driving into any fire hydrants just to improve my search results.

And if these links bring more visitors to RightSite, then it means more benefits for the businesses that list their properties and services on our site.

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Today’s Sign of the Media Apocalypse

November 24, 2009 – 9:15 pm

I hate to pick on one of my favorite media outlets twice in seven days, but something definitely is going wrong over at Sports Illustrated.  Earlier in the week there were strange reports of Peyton Manning discriminating against teams that ate blini. (Possible anti-semitism)? And today there appears to have been an outbreak of a new strain of punctuation virus.

While it is possible that the editors at SI.COM are engaging in some kind of contest to see who can fit the most commas into two lines of text, our inside sources tell us that this may be evidence of a new form of the H1N1 virus that causes media professionals to sneeze commas all over the page. Two periods and four commas in two lines of teaser text is a sure sign of a sick mind. When things slide into semicolons it may be time for hospitalization.

As a native Minnesotan, I think Joe Mauer deserves better than this!

Posted in Whimsy | No Comments »

Google Spreadsheets Blocked in China?

November 24, 2009 – 5:58 pm

While we may have created a few dodgy budgets at RightSite, we still haven’t figured out how to create a subversive spreadsheet. Despite this, it seems that while Google docs are accessible in China today, any of the spreadsheets that you may have created are not.

At this time, we are able to access the main Google docs page (docs.google.com), and access to text documents seems fine. However, the majority of attempts to access spreadsheets created in Google are futile. We are also unable to create new spreadsheets through Google.

We say the majority of attempts because my assistant was able to access one of our crucial spreadsheets this morning, which we downloaded from Google and then uploaded to Dropbox.

Since Google Sites (which we use for our RightSite Wiki) is still blocked we will have to migrate our wiki over to Zoho’s wiki app as soon as we have the chance.

No idea why we were able to score this sporadic access, but if you can pry your precious spreadsheets out from behind the GFW then Dropbox is a good stopgap measure for document sharing. It doesn’t like having multiple users editing at one time, but is a good solution for less active sharing of docs and provides a good revision history.

We will let you know if things come back on line.

Posted in technology | 1 Comment »

Blocking Parked Domains in Google AdWords

November 22, 2009 – 10:04 pm

Sometimes I wonder if this blog starts to sound a bit paranoid, but when you run your own business you start to realise how many unscrupulous folks out there are trying to help you part with your cash. And one of the biggest scams victimising online businesses these days is the business of parked domains, domainers and clickfraud in Google Adwords.

Marketing RightSite with AdWords

For RightSite, like many online businesses, one of the ways that we market ourselves is through Adwords. Anyone who has used the web has seen these little pay-per-click text (and image) ads placed next to search results and on the pages of many blogs and smaller sites.  These ads allow businesses a means for publicising themselves in relevant media and provide useful revenue to online publishers.  What many people don’t realise is that, at least in RightSite’s case, approximately 15-20% of the clicks that advertisers paid for end up being fraudulent.

In the past several years a whole industry has grown up to take advantage of google adwords that makes the hookers on Tongren Lu look positively saintly. There are many variations on this business, but the basic elements are:

• Parked domains
• Domainers
• Bots that make fraudulent clicks
• Naive or inexperienced Adwords users
• A revenue sharing model that provides Google with a share of all revenue to publishers and fees to advertisers

To take it from the top, RightSite starting advertising with Google Adwords several months ago, and after it took us a few weeks of practice to figure out how to promote our site effectively using these tools, we started to see a significant number of clicks on our ads. In all, we have been spending about RMB 3000 per month on Adwords.

After a few weeks of looking at Adwords reports, however, we started to notice some highly unrealistic click-throughrates on our ads. In many cases there was one click per impression, and in many cases there were even more click than impressions.  We were getting ripped off.

Folllowing some investigation, we discovered that most of the high click through rate sites that were displaying our ads were parked domains. Domains that someone has bought as an investment and is leaving fallow while they wait for the opportunity to re-sell/extort cash from some poor chump who needs that domain.

The Basics of AdWords Fraud

If you read this post, you can get a complete explanation of the high click rates, but in short, unscrupulous domainers set up programs that click on the google ads — your google ads — on their sites, so that they can generate fraudulent revenue.  If they do this stealthily enough most users, and Google, never notice.  And, since Google gets a cut of all of the ad revenue from these fraudulent clicks, their motivation for stopping these shenanigans is limited.

How to Protect Against Click Fraud

The best way to protect yourself against click fraud is to tell Google not to show your ads on parked domains.  While there is a chance that you could generate real traffic from ads placed on parked domains, the quality of such traffic is quite low (high bounce rate, low time on site) and the risk of getting ripped off is simply too high.

This post explains how to instruct your Google Adwords account not to display your ads on parked domains. However, since Google changed the Adwords user interface a few months ago, a few modifications to these procedures are necessary.  I will do my best to explain.

Updated Procedures for Blocking Parked Domains in Google Adwords

While we still spend about an hour per week scouting through our Google AdWords report for fake clicks, eliminating parked domains has removed the vast majority of the fraud that we had been encountering earlier.  So taking these steps is definitely worthwhile.

In your Google Adwords account, choose “Reports” from the Reporting tab.

Create a Placement Performance Report as specified here.

Follow all the instructions as listed in the BGTheory.com page above, except that under the new Adwords interface, the navigation has changed.

The New Navigation

Opportunities

1. The BGTheory.com post above refers to a “Tools” tab in AdWords navigation. This tab no longer exists.
2. Now, users should navigate to the “Opportunities” tab. (Sound much more “market-ese” than “tools,” doesn’t it?)
3. On the Opportunities page, look for the Tools block in the left column
4. Click the “More tools” link to navigate to the Tools page
5. On the Tools page, choose “Site and Category Exclusion”
6. On the site and category exclusion page, choose your Campaign. (You should repeat this for all your campaigns).
7. After choosing your campaign, click the “Page Types” tab
8. Under “Page Types” tick the boxes for “Parked Domains” and “Error Pages”
   

   The Final Steps

9. Then save all changes, and you are done.

Presto!  You have just saved yourself some kuai and helped prevent a few domainers (and possibly a few Googlers) from being evil. Now if people will only tell their friends about this then maybe we can put a few domainers out of business and save us all some money.

If any of you know of more effective ways of preventing fraud, I would be glad to hear from you.  At the same time, if any of our users have questions, I will do my best to answer them.

Until next time, see you here on Mingtiandi.

Posted in Marketing | 3 Comments »

Crisis Management Planning

November 21, 2009 – 6:24 pm

It’s Saturday in Shanghai and that makes it time to celebrate another victory at RightSite.  We completed another week of productive work under substandard conditions.  We successfully produced a our latest newsletter, got about 90 new property listings added to our directory, and have gained considerable ground on completing our RightSite Pro features without having to physically assault our web development vendors.

All part of life at a start up.

When starting up a company we operate on the lowest possible budget that we can until we start generating a profit. That means that we often overwork our teams, our equipment, and even our offices.

So the office decided to fight back a bit this week.  On Tuesday the power suddenly went out at lunchtime, and after several adventures with circuit breakers, UPS, and shutting down the mail server, the phone server and the router, and some consultation with our neighborhood electrician, we figured out that one of the air conditioners had gone evil. (Air conditioners routinely double as heaters in China). At least by isolating the problem we were able to get electricity restored, although some of the team had a chilly afternoon.

So after the electrician was sent away, the air conditioner repairman was summoned. When he finally arrived the next day, and after blowing out the circuit breakers a few more times, we were able to find out that the air conditioner had lost a capacitor (or at least it kind of looked like a capacitor, but I’m not sure of the Chinese for capacitor)

Just imagine what we could have done under reasonable working conditions.

Our other victory of the week was resucitating my old desktop PC to put it to work as another server.  With the advent of our RightSite Pro products we will also be putting into place a training server that we will use to train our new staff and do testing on new features.  So the team from our IT vendor, Fusion were kind enough to help us fit out the machine with some new hard drives so that it could be set up for its new duties. Total cost of hardware — RMB 386

Once the new hardware was in place, we set up a server installation of Ubuntu Linux, Apache webserver software, MySQL and PHP. So now this old PC is running a LAMP stack and is ready for its new role as an in-house web server.  Total cost of software — RMB 0!  (Take that Bill Gates!)

There are things that RightSite willingly spends on — the development of our website, professional hosting of RightSite and the training and development of our staff. But in non-core areas, we don’t spend money that we don’t have.

Of course, working with equipment like this puts us in danger of more equipment adventures like we had earlier in the week, but that is part of the deal with start up. When we start bringing in more money, we start spending on more expensive systems.

In any case, this gave us an idea for another story on our website.  In the coming weeks, watch RightSite for a feature on crisis management planning in China!

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SI.COM Gets the Scoop on Slavic Pastries in the NFL

November 21, 2009 – 9:21 am

One of the few time wasting pleasures that I have maintained even during our start-up regimen here at RightSite is my daily scanning of the NFL news from the US. Reading about the drama of football gives me a break from sifting through the latest real estate data and investment news and gives me some insight into what is really going on back home in America.

Today I found out that what is really going on is that there is either a severe shortage of proofreaders, or that NFL star Peyton Manning loves to pick on teams that have grown fat and happy on traditional Slavic pastries.

According to what we see on the popular website SI.com today, the strategically-minded NFL star Peyton Manning has refined his game to a new level, by specifically targetting players on the opposite team who have grown fat from eating too many blini.  A blintz (or blini if you’re having more than one of them) is a pastry of Slavic origin that’s a bit like a crepe and sure to load you down with extra carbohydrates.  Easy to see why defenders might lose a step by ingesting a few too many of these, but many of us slip a bit as we near the holidays.

No word yet on whether other teams plan to adopt this strategy or whether Peyton plans to later victimise Vikings who love their lefse a bit too much.

Posted in Whimsy | 1 Comment »

More Than A Feeling

November 17, 2009 – 11:21 am

From talking with Shanghai’s business cognescenti in the bars up and down Tongren Lu, the mood of late has been that business is getting back on its feet. And from the recent news in the China Daily (if this is a worthy source) the uptick in business is reflected in figures and not just sentiment. 

According to the report,

China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) saw a third consecutive monthly increase in October, up 5.7 percent year-on-year, the Ministry of Commerce said Monday.

In October, China attracted $7.1 billion in FDI, compared with more than $6.7 billion in October 2008, said Yao Jian, spokesman of the Ministry of Commerce.

Of course, the figures for late 2009 were shockingly low following the collapse of a few old banks in New York and such, but this is still encouraging. In my opinion, however, we won’t start to see real movement towards a pickup in business until after Chinese New Year 2010 when all the new budgets are in place and real spending allocation is being implemented.

For now, those of us who operate on the Chinese fiscal year (the same as the calendar year) are getting our budgets for 2010 ready and dreaming of big new offices at bargain prices. More about that soon.

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RightSite Marches On

November 15, 2009 – 5:22 pm

One of our primary missions this year at RightSite.asia, my online b2b for industrial property, has been to build up our web traffic, and our primary means for doing this has been through search engine optimisation (SEO).  Lately the RightSite team has scored a number of victories in this mission, and well, the occasional setback. (But I’m only admitting this because we are compelled to tell the truth here on the Internet).

How RightSite Uses SEO

SEO is important to us because RightSite basically makes it money by charging members for premium services, and these services provide RightSite’s users with tools for marketing themselves on the Internet via RightSite. If RightSite is a highly ranked site on the Internet and gets a lot of relevant traffic, then these services will help our members to market themselves effectively.  If RightSite does not get a lot of traffic, then our services are really not all that valuable.

Tools for Measuring SEO Performance

We use a lot of tools for measuring how successful our web traffic is, primarily Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.  One other tool that we use is Alexa.com, and this is what has been driving me crazy. According to its website, Alexa is

Alexa’s Web site is built on the notion that timely and relevant information is essential to a vital web experience.

Alexa Site Information – Alexa has built an unparalleled database of information about sites that includes statistics, related links and more. All of this information can be found on Alexa’s Site Overview pages, Traffic Detail pages and Related Links pages. To access these pages, simply type the URL of any site into the Alexa Search box.

The big number that people seem to look at on Alexa is the Traffic Rank, which shows how your website traffic ranks compared to all the other websites in the world.  Google is #1, Yahoo is #2, and — well, I think you have it figured out by now.

However, the issue that I have with Alexa is the wild variations in its rankings.  In general, I have been pleased to see that RightSite has made significant progress since it was launched in March of 2009.  At first we had no Alexa ranking, and then we started showing up at around #2,000,000 in the world, gradually worked our way up to a six-figure ranking, and now we have broken into the top 100,000 this month.  However, while we have made progress, there have been wild variations from week to week.

If you look at the images in the photo gallery above, you will see that RightSite was ranked at #15,962 in one frame (as of Saturday the 14th of November). However, on Sunday the 15th, our ranking had slid back to #99,119.  Both of these numbers represent significant progress over our 3 month and 1 month average rankings, but if the folks from Alexa are listening out there a little stability would be appreciated.

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Solar Power Surges in China

November 15, 2009 – 4:04 pm

It’s been a while since I checked in here at Mingtiandi, but that’s only because of how much work we’ve had to do building RightSite.asia.

One of the benefits of building RightSite has been getting the opportunity to find out more about some of the intense industrial development going on in China.  During the last two years China has made a dramatic shift towards developing new energy and is starting to make progress towards establishing energy independence. I recently added a forum post on our RightSite forum that tells more about what is developing in China’s solar power industry, and I hope you will check it out if you have time.

After a short break I will be back with more updates on what’s been going on at RightSite.

See you soon…

Posted in entrepreneurship, technology | No Comments »