Chris Faron

If it ain't broke fix it anyway!

Google travel portal getting ever closer?

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With the launch a while back of the Google Hotel Finder experiment (search for hotels in certain neighborhoods in the USA), Google Hotpot (a platform to review hotels and restaurants), hotel price ads (that shows price and availability for hotels) integrated into Google maps, the much rumored search giant’s expected entry into the travel space, just got [...]

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Written by chris

August 22nd, 2011 at 9:19 pm

Posted in Travel industry

Social media: new rules of the game=personalization

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At a recent event here in Italy (Ca Foscari Digital Week) on the changes in digital media, I thought I would highlight a few key points of the workshops that I attended. First was the “Social media: le nuove regole del gioco” ( Social media: the new rules of the game ). What was highlighted [...]

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Written by chris

May 5th, 2011 at 6:00 pm

Posted in Social Media

Google Panda update missed this one

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With all the talk about the new panda update penalizing sites that have low quality content, I was surprised to find a very poor result in the first spot in Google for the key phrase [google buys beatmyquote] . Clicking on the link to a Smart Company result takes the user to a virtually blank [...]

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Written by chris

April 14th, 2011 at 8:18 pm

Posted in SEO

Tagged with

Google Search results with only 3 normal organic listings

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More bad news for SEO specialists still concentrating only on organic results in Google (surely not….). It seems Big G is testing first page results with only 3 “normal” organic listings and 7 map integrated ones. Considering the map listings are appearing for more and more listings, this is going to make it even harder [...]

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Written by chris

April 3rd, 2011 at 7:00 pm

Posted in SEO

Tagged with

Google quality rater paid me a visit?

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While going through my Google analytics data for one of my domains, I noticed a very strange URL as a referral. It was domain.com/this_page_should_not_exist.fake (no page extension like html, etc). Being a curious type and working in SEO meant a further investigation was on the cards. I checked the location of the visitor which was [...]

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Written by chris

March 6th, 2011 at 10:53 am

Posted in SEO

Tagged with , ,

Piwik the open source alternative to Google analytics Pt1

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Piwik is a free site statistics analyzer which is a valid alternative to the well known Google analytics product. Being open source means that not only is it free but you have the freedom to modify the underlining code to your specific requirements. I’ve been testing this product since 2009 and I must say the [...]

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Written by chris

January 27th, 2011 at 9:51 pm

Posted in Analytics

The affiliate marketing minefield

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From a publishers point of view, an affiliate is someone that promotes products and services of an advertiser in exchange for a commission on leads or sales. A publisher displays an advertiser’s ads, text links, or product links on their Web site, in e-mail campaigns, or in search listings. The affiliate is paid a commission [...]

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Written by chris

October 9th, 2010 at 1:52 pm

SEO Duplicate Content checker tools

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Duplicate content or pages with similar content is a major problem on the web both for users and for web designers and SEO specialists. There are many tools around the web to help alleviate the problem. These are my favorites: Webconfs Similar Page Checker after entering the 2 urls outputs the results as a percentage. [...]

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Written by chris

October 2nd, 2010 at 9:10 pm

Posted in SEO