Chris Faron

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]