new websites

After a noticeable lull in my web development work, October and November have been productive.

Vintage Audio Online is a website dedicated to one of my hobbies/business – Vintage Audio. I tried to zone in on what I felt the vintage audio enthusiast wants – pictures and information.

TabletReviews.co.uk – The iPad brought in the age of the tablet, so fittingly, a site dedicated to the latest tablets, tablet news, and like the name says, tablet reviews.

DutchCityBike.com – I spent the month of October in Holland, and it reminded me of what  a great thing the bicycles is.  Dutch bikes are making headway into the States too.  This site is a bit of fun, it’s an interest of mine, and an experiment to see if I rank on some Dutch bike terms.

CouchSeattle.com – Couch Seattle is my friend Ameer’s store.  Ameer built the site on his own, and it was hosted on WordPress – even though he already owned the CouchSeattle.com domain name.  I finally convinced him to make the switch to host wordpress himself on his own domain.  At the same time, I’m putting some working into optimizing his site to drive organic traffic.  He’s also taking Adwords on, as opposed to paying the local SEO company in Seattle he used before.

Google search volume overstated in Google Analytics by using 6 month cookies

Interesting post about Google Analytics.  Seems a 6 month cookie is used by Google, so that any visit for up to 6 months after the cookie is set, no matter where the visit is from, is attributed to Google.com search.

Comparing the stats for Toprural delivered by Google Analytics with his own 3rd-party solution, he finds that, while his own system (AT Internet’s XiTi) says 37.8% of visitors come via Google, GA says it’s 71.8%. The core of the problem, he discovers, is the good old cookie window. It turns out the default cookie window Google ascribes to visitors that arrive on a site via Google is six months. Six months!

So, every visit a user happens to make to a site for the six months after having once visited that site via Google is ascribed to the search engine. The standard window for display media is 30 days, a sixth of the length Google has opted for, while we’re typically asked to assign search cookie windows of a couple of days at most.

Read the full article here.