To Pop or Not To Pop

As an avid web user I’ve never been a fan of pops. Popunders, popups… it does not really make a difference. I can deal with them. As a publisher, I recognize the revenue value of running pops. I’ve run them on the four of my sites, I generally do not run them on my newer sites.

I think I’d like to stop running them on all of my sites, but I have an issue. Popunders have come to represent a significant portion of the revenue stream for the sites in question. The general belief is that popunders and popups bother web users to the point of driving them away on the visit they are making and discouraging their return in the future. Pop supporters will tell you that users who don’t like pops will have a pop blocker in place and will not be affected by pops in the first place. I believe that popup blocker or not, users who are tired of pops may be reluctant to stay on my sites, or to return if they get a popunder (I run one from Casale and one from FastClick per 24 hours per unique user).

So I have some reluctance to dropping the popunders. If the revenue lost from popunders will be made up from additional page views and return visits, my decision is simple. The only way to truly get this answer though is to give it a whirl, something I will do starting in early January (after my high traffic season on FoodClassics.com).
I will surely post back my results after a couple of months of the effort.

A Spidering We Will Go

So I’m sitting here this morning working on a site spider tool that can be used to generate Google SiteMaps, and I find the more I spider, the more I must tweak my spider! It seems that every new site I test this against throws another link text format at me.

One would think that a simple href could be written consistently, so that my simple spider could process pages most efficiently. For those of you who think in simple terms like me, here are a few things to look out for when writing your own spider…

• href’s that do not use opening and closing quotes (either single or double)
• url’s with spaces in them (e.g., href=”ANNUAL REPORT.pdf”)
• pages that use redirects, whether temporary or permanent
• url’s that contain ‘../’

I realize that these things are really acceptable within HTML. However, for my own selfish reasons, I implore you to use simple links with no embedded spaces (escape them please) and no ..’s when you are writing your HTML. You will make my life much easier. And we all know that making my life easier is the most important thing to do! ;)

Put Your Brain To Work

Welcome to BrainSeeds!

I’ve been toying with what to do with this domain since I first registered it… a long time ago. I like to play around with internet websites, trying to see what I can do both with technology and SEO. It’s my intention to use BrainSeeds to talk about subjects primarily related to the internet business, paying particular attention to small publishers and how they can improve their websites.

I’m sure I will make several mis-steps in this journey, but I hope to get it mostly right.