Detective Activity Feedback 06

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

October 18, 2006 [1485 views]

Findings from Detective Activity

A big thanks to all who finished this week’s activity. Most of you seem to have really enjoyed the exercise.

Here are the main findings plus some comments.

• 38% of the sites were on Linux with 50% on Windows.
• 40% of sites are being served using Apache with 44% using MS IIS
• Finding out when a company launched its first site can be useful in understanding when it might want to upgrade. A site that has just relaunched is unlikely to be interested. Using the Internet Archive it is often possible to see what changes have been made at each stage.
• Finding out how many visitors are coming to a site is one of the dreams of competitor research. The only accurate way is viewing the web server logs but it can be estimated from search engines or using tool bar sampling.
• You need to understand the diffence between visitors, hits and page impressions and we will cover this in a later session.
• Finding out the development technology is hard and almost half of the sites proved impossible. PHP (16%) was the most popular. I suspect that you need to look at more sites to begin to work out how to spot the signs.
• PageRank and AlexaRank are measures of reputation (crudely numbers of inbound links and popularity respectively). We will go into more detail during the session.
• A wide range of approaches had been used to try and understand the keywords a site had used. These are useful as they are likely to be the terms for which the site will score highly in the search engines (if proper optimisations are applied).

Comments and questions about the module

1. Can we have the activities earlier to allow us to do them between the two lectures? Yes, where possible, starting this week.
2. How do you download the Podcasts? You need an MP3 player or software such as iTunes and you should be able to right-click (on a PC) on the link.
3. Is there a specific book? No, I will recommend several.
4. I am worried about the exam. Should I be? No, I will provide some details in the next 2 weeks.
5. I am having problems with Zoomerang. Use Firefox.
6. When will we learn to optimise for search engines? Coming soon.
7. Will there be an individual mark for each activity? No, you are marked for participation.
8. I don’t understand ranking. I will go over this in the lecture session.
9. I have only just joined the course and need to catch up. All the materials are online and the Podcasts should give you a good sense of the lectures. Ask questions on the site if things are unclear.

 

  

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