Instrumental Music

The consistent data center wide movements have continued over the weekend in a largely downward direction with visitor traffic and bounce rates to match. Rankpulse shows a relatively high level of search results churn for 5 of the last last 6 days - not as high as the spike in late February but the next best think and this time we believe not based on a data center flip flopping but a global changes. This latter point is based on daily observations at reladvance.com which has shown global step changes for two SERPs (Search Engine Rank Position) until today when one has a range of results from 37-42 randomly spread across the data centers. If anything Yahoo is holding up so it is becoming clear that the visitor volume reductions we are seeing is the impact of the Google update and changing SERPs results. As ever there are movements both ways and some 3 and 4 word phrases are bubbling up into the top 50 while relatively popular 2 word phrases are sinking fast. The update has not raised ...

Yesterday we reported a Google update which apparently had modestly depressing impacts on some of our search positions only to find the next day that visitor number are collapsing faster than ever and worse still bounce rates for our most popular entrance pages have gone to 100% or there abouts. This pattern has kicked in over two days. The modest site wide updates we did on the second of those days can't possibly be responsible so we are now very confused and anxious. There is no real keyword pattern that we can detect and Yahoo seems to be moving down with Google. Very very disturbing or is it the start of school/college holidays? I don't think we've seen a marked Easter effect before. So let's see what the next few week bring - there may be a bit of a blog gap while we have a break in the run up to Easter and try and collect our thoughts.

This one hasn't got a name yet but something has happened overnight because almost all the inconsistencies between data centers have been eliminated according to the Reladvance report I have been using to monitor this aspect of Big Daddy's roll out. Rankpulse is showing unusual but not spectacular changes in rankings for the last couple of days so that tends to confirm this is an update. As yet there has not been much comment in the SEO Forum so you may well have heard it here first. It looks to me as if we may be seeing some first fruits of Big Daddy - you can understand that Google may have been uncomfortable about the use of the term 'Google Dance' as a description for their updates - we may be in for much more uniform step changes in future. The impact on us seems to be a modest with some downward drift on 'composer mp3' search results. This contrasts with Yahoo where we are continuing to see broad upward progress including some break-throughs. There is also...

Initial impact - zero. Given an discount increase from 20% to 50% we seem to have a pretty price inelastic demand function here. The new discount offer is pretty clear on the streaming sample pages but perhaps we need to beef it up on the main pages. Perhaps a link nearer the top of the panel will help and some work on the discount page itself. We might also try some explanation of the basket pricing calculations to help give people the confidence to build up their shopping basket. We could also try some additional messages/links built into a few pages to see if that achieves a greater impact. Try, try and try again!

I thought it was about time we said a few words about Ringtones and then this article came along: Who ever invented the ring tone is probably sitting on a beach, drinking something with a little umbrella in it and will never have to worry about paying the bill again. Most of us know that ring tones are the sound our cell phones make to alert us of an incoming call. It was first just a tool used so one person could distinguish one cell phone ring from another, however, now you can make your cell phone make any kind of noise you can think of, from the voice of a favorite band or singer to everyday sounds of street traffic to barn animals. Some ring tones make a nice sound and don't annoy the ones around them. Other sounds are just down right annoying and rude and those are the ones that are usually the loudest and can be heard from blocks away. Birds too have picked up on ring tone music too and a German study has found that many wild birds are excellent mimics. Starlings, Blue Jays...

No - not lost in a fog of alcohol - a weekend without streaming samples! In our enthusiasm to launch or Spring Sale with it's 50% volume discount - up from the 'Launch' Discount of 20% - we made extensive use of the powerful Find and Replace command in Dreamweaver and stupidly omitted to test the streaming sample pages after we had uploaded them! So what did we find in the failure log this morning but a lot of sample files with odd characters in the filename. It took a moment or two to cop on because we often see the results of failed unauthorized attempts to download these samples in this log. Then a quick check with four OS/Browser combinations convinced us we had a problem Houston. Thinking back to Friday afternoon's activity and the rush to make those changes and a penny began to drop. A test on Widor's Toccata confirmed the diagnosis and we have now reversed the evil spell and restored streaming happiness! Because of the way the files are organised/named we avo...

40% of our Bandwidth goes to visitors form the USA with half that going to UK visitors. There have been one page visits from such far away places as Paraguay and Madagascar and even Iraq. Despite Google's entry into China we are seeing relatively few visitors form there but I guess that will take time to develop. Naturally we were also visited by 28 different robots during March - several of the larger ones come every day and it is interesting to note that Yahoo's bot made twice as many hits as Google bot. Is it just inefficient or is the number two just trying harder? Like any global business our site is working round the clock with a peak at 15.00 UK server time when both Europe and the Eastern seaboard of the US are awake. This peak is four times the trough at 07.00 hours when both the West Coast and Western Europe are still asleep. For reasons that passeth our understanding Friday is the slack day of the week for us but there isn't really much of a day of week or day of...

Poking around in the Web Design section of Google Analytics this morning brought out a couple of interesting observations: 1. Over 21% of our visitors now use FireFox - this has been growing steadily since we started getting any kind of tracking and I think was around 7% in the early days so that has trebled. As a member of that fraternity myself I can understand why it has caught on so strongly. 2. Only about 11% of our visitors use dial up connections. There are another 10% that the system can't identify but everyone else is on broadband of some kind. As some one who used to work in the telecomms industry and was in at the start of the R&D for ADSL this is extraordinary. Obviously the MP3 focus of the site leads to a strong self selection bias but it is helpful to know how strong this is. It also means from a practical point of view that we don't need to worry too much about page loading times or the size of downloads. Oh and by the way it is nice to see that 4% snea...

March has seen a 50% drop in visitor numbers and there is no discernible pattern. The rate of decline is the same on Google and Yahoo and in the major Keywords there are no obvious victims. Similarly the most frequently visited pages are showing no distinctive performance. Our updating efforts on the streaming sample pages have brought no obvious benefits. The bounce rates on them have gone up nearly as often as they have gone down. Just looking at the competitive sites on a 'Debussy MP3' search flags up the changes which have been going on. It looks as if there are legitimate piano recordings on sale for as little as $0.17 and there are amateur piano recordings offered free of charge by an Italian pianist. Where as in the past these offers were not evident we were often the first site you got to with a straight forward download offer. Our strategy from the outset was to take our price from the market leaders - iTunes and it is beginning to look as if we need to seriously recon...

Keywords are a continuing source of facination for us so this article was irrisistable: Keyword Elite , The Ferrari Of Keywords Research By Peter Vermeeren In order to find the right tools to research high paying AdSense keywords, it is important to know what information you want to know about keywords. It would be just great if there were a tool that told everyone exactly what Google pays for each keyword, but that doesn't exist and anyone who creates such a tool is certain to be barred from Google forever because it is a clear violation of the terms and conditions of having an AdSense account to reveal any income information to anyone else. You can use Adwords keyword tool to select keywords and you'll get some information. But there are many, many great tools out there that will help you select the right keywords for your AdSense campaign focus. Look for only those tools that provide information about the number of searches performed, the number of competing websites and a ...

McDar is back and Reladvance is better. Both are showing very few differences between data centers for key words that have been good indicators of Big Daddy progress up to now so it looks as if that is done. With Reladvance we can also see the variations in PR, Backlinks and Pages indexed which are extant across the data centers but evidently they are incidental to the Search Results rather than causal which is a useful lesson for the future interpretations of what is going on with Google updates. Our problem is that we have been seeing a steady decline in visitor numbers from all sources over the last several weeks. Big Daddy has seen significant swings and roundabouts for various of our key words and phrases. While updating the sample pages we have noticed potential sources of confusion between the composer and sample pages and part of that update has been to make the purpose of the sample pages clearer and make their optimisation. We are also working on the Ringtone pages to mak...

The steaming pages for the samples of our main music recordings have been completed - phew! Just couldn't resist a quick peek with Analytics but it is either too early or it has had absolutely no impact. Never the less we will press on and bring the ringtone streaming pages up to the same standard. The famous Matt Cutts Google posted yesterday about the current state of Big Daddy and confirmed that it is almost complete with only one or two data centers remaining to be updated. It looks to us as if we are already benefiting from the first fruits of this change but the emphasis on infrastructure changes suggests that there may be subsequent changes as some of the new functionality is switched on and brought into use. Still no McDar so we are flying blind to some extent.

This article caught my eye as I was ignorant of this new development - knowing what this human editor excludes from this blog I'm a bit doubtful but read on and see what you think: First of all, there may be some of you that have never even heard of Autoblogger Pro. So let's examine this new script. Autoblogger Pro is really a very simple concept. It integrates itself into a Wordpress blog and then uses RSS feeds from news sources and blogs to populate the blog with relevant content. For example, if you want to build a blog that focuses on 'Mortgages' then you would simply locate several blog or news feeds that focus on mortgages and then load them into the admin area of the script. Every time the script is executed it will then pull in the RSS feed from all of the sites you've entered, and post them to the blog. In essence, you end up with a blog that contains highly targeted content, blended and unique because it comes from a variety of sources. All maintained by ...

Volumes of visitors are a bit volatile at the moment but there is no obvious explanation. A few key words have fallen back significantly and we can see the impact of that but others have been moving forward or holding their ground. Without daily access to McDar we can't see if it is Google flux which is at play or some early reaction to the changes we have been making to our pages. The sample page conversion program is making good headway now and we can see some light at the end of the tunnel. On reflection I think we'll use a slightly different template for the Ringtone products because we have never used the pop-up pages to display them and they are complete recordings rather than samples - just Lo Fi rather than Hi Fi.

A little bit of Monday morning - back to basics reflection: The Internet is really just a big gathering of a lot of little niches. No matter your taste or desire, if there is not already a website out there catering to you and those like you, there soon will be. Unlike traditional media such as print or television ads, Internet marketing is ideally suited to efficiently convert members of any niche into potential customers. From search engine optimized websites to ezine advertising, Internet marketing is finely tuned and will get the most out of your advertising dollar. But before you decide on what marketing strategy to employ, you first must define your niche market. For instance, if you want to sell a new method of making coffee, which will help the customers get more caffeine out of every bean, you need to decide who your customers would be. You cannot presume that all coffee drinkers will form your niche market. You must know the socio-economic level at which your potential cu...

You may well say - at last but it is going to take a few days to complete. There were still some last minute snags but the Bach sample pages are all updated now. We will be going through one composer at a time because the composer page has to be modified as well to cope with the larger pop-up file. One of the last minute snags was Firefox suddenly deciding not to accept pop ups from us even though it was showing the acceptance rule for our site - it has recovered now thank goodness. McDar is still down so we can't really tell what is happening with Big Daddy at the moment.

It is strange how dependent one can become on a regular source of information and it is hard to be patient but then again it is free, so I guess that you get what you pay for and we should just be grateful for their kind efforts. McDar has been down for a few days now and so we have been unable to track the most recent progress of Big Daddy and we are still not sure what the overall impact will be for us even though it has rolled out to most data centers now. Rankpulse is showing exceptionally low levels of activity or flux, as it is often known, for all but one of the last six days. Our overall visitor numbers are drifting very slowly downwards but we can't see any underlying trend. The spread of key words which our visitors use is so broad it is very hard to pick out what is going on in these circumstances even with he power of Google Analytics. There are some straws in the wind which suggest that it might turn out OK. Certainly we are getting good coverage but there are a distur...

Yesterday's little panic about the site: search results for www.download2mp3.com is over we are restored albeit not quite to our former glory. The number of links to is back down to 15 after sometime at 38 - not sure what this really signifies since it seems to be a pretty arbitrary although all the guidance says that links are important nobody really comments on the contents of these site search results. The other elements such as pages from site and sites containing are relatively straight forward and you can see parallels with what the other major search engines pick up. The more entertaining results are from the similar to or related to: search results . For a while we got a very odd collection of sites but it is settling down to a number of independent music sites. This is quite encouraging because this feature doesn't always work for other sites I keep track of. Of course when I went back to check a couple of details it had gone again - just a touch of the flux - no ...

We were a bit previous on Friday - those last few surplus pixels have proved too elusive and the template still isn't fit for use.... Otherwise it looks great so more tedious experimenting today. Big Daddy rolled out a little further this weekend and there are only a few data centers that have not been updated now - Google still on schedule. Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.download2mp3.com - just a little bit of a shock to the system when this happens as it did this am. Some links from and pages that contain search results are available albeit on a relatively modest scale compared to what we are used to. This hasn't happened to other sites I look out for so we are hoping this is a passing glitch. McDar is down this morning but things looked OK yesterday. Perhaps it is just a little ripple to get the week off to an interesting start.

Following up on the template solution for the 'main' pages we have been working on a template for the samples pages. This has been tricky because we have been going from a flexible page width format to a fixed narrow centered one. Lots of fussy table design to get the graphics right. Just the update drudgery now. The purpose of this is to strengthen the branding on the site and enable site wide update/messages more easily. The caching of the template material by visitors' browsers should mean that there is no significant addition to the download time for these pages. The composer/ringtone of the week will be changed over today as we swing into the new routine. On the Big Daddy front there has been no real movement on the data centers for a few days but we are seeing the potential impact of Big Daddy on our pages reduce as the results pre and post get closer together - let's hope Google haven't been doing all this for nothing!