Example of a blog that gets labeled as content farm

February 27, 2011 Dave Ohara

Google has made changes to its search algorithm to reduce rankings of content farms.

Finding more high-quality sites in search

2/24/2011 06:50:00 PM

Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.
Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

Some professional bloggers make a significant portion of their income from advertising. Check out this post as one example of a blogger labeled as a content farm.

Unfortunately (and surprisingly), this change has had a major impact* on organic traffic flowing through Google to Digital Inspiration as well. See this chart from Google Analytics.

Google has rolled out their new algorithm in US only but once the changes are propagated to other country-specific Google sites - like google.co.in and google.co.uk – the organic traffic from Google to Digital Inspiration would take an even bigger hit.

The AdSense-centric business model of this blog, where online advertising revenues are more or less based on the number of page-views, will obviously suffer because of this change in search engine rankings.

I am so glad I don't depend on Google Adsense for income as much as it is another metric to measure how well my site works.

Thanks for continuing to visit the Green Data Center blog. Total traffic is the important if you are focused on advertising revenue. I have different goals that I'll be sharing in more details as I roll out changes in the site.

Data Center Hunter or Harvester/Farmer, looking for customers

September 9, 2010 Dave Ohara

In the data center industry there are many people who enjoy game hunting.

And a dominant method to find customers follows a hunting methodology as opposed to a harvester/farmer approach.

Here is an article that talks about the Hunter vs. Harvester approach.

In working with business owners and entrepreneurs over the years, I’ve noticed that when it comes to acquiring new customers, most of them are hunters. They pounce on new leads, chase the prospects, make themselves readily available to the prospect and then bend over backwards to land the new customer.

On the other hand, I’ve noticed that the most successful business owners and entrepreneurs take a different approach to customer acquisition: they are harvesters. They gather in all their leads, work hard to prevent any from slipping through the cracks, cultivate those leads and then harvest them when the time is right for the customer.

The most interesting thing about these two styles is that the hunter usually gets tired, a bit humiliated and ends up getting small margins. On the other hand, the harvester stays fresh, confident and usually earns higher margins.

I just saw this post on DataCenterKnowledge post on Data Center planning, and got me thinking about hunting vs. harvesting.

How to Avoid Data Center Planning Mistakes
September 8th, 2010 : Kevin Normandeau
Why do so many data center build outs and expansion projects fail? This white paperfrom Lee Technologies addresses this question by revealing the top nine mistakes organizations make when designing and building new data center space. It also examines an effective way to achieve success through the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) approach.

One person may think this is harvesting, but I think it is more like hunting.

Here is an example of what of what I think as a harvesting/farmer approach.

I've been watching my top 5 data center construction companies post. I get about 50 hits a week - every week for the past 8 months. I am amazed there are 470 keywords that point to my post.

And here is an example of this last week.

Looking at the ISPs the list shows the following companies - Capital One, GM, global crossing, JP Morgan Chase, Network Appliances, and Yahoo besides a long list of ISPs.

Here are the top 10 cities for this week. Note, the ability to look at ranges of time to see what cities the customers are in. If I looked for 8 months, I would get the every major city.

A group of people in Cleveland are looking for a data center. Who? This is obvious one.

Capital One Partners

Place page

1300 East 9th Street
Cleveland, OH 44114-1506

Pretty cool I can do this research from a blog post and Google Analytics!

Here are the top google keywords used to find my post.

If you were thinking like a Farmer/Harvester you would be figuring out how to reach the customers who are looking for these keywords in the cities I listed.

It is common for data center vendors to pay over $10K for a booth at a conference and maybe buy a speaking spot in front of as few as 2 dozen people. But few people think like a harvester and prefer hunting.

Not only that, but hunting for business is tough stuff, even for those who manage to make a living at it. When you’re in “hunting” mode, you’re dialing for dollars; you feel resistance at every turn; rejection is common; you get “price shopped” against competitors so margins are thin; and you waste tons of time working with prospects who simply aren’t ready to buy.

Seems more efficient to be a Harvester.

On the other hand, when you’re in “harvesting” mode, you’re working smart and scooping up sales left and right. You’re like the fisherman with the irresistible bait, drawing your prospects to you. You can spend your time closing deals on the phone with hot leads or go out on the golf course because you know your prospects will call you when they’re ready to move forward.

And, now that I think about it, the data center people I enjoy talking are Harvesters, and funny enough many of them enjoy game hunting.

Lead warming is about communicating with your prospects from the moment they express interest and then if they don’t buy right away, that’s OK because you then don’t let them slip away and instead breadcrumb them with information they’ll find valuable about your product, service or company

If you think you want to be a Harvester and want to leverage my post you can drop me an e-mail dave@greenm3.com. The easiest thing to do is to drop an inline advertisement in my post, and you'll have 50 eyeballs a week. :-) But, there are many more interesting things to try to be a data center harvester/farmer.

Web Metrics on Frozen Kindle 3 post

September 5, 2010 Dave Ohara

One week ago, I posted on my experience contacting Amazon.com tech support regarding a frozen Kindle 3. The following are a bunch of metric analytics I'll use to describe my post 7 days old. Note: I am using this as an example of what I can figure out now on any post I put on this blog.

There are some interesting market research and intelligence I am figuring out about users around the world who hit my post. For example, understanding what keywords people are searching for helps develop better content. I can also get leads on companies looking for data center content and how much interest there is in content in different geographic locations.

First after 7 days, if you Google search "frozen Kindle 3" my blog post my post shows up #1.

Here is the traffic through Feedburner for the post. 311 feed readers and 106 clicks back. Nothing particularly big.

Going to Google Analytics, here is the traffic over the past week.

There were 897 views with average time on page of 4:49 which means a lot of people were taking time reading and referencing the post as they were trying to fix their Kindle 3. The bounce rate is 96.14% as the readers didn't have an in interest in green data centers, but it was since to know that 3.86% read something else on my blog.

Looking at the keywords typed in Google Search here are the top 15. The #1 entry is the 106 unique page views that came from the same 106 reported in Feedburner for clicks to content based on my RSS subscribers. #2 and on are the order in frequency of page views from keywords typed in that users eventually clicked on my post.

The list of keywords goes up to 241 down to one click entries.

There are a total 45 countries who have used Google Search to find the post. The following are top 10.

138 regions.

To get more specific here are the top 10 out of 500 cities.

There are 391 service providers listed including amazon, RIM,

What type of users are the Kindle 3 user base? Windows, Mac, Linux. Here are the top 13 which should work as a pretty good sample to figure out a user mix and there other devices. Note the # of Apple users - Mac, iPhone, iPad, and iPod.

And the browser mix illustrates the Apple loyalists with the high Safari hits.

And, what search engines did people use. My Microsoft friends ask why I don't use Bing more. well when more than 95% of my search traffic comes from Google, I keep to the same mindset of my users.

I'll write about analytics on a green data center technical topic. But, the main one I am studying is the 2,000 hits I have on the Top 5 data center construction companies. I am quite surprised at how much traffic I get to that post, and how it stays up there in traffic.

Researching Topics using GreenM3 site metrics, example Social Security Data Center post

April 27, 2010 Dave Ohara

I regularly go through my feedburner stats to see what blog posts are getting traffic.

A typical post will look like below. Peak, then fall off to single digit traffic.

The Social Security Administration's mistake in site selection post is different. It is keeping steady at 40 - 50 hits a day 1 1/2 weeks after I posted.

Part of the traffic I think stems from learning from other's mistakes which rarely get published. As most content is vendor sponsored, most content discusses buying new products to solve problems.

I went to the typepad metrics to track down one of Google Search hits. My blog entry made it up to #9 on "social security administration data center"

The SSA data center says they were trying to a be a green data center, but it is going to be probably be one of the slowest built data centers out there.

SSA data center to go green

Agency will use energy-efficient technology

By Alice Lipowicz

May 20, 2009

The Social Security Administration intends to use green information technology solutions in the new $800 million data center that will replace its existing facility.

SSA will use money from the economic stimulus law to help identify and install energy-efficient IT solutions at the new National Support Center, which handles Social Security benefits, according to a plan released May 18 on the Recovery.gov Web site. Green IT solutions are designs, practices and devices that reduce environmental impact and limit energy consumption.

A data center friend tipped me off the SSA is hesitant to adopt hold and cold aisles. Can imagine what the SSA PUE will be? It will be a long time before we see that number. Given the data center won't go online until Oct 2013 based on 2009 estimates. Who cares what the PUE is as by 2014 I hope we have beyond PUE reporting by then.

GreenM3 search results "dan barber fish farming" example of search engine optimization

April 14, 2010 Dave Ohara

Part of running www.greenm3.com blog is to understand how successfully I can write content that has high Google search results. I am surrounded by Microsoft friends where I live, and people regularly ask why I don't use Bing search. Because over 90% of my search comes from Google.

And my top browser traffic is from Firefox.

Which are interesting insights into the technical audience for my blog.

Mobile is small traffic, but interesting distribution.

I had fun writing the blog post on Dan Barber's Sustainable Farming. Yes, I have fun writing some entries which is why I write so much. :-) When I first wrote the entry I realized I was behind the curve. The TED video had gone live Mar 10, 2010 and there were multiple media/bloggers who wrote about Dan's video. My post went live on Mar 26, 2010, two weeks after others. And, when I checked on Google search, I was buried down in 4th page of 10 results.

But, today I just got this Google Search, making it up to spot #8.

Which is kind of mind blowing that my one post beats so many other professional media sites.The traffic from you is what drove my Google Search ranking up. I had about 800 views/hits over the past 2 1/2 weeks. On average, I get about 400 views/hits per post.

One site with more details on the fish farm Dan Barber references is on Monterey Bay Aquarium's blog.

The Future of Fish Farming?

It's a story that almost sounds too good to be true -- except that it is true, and it says a lot about the kind of world we're creating for ourselves. It's a world we can live in, for the long term.

I first heard the tale from chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill during theSustainable Foods Institute we put on last month at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. He described his delight in touring a multi-species aquaculture farm in Spainthat is a seamless part of a wetland restoration project in the Guadalquivir Marshes of Andalusia. Where the farmers produce abundant, high-quality seafood -- sea bass, bream, red mullet and shrimp -- AND where predators like flocks of flamingos are welcomed as a sign that the ecosystem is flourishing.

The Vera La Palma web site is here.

www.time.com has an article on Sustainable Aquaculture.

A ABEND / ISLA MAYOR Monday, Jun. 15, 2009

CHANNELING NATURE: Veta la Palma pumps estuary water into rehabilitated wetlands

Daniel Perez for TIME

It is rare for a farmer to appreciate the predators that eat the animals he raises. But Miguel Medialdea is hardly an ordinary farmer. Looking out on to the carpet of flamingos that covers one of the lagoons that make up Veta la Palma, the fish farm in southern Spain where he is biologist, Medialdea shrugs. "They take about 20% of our annuel yield," he says, pointing at a blush-colored bird as it scoops up a sea bass. "But that just shows the whole system is working."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1902751,00.html#ixzz0l7yJldTZ

Thanks again for visiting GreenM3 blog.

How to Avoid Data Center Planning Mistakes

Capital One Partners

SSA data center to go green

The Future of Fish Farming?