It is often difficult to choose the correct indicators to use when we have to decide on how to measure the efficiency of a SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) mission, or when we want to know where our website stands, also when we want to trace the effects of any modifications that we make to it.  It is clear though that some indicators are totally useless and can even be misleading.  Let’s take a hard look at some of these devils: « Public » Metrics What I call a Public metric is an indicator given by an external tool and which can be […]

When a website editor wants to make money from online advertising he can choose from several operational modes: the CPM, the CPC or a fixed contract.  This choice is also a problem for the advertiser, which method would be best?  Should he pay for each prospective customer interested in his ad or should he pay for every hit?  Although these are frequent questions, the answers are never too difficult to find. Firstly, Let me introduce some vocabulary: CPC: Cost per click, this is the adsense advertising model. Every time a user clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays the editor. […]

A nice infographic from http://www.visualeconomics.com, the original is here. Pay attention to the fact that reading is the smallest item in the list!

I don’t know about you, but there are several blogs that I like to read to keep abreast of web/SEO/etc developments.  Amongst these, there is one that shouldn’t be missed: it is Stanford’s CS department blog. It has many assets: it is a blog written by a star team of researchers specialising in website algorithmics, and from which most Google, Yahoo (and others) brains emerge.  In short, their postings are always interesting and there’s no « useless-post-about-a-boring-life »… All this to say that, a few months ago, Bobji Mungamuru posted about a very interesting article in which he discusses about Click Fraud. […]

Here in France, we had this morning a funny surprise during our first request to Google France. Indeed, the homepage presents this small sentence under the search box « Nouveau! Le téléphone HTC Magic est disponible. En savoir Plus ». This litterally means  « New! The telephone HTC Magic is available. To know more about it « , with a link to this this page of google.fr. On the target page, a cool picture of the HTC Magic Android, and 2 links to a SFR (the third  French mobile phone company – 19 million clients, including over 3 million using 3G technology, according to […]

At first PPC is more interesting, then SEO becomes the solution after a while. At least that’s what this nice infographic from elliance is saying.

According to Wikipedia, Social Psychology : « is a type of social science that is concerned with individuals’ thoughts, feelings and behaviour as they affect or are affected by other individuals… » and which « studies the interactions between individuals in a group, a society or in different organisations ».  How true is that definition? I’m not sure, but what I do understand is that when I read texts about social psychology they give us the key to understanding what motivates us to undertake specific actions. At this stage you should understand what I’m aiming at: how do we get people to do what […]

I was talking recently to three excellent engineers from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft this week, and that reminded me that I meant to do this post a little while ago. So I’ll keep this post short and sweet: if you’re an excellent Yahoo or Google or Microsoft engineer with solid experience in everything, I am hiring. If you want to apply for a Research Engineer position  in the beautiful town of Orsay (France), use my e-mail and we won’t need recruiters to discuss. Thanks! The beginning of this post remind you of something? yes, sure, it’s a pastiche of this […]

A friend recently asked me to explain her the concept behind MapReduce. The last time we saw each other, I had no time to do that, so I now use my  blog for this purpose. Map and reduce are particular functions that can be found we in numerous functional languages (such as python, ocaml, etc.). Map is a function that takes as input an other function, let’s say $latex f$ and a data structure (most of the time a sequence), that calls the function $latex f$ on each of the structure’s items and returns a list of the return values. […]

I will probably wrote one day about the folklore in SEO about the colour of the hats (white hats follow Google guidelines, black hats don’t, and grey hats are neutral), anyway the goal of my post is to present this infographic by seomoz. The original post is here. I won’t discuss about the graphic, but I’m pretty sure you can guess from it that the author (randfish, « a self-proclaimed professional white-hat SEO« ) is not a big fan of black hat techniques.