Website Monitoring NewsLatest posts and articles on website monitoring services.

Uptrends expands monitoring network.

We are pleased to inform you that we have expanded our network of monitoring stations. We have added a new monitoring stations in Lausanne Switzerlandto improve our geographical coverage. The IP number of the new monitoring station is 94.103.100.197.
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A new version of our site is now available. This version aims to be clearer in the description of our offer of monitoring.
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Turns out, not that funny.

MSN.com home page posted a photo highlighting a hilarious website http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com today. The website allows users to post awkward family photos – imagine if you will such photo categories as “The Mullet Club,” “Dad’s without Shirts” etc…

The owners of the website also just published a book of photos along the same vein. The article accompanying the photo included a link to the http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com however, as might be expected with this type of publicity the website crashed

the day of the MSN.com article.

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Clearly, in the short-term, the awkwardfamilyphotos.com website owners will pay a lost opportunity cost for not being prepared for the influx of hits. In their defense, perhaps they didn’t know the timing of the article and therefore

didn’t have a chance to prepare with added capacity or web load stress testing. This may have also been a case where active User Traffic Pattern monitoring, which includes monitoring and alerting on the number of

webpage hits and average page load time may have helped the website users get ahead of the capacity curve early in the ramp up of site visits.

Again, at this point what we don’t know is the potential long-term impact (ie. google Site Speed cost) of a sudden, but relatively sustained loss in site speed.

What we do know is that a funny site got smacked with downtime and slow load times – we ran a couple instant tests on our free website uptime tool (see one typical result below) – and we doubt the owners of the site are laughing.

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Pondering the New Factor's Ambiguity

No one is exactly sure about how google’s site speed factor will exactly affect a specific website’s search rankings, nor is anyone sure about how google’s site speed factoring will change in the future. There is some speculation that google’s recent move is part of bigger plan to “warm-up” website owners to further prioritize faster site speeds. It’s difficult to speculate as currently google will even recommend getting rid of its own google Analytics to improve site speed on a page!

Dotcom-Monitor.com was quoted in a Dec. 4, 2009 article on CBSnews.com that in some instances especially large e-tailers may find themselves punished if google added site speed to the search result algorithm. That remains to be seen, however, what is clear is that e-tailers and everyone else involved in maintaining search relevance is paying more attention to site speed relative to search rankings and monitoring for site speed.

Even with the unclear effects of google's site speed factor, there are things you can do to learn more about your site's performance and to keep one step ahead of the google site speed issue.

Step 1: Looking Under the Hood of Your Site

It may seem a daunting task to quantify how fast your site performs or to uncover what's slowing down your web site. It's certainly a deep topic – however there are many great tools to help get you started. Two tools we've used at Dotcom-Monitor assist in developing our own web presence are Yahoo's YSlow and google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/using.html” target=”_blank”>google's Page Speed. Each gives you a good breakdown of what comprises your page and tips for changing page composition to make the overall download faster. google's own Webmaster Central listed other tools in addition to these two googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html” target=”_blank”>when they announced the speed factor.

Step 2: Site Speed monitoring

Once you've prepared your site to run at a speed that works for you and your customers, how do you make sure it stays that way?

Virtually every large e-tailer is already conducting active, externally-based site speed monitoring. For these large e-tailers adding site speed to the discussion around google search rankings is merely another data point in a wider discussion about uptime, performance, — and now search rankings. However, for some mid-market and smaller online stores adding active external monitoring to ensure performance and uptime is a new area. The fact that a factor in SEO now relates to site speed adds uncertainty about how to utilize active, external monitoring to ensure website uptime, performance, search rankings – and a good online reputation and revenues.

Specific and Comprehensive Site Speed monitoring Solutions

The following active, external monitoring services at www.Dotcom-Monitor.com all address the need to maintain a 24/7 monitoring of the functionality and performance of websites which takes into account site speed. When site speed affects performance and a user’s experience in a way that impact revenues www.Dotcom-Monitor.com automatically sends alerts and initiates diagnostic processes. Owners of the monitored website can ensure they maintain a website that users will use and address any site speed issues quickly, so that slow downs have minimal affects on their online reputation, revenues – and now search rankings.

Dotcom-Monitor Tracks Site Performance

Dotcom-Monitor offers services that can help you keep lookout on your site's performance: http://dotcom-monitor.com.

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WatchMouse’s PSP technology powers new API live status page on dev.monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter.com

Amsterdam, The Netherlands – May 18, 2010 – WatchMouse, a global industry leader in self-service website and application performance monitoring, announced today that it has been selected by monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter, the real-time, 140-character information network to power its live status page on monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter.com/” target=”_blank”>dev.monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter.com, a new portal designed to facilitate complete transparency with developers who access the monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter APIs.

[...]
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New Feature: Primary Vendor Selection

By default, every Site Audit will automatically discovers all pages and all supported tags. However, when sites are very large (500,000 pages or more), have complex structures or very heavy pages, a small number of tags may not appear during the audit. For these situations, we’ve added the “Primary Vendor” feature.

The Primary Vendor Selection feature is completely optional, and if all of the options are left unselected, the website audit will complete with the same methodology as always. Primary Vendor Selection adds an extra layer of vigor, and is most useful for large or complex sites, because it forces SiteAudit to check and recheck for the vendor tag you select.

How to Use Primary Vendor Selection

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SiteAudit allows you to select the primary vendor for your domain.

On the New domain page, you’ll see a new section labeled “Primary Vendor.” Selecting any of the checkboxes for that type of tag will tell our system that each tag should be on every page audited. When our system does not detect a required tag, it will check the page up to two more times before determining that a tag is definitely not on the page. This will greatly reduce the number of “false negatives,” which can be caused by many factors including network packet loss, page lag, etc.

CAUTION: Select only the tags that you expect to be on every page of the scan. Because of the additional page checking when the tag is not found, selecting a tag that is not highly implemented will cause the scan to take longer to complete.

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Websites for an overwhelming number of staffing firms experience downtime on a regular basis, according to the recent study released by Uptrends.com, the global website monitoring company (www.uptrends.com).
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Initial research reveals 81% of top 100 global brands are being exploited in search engine ads

Amsterdam, The Netherlands – May 4, 2010 – Following on the heels of a highly visible court
case between Louis Vuitton and google, WatchMouse, a global industry leader in self-service
website and application performance monitoring, today announced the new product launch of
GeoBrand, an automated way to detect brand abuse in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on
Yahoo!, Bing and google in over 30 countries. WatchMouse tested GeoBrand using Interbrand’s
“2009 Best Global Brands” list, and determined that 81 percent of the top 100 global brands are
victims of search engine advertising brand abuse including BMW, IBM, Cartier, Coca-Cola,
Goldman Sachs and L’Oréal.

Search engine advertising programs offered by Yahoo!’s Sponsored Search, google’s
AdWords, and Microsoft Bing’s Search Advertising service allow any business to purchase
keywords to display web advertisements on the search engine results page.

“Unauthorized use of third-party trademarks and brand names as keywords to trigger
keyword advertising and sponsored links is a rampant problem. We discovered through our
testing that one of the sectors with the most widespread and blatant brand abuse is the
automobile industry,” states Mark Pors, CTO and co-founder of WatchMouse. “Business is
siphoned or lost when consumers visit a competitor’s website via a competitor’s keyword ad
rather than accessing the brand owner’s website.”

The recent European google-louis-vuitton-search-ads” target=”_blank”>court case involving Louis Vuitton and google ruled that companies
who use brand names in search advertising to drive sales must be more transparent about who the
seller is. The court’s decision however, left the challenge of tracking and handling this type of
brand abuse with brand owners.

Each of the major search engines has different policies that vary by country. The challenge for brand managers is to remain abreast of the rules and to monitor and track abuse globally.

“It’s very challenging to detect when and where a brand is being exploited via online
advertising because search engine results vary greatly depending on the user’s actual location by
country. GeoBrand is the only monitoring solution capable of detecting the unique PPC ads for
each country’s search engines,” adds Pors.

GeoBrand performs actual tests and detects PPC ads in 30 major countries and generates
reports of the offenses by country and specific search engine. This provides brand managers with
the documentation they need to correctly manage search engine complaint procedures, overbid
competition, and if necessary, to take legal action.

The GeoBrand Solution offers:

• Actual tests in 30 major countries
• Smart filtering technology delivers the most relevant brand abuse cases
• A clean, web-based console for easy management and reporting
• A way to proactively monitor and manage all brands and trademarks on the Web
• Easily accessible, brand and trademark abuse reports

GeoBrand is currently available for members of INTA (International Trademark
Association), professional legal service providers and dedicated brand managers only. For more
information visit www.geo-brand.com.

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