Monday, December 3, 2007

uISV Class 07 - December Grades

I'm going to run WebsiteGrader each month to do a status check on us and see how we are doing. Here's how were were doing when I initially ran it last month.

Here are the results for this month:


SiteScorePage Rank
chatspring.com (was steplively.com)310
http://www.thinklife.co.uk/403
joelmarcey.com484
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com/764
http://www.sportavista.com/ note1N/AN/A
http://www.sendalong.com/120
catchthebest.com760
http://www.heliumfoot.com/390
http://www.lokad.com/954
twistedwave.com735
http://www.omnicustomersupport.com/350
http://www.webworkschedules.com/280
http://www.sixproducts.com/300



I noticed a major issue of using www in the urls. In particular catchthebest.com vs. www.catchthebest.com and twistedwave.com vs www.twistedwave.com. I know google treats those as different sites, which is why you need to have a redirect in place. I also noticed that WebsiteGrader also treats them differently. For Catch The Best, the score difference is 76 vs 58 and 73 vs 51 for Twisted Wave. To keep it consistent, I'm using the URL that I get directed to if I go to the site. So the URL in the table is the URL I used in WebSiteGrader. This also affected the reported PR score. Also the following warning is displayed for the Google Page Rank scores on the report page:

Note: The Google Page Rank is dependent on external sources and may not be reported correctly. If you receive a Page Rank of 0, the rank may not be accurate.

The highest ranking was Lokad with a 95 still, second month in a row. The best improvement was joelmarcey.com with an 8 point jump.

Gentle nudge to Jon of SendAlong to update his meta-keywords and description tags and I think we would see his score jump 10-20 points based on my own experience.

So that's it for this month. I'll run them again next month.

Note 1: WebSiteGrader was unable to run on
www.sportavista.com. There was no errors when I ran the report, but I'm able to browse to the page, so I'm not sure what the issue is. The big concern here is that Google and others may be having a similar problem that WebSiteGrader is.

Updated 12/10 - Aded Ian Howson's blog from www.sixproducts.com

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks Chris for displaying these stats and including my blog in them.

I guess mine is doing ok, not great, but not horrible. With Wordpress I can see how many people hit the website of my blog directly, but not the number of people who read it via RSS. They took that feature away. So it's hard to know whether my blog is actually being read by a lot of people or not.

But I do like it that my blog is part of a statistical analysis :-)

Joel Marcey

Chris said...

Your doing a better than I am :) I think getting out there early and having some sort of readership (and links) is a great head start on your uISV. Speaking of which, when are you going to announce your product idea? You had 3 picked out and I'm waiting to hear what you decided to work on first.

Have you thought about hosting wordpress yourself? I've been thinking about going that direction myself. I know I should do that, but there are just not enough hours in the day right now.

jonchase said...

Chris -

Thanks for the monthly update! I've added keywords and descriptions to the home page, but I realized that the big thing affecting SendAlong's score is that my index.html page is just a redirector to the real part of the site (it's nested several directories deep). When I try to grade www.sendalong.com/send/s/site/index.html my score goes up to 27.

I'm looking at releasing a new version (still beta, but getting closer to 1.0!) in the next two weeks, at which point that issue will be fixed. And I'll actually have a decent looking site:).

As for Wordpress hosting, it's not hard if you already have a server up and running with PHP and MySQL. If you've got those prereq's, the basic install only takes a few minutes. Then you can do all sorts of fun stuff like using Google Analytics and FeedBurner.

Anonymous said...

Chris,

I think once I get my business website up and going, I will move my personal blog onto my hosting server to keep everything in one place. I would, most likely, use Wordpress.org for both my personal and business blog since I have been Wordpress.com up until now (I think the transition will be easier).

Regarding when I am going to annouce the product idea(s), I have been debating that for a while now. I have been trying to come up with what is the right time to do that. Do I announce right away to get idea feedback? Do I flesh out the idea myself before saying anything to try to avoid (1) any possible copycatting (2) making a fool of myself if the idea is bad? Maybe I will post something on BoS about this.

Joel Marcey

Chris said...

Jon,
I'll stop nagging you then :). 27, that's a huge jump. Great to hear you are almost ready to launch. That is very cool. Let me know when the new site is up.

Joel,
I've done both. With Web Work Schedules, I waited for a long time to announce. With Omni Customer Support I announced it before I worked on any of the code. I think announcing it early is the best thing to do.

I think getting feedback as soon as possible is the way to go. I'm not worried about copycats, since it is the execution that is the most important thing. Writing the code is only the start of it. Better to find out early that the idea is bad rather than waste a lot of time working on it only to find out later that it is bad.

I would not worry about making a fool of yourself either. If you ask, "is xyz a good business idea?" and people shoot it down, then all it means is the idea was not good. No big deal. Move on to the next one. No one will remember that you once had a bad idea.

Anonymous said...

Chris,

I think you have convinced me to divulge my ideas. :-) Watch my blog for some related posts.

Joel Marcey

Anonymous said...

Hello Chris,

thanks for including sportavista in your list. We have been working hard over the last couple of weeks to make sure our site is viewable and accessible by search engines and other bots.

Our ranking will hopefully get better over the coming weeks. We have had some press attention as well, so a number of links to our website are out there.

Thanks for the great initiative. It's now one of our goals to become the best progresser in your list for a couple of a row :-)

b.

Chris said...

B,
Glad to hear things are going well for sportavista. I'm not sure why WebSiteGrader has problems with your site. I have no problem when I go it it withy my browser.

Just a reminder that I've moved my blog to www.manzanitatech.com. You can see the latest grades there.