During our regular research for potential link partners we find all kinds of interesting things.  We find really great resources, really funny pages, neat articles, and basically a lot of information we never knew before.  During the course of her efforts, my chief link builder discovered a new kind of captcha that I guess I missed when it first launched.  I suspect some others may have missed this too which is why I thought I would point it out.  The new kind of captcha forces you to engage with an advertisement in order to get your captcha code.  Frankly it’s brilliant.  Annoying, but brilliant.

The company which launched this cool idea is called Solve Media (SolveMedia.com).  According to Solve, their ads (compared to non-interactive static ads) increase brand recall by 111% and message recall by a factor of twelve.  That’s pretty significant.  For more you can check out their white paper and look at examples ads on their site.

As an internet marketer I think this kind of advertising is a double-edged sword, at least for now.  On one hand, it really does reinforce brand and message recall, but on the other it annoys the living daylights out of some poor sap that just wants to submit a comment form.  Since brand recall is so high, and message recall is typically linked to the emotion elicited by the message, a user who is annoyed and inconvenienced by an advertisement may go away with a sour taste for the brand.

There are some kinks to be worked out with this new form of advertising (as shown in my screenshots below) but I think they really might be on to something here.

This type of captcha ad makes the user watch a short video, typically 15 seconds, to reveal the captcha solution.

A shot taken during the Bonobos captcha video advertisement.

The unfortunate ending to the Bonobos video ad. There's no captcha solution here.

This is a much better, much less inconvenient ad which gives you a quoted brand message in an image which is the captcha solution.

This video ad for a Camry is executed well. It's a high quality video with the caption solution apparent throughout the message.

The captcha solution for the Camry is displayed the whole time.

Firefox has beaten Internet Explorer to the coveted version 10.  Is anyone really paying attention?  Not really.  Firefox switched their update numbering scheme which is why their version numbers keep climbing so rapidly.  They adopted a more Chrome-like system of dropping support for older versions which is why you get fewer 8.1.4.5 type versions.

Mozilla say that Firefox 10 makes add-ons compatible by default	Installing Firefox 10 shows that not all add-ons have been made compatible by default
Firefox 10 scores a 2,977 in Pacekeeper's benchmarks	Chrome still trounces Firefox in speed with a score of 4,893 in Pacekeeper's benchmarks

Yesterday’s anti SOPA / PIPA protests were quite effective. Thousands of sites went “dark” and thousands more issued statements or offered some kind of graphic in protest to SOPA / PIPA. As a result many major supporters, including some of the authors, have withdrawn their support.  Though the bills were not killed, they were significantly damaged.  Below are some interesting statistics about the impact of yesterday’s protests.

• 7 million people signed Google’s petition to stop the legislation
• Google’s petition was +1′d 130,000 times
• Google’s Facebook post about SOPA / PIPA received over 4,600 likes, and 1,100+ shares
• 3.9 million tweets went out about SOPA / PIPA
• 162 million users saw Wikipedia’s blackout page
• 8 million people used Wiki’s blackout page to look up their representative’s contact info
• 12,000 people commented on the Wikipedia Foundation page
• 323,000 Flickr pictures were darkened during the protest
• Reddit blacked out their site meaning their users didn’t spend 18 million minutes viewing their content
• WordPress’ protest was seen by about 35 million bloggers
• Craigslist went dark and as a result probably lost about $825,000 in revenue

As a result of all of this activity, the bill now has 35 opposing senators, which is up from only 5 opponents last week.

Awesome.

A nice chunk of the internet has gone dark today in protest of the SOPA legislation which is up for a vote and is fervently backed by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).  It’s nice to see so many sites up in arms about this legislation and I hope it has an effect.  I’m afraid that it’ll be like the healthcare bill that was jammed down our throats; keep trying until you get it.  I’m sure someday something like SOPA will be passed into law.  They’ve been trying for MANY years to get the ability to censor the web.  It’ll be a sad day when the government is given carte blanche to take down sites without due process.

SEOMike is fully opposed to SOPA, ProtectIP and any other attempt to censor the wonderful, wild internet.

Thousands of websites are protesting today by “going black.”  Below are some screenshots from a few notable sites.

Google logo crossed out in protest of SOPA	Craigslist goes dark in protest of SOPA
Greenpeace goes dark in protest of SOPA	Archive.org goes dark in protest of SOPA
Mozilla goes dark in protest of SOPA	Reddit goes dark in protest of SOPA
Wikipedia goes dark in protest of SOPA	Wired gets censored in protest of SOPA
Wordpress goes dark in progest of SOPA / ProtectIP	The Cheezburger network protests SOPA

Visit SOPABlackout.org to learn more

The world has lost a paradigm shifter.  I saw the news on my Apple TV, confirmed on my iPad, checked Facebook on my iPhone and made this blog post using my iMac.  RIP Mr. Jobs.  You changed the world.

Steve Jobs - Paradigm Shifter

Our site has ranked at #1 in Google for “kansas city internet marketing” for years. A few days ago I noticed that it had dropped off completely with only sporadic internal pages ranking at #6 and beyond. Needless to say, I was unhappy. I spent several days trying to figure out the reason for this sudden MASSIVE drop in ranking. I investigated everything from a black-hat attack to a spam penalty against my site. I found nothing.  Something that was really bothering me was the fact that our homepage had NO cache in Google!  This is often the signature of a spam penalty – but with other pages on my site still ranking it didn’t have the same “fingerprint” of a spam penalty.  I don’t even spam anything anyway so it couldn’t have been a spam penalty. I remember saying to myself “I don’t know what’s going on. Time to freak out.”

The above image shows page crawl rate. You can see the day the robots.txt started having a problem. My site hung on for another week before being removed from it's #1 ranking.

After checking everything I could think of I decided to look at Google Webmaster Tools again to see what Google was saying about my site. Unlike the last time I looked, Google now said EVERY page was unavailable! How could that be when my site was obviously live?! I checked the site on my iPhone and on my 3G enabled laptop and everything worked properly from outside my network. I decided to check the server headers on every single page on my site to see what the problem was and after receiving 200OK for every HTML file I was still flummoxed. I then decided to check other files like images and pdfs and they all got 200OK.  Lastly I checked the robots.txt file from my 3G laptop and lo-and-behold it returned nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  Just a blank page.  It resolved fine on my local network so I knew something was getting in the way of my robots.txt file getting out to the web. It could be only one thing – the firewall.

The problem with an empty response for the robots.txt is that apparently it’s not really an error to Google. It looks like they treat it as a “disallow all” statement. Crazy. You’d think that they’d treat it just like they would of there was no robots.txt file and go about their business indexing the site.  They don’t.

UPDATE
The problem was that the router / firewall I use received a software “update” on that day which caused a problem with one of the filters.  It seems that a filter was scanning text files in transit but not putting them back together correctly or something.  Somebody somewhere made a small mistake in their coding and it was disastrous for us.

Today I was trying to log into my cable account to add 30Mbps service using Google Chrome.  I got logged in and then after I got a few pages into my order I received the error message below:

Time Warner Cable's Site Doesn't Work in Chrome. (click for a larger version)

I tried clicking their “Continue with my current browser” only to be redirected to the error page.  I was annoyed that a company would spend all that time and money making their site work in Internet Explorer (which is still a bad browser) but neglect to include Google Chrome.  Anyway, then I tried logging on to the website with IE9 so I could try to retrieve my lost password. (which they lost for me in a backend transition)  The image below is what I saw in Internet Explorer – the browser for which their system has been optimized…

Time Warner Cable demanded I use IE - and this is how it looked. (click for a larger version)

This would have been laughable if I wasn’t so frustrated with their awful site speed, clunky design, and late-notice of an incompatible browser.  I have talked about browser testing before, and will continue to call out companies that employ web-amateurs instead of webmasters.

A coming update to the WordPress blog system will no longer support Internet Explorer 6.  A blog post which was posted on May 12 reports the change.  Version 3.2 which is currently in beta testing and scheduled for release in June 2011 will impact many bloggers around the world because the developers of WordPress have not considered IE 6 in the design and coding of their backend admin area or in their main themes.  Good for them!

The message from everyone: IE6 GO AWAY!

April 4th marks the end of another “original” search engine – AllTheWeb.com.  Yahoo will close the search engine on April 4 saying that they will “focus on other features to improve your search experience.”  Farewell ATW – you were one of my favorites back in the day.

AllTheWeb started out as Fast Search.

AllTheWeb - 7/16/91 - 4/4/11