Each year fireworks are the big attraction on the Saturday nearest November 5th at the Watford Council organised event in Cassiobury Park.

Relative areas from counts of “bon” and “work” in referring keywords  - cc(0) clker.com

Looking at the search terms queried which resulted in a visit to CassioburyPark.info on November 5th showed that traffic sent by fireworks related keywords outnumbered that from bonfire searches by 33-to-1.

It isn’t all Fireworks though.  The bonfire remains but gone is the Guy Fawkes judging contest, and effigies of him or “celebrities”.  Along with the main display there is also an earlier Fireworks display for small children and a stage featuring music from local musicians.

“Sounds like the worst ‘firework’ display ever” writes Mike Duce on Twitter. (yF).

Traffic

For the past three years there has been a noticeable rise up to the day of the Fireworks display which has been the busiest day of the year.

Guess when the Fireworks were!

There has been massive year on year growth in the number of event related searches.  This year saw more mobile visits to the site on the day of the event than visits from all platforms to the site a year ago.

Comparing November 5th 2011 with a year earlier (November 6th 2010):

• Desktop visits increased 125%
• Mobile visits increased 398%

On November 5th 2011:

• 38% of visits were from a mobile device
• Heavy use of Apple devices saw Safari as the most used browser

What mobile devices are people using?
Apple devices are the most popular by far with traffic from iPods exceeding the total mobile traffic served from the SymbianOS, Windows, Nokia and Samsung operating systems combined!  They other devices aren’t all phones either with iPads accounting for about 20% of all mobile traffic.

The proportion of mobile visits which were made from an Apple device fell from 81% in 2010 to 73% in 2011 but this was more than offset by a 342% increase in the absolute number of iOS visits.

Keywords and Google Suggest

Continued evolution of Google Suggest and its ability to impact search queries is apparent with 3 of the top 4 search terms ending with “2011″ compared to just 1 ending “2010″ the previous year.

The average length of each referring search query also increased, from 2.8 in 2010 to 3.2 in 2011.

How does this compare to the rest of the year?
In every year for which Analytics has available data, there was a higher proportion of mobile visits on the day of the event than over the year as an average. This is unsurprising given there are few other times a year when there are tens of thousands of people in the park at a time.

Both the proportion of and absolute number of mobile visits are increasing year on year.   The growth in mobile traffic from 2010 to 2011 was 300%, and the proportion of visits made from a mobile device has risen rapidly from 9% in 2010 to 22% this year.
 

The site

There isn’t a separate mobile version of the site and truth be told I haven’t ever seen the site on a mobile phone other than my own.  I will have to try accessing it on some of the most popular devices to ensure that the site looks okay on them.
 

The Event

In the old days an “anything goes” approach was taken to bonfire building.  Nowadays it’s much smaller and pretty much all pallets.

Me standing in front of the large bonfire in 1999.

In the 1990s there was the Computacenter hot air balloon, glow sticks, sparklers, hot-dogs barbecued at various places and the crowds were held back by rolls of orange mesh fencing.  They even used to let cars park on the grass.

Nowadays the park resembles a building site by the end of the preceding week with large steel fences rather earirly erected around nothing but empty parkland in the days before the event.  The barbecues have been replaced with a semi-circle of professional catering trucks, a truck load of portable toilets are dropped off, the bonfire has moved up the hill, the fences further back and cars aren’t allowed to park near the event.

Don’t get me started on the Rainbow Festival.

I’d seen this previously but never wrote anything about it until I was prompted to when I was looking at the inbound links to an affiliate site and saw it had one from the Knowsley.gov.uk domain.

The Knowsley’s blog section of the their website (last updated June 2009) is no longer linked to from the council homepage (PR 6) but the main blog is PR3. It contains just a handful of posts all of which have at least 500, mainly spam, comments. The first few comments on most posts are genuine messages left by local people or those involved in subject of the blog, a Chernobyl Aid Convoy. One of these posts is currently attracting new SEO comment spam at the rate of about 10 per day.

Two of the blog posts actually have a Page Rank of 1 except I can get neither of these to load because the pages throw ASP exceptions!

Here are some examples of some of the many domains that Knowsley Council’s domain links to. It should be pretty obvious which are legitimate links and which are comment spam!

The ASP exception page suggestions that the CMS being used here is Immediacy, couldn’t find any prices on their website so no doubt it costs an arm and a leg.

Pretty sad to see Knowsley Council taxpayers money being used to promote all these websites.

The page in question here is GameMaker Blog’s contact us page.  The page is short but contains contact details to which people can send Game Maker news tips.  It currently contains my personal MSN/WLM address, a link to the GMB Twitter, a button to send me a private message at the official Game Maker forum and an e-mail address – “philip.gamble (please spell my name correctly!) @gamemakerblog.com”.

I set up the email address a couple of months back which took at most two minutes including setting up forwarding to and sending from my gmail account.  It seems to have encouraged more and higher quality emails (and yes multiple targeted unsolicited requests from a certain download site).

I considered a few reasons why the new email address has had a better response rate:

• More professional – makes the site seem less ‘fly by night’ I presume (though we are 3 years old).  Maybe even gives the impression that the organisation is bigger/more powerful/part of a larger network.
• Replaced what is effectively junk with a readable name – the previously displayed email address (freeg131@) would probably be seen as meaningless rubbish to most people who might think it looks spammy.
• Personal – a real name contact.  People believe that their message will be read and dealt with as opposed to a general contact@website.com

I could experiment with an on page “email us” form. I use one of these on another site where I judge the average user to be considerably less tech-savvy than a bunch that are making their own games. However I fear this might encourage pointless, poor quality messages by making it just too easy to send me a message – and of course people could fill in a fake ‘from’ address which would benefit no one.

If you run your own website and currently have a free e-mail address posted on it I would highly recommend you change to a your.name@yoursite.com address.

As the name suggests it is a blog about the Game Maker game development tool. Articles on the site include news about the company behind the software, YoYo Games, the development of the program and community projects, websites, media, competitions and games.

At three and a half years old it is also probably the longest online project I have stuck with.

Over the years we’ve had some good exclusives as well as reporting on breaking stories and some more run of the mill stuff.

It isn’t the most profitable as it does require quite a bit of time to keep in order. Along the way I’ve been helped by more than 10 fellow writers and countless Game Maker users. One big problem I have experienced throughout the past couple of years is finding regular contributors to create fresh content for the site.

There are people willing to help, approximately 20% of all articles on the site are written by someone other than me, but there are often long dry spells when all the posts are written by myself.

Slightly out of date alias-heavy pie chart below (I prefer to use real names on the site)

I am very grateful for every post other authors write but it seems to me that more than ever the site is a one-man band.

Recently this was bought to my attention once again. 15 minutes after I left the house YoYo Games released the results of their latest game development competition. More than 5 hours later I returned home and saw I had received a message sent just a couple of minutes after the results had been released telling me that they were out.

A 5 hour delay may not seem long but I think it makes the site look bad. It isn’t an exclusive, it isn’t a hard to get story – effectively all it requires is a quick re-writing of a blog post made elsewhere.

Breaking a story or finding something relevant not currently featured at one of the Game Maker forums or on other prominent Game Maker websites can sometimes be exciting (more so than it probably should be).  Sometimes I have to hold off a story to get verification from another party or find more evidence which can be frustrating but we’ve reported a fair amount of YoYo Games news which they have either not reported themselves or have only later acknowledged.

Despite this people expect us to get the basic stuff right and online quickly – from what I hear some people have begun to rely on the site for all things Game Maker and I don’t like to let them down.

Anyone can set up a half-arsed attempt at a Game Maker news blog – there have been many. If all you want to do is re-write blog posts from elsewhere hours or even days late you won’t gain the followers or respect that we have worked so hard for at GMB.

As an early adopter of Twitter I am pleased to see it has become one of the better known social networking tools.  @GameMakerBlog now has over 400 followers and Twitter is the fourth largest referrer of visits to the website.  A good number of Game Maker users have also, for some unknown reason, chosen to follow my personal account where they get to find out my opinions on formula 1, university, the things I watch on TV and other random but effectively pointless things I say and do.

The people

Such a horrible phrase. The Game Maker community is made up of programmers, artists, game designers, web developers, reviewers, gamers and authors. Through my involvement with Game Maker Blog I have come into contact with an incredible bunch of people from around the globe.

Obviously I know some better than others. If you’ve got me added on both Facebook and MSN you’re in the minority (I don’t accept random Facebook requests).

I’ve been helped by forum members, moderators, administrators and YoYo Games staff.  People willingly give their time to send news tips my way, answer questions and organise longer articles such as interviews and book reviews. If this is you, thank you. You make things so much easier and help us do things that would not otherwise be possible.

Despite the fact that I’ve never made anything half decent in Game Maker, I have been welcomed by the community.  There have been bad times but the good ones outweigh them.  The efforts people put into game maker games, magazines and other projects as ‘labours of love’ whilst having good time doing it means that Game Maker is far more than just a development program.

Whilst it’s handy being in the same time zone as YoYo Games the worldwide community means news is happening 24/7 so contributors from abroad are a valued asset (even if most seem to have faulty “u” keys on their keyboard).

We had a couple of failed attempts to launch a reviews series then third much more successful attempt spierheaded by Andrew McCluskey following the demise of GMTech. (Also contributions from Jack Brockley, Josh Conley and Matt Scorah.)  Andrew then only went and launched Rekame Mag and got himself a job at YoYo Games!

GMTalk

GMTalk was an accident. Josh and Jono at GMVision had a fortnightly live radio show which improved after a shaky start but quickly got pretty tired. After two shows in a row were plagued with technical problems it was apparent that I wasn’t the only one wishing for something like GMCast to appear on the scene. A few hours later Andrew, Jack and myself recorded the first episode with our guest, James Garner from DS Game Maker.

If you listen to GMTalk you’ll find that we have a mini obsession with magazines. Game Maker magazines can be great if done right but oh, they can be dire.  They simply don’t work for run of the mill news because by the time they are released it isn’t news.

If you’ve ever been on a show (we try to get through different guests each time to keep things fresh) you’ll know how different the initial recording is from what gets published. “Chaotic” could certainly be used to describe our antics at times and often recorded content cannot be included in the final release. When recording more often than not it feels like we are low on usable material but it always seems to work out allright in the end and the positive reception we have received makes me feel all warm inside. To know that people have actually sat and listened to 3 young British guys and our assortment of guests ramble on about geeky computer stuff sometimes worries me, but to hear that they actually enjoyed listening makes me proud (and all that time in Audacity worthwhile!).

Some stats

From launch until the Autumn of 2009 growth was pretty steady with occasional dips in traffic when there wasn’t as much happening to write about. At the end of 2009 version 8 of Game Maker was released which almost doubled our traffic, initially as new features were announced and betas made public but also thanks to a series of logo related posts.

In recent months traffic has declined slightly.

It’s hard to predict traffic levels and the kind of reception a story will receive in the comments section. Posts about YoYo Games’ financial status, which I find interesting and extremely relevant, often don’t get much attention at all – perhaps because the majority of our readers don’t understand them or care about what they mean.  Of course traffic also varies based on the news which is out of our control – both the size of announcements and the number of things available to report on.

I don’t write blindly attract traffic but it doesn’t take a genius to work out which topics result in lots of traffic.  I try not to focus on a narrow path of news but know that the site is very media-heavy and games and development light. I haven’t been able to effectively implement most of what people said they wanted in our survey.

Talking of financials here is a graph of the site’s very low advertising revenues since launch.

The site uses a variety of ad networks, most of which are immediately obvious if you don’t have an adblocker/noscript.

TLA robbed us of our pagerank and then buggered off just after our record month. This has left revenues in a less predictable state with jumps of a third on a month by month basis now not uncommon.

Direct ad sales were a nice bonus when they unexpectedly came along but I haven’t actively been trying to sell them.

Costs are pretty static at less than $10 a month on the domain and hosting.  Prizes and accessing documents filed by YoYo Games are easily covered.  The site certainly doesn’t loose money – costs aren’t really an issue – time is.

The future

I graduate in July.  I won’t have the time/energy/drive to work on the site nearly as much as I do now.

I hate to say it, but don’t know of any reason why I shouldn’t, but recently I have been having these thoughts more often. I wrote a bit about the obvious incompatibilities between keeping GMB as it is and having a full time job a few months back in Rekame Mag 2.

Ideally the blog will continue, and continue strongly in to a future which is looking more and more exciting as YoYo Games hire more people to work on some exciting new ideas. For this to happen I would either need to find a slightly younger care-free version of myself or a small team that can commit to keeping the site fresh and encouraging existing and new contributors. Neither of these will be easy to find.

More people are going to be drawn towards Game Maker as a development tool as games appear on device running the iPhone OS, Android and on PSPs.  I think it would be a shame for there not to be a decent blog for them to read.

The test, which lasts an hour and a half, consists of 70 questions on various aspects of Google’s web statistics program. Lots of information is provided by Google to help you prepare for the exam in the form of videos as well as the help center and Analytics API.

The questions are all multiple choice though by no means easy.  You have the ability to pause the test, go away and research the answers, then return at a later date – indeed Google encourages this as in one question it advises you to go and use the Google Regular Expression builder to answer a particular question about filtering out a range of IP addresses from site statistics.

To pass you need to score 80%.

Sure I’ll admit to googling myself – I like to see what is found there and how high this site ranks!

I’ve been attempting to find out what differences the sites ranking have above me have in order to work out what I need to concentrate on to boost my position and ideally achieve the number 1 ranking.

Freeg131.com ranking for Google.co.uk search of 'Philip Gamble'

Choice of domain

When it came to choosing a domain name philipgamble.co.uk and philipgamble.com were both taken as was philgamble.co.uk (and possibly the .com but that is now available) so I opted to use my alias/username freeg131.  Ranking top for that has been no problem.

I had assumed that the lack of the words ‘philip’ and ‘gamble’ in my domain name was the main reason for my bad ranking but then I discovered that I am above philgamble.co.uk on a search for “Phil Gamble” despite not having used this in anchor text for a long while (my article attributions at Game Maker Blog used to use this but I changed it to my full name).

There’s also www.philip-gamble.co.uk who is a gardener and PhilipGamble.com which is parked at Sedo.

Use of redirects

In an attempt to have a more professional looking domain I registered pgamble.co.uk about a year ago which I presumed was being 301 redirected it to freeg131.com.

However whilst writing this post I discovered that this was not actually a 301 redirect [see below]. When I took control of the CassioburyPark.com domain name I set up a cPanel account for this and did the 301 manually, but have gone through cPanel to set it up for pgamble.co.uk to freeg131.com now (and it is working).

The pgamble.co.uk domain was simply parked to my public_html directory so it displayed the freeg131.com site. pgamble.co.uk hasn’t been indexed by Google however so I don’t think duplicate content is an issue here and both domains also had PR3 and I presume this is because Google had realised they were essentially the same.

Backlinks

The vast majority of links are from GameMaker Blog as I have authored over 500 posts each of which include a link back in the author credit.  According to bad neighbourhood 85.41% of the links in are from a blog.

Perhaps there isn’t enough variation in my anchor text – the other Philip Gamble’s have their industry mentioned in some of their links where as most of mine are either me or friends referring to me or my site.  Maybe I should take the links off GameMakerBlog.com and start looking to get some links with anchor text such as “Philip Gamble’s blog”, “Philip Gamble from Watford”, “Phil Gamble is a really nice guy” etc.

Discovered there is a free version of SEO Spyglass which revealed these results (MajesticSEO tracks about 1,500 links in):

Selling links

You don’t have to be a genius to realise I am selling links from this site to a gambling website. Three links can be found at the top of the homepage. I think this must be the main reason for my poor rankings as it has associated my site with a bad neighbourhood.

An interesting point here though is that my Pagerank does not seem to have been effected. Using the SEOmoz Chrome toolbar to look at my mozRank (which is supposed to approximate page rank) pulls up 4.13 which is not much more than my page rank 3. On another of my sites, which previously sold links through text-link-ads.com, a page rank penalty is clearly in place – the site has PR 0 but a mozRank of 4.37 and many links from pages with pagerank. Thankfully, unlike for freeg131.com, this doesn’t seem to have affected the sites search rankings. Interesting that if this were the reason in would mean there are 2 different kind of penalties applied by Google here for doing the same thing – perhaps this site’s PR value will return to 0 after the next update.

I have been reading a bit about page links recently after having another approach from a casino company wanting to get links from what they see as a “Gamble” related domain name and might be taking the current ones off soon.

Recent changes

I recently made some changes to the site bringing “Philip Gamble” to the front of the title tag, updating the homepage meta description, removing sidebar links which duplicated those across the top of the page and adding nofollow to the WordPress and theme footer links. There are also now only 5 blog posts per page as opposed to 10 previously.

I also removed the twitter sidebar feed which was displaying 19 followed external links out of a total of 35 on the homepage.

Hope this works!

A good example of this is comes in the form of a re-tweeted message (via Will Critchlow) where someone asks for a solution to the P versus NP problem (for which a $1,000,000 millennium prize is on offer). The project was given a $500-1000 budget. It received four bids.  ”Hello, Easy job for me,please send me a PM.” and “i can do it. please, write in chat. thanks” are the complete copy of two of the bids, all of which came in under budget.

I’ve used ScriptLance in the past both as a buyer and provider of services but because of their policy of suspending an account if it is inactive for a certain amount of time – they then ask for a scan of your passsport and demand to know why you haven’t used the site for x months in order to reactive your account, even if it has funds in it – I decided to head elsewhere.

My project specification was for eight 300-500 word articles on the making of the Harry Potter film series. These would be part a section detailing films made at the Leavesden film studios. I had already written pages for two (not Harry Potter) films but opted to outsource this work as I have little interest in Harry Potter myself (and also as an experiment to see how it goes!).

I gave the project a target price of “Less than $250″, the lowest available option, and left a 7-day bid time. As you can see from the project specification I outlined what I was looking for, provided a sample article that I had written myself and asked bidders to include a sample of their work.

I received 11 bids. The highest was $225.00 and the lowest came in on the last day at $25. I discounted those that didn’t provide samples, gave a generic bid or had extreme prices and opted for a $50 bid which below the average bid value. It comes in at about £4 an article (plus whatever fees Guru charges for making payments, finding a freelancer etc). Put that way it seems quite expensive but since it isn’t purely writing (some research will have to be done) I am quite happy with the price.

Whether or not I will be when I see the work I don’t know! I’ll keep you updated.

Robin: why would version 8 users need a different site?

(upon hearing I had registered GameMaker8.com)

A comparison of various statistics taken from the week before the changes and the week after are posted below. Revenue is not disclosed as this is against AdSense terms. The large percentage increase is partly due to the fact I was using a different network before where the site was performing very poorly.

Everything I wanted to increase did see a noticeable change – traffic levels, revenues and the amount of traffic passsed on to Game Maker Blog. Nothing sold via Amazon yet though.

Traffic to GM8 has been very good considering the minimal amount of time I have spent on it since registering the domain.  The top Google ranking for “game maker 8″ went pretty quickly to YoYo Games after the final public release of version 8 but traffic still averages about 9,000 page views a month.

Old website:

New homepage:

As well as providing more content, which should keep people on the site for longer, I also turned my attention to trying to monetize the website. The small homepage box ad from Project Wonderful has been replaced with a larger Google Adsense block and the page about Game Maker books gives me the opportunity to plug my Amazon Affiliate links.

I will watch traffic and revenue stats with interest over the next week or so.