One of my favorite Internet Marketing blogs is HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog. They recently published a compelling article showing the search engine authority ranking for Massachusetts’ top 100 public companies as ranked by their awesome Website Grader tool. Since I live in Minnesota and work for one of the companies in the Star Tribune Top 100 I thought I would run through a similar analysis for Minnesota companies.

These are the top 100 public companies in Minnesota as measured by annual revenue, ranked in order by Search Engine Authority. The links will take you to each company’s Website Grader report.

Target Corp. (www.target.com) 98.6
Best Buy Co. Inc. (www.bestbuy.com) 98.5
U.S. Bancorp (www.usbank.com) 98.2
Ameriprise Financial Inc. (www.ameriprise.com) 97.6
3M Co. (www.3m.com) 97.4
Compellent Technologies Inc. (www.compellent.com) 97.2
Travelers Companies Inc. (www.travelers.com) 96.7
ADC Telecommunications Inc. (www.adc.com) 96.6
TCF Financial Corp. (www.tcfbank.com) 96.5
Life Time Fitness Inc. (www.lifetimefitness.com) 96.5
Gander Mountain Co. (www.gandermountain.com) 96.4
Famous Dave’s of America Inc. (www.famousdaves.com) 96.1
Rimage Corp. (www.rimage.com) 96
ValueVision Media Inc. (www.shopnbc.com) 95.7
Christopher & Banks Corp. (www.christopherandbanks.com) 95.5
Lawson Software Inc. (www.lawson.com) 95.2
Medtronic Inc. (www.medtronic.com) 95.1
UnitedHealth Group Inc. (www.unitedhealthgroup.com) 94
Valspar Corp. (www.valspar.com) 94
Mosaic Co. (www.mosaicco.com) 93
Select Comfort Corp. (www.selectcomfort.com) 93
Piper Jaffray Companies (www.piperjaffray.com) 93
Caribou Coffee Co. Inc. (www.cariboucoffee.com) 93
Supervalu Inc. (www.supervalu.com) 92
Fastenal Co. (www.fastenal.com) 92
Plato Learning Inc. (www.plato.com) 92
General Mills Inc. (www.generalmills.com) 91
Polaris Industries Inc. (www.polarisindustries.com) 91
Graco Inc. (www.graco.com) 91
Alliant Techsystems (www.ATK.com) 90
St. Jude Medical Inc. (www.sjm.com) 90
MTS Systems Corp. (www.mts.com) 90
Xcel Energy Inc. (www.xcelenergy.com) 89
Ecolab Inc. (www.ecolab.com) 88
Imation Corp. (www.imation.com) 88
Tennant Co. (www.tennantco.com) 88
EV3 Inc. (www.ev3.net) 88
SoftBrands Inc. (www.softbrands.com) 88
Canterbury Park Holding Corp. (www.canterburypark.com) 88
Donaldson Co. Inc. (www.donaldson.com) 87
Fair Isaac Corp. (www.fico.com) 87
Entegris Inc. (www.entegris.com) 87
Datalink Corp. (www.datalink.com) 87
Stratasys Inc. (www.stratasys.com) 87
Pentair Inc. (www.pentair.com) 86
Arctic Cat Inc. (www.arctic-cat.com) 86
Analysts International Corp. (www.analysts.com) 86
C.H. Robinson Worldwide Inc. (www.chrobinson.com) 84
Hormel Foods Corp. (www.hormel.com) 84
Digital River Inc. (www.digitalriver.com) 84
Nash Finch Co. (www.nashfinch.com) 83
Otter Tail Corp. (www.ottertail.com) 83
MoneyGram International Inc. (www.moneygram.com) 83
Virtual Radiologic Corp. (www.virtualrad.com) 83
PepsiAmericas Inc. (www.pepsiamericas.com) 82
The Toro Co. (www.thetorocompany.com) 82
G&K Services Inc. (www.gkservices.com) 82
Winmark Corp. (www.winmarkcorporation.com) 82
Navarre Corp. (www.navarre.com) 81
Allete Inc. (www.allete.com) 80
Nortech Systems Inc. (www.nortechsys.com) 80
American Medical Systems Holdings Inc. (www.americanmedicalsystems.com) 79
Patterson Companies Inc. (www.pattersoncompanies.com) 78
Buffalo Wild Wings Inc. (www.buffalowildwings.com) 78
ATS Medical Inc. (www.atsmedical.com) 78
Deluxe Corp. (www.deluxe.com) 77
Medtox Scientific Inc. (www.medtox.com) 77
Granite City Food & Brewery Ltd. (www.gcfb.net) 76
Health Fitness Corp. (www.hfit.com) 75
Clearfield Inc. (www.clearfieldconnection.com) 74
Dolan Media Co. (www.dolanmedia.com) 72
FSI International Inc. (www.fsi-intl.com) 72
H.B. Fuller Co. (www.hbfuller.com) 71
Vital Images Inc. (www.vitalimages.com) 71
Vascular Solutions Inc. (www.vascularsolutions.com) 71
Regis Corp. (www.regiscorp.com) 68
Winland Electronics Inc. (www.winland.com) 68
Hutchinson Technology Inc. (www.htch.com) 67
XATA Corp. (www.xata.com) 66
HickoryTech Corp. (www.hickorytech.com) 65
SurModics Inc. (www.surmodics.com) 64
Appliance Recycling Centers of America (www.arcainc.com) 63
Image Sensing Systems Inc. (www.imagesensing.com) 63
Communications Systems Inc. (www.commsystems.com) 62
Hawkins Inc. (www.hawkinsinc.com) 59
Techne Corp. (www.techne-corp.com) 59
Digi International Inc. (www.dgii.com) 59
CyberOptics Corp. (www.cyberoptics.com) 59
Insignia Systems Inc. (www.insigniasystems.com) 58
Synovis Life Technologies Inc. (www.synovislife.com) 57
Multiband Corp. (www.multibandusa.com) 57
Mocon Inc. (www.mocon.com) 57
HMN Financial Inc. (www.justcallhome.com) 54
Apogee Enterprises Inc. (www.apog.com) 52
Angeion Corp. (www.angeion.com) 51
WSI Industries Inc. (www.wsci.com) 51
Rochester Medical Corp. (www.rocm.com) 48
Capella Education Company (www.capellaeducationcompany.com) 47
Zareba Systems Inc. (www.wtrs.com) 47
IntriCon Corp. (www.intricon.com) 36

Here’s a chart showing the trend:

Some more random info:

The average score for Minnesota’s Top 100 is 79.7.
The average score for Massachusetts’ Top 100 is 78.5, proving Minnesota superiority.
The score for this website is 95.3, which would be in the top 20 for Minnesota and the top 10 for Massachusetts.

What does all this mean? I don’t know. But I am pretty surprised at how poorly many of these companies scored.

How does your company fare? Or better yet, run the analysis for your state’s Top 100 and see how you compare to Minnesota. Which state has the best Search Engine Authority?

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One of the neighbor kids showed off a new web site called Peter Answers, which describes itself as a “Virtual Tarot.” Erin came home raving about it but I’ll be darned if it worked for us when we tried it. I assumed it was grabbing data from Google and making educated guesses about the answers, but I couldn’t get it to work at home.

Then the kid came over to our place tonight and I saw it in action. It was pretty obvious there was some trick because it was giving answers that were VERY specific, and nothing that would be on Google. So I did a quick Google search of my own and figured out the trick.

How does Peter Answers Work? Just like this:

There are two text entry boxes that you complete when you ask a question. The first is called the petition, and you are directed to type the phrase “Peter, please answer:” or “Peter, please answer the following question:”

Then in the second box you actually type your question, such as the question my son just asked which was “When was the last time I farted?”. After you hit the question mark it will spit out the answer, which should be spookily accurate.

The trick to Peter Answers is that the person typing the question, but most importantly the petition, knows how this works. What they do is when they are typing in the petition field they are actually typing in the answer they want Peter to give, but the text that it shows them typing will be “Peter, please answer:” or “Peter, please answer the following question:”. Since when other people type in the petition box it types what they actually type, how does the trickster actually type the answer? By starting by typing a period, then the answer, then another period then the rest of the petition as required. When you type the first period everything you type up until the next period is the answer that Peter will spill out, but the text that shows as typing on the screen will be the normal petition.

Peter Answer the fortune teller is really quite ingenious and the kids were totally freaked out. I was able to get back at the neighbor kid by using VNC to remotely ask a question while she was sitting at the keyboard, which totally blew her mind. Unfortunetly my son knows that trick and spilled the beans.

Electronic Peter Answers Game For Sale At Amazon.com

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Google has released Google Trends, a really cool way to see what is going on in the world through what people are searching for. I starting looking at this tonight and figured something was broken when I saw “WCCO”, “KSTP” and other Minnesota radio stations in the list but as it happens we had a big storm and I guess people do a lot of searching for information around an event like that. It was interesting to watch those phrases lose ground fast to the American Idol searches that got hot and heavy as the finale approached.

Just because I like to keep my coding chops not so rusty I’ve been up writing a perl script to scrape that page every hour and stick the data into a table. Assuming the cron job works it should work great. Not sure exactly how I will use the data, but I have a few ideas. I’m sure within the next few days we’ll see lots of other people doing the same thing and finding really interesting uses. At a minimum I could easily clone the Google page but add Red and Green trend arrows showing movement between places.

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I had been using Bloglines for reading RSS feeds for over three years until I started using Google Reader a few months ago and I haven’t looked back. It’s hard to quantify why I switched – there are still a lot of things I like about Bloglines. Reader is very bland whereas Bloglines shows the favicon for each site, for example. I like that I can easily see how many subscribers I have for my own feeds in Bloglines. It feels more stable all around.

And yet I switched to Google Reader, while it is still in their lab. I switched but lately it’s been questionable as it has been slow and acting funny, case in point the error message shown here.

I think I switched because I’m not ready to bet against Google in anything. And I’d rather switch when I want to rather than when I am forced to.

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Darren Rowse asks What’s the weirdest thing you’ve sold on Amazon?

While I don’t have the sample size Darren has (he picked 10 unique items from one day? I only sold 40 all year!) I think I do have unquestionably the oddest item ever to be sold on Amazon:

0595094724

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In Ken Norton’s Amazon Unbox is Evil he refers to the fact that his first purchase on Amazon was back in 1996. That got me to go back and look at my history. My first purchase was Rick Reiley’s Missing Links on September 3rd, 1997. This is what I love about Amazon. I can’t name another company that I do business with that gives me that kind of visibility. Of course I can’t name another company I’ve done as much business with as Amazon either.

Still, a minor complaint.Kudos to Amazon for making this data easily accessible.

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Whatever happened to Peacock Maps?

Sure, they still have a website but their main product is discontinued and hasn’t been updated since 2002, the last year they apparently published one of their “whole internet posters.”

I have the 2001 map framed in my office and I really like it. I thought to look today to see what the latest map looked like and was disapointed to find that what had appeared to be a promising little internet business has seemingly faded into oblivion.

I suppose they weren’t the first.

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Google has added an image of the Google toolbar to their main page. For most companies this wouldn’t be a big deal – adding a small image for marketing purposes is commonplace. But in Google’s case, where a streamlined front page is critical, it stuck out like a sore thumb for me.

In a 2003 “Fast Company article”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/google.html titled “How Google Grows…and Grows…and Grows” the author highlited this using the example of a small string of text that had appeared on the front page (“New! Take your search further. Take a Google Tour.”):

bq(quote). If you’re a Google engineer, you know that those nine words comprised about 120 bytes of data, enough to slow download time for users with modems by 20 to 50 milliseconds. You can estimate the stress that 120 bytes, times millions of searches per minute, put on Google’s 10,000 servers. On the other hand, you can also measure precisely how many visitors took the tour, how many of those downloaded the Google Toolbar, and how many clicked through for the first time to Google News.

In this case it’s a 3630 byte image file, which again, for most sites is nothing but in the case of Google, the site a majority of internet users see first thing every time they open their browser, it is critically important to understand the impact.

Of course someone has appeared to do something right since from this user’s experience the page is still the lighting quick loading page I expect. Still, I hope they take that image down soon because it really is standing out like a sore thumb for me. I suppose I’ll have to go download the damn thing. They win.

bq(update). [UPDATE] – Just noticed that on a computer where I have installed the Google toolbar that I don’t see the advertising – which of course makes sense.

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I’ve been so busy at work that I just haven’t had the energy to write. Hoping to get back in the swing soon. But sometimes something comes across your monitor you just have to point out.

“savetoby.com”:http://www.savetoby.com is a site about a man holding a baby rabbit hostage – if he doesn’t get $50,000 in donations by June he will eat poor Toby the bunny. He even has recipes.

Crazy? Like a fox. Donations as of this writing: $15,029.26

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I have 10 7 “Gmail”:http://gmail.google.com invites to give away if anyone is interested. Just send me an email. Look to the Contact tab for info on how to contact me.

Not that I think anyone out there actually still needs one at this point…

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In “The Mythical Million”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2003/10/04/the_mythical_million.html I called Technorati’s claim to tracking a million weblogs bunk, based on what I saw in my own link cosmos: numerous examples of weblogs that Technorati called unique but were clearly not. I debated even writing the darned thing because of all the love that was out there for Technorati at the time but alas it didn’t matter much as my article got no play. Everyone took Dave’s word at face value.

But the veneer on the love coating Technorati is starting to crack. The website has been dog-slow for a long time. And apparently even those who paid money for some of the advanced features never got what they paid for. As Adam Greenfield writes in Not ready for prime time:

bq(quote).. Now I’m mad. I surely hope this is not a harbinger of more and more pervasive bad faith from Technorati as they grow. I wish them success, and still appreciate the really cool and useful free service they provide (when it’s up), but this is just not acceptable. Especially from people who should presumably be able to quote “Cluetrain”:http://www.cluetrain.com/ chapter and verse in their sleep.

I don’t begrudge them the $5, or at least I didn’t while they were a brave indie venture, but now that they’re clearly headed for bigger and better things my standards are a little bit higher. I expect Technorati, quite simply, to make good on the promises it makes its users. Do that, or don’t bother.

For the moment, I feel like a stepping stone, and I don’t like it one little bit.

I can imagine Adam felt some regret writing about his troubles and probably thought that with all the love (and VCs) surrounding Technorati that his article may get some negative attention. Well guess what – he’s spot on. And that’s one story you won’t be seeing on “politics.technorati.com”:http://politics.technorati.com/

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Google Guide: Interactive Online Tutorial on Searching with Google(tm) is the single best resource for understanding everything there is to know about Google.

I thought I knew Google pretty well but after skimming through the guide I found a few new things to put into my searching repertoire, like proximity searching. Keywords are the lifeblood of the internet and Google is the best tool to find those results across millions of web pages.

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I really like Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards from A List Apart. I hope to apply this process to my own site one of the days.

The basic process for the retooling was as follows:

1. Strip out all non-essential tags.
2. Add semantic markup.
3. Group data in boxes.
4. Add layout markup.
5. Apply unique style attributes.

My templates and stylesheets could use a serious pruning. Most of them are bastardized copies of the original MT templates and I’ve added a lot of cruft. Taking this approach would allow me to optimize the pages and would be a good learning experience. Hope to do it soon.

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Whenever I’ve stumbled across Jakob Nielsen’s website useit.com I’ve chuckled politely to myself – here is one of the supposed leading web usability experts and his website looks like shit. I don’t expect anyone to be thrilled with my design, but that isn’t what I do for a living. You put web usability expert in your title and maybe your site should reflect that.

Apparently others think the same as I and there is now a pretty serious effort called ReUSEIT put together to take a stab at seeing if it can be improved.

ReUSEIT is, to borrow a quote from the W3Remix contest, “a design challenge for coders, and a coding challenge for designers.” Here’s the idea: create a redesign of Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com. Design a usable, intuitive layout and navigation, organize the content with usability in mind, and create a work of art which still reflects the importance and influence of Nielsen’s work.

This is NOT a Jakob Nielsen slam-fest. It is a legitimate design contest that Mr. Nielsen himself has given his blessing to. So don’t even think about it!

Impressive list of judges but it looks like they need some help getting some prizes put together.

Will be interesting to watch.

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Google has introduced Google News Alerts, a service that allows you to get email updates when news includes keywords that you specify. It’s a great way to keep up to date with news as it happens – set some up for your company, competitor, industry, etc.

Frankly I’ve already been doing this for awhile through RSS but through a mechanism not sponsored by Google, and actually against their end user agreement for their API, so it isn’t something one can count on to be available for the long term.

Hopefully Google can introduce an RSS version for news by keyword.

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Why is it that when I mistype a url like http://www.cnn,com that browsers are not smart enough to realize I made a typo and to correct it for me? I’d really like that.

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Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign writes about his recently released redesign for the Adaptive Path website. The site is a marvel of CSS usage including some neat rollovers traditionally done using javascript that use CSS only.

One of the things that I’ve always liked about Doug’s own site and his rendering of this new site is how he handles fonts. He ain’t no font bitch. I won’t name names but it seems like a lot of the respected web designers around insist on using style sheets that fix the size of the fonts without allowing the user to change them via their browser. Even worse they don’t design for large screens so when I’m viewing their stuff on my main computer with the 21″ monitor I’ll have this little strip of content running down the middle of the screen that I can barely read.

If I can ever find the time I’ll be learning from Doug’s work on that site. Very nice.

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The Minneapolis Star Tribune has started requiring registration to read more than a couple of articles a day. Phil Ringnalda writes about a solution that makes that problem go away. Thanks Phil.

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Get home after being gone for the week and what do I find? A couple of new Paypal scams in my inbox.

This first one came as an HTML form, with the form processed by http://www.paypal-service.net/index.php. A whois search reveals an Administrative contact of paypal187@hotmail.com, I guess you have to give him some credit for putting Paypal somewhere in there. The Technical contact seems like a genuine hosting business and I’ve sent them a complaint email.

The email spoofs secure@paypal.com but the email header shows the email coming from Received: from bgp481345bgs.summit01.nj.comcast.net ([68.37.162.100]), which appears to be a cable modem user in New Jersey. Figures.

The second one took a couple of different tactics. Rather than being a form it was an HTML email with a link to another site. The URL for the link is http://www.paypal.com.cgi-bin-webscr@poypol.com/access/?B59n4uDo. Some users may glance at that quickly and see the paypal.com at the beginning and think everything is OK but a closer look would show them you are actually being sent to poypol.com. Not positive, but I doubt that’s where you have your money. At least their whois record looks a bit more professional than the other scam.

This one spoofed support@paypal.com with the header showing Received: from mail.paypal.com (modemcable168.11-130-66.mtl.mc.videotron.ca[66.130.11.168](untrusted sender)). As you can see they did a little better spoof actually trying to show the from as coming from paypal, but again it would appear to be from a cable modem user, this time in California.

Both scams rely on screens that look authentic and could easily fool less sophisticated users into revealing their paypal account names and passwords.

Be careful out there.

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Microdoc News asks 13 different search engines What is the best search engine?

Not surprisingly, almost all respond with “Google.”

Also not surprisingly, MSN responds with “MSN.”

One hopes that it’s just a problem with their ranking algorithms but more likely it is as Microdoc News surmises – that Microsoft is fiddling with the results for advertising purposes. Makes you wonder where else they do it.

What is the best operating system? according to Google? FreeBSD.

What is the best operating system? according to MSN? Debian Linux.

Alas, no clear conspiracy.

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