Wise Scout - A blog about our online adventures while creating our job board

New motor trade job site

Your DisplayName here! — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:11:36 GMT

We have now launched a new job site for the motor trade at www.startmonday.net

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Wiser Accounts

Your DisplayName here! — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 13:28:38 GMT

Thank you for those people who emailed about our beta trials, we still have spaces so please do get in touch. We also have a new holding page for the accounts application here http://www.wiseraccounts.com

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New accounts product

Your DisplayName here! — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:23:43 GMT

We are soon to launch a new accounts product aimed at the contractor, freelance and temporary staff markets that makes it really simple to securely store all of your accounts info online and can be easily shared with your accountant. It automates lots of the time consuming and repetitive parts of maintaining your records and is designed to be completely different to Sage and Quicken, which in our opinion do just too much for what we need as contractors. We are looking for some beta testers to give the site a spin and in return will offer 12 months free use of the site after we go live, if you are interested in being involved please email: wisescout@googlemail.com

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New Year, new start

Your DisplayName here! — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:32:09 GMT

It is not a myth, we have stats to prove it. Yesterday we set a new daily record at 828 visitors, showing that finding a new or first contract is a priority after the New Year.

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Server timeouts

Your DisplayName here! — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 10:00:49 GMT

Apologies to any site visitors who have been experiencing timeouts over the past week. It appears that having in excess of 1 million jobs in our database over the last 3 months has confused it slightly, we think the problem is related to the way it indexes our keywords. We think we have fixed it but only time will tell.

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Site access issues

Your DisplayName here! — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 11:26:39 GMT

Many people who use any of the Host Europe services would have experienced problems accessing our site (and others) over the weekend due to network routing problems on their systems. We had a little panic for a moment when the number of users dropped but now we have investigated the problem we are happy it wasn't with our host. The volume of visitors has picked up again so most of the issues at Host Europe must have been fixed.

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Our best single day so far

Your DisplayName here! — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 11:36:58 GMT

Last week we reached a new day record of 384 unique visitors, 96% from Google. Not bad for a site that is 3 months old with only £30 spent on marketing. In fact if you see our previous post at the beginning we had 299 in 2 weeks when we first started.

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Quick Google tip

Your DisplayName here! — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 11:34:12 GMT

When checking how many pages you have indexed by Google put this in your Google search "site:www.wisescout.com" but also check without the www eg "site:wisescout.com". I hadn’t been checking this second search and was getting quite concerned (see previous post) why our listings where swinging up and down so much when we have at least 35000 genuinely unique pages. Google is now showing us with about 9500 pages indexed which is a great relief.

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Google Bot – oh how it confuses me

Your DisplayName here! — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:05:52 GMT

The wonder and mystery of Google has perplexed me again this week. While working on our sitemap I managed to get some more pages listed in our map, within an hour Google Bot had been by and starting to index pages quickly, very quickly (the server got a little bit upset and threw a few timeouts). The result was a jump of indexed pages, in fact it doubled over night to 10500. If that were the end of the story that would be great. It wasn’t and within a day the indexed pages dropped down to 4500, over a 1000 less than we started with. Two days later and every few hours we go up and down between 4500 and 5500. I presume it must be something to do with duplicated content, as our pages are search results of jobs there is a fair chance that some pages will contain similar results, so the next job is to work out how to get Google Bot to visit more unique pages.

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Google Page Rank (PR)

Your DisplayName here! — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:58:44 GMT

We have PR at last. The gods of Google have looked kindly on us and have given the main site (.com) a PR of 4 and the blog (.net) a PR of 3. We are very pleased. It has been nearly 3 months since we launched and really had no idea of what rank we would receive. We have over 400 in bound links, some from PR5 and PR6 sites, that we have been tirelessly building up. In fact outside of development it is the most time consuming job. We have also seen a big jump of indexed pages which is now up at just over 4500. We actually currently have over 50000 pages on the site so we hope that Google will continue to index more each week.

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US Site On It's Way

Your DisplayName here! — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:41:50 GMT

New US site is on it's way, now we will have a clear UK and US offering, the new site is currently under going testing and we hope to have it live by the end of October. We have received a lot of visitors from the US and we will now be able to offer better job coverage and search facilities.

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