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I really don’t care how any given A/B test turns out. That’s right. Not one bit. But wait, how do I double or triple conversion rates without caring how a test performs? I actually care about the whole SYSTEM of testing. All the pieces need to fit together just right. If not, you’ll waste a ton of time A/B testing […] The post My 7 Rules for A/B Testing That Triple Conversion Rates appeared first on Lars Lofgren.
over a year ago

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More from Lars Lofgren

The Stupidity of Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Policy

Site reputation abuse is when a third-party abuses the reputation of a domain to rank a bunch of pages in Google. The SEO community refers to this type of thing as parasite SEO. Google has gone so far as to publish an official policy (documented here) on how this isn’t allowed: Site reputation abuse (parasite SEO) is rampant today. I […] The post The Stupidity of Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Policy appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

8 months ago 34 votes
The Billion-Dollar World of Parasite SEO: How to Cash In

Parasite SEO is when a third-party company partners with an established domain, then posts a bunch of SEO content to make a bunch of money. Content often gets published in a subfolder or subdomain or the website. The goal is to leverage the domain’s trust with Google to get rankings and traffic easily. With the right agreement, you can make […] The post The Billion-Dollar World of Parasite SEO: How to Cash In appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

8 months ago 37 votes
CNN and USA Today Have Fake Websites, I Believe Forbes Marketplace Runs Them

What if I told you that Forbes Marketplace, the affiliate company operating on Forbes.com ALSO had agreements with CNN and USA Today? And that Forbes Marketplace was stuffing those sites full of affiliate content just like it is with Forbes? And what if Forbes Marketplace went to extreme efforts to hide everything? Would this be considered parasite SEO? I believe […] The post CNN and USA Today Have Fake Websites, I Believe Forbes Marketplace Runs Them appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

9 months ago 30 votes
Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host

Are you sick of Forbes appearing in search results? For topics that Forbes doesn’t have any expertise in? Here’s the organic rankings for “best pet insurance”: Forbes ranks #2. Not sure a business website knows how pet insurance actually works. But okay. They also have the #1 ranking for best cbd gummies: Because it’s a marijuana category, PPC ads don’t […] The post Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

10 months ago 26 votes
What Happened After I Outed a Reddit Mod for Affiliate Spam

I recently broke down how Reddit mods and users are abusing Google search rankings with affiliate spam. It’s reddit marketing gone awry. The post blew up and got a decent amount of attention. Then I got a front row seat to how deep of a spam filled porta-potty Reddit has become. The State of the Thread When I Posted Here’s […] The post What Happened After I Outed a Reddit Mod for Affiliate Spam appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

10 months ago 32 votes

More in technology

PSA: part of your Kagi subscription fee goes to a Russian company (Yandex)

Today I learned that Kagi uses Yandex as part of its search infrastructure, making up about 2% of their costs, and their CEO has confirmed that they do not plan to change that. To quote: Yandex represents about 2% of our total costs and is only one of dozens of sources we use. To put this in perspective: removing any single source would degrade search quality for all users while having minimal economic impact on any particular region. The world doesn’t need another politicized search engine. It needs one that works exceptionally well, regardless of the political climate. That’s what we’re building. That is unfortunate, as I found Kagi to be a good product with an interesting take on utilizing LLM models with search that is kind of useful, but I cannot in good heart continue to support it while they unapologetically finance a major company that has ties to the Russian government, the same country that is actively waging a war against Ukraine, an European country, for over 11 years, during which they’ve committed countless war crimes against civilians and military personnel. Kagi has the freedom to decide how they build the best search engine, and I have the freedom to use something else. Please send all your whataboutisms to /dev/null.

2 days ago 3 votes
Alvik Fight Club: A creative twist on coding, competition, and collaboration

What happens when you hand an educational robot to a group of developers and ask them to build something fun? At Arduino, you get a multiplayer robot showdown that’s part battle, part programming lesson, and entirely Alvik. The idea for Alvik Fight Club first came to life during one of our internal Make Tanks, in […] The post Alvik Fight Club: A creative twist on coding, competition, and collaboration appeared first on Arduino Blog.

4 days ago 6 votes
Vote for the July 2025 + Post Topic

Past ads get a second chance.

5 days ago 9 votes
How a Hibernate deprecation log message made our Java backend service super slow

It was time to upgrade Hibernate on that one Java monolithic1 backend service that my team was responsible for. We took great precautions with these types of changes due to the scale of the system, splitting changes into as many small parts as possible and releasing them as often as possible. With bigger changes we opted for running a few instances of the new version in parallel to the existing one. Then came Hibernate 5.2. Hibernate 5.2 introduced a new warning log to indicate that the existing API for writing queries is deprecated. Hibernate's legacy org.hibernate.Criteria API is deprecated; use the JPA javax.persistence.criteria.CriteriaQuery instead Every time you used the Criteria API it would print the line. Just one little issue there. Can you see it? Every time you used the Criteria API it would print the line. In a poorly written Java backend service, one HTTP request can make multiple queries to the database. With hundreds of millions of HTTP requests, this can easily balloon to billions of additional logs a day. Well, that’s exactly what happened to our service, resulting in the CPU usage jumping up considerably and the latency of the service being negatively impacted. We didn’t have the foresight to compare every metric against every instance of the service, and when the metrics were summarized across all instances, this increase was not that noticeable while both new and existing instances of the service were running. Aside from the service itself, this had negative effects downstream as well. If you have a solution for collecting your service logs for analysis and retention, and it’s priced on the amount of logs that you print out, then this can end up being a very costly issue for you. We resolved the issue by making a configuration change to our logger that disabled these specific logs. This does make me wonder who else may have been impacted by this change over the years and what that impact might’ve looked like regarding the resource usage on a world-wide scale. I’m not blaming the Hibernate developers, they had good intentions, but the impact of an innocent change like that was likely not taken into account for large-scale services. Last I heard, the people behind Hibernate are a very small team, and yet their software powers much of the world, including critical infrastructure like the banking system. I’m well aware that we’re talking about Hibernate releases that were released around the time I was still a junior developer (2016-2018). Some call it technical debt, others call it over half a decade of neglect. unmaintaned monoliths suck, but so do unmaintained microservices. ↩︎

5 days ago 12 votes
The History of Windows XP

NT Vincit Omnia

6 days ago 12 votes