Some screen shots of Google Chrome OS :
The Google Chrome OS source code available for download.
19 Nov 2009
Google Chrome OS screenshot
19 Nov 2009
Ranking in Google.co.uk V Google.com
This isn’t going to be a massive post …..
1) Going out on a limb here IP address Not important !
2) Tld is king
3) Google Webmastertools is your friend
4) Tld IBL’s will help thumbs up
5) Thats all folks ( but testing speed has I type : James will have a post on this later )
Dave
Added :My Clients that sell to the UK market place get 20 – 30% more traffic for google.co.uk over google.com even thou they rank #1 in both, upshot people in the UK use co.uk … just saying
19 Nov 2009
“Content is King” is Bunkum
Apologies for the attention-grabbing title. Couldn’t resist. Everyone knows that people like content, right? And that Google makes sweet, dribbly love to sites with good content. You can’t sneeze without spraying a “content expert” who’ll tell you all about the importance of killer copywriting for ranking.
I alluded the other day to a site I was looking at that is pretty much content free, poorly structured, lacking any real volume or quality in backlinks yet still ranking for some ace keywords bringing in a shedload of targeted traffic and big sales numbers.
Today I was looking at their primary competitor – a massively well known name who rank for any number of insanely competitive one/two word phrases. And guess what? No content, poor structure… etc etc etc.
So content is dead and we should fire our copywriters and spend the money on wine, women and links, right?
But wait! Who ever said $content =$text?
What both these sites have in common is presentation. Their market is all about visuals. So the sites are entirely geared up towards photography. One of them uses video to display its products in a really innovative way. None of this is really indexable stuff – aside from some alt attributes that repeat the product name from the heading tag – and yet if I wrote killer 2000 word post after killer 2000 word post on their product I’d probably never outrank them.
The reason? This stuff is really linkworthy.
It’s a really fast-moving market. Things come and go in the space of a few months and there’s a whole raft of people out there who live for the latest thing. As soon as something hits the shelf, they’re blogging about it to maintain their status as the hippest kid on the block. Where do they source their images? And where do they send their acolytes? Not to anywhere with anything as old-fashioned as words on it.
So content is really king. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that a copywriter is always the place to go for it.
18 Nov 2009
Google Breadcrumbs
Google Breadcrumbs confusing or helpful, I’m not sure yet but in 2nd screen shot below you can make out that the mu.wordpress listing has 2 links the second going to “Your Wordpress MU”
Second shot with Breadcrumbs :
17 Nov 2009
Linkbait vs. Linkbuying
Linkbuilding is the one remaining ‘black art’ of SEO (remember when there were tonnes of them?) Get it right and even a woefully optimised and cobbled-together site can rank in a competitive vertical.
I’m looking at a site right now with 600,000+ organic visitors a month that has fundamentally no content whatsoever and sits in a template with cruddy URL structure. The code is stuffed with inline JavaScript, non-validating HTML and a raft of other stuff that you presumed went west with Brother Beyond. Yet I can go blob in any number of high volume search terms and find them nestling nicely in the top 3.
The reason? Links.
We talk a lot on here about how you can source links. Whether you’re blackhatting your way around exploits in popular platforms, doing cheeky things with Encarta, content-spinning, linkbuying or whatever, the ground of debate for SEO has narrowed down to how you get that tasty tasty link juice. I know there’s a tonne of methods and strategies out there, but broadly speaking there are two main strands of thought in currency right now.
Linkbait
Linkbait is the catch-all term for doing stuff that is so cool or interesting that people want to link to you. You know the kind of thing: gather together some kind of cruddy list, build a cool tool that your audience will want to use, use a provocative title to stir people to respond.
It sounds easy when you put it like that. But it largely depends on the market. SEO is a fascinating, vibrant field with a big audience of hip young things that will reblog anything that catches their eye. Aluminium guttering isn’t.
So in most markets, linkbait requires imagination in the first instance. People with commercially-exploitable imaginations don’t come cheap and quite often their ideas cost $$$ to implement. It might take them 6 weeks at £800 a day to come up with the idea of a Google Maps mashup showing dogging hotspots in the UK. That’s before you add in development time to build it and the research time to populate it. And then you’ve got to promote it – unless you’ve got time to wait.
Pros
- Gets you ungettable links from social networks, blogs and forums
- Your competitors can’t replicate it.
- Great for brand engagement
Cons
- You see that huge heap of dung in the corner? That’s a million linkbait ideas that never took off. The idea wasn’t strong enough, the market not deep enough, or the budget too tight to make it work.
- Your corporate culture might mean that a Top 10 Nude Aluminium Guttering Workers list just won’t get past the marketing department. And if it does you might get sacked when someone takes umbrage.
- Who knows who might end up linking to you? What if Robert Mugabe is madly into dogging and blogs you every day?
Linkbuying
Linkbuying is based on a simpler premise than linkbait. You want good, relevant sites linking to you, so you find good, relevant sites and wave cheques in their general direction. Could be that you’re buying SEO-friendly banner advertising, advertorial content or Whatever.
Of course, buying links in the right places at the right price in the right way is as much a skill as the linkbaiting. And finding just one decent link can cost you days of time in finding and negotiating even before you get to the cost of the link.
Pros
- Transparency: you gets what you pays for – with invoices and everything and a nice list of links in an Excel spreadsheet every month
- Control: the target sites are on-topic and receptive to your approach. Assuming it’s being done right.
- Can be great branding if it’s done right
- If links go bad, they can normally be removed
Cons
- Transparency: outright linkbuys are pretty obvious to anyone who isn’t a total chimp
- How do you price any given link when PageRank is still so f****ing important to site owners.
- Your competitors can duplicate what you’ve got – or buy up your slots if their chequebook’s bigger
- Algorithmically detectable?
Conclusions
Really, the lines between most linkbuilding techniques aren’t really that well defined. One man’s linkbait is another man’s comment spam and to Person X the whole thing is unconscionably immoral. Truthfully, most of us dabble in both techniques depending on the market we’re operating in and really what works is what matters. Regardless of what Google say, linkbuying isn’t going to go away any time soon – the algorithm is nowhere near as smart as people like to think it is. On the flipside, linkbait isn’t some kind of panacea – you’re in the lap of the gods as to whether it will take off unless you’ve got PR muscle to back it up.
The EU – a vast unregulated monopoly – loves the chance to present itself as a bulwark against, er, vast unregulated monopolies. You might remember them dragging Microsoft through the courts for eleventy years because they had the temerity to bundle their browser in with their OS, a battle that thrilled us all and led to spontaneous outpourings of joy when Microsoft’s evil monopoly was broken. We had a firework party down our way.
Anyway, they’re at it again. This time, they have cookies in their sights. The draft legislation is available in full, in a monstrous PDF format here, but the parts you’re probably interested in run thus:
Third parties may wish to store information on the equipment of a user, or gain access to information already stored, for a number of purposes, ranging from the legitimate (such as certain types of cookies) to those involving unwarranted intrusion into the private sphere (such as spyware or viruses). It is therefore of paramount importance that users be provided with clear and comprehensive information when engaging in any activity which could result in such storage or gaining of access. The methods of providing information and offering the right to refuse should be as user-friendly as possible. Exceptions to the obligation to provide information and offer the right to refuse should be limited to those situations where the technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user. Where it is technically possible and effective, in accordance with the relevant provisions of Directive 95/46/EC, the user’s consent to processing may be expressed by using the appropriate settings of a browser or other application. The enforcement of these requirements should be made more effective by way of enhanced powers granted to the relevant national authorities.
Or, to put it in English: Thou Shalt Not Use Cookies Without Asking First.
Now cookies can, as we all know, be used for evil. But… seriously… dudes… WTF? It’s kind of hard to even know where to start with the stupidity of this law. If you unpick the offending clause it allows for their use if it is “strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user.” We figure that means that your shopping cart is going to be OK but outside that… there’s a shedload of grey.
Technically speaking, this is merely a directive – not a law. That means that it is more guidance for lawmakers than an actual law with fines and prison sentences and stuff. But even putting this in shows a worrying lack of foresight. A single guy in a tinfoil hat who knows where to find his cookies and the name of a law firm could play merry hell with your business if you do something as zany as install Analytics.
You just know that someone somewhere is writing the form letter for solictors to send out at £180 a time about “our client… blah blah… EU directive… blah blah… cease and desist cookies… blah blah.. contact your ISP and have your site taken down… blah blah”.
They live for that shit.
You would have thought that the fact that the World Wide Web is all, like world wide might have seeped into the skulls of these people. If it’s really going to be a problem, I’m just going to locate my servers somewhere less savoury, or do my shopping on US sites or any one of 157,813 things that will make the EU less competitive for internet businesses to operate in and make precisely no difference whatsoever to the prevalence of cookies.
My guess (hope?) is that this is something that will get buried in the terms and conditions of most websites, unloved and ignored. The alternatives – dropping cookies altogether or masses of do-you-agree pop-ups springing up with every pageload – don’t even bear thinking about.
Alas, I can’t think of an internet version of the time-honoured French practice of burning a lorry load of lambs outside Calais by way of protest so I guess we’re all doomed.
09 Nov 2009
Why you should USE the NoArchive Meta tag
Before I started writing this post I found this post on webmasterworld in the webmasterworld thread you can see XOC point out he is ranking for Boxter in google.com .. the reason I have pointed this out is to stop people saying Google will ban you or move you off the first page etc etc..
The first Question I asked myself was why would I need a Google cached link in the serps :
Common arguments are what if your site is down people can’t see your site, well I run a blog I want people to interact with my site and see the latest comments that I have allowed I don’t want to wake up in the morning and find someone has left Matt Cutts cell number on my blog and Google has cached it (Google is quick at getting data slow at removing selective bits of your site)
so again I asked myself why would I need a google cached link… I mean I have seen sites like XOC’s hold rankings for years and all my new posts that rank in Google don’t have a cached link for days sometimes take the cleaners in london post early today:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cleaners+in+london
Another argument was people like to see how Google see’s their site, the fact that google show you text version and a full version, but they also say “It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 7 Nov 2009 20:45:03 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime.” should be a signal that the data could be wrong but I can get real time what Googlebot see’s
So the only reason I can see why I should leave the Google Cached link is so that other people can see what my website looks like in Googles eyes and why would I do that ?
Dave
09 Nov 2009
Cleaners in London – google local wtf ?
Since Google said they where adding new features to Google Local to stop the spam I thought I would keep an eye out, normally I am banner blind to maps these days..
But how the hell do you get Covent Garden’s Hidden Village shopping centre, Adidas (Twice) and a Pay as you go car hire company !! some help me understand..
Google Local gets cleaners in london mixed up
Dave
