Thoughts and tips from the expert minds of our team
11 Jan 2010
It seems that the BBC hit the nail on the head :
“Many people are unhappy with Google only responding to questions by e-mail”
If you release a consumer product you need consumer support IMO when your only support is http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/label?lid=18bf75ad33b7d554&hl=en I can see a big problem
DaveN
11 Jan 2010
This to me is one of the worst things in the industry at the moment and I really hate it with a passion,.
note the “SEO link” a reference to David Naylor has been used to protect the client and industry it wasn’t SEO related !
A few weeks ago I got an email you know the normal link request one which had multi offers:
“At present we are looking after a lot of large websites and we feel that your site WWW.BRONCO.CO.UK would be a good place to advertise on, we can supply you an article with a Link to our client or just purchase a sidebar or a footer link or you could just add a snippet to this post :”
What was interesting wasn’t the fact that the company had taken time to visit the target site, they offered a snippet of text that could be added to a couple of my articles and they really fitted in well, the snippet read something like :
“Just added: I thought I would revisit this post after finding this SEO they seem to offer pretty much the same has Big Seo Corp.”
What surprised me was that the Link was for one of my clients, a client that I work solely with, a client that doesn’t buy links ever and they have no need to lol.. so I thought ok I will run with this, after a few emails backwards and forwards we agree a fee and they sent over a purchase order with a slight amendment :
“Actually, if it’s Ok with you can we use the same snippet and anchor text but we have run out of budget on the “david naylor” account can we just send the link to “Competitor of David Naylor” ..”
Then it became clear to me they are using my client as a shield just incase it goes south and I out them, so I responded with a No, it’s already gone live, that seemed to piss them enough to ask if they could call me. I said Yes gave them my really name and phone number, they never called or email back again .. I feel I have a couple of choices now
a) Do nothing and just walk away
b) I have a footprint now so collect links, contact the webmasters see if they pulled the same stunt then Out them… they are a large UK SEO outfit
c) Just send all emails to Googles spam teams
d) Do the same thing with their clients?
But this really pisses me off, It’s right up there with writing to a large companies HR department asking for a reference for their top inhouse SEO for a laugh
Dave Naylor
07 Jan 2010
Added By DaveN :
SEO is dead remember :
also thetimes.co.uk pr8
Rupert Murdoch’s serious about his war with Google. Why else would he change his canonical domain from http://timesonline.co.uk http://thetimes.co.uk (PR8) to the new (less friendly) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/ (PR5)? He’s just flexing his muscles to show how little he cares about PageRank, right?
Either that or his developers have screwed up and no-one ever at News International is sufficiently on the ball to realise that their domains are shot to hell 
In a sense, this is all a bit of fun, but it is perhaps indicative that traditional media still haven’t got to grips with the demands of the internets. It’s only a small thing, but I’ve had The Times bookmarked at the old URL for years and fixing this problem is the work of seconds. By my count, the old domain has been lost for a couple of weeks at least. That’s a tonne of link equity currently rotting away, and God alone knows how many bookmarks and links that are getting deleted.
While PR doesn’t correlate with rankings, it does show that the old domain is holding a lot more authority than the new site. Murdoch and Google have locked horns a lot recently, Murdoch thinking that his brands are so strong that he can afford to decouple himself from Google’s traffic and charge directly to access his content (I think he’s mad as a box of frogs, personally) so perhaps he genuinely isn’t interested in external metrics like PageRank.
Even so, maintaining that brand means keeping those critical canonical URLs alive as long as possible. Inevitably content will get shunted off this mortal coil, but breaking everyone’s bookmarks and links is no way to maintain a brand – particularly if your content is much of a muchness with other sites as is increasingly the case.
Ah well. His funeral.
06 Jan 2010
This is just pure poetry to any would be black hat out there… as the Nexus One hits main stream the world is going mad for search terms like “Nexus One Sprint”
But look at the Organics in Google WARNING #7 is MALWARE Google Search for Nexus One Sprint
Screen shot before it get’s cleaned up it’s a big image so click it :
Dave
05 Jan 2010
Richard It’s not worth going for honest :
I don’t often screen shot my analytics’s but for Mr. Baxter who so wants to rank for UK SEO.. HONESTLY PUT YOUR EFFORTS IN TO SOMETHING BETTER !!! 
see you at SES London
Dave
NOTE! I know this was in November – well spotted! It was a draft story that I’ve accidentally hit the publish button for! Still, it’s getting retweeted now so it seems too late to pull it. Feel free to laugh.
Attention seems to have wandered away from the trad desktop (you know: that thing that everybody in the whole world uses every single day) to the mobile market (you know: that thing that a few dudes with iPhones actually make much use of).We know that tech moves outward from early adopters through to the masses, but the problems posed by screen size, interfaces and connectivity mean that it’s unlikely your gran will be making the leap any time soon.
Still, a few years from now as early adopters age and technology improves, mobile will become a proper platform for a distinct kind of content delivery that we already see made flesh in iPhone apps.
Google, or course, aren’t unaware of this and recognise that mobile apps pose an interesting quandary to their model. In Dublin earlier this year, a presentation given to web marketing agencies made heavy, heavy mention of mobile, focussing on their co-founding role in the .mobi TLD and their Android platform. But they do have a strategic weakness here. A dedicated app that presents data for house prices using GPS and access to estate agency databases through a cool, usable touch screen interface probably offers more value than a search for “houses for sale in Leeds” on Google, for example – and it’s now clear that people will pay for those kinds of applications.
So in an interesting replay of the Google vs. Microsoft battle, it is now Google who face the distributed wit of thousands of keen, savvy app developers who are at home in this environment in a way that Google’s own developers just aren’t. Google’s attempts to face off with Apple (who, realistically, own the future of this space) through Nexus 1 and the Android platform are interesting, but no tech company outside Apple has shown the ability to move outside their core platform.; IBM couldn’t move from mainframes to the desktop, Microsoft couldn’t move from the desktop to the internet… so when Nexus finally does arrive, we’ll really start to see how this plays out.
With Google’s resources and know how it should be possible to compete in the apps market directly – but the purchase of AdMob suggests that they are still betting on search-based Advertising as the revenue model for a mobile future. I’m not so sure. As I’ve mentioned, paying a fiver for an app that does an incredible job in a specific vertical seems to be attractive to users. People are reaching the stage of ad saturation, as evidenced by the number of people with adblocking extensions.
So what do you think? Is this the kind of small-change acquisition that suggests Google are just going to stick to their core model or something that indicates that they don’t quite have a handle on future of mobile platforms? Or do you think that search is a big part of the future for mobile and Google will inevitably come to dominate this space through acquisitions like this?
05 Jan 2010
What another Gimmick by the UK Government? If you are unaware, today the UK Government launches it £400 grants for Boiler scrappage,
But here is the thing, a new boiler will cost you £1750 – £2500 no small amount if you’re on a low income or just lost your job, but hey if you’re one of the lucky people that could afford a new boiler before the “Boiler scrappage scheme” was launched you’re good to order it now !.. and get a discount
IMO what the government should have done is looked at scaling the grants on household income, so that the people that need to save money on their heating bills ( the poor and the elderly !) could do this without having to find the extra £1500 ..
Dave
04 Jan 2010
If you’re sick of google personalised search results like me, something I hadn’t noticed before today is go to a Google serp like this one, sign out if signed in, then click on the web history link
you will be given 1 of 2 options :
or
Dave Naylor
David Naylor, more commonly known as DaveN, started working in the SEO industry over 10 years ago with three major corporations releasing their database driven data, creating internal link structures and improving usability.
Becky Naylor