Quite a few years ago now, it was possible for the likes of you and me to Domain Taste. This is where you registered a domain name, looked at the revenue generation from holding pages filled with ads and tracking scripts, and if they created a greater return than the cost you kept it, if ROI was bad you just deleted the domain before the registry requested payment.

The governing bodies like Nominet in 2006 took the industry a step forward in my opinion by preventing domain tasting. Later in 2008 ICANN followed suit. There is one big issue to me, and although I never did domain tasting (but could if I wanted to), so I guess you want to know why?

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There’s a lot of anxiety/anger/fear about Rupert Murdoch’s proposed takeover of BSkyB. Daily, commentators pour forth to point out that that would mean that he would own The Times, The Sun, The News of the World, Sky News, MySpace, BSkyB, Fox News and Australia. Which is an awful lot of influence for one man to have.

Now because everyone’s impeccably right-on these days, Murdoch’s right-wing politics mean that this gives us the screaming heebie-jeebies. But meanwhile, away from the traditional media, Google has snaffled up YouTube, Blogger, Urchin, Doubleclick, Feedburner and more besides – either directly or more tangentially (for example, Google have a 5% stake in AOL. And AOL just bought the Huffington Post).

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Back in October we launched yet another design for Dave’s site, pushing out some HTML5 and CSS3 goodness. But as can usually occur, something happened that we didn’t account for. By dropping the year from the date within the posts we had an increased number of comments on those older posts. Although it didn’t necessarily break the site we thought it best to implement a solution.

The Solution

As you may have already seen on the site we have the following appearing above the content on any post older than one year.

Rather than mess around with anything already designed and implemented we came up with a solution that is more visual in showing when a post is old or not, along with a friendly message to go along with it.

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In these hard economic times, small businesses need all the help they can get, unfortunately a mistake made with Google Places is having a massive negative impact on The Old Deanery.

Disclosure: The owners of The Old Deanery happen to be good friends with David Naylor, and also happen to be my parents!!!

Sometime in late January The Old Deanery started getting phone calls from people in Bradford saying they were nearby and wanted to come for lunch, this was met with a bit of confusion as The Old Deanery is about 45 minutes away in Ripon! They got a second call last night saying they were nearby in Bradford and wanted to come for a meal – mentioning they had seen us on Google Maps. At this point I decided to check it out, the results were not good…

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If I win this http://bro.gs/fsgl one of my Twitter Followers that tweets this post or anyone that leaves a comment on how to improve my Blog gets to win either a Kindle or 5 Seo questions answered by me and my team.

The Competition Ends today so Vote Now http://bro.gs/fsgl

While trying to get my head around the whole “Google caught Bing cheating” I found myself asking more and more questions.

The first question was when Google ran the experiment they say around 20 Google engineers went home and ran the test queries using Internet Explorer with a Bing toolbar installed and the Suggested Sites enabled. They also had to click on the top results in Google ( or the Fake results )

What no one is reporting is how these test queries where actually run ?? I guess one of two ways.

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The fun fallout over the whole Bing-plagiarising-Google thing is quite the thing today (in case you missed it, Danny Sullivan has the definitive explanation). But apart from the “is this stealing” hoo-ha, there’s a more interesting philosophical point bubbling below the surface.

For years, and right up to the present day, people have been asking whether Google manipulate the SERPs in order to increase AdWords spend. The short version of this conspiracy version being:

“If Google give 4 or 5 slots of the first 10 to non-commercial results (pace: Wikipedia, BBC, Direct.gov.uk etc) then competition – and therefore cost per click – for AdWords slots is driven higher. Ergo, why wouldn’t they game the SERPs?”

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Yesterday I did a blog post asking whether Bing have gained market share at the expense of Google. James Murray from Experian Hitwise contacted me and kindly supplied me with the past 12 months % share figures of the top 3 search engines, so I thought I would share the results with you all…

It appears that all 3 search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo) have gained market share, at the expense of the little guys.

Google.com dropped market share by 42%, but this was regained by Google.co.uk which increased market share by 13.4%, meaning Google overall went from 80.45% market share to 83.99%, giving an increase in market share of 4.4%.

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