Dave gave a presentation in ProSEO just 3 days ago in which he painted a gloomy future of Google moving into partnerships with certain providers and making use of their own muscle to start replacing traditional organic SERPs with something more within their control. A lot of people thought it was just “tin foil hat” stuff. But as Patrick and others have noticed… local is going mad today. Still trying to gauge everything, but it’s clear there are some big winners and perhaps we’re starting to see behind the curtain as to where Google is headed in a year or two.

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Anyone who’s heard Dave speaking over the last year or so (and believe me I get my fill every single day!) will have heard him mention the ‘link landscape.’ It’s an interesting concept that might be familiar to you under different names such as ‘backlink profile’ but I just thought I’d share with you how we here at Bronco go about one branch of our research.

Now don’t think this is one of our entirely out-there kind of ideas; after all, most SEOs have trailed their fingers through the slurry of other people’s links looking for a pattern. But perhaps a majority of people take as their starting point: “what are the competition doing?” We start from a slightly different point: “what signals are Google telling us are important.”

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God-bastard-dammit. Another day, another client. Another website that “can’t be changed”. Another calamitous drop in rankings caused by a weakness in site architecture and a lack of support for content delivery.

I have a drink of tea and sigh. It’s another e-commerce platform.

On paper, a platform offers something great: the opportunity to roll out a fully functional e-commerce store in as simple and cost effective a way as possible. The payment and admin systems have all been developed prior to the signing of a contract and the cost base for future development is split across many clients (and in truth will be borne mainly by the biggest clients then rolled out as a free or cheap extra to everyone else as it gets worked into the code base).

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This is a guest post by Rishil – Explicitly.me/

For those of you who don’t know what the favorite function is (really? ), from day one twitter has allowed you to tag tweets with the use of their teen tiny star:

Some people use it for showing their appreciation for a tweet they like, while others like me:

TIP: If you see a blog link on twitter you think may be interesting, but don’t have the time to read, bookmark it by using the favorite button.

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Yep you heard it here first, the site overlay report on Google Analytics appears to be missing, instead it has been replaced by a very similar report called the “In-Page Analytics” report. Interestingly it still has the same problem as the old overlay report in that it can’t differentiate between the different locations of links going to the same URL. So for example you may have a home button at the top and the bottom of your page, but it would attribute them the same percentage of clicks.

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They announced on the blog last night that they have improved the link report in Google Webmasters Tools. There have been two new features released.

Firstly they have grouped the links by the domains, and you can see a count of the number of domains linking to you. You can then drill down and see which pages they are linking to, and drill down further and see which pages link to that page.

Secondly you can also check out which of your content is the most linked to and then drill down from there into the different domains, it also gives a count of the number of unique domains.

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As long time readers will already know Dave likes to change his site pretty much yearly, but this year I shot myself in the foot and suggested an update before Dave even had chance to consider the idea.

To be frank over the year certain areas just started to bug me and the site no longer showcased the company or Dave in the way I thought it should. This coupled with new functionality dropped into the site over the year it seemed time to have a rethink and refocus what the site was delivering.

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Weighted sort was released quite some time ago now, in fact just over a month ago and I’ve been foolishly weighting to see it on my Google Analytics, but unfortunately it just didn’t appear. The same can be said for my colleagues – none of them have noticed it either, but it turns out it is there, hiding, so if you haven’t seen weighted sort yet follow my simple guide:

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1. Login to your Google Analytics account
2. Go to any report where it has a % metric (e.g. bounce rate, conversion rate etc.)