SEO Blog

Thoughts and tips from the expert minds of our team

05 Mar 2010

Speaking at Search Engine Strategies – SES New York

In a couple of weeks I will be heading out to New York with Becky to attend and speak at SES New York. New York is one of my favourite SES conferences to attend and this year promised to be another great show.

The Search Engine Strategies conference runs from Tuesday 23^rd March to Thursday 25^th and I am doing 3 sessions.

On the Tuesday 23rd I will be starting the conference off with an Express Clinic in the Expo Hall between 4pm and 5pm, so if you want me to go over your site then pop along.

On Day 2 I will be speaking on the “SEO Super Tools” panel, alongside Dave Snyder, Dixon Jones, Bruce Clay and Wil Reynolds at 5pm. Ever since I started doing SEO we have always built our own tools in house. We have used off the shelf packages but found that they never did everything you needed. So to me it’s more effective to get my programmers to create the perfect SEO tool. Also it means that I can keep all of my own data safe! In the session I will be discussing some of my favourite and most useful SEO tools that are available to all, as well as some of the things my secret tools do.

Following that session we will be heading to the bar area for the White Hat / Black Hat Unconferenced for a more informal discussion about SEO. The session promises to be a really open discussion and this will be a unique event for SES New York.

On Day 3 at 2.15pm I will be doing the Big Sites & Big Brands Site Clinic with Kristjan Mar Hauksson. This is always an interesting session as big brands are great at getting brand awareness but often they struggle to get their SEO and organic rankings right. This will be an interactive session where we will appraise the SEO live.

So if you are planning on going to a search conference this year then try SES New York .. and if you are already booked to go then I’ll see you there.

DaveN

04 Mar 2010

Bing: Left hand, Right hand get your shit together

Yes you heard right: it’s an anti Bing Title. This stuff annoys the hell out of me…

Bing are at one of the trickiest stages when it comes to building a brand. There is awareness about the brand and people are trying it out, but there’s no massive emotional attachment to it like there is to (to pick an example entirely at random) Google. That makes it dispensable in the same way that Sunny Delight was when it entered the UK kids’ drinks market. Despite a massive marketing push, the first hint of trouble with the product and and it was dead in the water.

In those early stages, you’ve simply got to be untouchable when you’re trying to eat into a dominant player’s market. That was how Google beat Altavista back in the day, and that’s how someone will ultimately beat Google.

Anyway, to get over this hump Bing are pushing like hell through online channels to reach new audiences to get them to try this new flavour of search. It’s a good time to be doing this kind of thing, because there is a sense of pressure on the Google brand of late, with concerns about monopoly and privacy seeping into the press and continued rise of social media as a way for people to share information and shortcutting search out of the equation.

Bing are, naturally on Facebook where they have 500,000+ followers – including children. They’ve been pushing Farmville big style – which is an awesome move you would think as it reaches some sweet markets right now:

But click that “we’ve got great results…” link and you’re taken to a page of Bing results which looks like this:

Hmmm .. what happened to Quality, Relevance and Integrity..? Take a closer look at those results:

#1 Redirected me (or potentially my kids) to a adult fetish and BDSM site!!
#2 Just look at the snippet – “I don’t play the Fucking game”
#4 I got this message…

If you are going play stupid games online like Farmville the chances are, this weekend you now have a date with a Fetish Queen and are going to chat about some Farmville hater you found on Bing. Oh and if you’re reading this then you might want to get to PC cleaned at the local computer store!

There’s a massive disconnect here between Bing’s marketing team, the Bing results themselves and ultimately their audience. When some parent checking up on their kids’ Facebook checks that link, that’s massive bad karma for Bing. It looks like the marketing team were keen to push something about Farmville to reach the kids and didn’t bother to check with the Bing team or get them to clean up the results for that particular search. For a huge company like Microsoft, connecting the dots between different things that are happening on the promotional front can be really difficult. Nonetheless when you’re pushing a big brand in the online sphere you just can’t go dropping the ball like this. Who knows who might end up blogging about it?

Behind the misdirected marketing effort lies another truth: that the core product is still immature in comparison to Google. And you can’t market something that isn’t ready.

So Bing: if you’re going to play with high traffic please make sure you don’t run the people down trying to cross that road!

Dave

DaveN

03 Mar 2010

Google vs The World – well just the EU at the moment

Because you are the best doesn’t mean that you deserve top rankings in the best search engine in the world, and this is similar to any industry. Take the BetaMax video recorder back in the 80’s, they died off as it was VHS that did the deals and won out, even though BetaMax had the better technology. Or take the more recent battle between HD DVD and BluRay… there was no room for HD DVD as BluRay stormed their way through, instrumental via the PS3.

People complain that Google is all powerful and that if you’re not on Google you’re not on the internet. I bitch and complain about Google all the time but I’m not going to sue Google as a customer has got a choice, they can use Google or Bing. I’m a Bing fan, I have good friends there and have been an unofficial ambassador for many years, but Google has the traffic when it comes to search and deservedly so. We jump through hoops with Google but many of us wouldn’t be where we are today without them.

Let’s look at a few facts:

Websites get penalised every day in Google. Whether you agree or not with the penalisation methods if you understand how the algorithm works you understand the risks as well as the gains.

Roll back the clock a few years to a company we all know and love – Espotting. For people that don’t remember that far back here’s a quick reminder. Espotting was an early pioneer of the pay per click game but were slightly different from anything else at the time as they paid the biggest % to affiliates, and the same as the comparison aggregators and scrapers of today, Espotting affiliates were destroying the user experience on Google. I was vocal at the time and I was working with Espotting affiliates, so it was a double edged sword. My issue was that for a search term in Google the entire first two pages were filled with Espotting affiliates and it used to really annoy me. I didn’t mind one or two Espotting affiliates, and didn’t care if they were the best or the worse, I just wanted diversification.

Roll the clocks forward and now we have comparison websites. It seems that anyone with a script can pull other peoples content onto a site and believe that they have the god given right to dominate Google.

Personally I believe that Google should penalise or at least filter search results so that I do get diversification. In fact, hang on, isn’t there something called QDF and QDD. People in the know, and anyone in online marketing should know, that QDF means Query Deserves Freshness and QDD means Query Deserves Diversification.

Let’s look at QDD.. it pretty much does what it says on the tin. If Google can bring back a diversified result for a search term to include shopping, images, video, news and blogs then that enhances the search experience. Take the search results for Michael Jackson today, the results are very diversified, but when he died the search results were very different and full of Fresh content (QDF). This doesn’t mean that the sites that were ranking have been penalised or the sites that are now ranking were penalised back then, it’s just Google adjusted their algorithm to fit the Google customers’ needs.

Google’s algorithm indexes billions of pages all the time and it doesn’t always get it right which does frustrate SEO’s, but in all honesty if Google were forced by the EU Antitrust laws to break down the algorithm you are then opening the door for “bad” people to walk right in, to reverse engineer it and to dominate the serps with automation.

As I have said previously I have many close friends within all of the major search engines but I get no favours (and wouldn’t expect any). My peers’ say I am one of the smartest reverse engineers but I can honestly say if Google’s back door was unlocked, the relevancy which has made them so dominant in this marketplace will be destroyed which is why the EU Antitrust investigation is so so wrong.

DaveN

26 Feb 2010

Louis Vuitton open letter

At SES London I got chatting to someone who works for Louis Vuitton, I joked that I would never blog about the brand “Louis Vuitton” just incase the lawyers sued my fat lazy arse.. of course I was just joking around and the conversation turned to what I would do if I was Louis Vuitton …

Ok I know they are aggressive with trademarks so they should use ICann to grab domains and 301 them, in fairness I bet they are doing this but what they aren’t doing is bringing out standalone product launch sites :

Take the Louis Vuitton Damier Ebene Canvas range, it would be so easy to have a microsite for that range or on a url damierebene.LouisVuitton.com or even www.damier-ebene.com. With the domain equity that they could pass the way the fashion media link, they could pop that for the terms “Louis Vuitton” and “damier ebene” closing a couple more top slots in the serps.

I reckon with a few months these results would look much better than this :

The red parts are replica bags suppliers !!

Secondly I would start link building out to sites that officially distribute the real bags.

Disclaimer : I don’t SEO, Work or have any association to Louis Vuitton, in fact I don’t even own a Vuitton product although I do like some of the Messenger bags …

Dave

DaveN

26 Feb 2010

BBC website to be “halved” in size – newspapers to benefit?

The Times is reporting that the BBC website – often held up as a beacon of technical innovation, exemplary design and the first port of call for millions of people looking for the latest news is to be ‘halved’ under plans that have been submitted to the board of governers.

“The corporation’s web pages are to be halved, backed by a 25 per cent cut in staff numbers. Its £112 million budget will also be cut by 25 per cent. It is also pledging to include more links to newspaper articles to drive traffic to the websites of rival publishers.”

The beeb’s presence in the web market has divided opinion between those who see it as a counterweight to the politically driven content and comment found in the newspapers and blogosphere, and those who think that it unfairly squeezes out other content providers by sheer weight of resources.

There’s merit in both sides of the argument, which has been running for years, but the looming election is bringing the issue into sharper focus. It is assumed that any potential Tory government would be less inclined to let the BBC continue to grow at the pace it has over the last few years and this report is a pre-emptive move to set the agenda on their own terms.

The BBC themselves are staying pretty schtum about it – more or less confirming that the report is real, but emphasising that it is merely a proposal document.

One of the most interesting aspects is that the BBC might carry more links to newspaper sources. Rupert Murdoch (and more recently his son) has been very vocal about the fact that he sees a free BBC news source as a huge problem in his plan to make readers pay for his content.

In fact, the BBC is already carrying syndicated links alongside a lot of its news content and there have been recent moves to include links to blogs and independent news sources.

So why does this matter to you? Well if the BBC are going to passing some of their power into the open media market, that’s going to mean more opportunities for effective use of online PR and relationships with the press. The BBC are known to be cautious about linking to commercial properties because of their obvious non-commercial basis. Newspapers, on the other hand, are keen to find new ways to monetise their content. We’ve seen affiliate links and paid advertorial links creeping into many major media outlets over the last year… so go figure

More importantly perhaps, our very own Rory Lofthouse will be praying that the iPlayer is left unscathed otherwise he’ll have literally nothing to do all day!

paul carpenter

24 Feb 2010

Channel 4 verus Google and YouTube

How often do you see this message on youtube when looking for channel 4 content:

This video contains content from Channel 4, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.

Just try this search you see the top results, click one if you’re in the UK and You Tube should show you the copyright message. Now Google owns YouTube, most readers here know that but I have a new following at the moment ( did I tell you I’m going to be on SkyNews lol ) and just want to make that clear, so why the hell does Google YouTube block me when Google.com will quite happily show me the video in their Cache.

So what does Cache mean? This is the content that Google stores on it own servers, normally your content if you have a website, and to stop Google indexing that content you have to use robots.txt file to block Google’s spiders. Alot of newspapers actually block Google from caching their sites so they still have editorial control.
So the big question is why would Google honour a take down request on Youtube but still serve copyrighted content from it’s cache ?
Dave

DaveN

24 Feb 2010

6 Months Suspended Sentence for Google

The BBC reported today that :

An Italian court has convicted three Google executives in a trial over a video showing a teenager with Down’s Syndrome being bullied.

Is it just me or is the screws of justice actually starting to turn, I know Google will appeal against this and David Drummond, chief legal officer at Google quoted that :

“I intend to vigorously appeal this dangerous ruling. It sets a chilling precedent,” he said.
“If individuals like myself and my Google colleagues who had nothing to do with the harassing incident, its filming or its uploading onto Google Video can be held criminally liable solely by virtue of our position at Google, every employee of any internet hosting service faces similar liability,” he added.

Personally I believe that Google need to start taking account of their actions. Last Monday on my radio show Strikepoint I kind of went on a large scale rant after Google again sent my children to places I don’t want them to go, which made me want to block Google from my home :

Seriously “best toys” is something my kids do search and I don’t want, or like the fact that Google is pushing them to Sex Toys..I have no reason for even letting them sign up for Gmail.

Dave

DaveN