Google

Google made an algorythm change on or around the 2nd of December. Unfortunately, it seemed one of my sites got penalised quite heavily as traffic dropped to a mere quarter overnight. The algorythm change was pitched as a way of thwarting the black hat technique of actively pursuing negative reviews as a link building tactic. [...]

Continue reading about Google reconsideration request – how long does it take?

Andy on September 2nd, 2010

What your unsolicited e-mail tells the potential client about you @bignameseocompany.com No-one get’s unsolicited mail from these guys. @owndomain.com Fair chance you actually know something about websites. Quite probably mention the fact that you are based in India as a selling point. You know how to “maximise brand effectiveness by leveraging the Web 2.0 Socioshpere” [...]

Continue reading about SEO SPAM – argh

Andy on March 22nd, 2010

This week SEOMOZ put up a post on crawling and indexing issues with Faceted Search. They also made reference to an interview with Matt Cutts on Faceted Search and SEO. Normally I’d join the conversation on there and pop in a comment or two, but in this instance I want to save myself the flames [...]

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Andy on March 2nd, 2010

This made me laugh. First I heard of it, my son rang me and said the PS3 wasn’t working. I thought fair enough, I’ll take a look at it when I get home – it’s still under warranty anyway so not really concerned. Half an hour later one of my mates calls and says his [...]

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Andy on February 19th, 2010

Found some competitors to my workplace today with quite frankly astonishingly good reviews listed on Google Shopping. Sounds good, I mean if almost 300 people felt compelled to leave positive responses about their shopping experience, then I want to shop there too and become another satisfied customer. Or do I? I’ll let you draw your [...]

Continue reading about Google Seller reviews – who do you trust

Andy on February 8th, 2010

It’s easy to be a bad company these days. Just don’t give too much of a hoot about your customers AFTER you’ve got their money for instance. I can think of quite a long list for that. On the other hand, how about being deliberately deceptive, and actually publishing the fact that you are for [...]

Continue reading about How to make your company look bad in one easy step.

Got this one today, the joke being this was arrived at from a link within Webmaster Tools itself. It would have been bad enough if it was in Google search results considering it’s one of their own pages. Obviously my favourite part is “Part of this page has been removed” – that would be the [...]

Continue reading about When you really ought to have a 404 – useless web pages

My Taekwondo site had sat for years on a subdomain at http://tkd.tomcatuk.net. I felt the site deservered it’s own domain, so I did a little keyword research using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Ran the keyword “taekwondo” through it, then sorted the results by global search volume. Top of the list (of course) was “Taekwondo” [...]

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Andy on February 1st, 2009

The allowed sites feature is great. As someone who’s been through the process of having his Adsense account disabled due to ads appearing on sites I don’t control (basically vandalism on the part of another webmaster) it’s great to be able to sleep at night in the knowledge my publisher ID isn’t being served on [...]

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Andy on January 31st, 2009

Bizarrely, a post I put up a while ago about press ups in Taekwondo started to appear on page one of Google.co.uk for the keyphrase “press ups”. If you’re doing TKD hopefully it was a useful, inspired and interesting read, but if you don’t, the odds are it wasn’t exactly what you were looking for [...]

Continue reading about Bounce Rate – seems to work