What is a pingback?
OK so my use of this term @ #TBUMBR (Travel Bloggers Unite – Umbria) seemed to start a bit of a panic (and TBH it was someone else who used the term pingback – not me in the first instance). Basically a “pingback” is a piece of technology that sits inside your blog and when you mention someone else’s content (assuming they receive pingbacks) they get told automatically in their website that someone else has linked to them.
Over at wordpress.com they say that :
- pingback
- is designed to allow bloggers to :
inform other bloggers whenever they cite an article from another site in their own articles 1
Let’s take a simple occassion I write an article about travel bloggers I’ve met over here in Umbria, Italy and mention a nice blog post they’ve written about Italy (take this about the Paris to Italy Sleeper Train over at the blog written by @Jools_Octavius) the next time he opens his wordpress installation it will let him know I’ve mentioned his article and his blog (upon accepting the pingback) will provide a link to my article which cites his article.
That’s it. If you’re really wanting to learn about pingbacks (which yes are kinda like trackbacks) you can see more over at the following articles ;
Geeky Stuff about Technical Definitions of what is a Pingback
Cool Pics I Ripped from Google Image Search
God knows why but I was looking at oranges (google still cant look at an image file and distinguish between an orange and a sunset was the point I was making). I found some cool pics with oranges and I aint posted in ages so I thought that I would stick some of them here just for the fun of it.
Cat Made of Oranges
Hahaha - I've never seen a cat made of oranges before. I have now
Read More »
Kick Ass Link Development needs Kick Ass People
I’m so tired of the first rule of SEO fight club being ignored. Maybe it’s the whole concept of community not being what it once was. I have a tight knit group of friends who I share stuff with (the things I would never put on this blog or be for general consumption) and there is a reason I trust these people – they’re kick ass SEO folks and I can trust them.
You know as soon as you go to see someone speak and you hear a speaker say “don’t tweet this” some idiots going to have it on twitter within seconds (may be the embedded command in the statement – all they hear is “tweet this”).
Read More »
Conference Calls for Small Businesses
I realised that for ages I haven’t posted and TBH if I start writing a post about links for SEO I’ll never stop do instead I thought, after listening to Radio 5 yesterday interviewing folks from Saracens about how they’re going to cope with a staff member in South Africa I thought I’d give you some ideas on software etc I use for conference calls and webinars.
I love this. Use it all the time for calls with people abroad. It is dependant upon the quality of your internet connection. I recently used this as my sole means of communication with the SEO Office in Edinburgh recently whilst as PubCon in Vegas. The IM is like all other instant messaging platforms but the ability to call phone numbers and other computers makes it really useful. The iPhone App is really good too. But remember to turn it off when you dont want to be contacted – I got Skyped in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 the other day not realising I hadn’t actually turned it off.
It’s not always viable to utilise an online service and the best place I’ve found for conference calls that I want to have with multiple participants is PowWowNow. Dead easy, simple – dial in and away you go. No fuss. No charges – just goes onto the phone bill.
I also use the normal places like WebEx for web conferences where I need to show presentations etc to clients when not in their offices – Skype does have this facility but TBH its pretty weak and I’ve never managed to get the resolutions to match up.
Thats all for now. If you have any alternative services for conference calls and/or web meetings let me know so I can check them out, having said that based upon this review of the Orient Express if they had Wifi I’d rather do that than be making calls all day long.
Google Losing Pages and Losing my respect
If it weren’t for the fact that everyone used Google I’d be in a position not to care about it. But unfortunately I’m not in that position and currently I’m getting fed up with it.
- Google Losing Pages – in the last couple of weeks I’ve seen more and more pages being ‘lost’ by Google. I had a section of one clients site dissapear (it came back) but all the same it vanished. Oh and currently my blog homepage (http://www.mercurythread.co.uk/blog/) vanished. Google just keeps losing things which is most annoying. Read More »
Banner ad style links are all the rage – and enraging
Link building makes me smile. It’s an art as well as a science and I’m always being nosey about what people are doing where and the ways in which so many people obfuscate links to users show them to search engines. Increasingly what I;ve been seeing that a banner style ad is becoming the rage.
One of those I’ve seen getting used more and more is to put a set of links in a div attach a JavaScript link onto the whole div so that if the user clicks you get taken to page a. Under this you place a set of links – all to the same domain with some nice anchor texts and link these back to the specific pages – so that the search engine can read and index all of the links.
UX is completely different from what SX (I just made that up but by SX I mean Search eXperience I was going to use the acronym for Search Engine eXperience but I didn’t fancy getting adult filtered). there is no way that a user can click the link – unless they have JavaScript turned off of course.
What was more kinda surprising that I’ve came across a big brand doing this – not a small company. I guess they know if Google catch ‘em nothing will happen. Too big to be banned I guess.
<div>
<ul>
<li><a href=”http://www.domain.com/keyword-rich-url-1.html”>Keyword Set 1</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://www.domain.com/keyword-rich-url-2.html”>Keyword Set 2</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://www.domain.com/keyword-rich-url-3.html”>Keyword Set 3</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://www.domain.com/keyword-rich-url-4.html”>Keyword Set 4</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://www.domain.com/keyword-rich-url-5.html”>Keyword Set5</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
TBH I’m kinda impressed at this but also dissapointed if the search engines can’t algorithmically see it. Oh well. Let me know if you find any pages hosting this kinda stuff. Interested to see how widespread it is.
Sweet, another SEO in Falkirk
Quick post – been busy in my new job (more of that next week). Anyway over here there is a wee fell by the name of Scott McLay (I stuck the facebook link in as it made me laugh when I saw the picture – looks like he should be wearing a spock costume from the recent Star Trek Movie) who is an SEO in Falkirk (ok he’s in a village right next to Falkirk but he’s got an FK postcode so I’ll call him an optimiser in Falkirk). Anyway he’s on the journey from Link Monkey to Link Developer to SEO => I’d say he’s more in the latter part of this search engine optimisation career progression judging by some of the cool ways in which I’ve seen him to be link building.
Anyway he’s battering up a new website all about internet marketing/SEO/links etc over at his new SEO Blog (check him out).
Google homepage background image – Bing style #fail
So the Google homepage was lauded because it was hugley usable. Removed all superfluous nonsense to allow users to complete what they wanted to do at Google which was search. The white background made Google simple to understand. So I read on Twitter about some horrendous image thing kicking in over at Google; “Google’s turned into Bing” was the first exultation I was greeted with when I entered the office.
I hate it. It’s a serious #fail – it’s not as bad as the whole debacle between Google and China (I just linked to the Wikipedia I feel defiled but I’m in a hurry here) but it’s annoyed me.
bingoogle - Google Background Image
Huge arrows on PPC sitelinks in Google
I’m really starting to hate the PPC testing at Google – they call it usability improvements. There again I can’t blame ‘em for trying to improve the profitability of their products. Today I was searching for a few brands to see about getting some new life insurance. And I see the following when I search google.co.uk for “Sun Life Direct”:
Sun Life Direct PPC ad with arrows on the sitelinks
Huge blue arrows next to the site links – all that is missing is a couple of large neon signs which say “CLICK HERE” in blinking text to attract even more attention. Yesterday the background colour of the top PPC ads (yellow above) had changed to pink on my machine and green on another computer! I thought I was going colour blind -apparently not.
OK back to follow CTR improvements on PPC sitelinks for a while and determine if this increases the value of these for clients.
