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”).

Anyway last Friday I was one of the Caliber ten that went to the Distilled #linklove conference – (if only some of you had paid attention to my emails you would have been there too #fail). It had a great line up of SEO folks talking about links – and not links that most SEO’s punt out (directory submissions, online PR etc) but the sort of link development that can be used to help rank businesses for short tail terms – real honey pots. TBH it wasn’t about do this and you get a result. It was here is how I think and TBH Wil Reynolds and Martin McDonald rocked. They weren’t just SEO geeks, they are the kind of inspirational people that a wannabe #SEORockStar will never be. Why? Because they do SEO – they don’t just talk about (seems to be the new curse of the industry – moron does some SEO, moron get’s a twitter feed/blog/facebook page, moron advances to being an #SEORockstar – do some bloody work please).

If you missed it there will be a proper DVD version available soon (go buy it as soon as it’s out and get your kids vested in links now so they can grow up knowing how to rock Google – my kids ten and he loves messing with Google and YouTube currently – chocolate is an inspirational force like great SEO’s).

Anyway here’s Martin’s slides from his presentation.

Courtesy of MOGmartin’s SEO Forum

1. 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.
2. Webmaster tools data in constant flux – I love Google Webmaster Tools (it’s got loads of nice wee things in it). But the link data is getting farcical – esp for internal links. I’ve seen pages for whole sites in the main navigation get no listing for internal links. Is like Google just decided that main navigation counts as boiler plate and is removed! I had that scary thought one night and have been trying to reconcile my head to it. Don’t think its true – more of a glitch but a glitch none the less.
3. Spammers winning the war – the advent of the Splog link scenario fills me with fear and anger at the same time. Maybe every site with a link listed on digital point should be investigated and attacked. But not just link spammers. Sites with rubbish continue to leech their homepage value into the site and outrank valuable pages. Take the Wikipedia (no link as I dislike it) ranking for almost everything – should Domain Authority really be given this much weight in the algo? i dont mean Domain Authority as expressed by SEOMoz etc (which seems more like a made up drug than cake ever could hope to be) more the internal strength and trust of a domain in itself which passes to all pages.
4. LDA the new LSI – I’m sure LDA is part of the algo in some way. It makes sense on a gut level. But the SEO love in over it is just nuts. It’s Googles fault I know but anything with a TLA which SEO’s can use is taken as Gospel, never understood, never really researched and just used as  a new way to baffle clients and make SEOs feel important. All in all a dis-spiriting pain in the ass and a refelection of the shallow depths to which SEO has stumbled. Google instant seems to be causing even more ‘research’ and inference by folks who should know better.

Oh as an aside as I’ve mentioned LDA no doubt some folks will be pinging me like mad for links from trackbacks/pingbacks. That aint going to work either. Same

Mild rant over.

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.

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.

Anyway he’s battering up a new website all about internet marketing/SEO/links etc over at his new SEO Blog (check him out).

I can’t say I’m overly surprised as I had the same issues a couple of years ago (excluding the PPC hassles he seems to be accruing) – but yell stealing his brand as his research appears to show is taking the whole thing too far. Has anyone else had similar issues with Yell?

So I’ve came back from being sick and MSN has rebranded, almost every client is experiencing growth in sales volume and value from keywords which two months ago were generating little and I’ve rediscovered my love of cup noodle snacks from the Orient (not pot noodles which are stinking) – Nissin noodles are the way to go.

So hurrah and all I have to do now is answer the myriad of emails I’ve been receiving about Bing.com (what a stupid name for a search engine) promise to answer all my emails by the end of tomorrow – or maybe the day after. As I’m currently moving all my affiliate programs over to DGM.

And to round it off the Terminator – sorry Kate – didn’t win the apprentice so hurrah to the other one who did.

Have I been cursed or is anyone else getting the same problems?

img[alt=””] {border:10px solid red;}

See how easy that was. One quick check and you can find the problems almost instantly – on a test site it only takes a short time to check your pages.

WTF is Google Doing

So the bit in red is the part where I could refine my result set by Any Tim, Any Language and Any File. By changing these variables you get different results within the new limits – its like the advanced search parameters you can select anyway.

The request URL also changed as for once I acturally hit the google search button rather than using a toolbar:

1. Now - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=clothes&btnG=Search&as_qdr=all&lr=&as_filetype=
2. Previously - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=clothes&btnG=Search

Thought I’d post as it looked like an intersting little change over at Google.

See http://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonybaxter

SEO is mentioned 254 times (19.48% Keyword Density)*

I know you can game the search results in LinkedIn – Colin spent ten mins in the office one day and had worked out most of their algo and was sending emails telling everyone how to do it.
Relevant search engine positions put buyers and sellers together and providing content where every 5th word is SEO does not achieve that.
*Figures gleaned from the SEO For firefox plugin available here @ SEO Book