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.

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?

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

• WP Themes Free – Ronseal website (it does what it says on the tin) and gives you loads of free WordPress Theme which is lovely. My first attempt at a theme can be found here. I keep thinking about building one of these but can never find a wordpress theme that’ll give me the flexibility to do it in an elegant way.
• Our Cool stuff – a  link developer I know has launched hiw own directory (is about a week old) – get in quick and get your links close to the home page for more Pagerank.
• Elegant Resorts – Nice looking website built by the guys @ Equator.

Have fun this weekend.

I’ve always used link directories. They’re quick and cheap ways to get links. But that’s the problem – if they’re cheap, easy and quick that means the links they deliver are usually of really low quality. Unless you’ve got a reasonably old website with a bit of good history, some decent back links and a reasonable chunk of PageRank they do very little. All they do is add to the keywords that are pointing to the domain – which helps with search engine positions but not a great deal unless you already have some PageRank etc.

You can use a company like Directory Maximizer to do the submissions for you – but you’ll limit the number of keyword rich anchor texts to about 5. Which runs the risk of overloading your website with keywords which could trip a filter over @ Google. Also your links are only going to go to your homepage – which is a bit useless as your homepage can only do so much to help.

To test out how many people are actually using link directories as a core link development tactic and how they operate, from a management perspective, I’ve stuck one up @ http://www.solis3.com. Andy’s stuck one up at Our Cool Stuff too so we can have a comparator. Neither have PageRank yet, They have very few links in them and they’ve not been spidered yet. Solis 3 was spidered in a previous incarnation but I got bored of it when the server crashed and couldn’t find enough time until recently to get it up and running. If you fancy some free links get submitting (there’ll be more categories added in coming weeks so if you want a category that’s not listed just let me know).

I’ve also just stuck a brand new website with 6 pages into Directory Maximizer and going to do nothing else with it for 6 months to see if it brings any benefit what so ever to the domain.

I know some of you will be sitting rattling the future pagerank stuff @ SEO chat for the next couple of days and probably end up crashing it. If you are checking PageRank so often it harms your social life and your relationship with your partner I suggest you take a valium and chill out while the wee green bar changes value in front of your very eyes.  And remember that SEO has no future anyway so worrying about PageRank is useless .

L8r

Search Engine Optimisation Results

Major Fashion Retailer Starts to Kick Ass

Over June and July me and the guys have been developing links like no ones business. Not in terms of quantity but in terms of quality. So far we’ve managed to increase the terms generating traffic by about 600 in under a month. Leading to more than 25% increase in sales and more than 20% growth in revenue YOY (word to the wise keep selecting your keywords based upon the user intention and you’ll get even better financial results).

Zero to Hero for Movie Blog

I love movies and I love comics so what better way to mess around than to start integrating the two loves. Duly I’ve been involved with the Watchmen Film Blog for a wee while now. We’re now upto over 2,000 uniques a week which shows the growth that can be achieved within specific niche markets. If you want to have a look at how the films starting to shape up you can see the Watchmen Film Trailer Here.

Caravans Still Selling this Summer

God I hate being an affiliate – I feel so dirty every time they send me a cheque :p Anyway this Summer has been OK this year. I’m still waiting for an account manager at BuyAt to send me new links for the Butlins programme – as they changed their tracking links which killed the dynamic booking component I developed. But all in all its looking pretty good. Visits are up, CTR is up, sales are up and by expanding the range of merchants its all going pretty well.

Anyway hope everyone is enjoying their Summer – its like the South of France up here in Scotland just now: excepting the girls are all orange or seriously pale. But as I jet out to Greece for a week I will no doubt have time to plan a new set of strategies for when I get back. See you when I get back.

Bugger and before I forget Colin (who used to work at Equator) has moved to Drive Business. Ok so he left me in the lurch and you know how hard it can be to get experienced SEO staff these days but Andrews now developing links like no ones business. On which subject check out andrews fashion blog here I love his post on Cheap golf Chic.

1. SEOmoz Develop Cheat Sheet : SEOmoz is an SEO place that I generally just swing by but this cheat sheet made me sit down and think about it. Its simple , elegant, fots onto an A3 printout really easily and has became one of the SEO posters at my desk next to an old Bruce Clay Search Engine Relationship Chart. Anyway it gives a heads up on stuff like redirects, canonicalization etc and its great just to have so when someone asks how to do that redirect stuff in .htaccess files I can just recite it. big shout out to SEOmoz.
2. The SEO Guide to Information Architecture : got this in the RSS feed from Dan Theis website, SEO Fast Start, and it rocks. You know all those niggly little things that you slap .net developers for on a daily basis and that IIS just seems to do in an attempt to mess with all the work you’ve done. Well its probably going to be found in this list and its a good long post which is worth reading if you have any interest in SEO from a website architecture point of view (should send some usability the link it they may even agree with it).
3. Guide to Advanced Operators in Google : when I started out messing about with search engines one of the most powerful things you can do is limit/specify your search based upon certain parameters. This nice little cheat sheet allows you to find all those small things that make life simpler like finding results based upon date, filetype etc. Once you start messing about with these you’ll find that you’ll be searching for some strange things and more often than not find them.

So there’s our list of our favourite cheat sheets and we’re sure you’ll find at least one little thing in each of them that changes something you do online.