It doesn’t matter which device I use (3 laptops, an ipad and an iphone) always the same. Get a decent signal and then whack it vanishes.

At first I thought it was my router and some TCP issue. Have restarted my router numerous times, changes the wireless settings (fixed channels vs auto channel selection), I’ve plugged it in which gave me 1 meg and tbh I’m getting angry. I need my Internet to work (am meant to be working now and not raging through the 3g connection on my iphone).

So I give up – for ages I’ve fought against going with sky purely because I believed in the value of my internet connection.

And to drive me up the wall I get the following every time I contact the online support :

22:38 Connecting...
22:38 Connected. A support representative will be with you shortly.
23:02 Connection closed. Attempting reconnection...
23:02 Connecting...
23:02 Failed.

That’s a real sample. Waste of time. As one of the tweet responses I got earlier on today said “I looked up the word “oxymoron” in the OED the other week – Virgin Media Customer Service was the definition“. Not surprised. Just annoyed.

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

SKYPE VOIP/Instant Messenger

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.

PowWowNow Conference Calls

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.

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 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

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.

Three folks, ten mins each to talk about a segment of a topic. Simple. Fixed length podcast (which is always good) from knowledgable folks. Anyway you can check them out over @ http://explicitweb.co.uk/.

Right back to work I toddle.

Today I did just such a thing and within minutes I get DM’d asking what I was doing mentioning such a story. TBH I can’t remember RT it but ignorance is no excuse!

I get sent a link to an article on the SEOConsultants.com website – a website which has more stuff on it that I can keep up with TBH and the the value of their RSS comes into it’s own – and the horror hits home. I’ve just in some way endorsed the sort of b*****ds I continually rail against.

Cheers to PageOneResults for making me feel like a complete wazzock on a Sunday morning and teaching me a useful lesson – I must think before I RT! And TBH more than that. Hitting RT does not always assure that everyone knows why you’re RT’ing, and remember kids check out those you’re mentioning as the web’s a dangerous place, full of dangerous companies, doing nasty things and in the same way you wouldn’t link to a toxic domain containing crap hitting RT provides a social link to equally toxic stuff (it’s your rep on the line not just a domain).

Self flagellation over for today…. I hope. Off to do 100 hand written lines of “I must not hit RT without thinking”, “I must not hit RT without thinking”,”I must not hit RT without thinking”…