Going to keep this post short and sweet I think. Mainly because of the fact I don’t want to give a bad name to any particular companies and of course this is all judgemental rather than specific details.

Recently I’ve been doing some audits on some very high profile clients; some as pitches, some as competitor analysis, some just because I happen to be bored at the time (depressing I know, I can’t seem to leave SEO alone!).

Now, not all of these sites have had issues and obviously I’m not sure whether these are caused by the agencies I’m attributing the value too or not; however, although it’s obvious some good work has been done, I’m shocked at some of the issues that exist.

One of my major bugs with what I’ve seen is from some of the big agencies, even those that preach “white hat” optimisation techniques are clearly cloaking pages and feeding different content to Google purely to fix some deeper underlying techniques. As I said – this is one of the bugs that annoys me the most! I really hate making quick fixes (no matter how clever they might be) to deeper issues, when, a bit more time spent on fixing the underlying issue will most likely sort out multiple issues and end up saving time as well as future proofing the campaign!

The above is really just one of the factors that has bugged me recently with the audits that I’ve been doing… there are plenty more issues like some very crude link buying, blatent outsourcing to low quality comment spamming (I get a lot on this site as I’m sure everybody does), all the way to just blatent lieing about what has been completed.

Anyway, that’s enough of a rant today!

Just to repeat, I won’t be mentioning any of these companies because, well, that’s just not fair in my eyes – they’ll get caught out for it at some point I’ve got no doubt at all.

Time to have a beer, kick back and turn the laptop off for the night now! Need a break before I do start mentioning companies

I decided, since I’m sat at home on a Saturday afternoon, and my server is not wanting to play nicely, that I’d finally post an update for here!

I’ve got about 10 draft blog posts that I’ve written over the last few months, always meaning to come back and finish them off but never quite getting around to it. Unforunately Fortunately Strangely Now, all these blog posts seem mostly out of place because of the career changes that I made this month – one of them in-particular was going to talk about the changes that have taken place at Summit Media over the past 12months and how this has affected me and my work. However, on the 16th August 2010 I started my new job role as SEO Manager at Brilliant Media.

Moving to Brilliant was a big decision for me, a hard decision that I know plenty of people have been in the position of having to make before – I now fully understand why people get so anxious/nervous about changing jobs… Non of my previous job changes have required so much deliberation.

Before I go on and talk a bit about what I’m now doing at Brilliant Media I thought I’d just mention a few words about Summit.

Summit Media

I worked in the SEO Team at Summit Media from 2008 to 2010 – I, without a doubt, enjoyed working their. It is such a unique place to work that I can’t imagine ever coming across an Agency like this again.

Working from a farm in North Cliffe where there were plenty of horses, peacocks, chickens, dogs. Offices placed within a block of stables and filled with a great bunch of knowledgeable people.

I had the pleasure, whilst working in the SEO Team, to work with Phill Midwinter while he held the position as Head of SEO at Summit. I learnt a lot from Phill, not just about SEO, and although he was only at Summit for a brief period of time he definitely made an impact, for me at least!

Brilliant Media

As I previously said, I’m now working as an SEO Manager for Brilliant Media – since 16th August. Not a lot I can really say about working for Brilliant yet as it’s only been such a short period of time. However, so far, I’m enjoying the role and hope working there will bring many mutual benefits to both Brilliant and myself.

Although I’ve only been there for a short period of time I already feel like a relationship is being built within the team that will allow us to work well together and enable the team development, and ultimately the quality of work and performance for clients, to be taken to another level!

I’ve made this promise quite a bit on previous posts… but, I’m really going to try and come back more often and blog about things here – I’m hoping that, at some point, more than just a handful of people will read these posts and it will move away from being so much of a personal blog to actually adding some value - Suppose I can dream…

I’ve had 44 spam comments in the past 2 hours, really taking the utter piss now!

They are not even decent spam comments! All but 4 are total giberish!

Thank you, come again! (or don’t if it’s you spamming me!!)

Unfortunately after finally getting done with the Christmas rush we have now had some changes at the company which has resulted in our Head of SEO leaving the company. I’ve got no doubt at all that Phill will land on his feet with all of this and get himself the next role that he wants – whether that role is self employed or looking for a head position elsewhere.

As for those of us that are left at Summit Media we now have more work to pick up between us, obviously just one of those things you cope with and get on with so not complaining about that.
To be honest… I’m not really sure this post has a point at all, but I felt like I needed to make up a “genuine” excuse for myself on why I’ve ALREADY broken my target for this site for the year, and we are not even out of January.

Oh well, there is always 2011!!

On seeing this I decided to sit down and see what I could find out about further ways to ‘influence’ these URL shortners to send me more traffic and to possibly impact on crawl times and as such rankings.

On 24^th September 2009 I decided on how I should do this and implemented it straight away.

I’m not going to give exact details out there of what I did because there are probably URL shorteners out there that are allowing this, it would be silly for me to give away this note without trying to test it a bit further

(In fact I know there are URL shortners out there that still allow this because I just found one, but that’s a story for another day).

The graph below shows the instant clicks that I received from testing this (without mentioning this test anyway, not even verbally):

Unfortunately, as can be seen on the 23^rd December 2009 all this traffic instantaneously stopped!

Not ideal as at this point I wasn’t checking it as much as I should have done and had no idea that this had happened and as such wasn’t able to do an instant check of my logs and traffic to see if any impact was made (hence why I’m not in the best of moods today because I have just ruined a lot of the benefits of the test)..

In case you think that this test was more of a “blackhat SEO exploitation” rather than an actual test – it wasn’t – what more is there to say about it. It was purely a test to see if increased traffic and crawlability would affect my rankings in one way or another.

From a quick (very unscientific) look at my statistics, etc. I would have to say that this has worked in the way it was supposed to, but, without a more in detail look, which I’ll be doing at some point this week, it’s hard to come up with any hard evidence.

I don’t normally want to share methods I’ve used to try and test things like this with the public because, as everybody knows, anything you find and then share reduces your competitive advantage… in this case though, I’m not really giving away any details that people can’t work out for themselves – I just wanted to post something up that gave an example of some of the tests that I am running in the background.

**EDIT**
I decided to go back and search for the exact posts on Dave Naylors blog so that I could add in the links that he deserves

I’ve come up with a list of around 50 factors that I think I can get information for relatively quickly and easily which I will be starting my study with.

I’ve started small and picked a high volume search term and are basing my initial analysis on just the top 20 results for this one term.
Clearly there are a lot of issues with this but I think as an initial study to get some sort of basic information before I take things a step further this should work quite well.

Not really got anything to share majorly at the minute, just thought I’d put up an introduction of the new project I’ve set myself…

Here are a couple of example graphs that show some of the very top level analysis that I’m starting with

Graph of relationship between Page Title Length and Google Rank

Graph of relationship between Meta Description Length and Google Rank

Clearly both of these have pretty poor relationships, not necessarily a bad thing – all information is good

My logo that I always normally use for my avatars is this:

Although I do like that logo (I obviously have got a lot bigger versions but that is the one most to hand) it doesn’t really feel right anymore for some reason.

I decided to upload my Skype one to my Twitter for now since it makes me smile and although a lot of people won’t understand why it does make sense to my friends (which ultimately is what matters in my eyes since I don’t monetise anything I do)

I don’t think that is ultimately the logo I want to use so I think I’ll put this new avatar creation at the top of my “Things to do when bored” todo list (everybody should have one of these that they can just pick something up at random in my opinion) and then see what I can come up

I completed the first 16 questions in about 30min (admittedly I’d say a couple of them were more luck than skill) but question 17… my gosh that was annoying as hell!!

I even contacted Dave himself:

That just annoyed me even more and I sat there for about an hour then I helped my friend Darryl Leaning (without giving things away too much) get to the same stage as me at which point we both got really confused about it…

I then decided I was getting really annoyed and was going to tweet something disapprovingly to Dave on Twitter

…

…

Then I saw it – I’m not going to say what it is because that would give it away for others but trust me, you’ll kick yourself!

Anyway, here we go

Finally completed it and, although I’ve got no recognition because I forgot to save the image that said “I was a winner”, I still feel happy I accomplished it

So, to actually do what was recommended to me by, well, everybody a long time ago I’ve now transferred all my feeds to Google Reader.

If you can think of anything funny / interesting / feeds I should be following please feel free to share them with me, my reader profile is http://www.google.com/profiles/inverseSEO

(Link Removed because the post has been deleted due to issues out of my control )

Probably the first ‘proper’ post I’ve written that explains anything and it isn’t even on my website!

Oh well, I’ll put something useful on here at some point!

Ok, well this post has now been removed due to issues out of my control so that kind of kills one of the most useful things I’ve written on the web, with regards to SEO / Online / Anything not to do with cars generally… oh well