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

Obviously it is a very complicated agreement that the two companies have to make and as such it is taking a lot longer than the original suggestion (as these things always do).

Both companies are apparently “optimistic” about a deal being completed early in 2010 although they haven’t yet specified a date (we’ll see, I think their idea of “early in 2010″ is going to be very different from other peoples)

Yahoo! and Microsoft are hoping that once they have come to an agreement and things get implemented they are going to be able to challenge Google’s dominance of the search field (well, pretty much everything as it seems to be heading) … Personally I think that they will make very little impact at all, even with their combined technologies Google must have a lot of projects in the background that they haven’t mentioned anywhere yet – as with most recent releases they always have something to compete!

A release, linked to by Hitwise UK Press Centre, by Livescience says:

According to Experian Hitwise, Google accounted for 71 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 3, 2009. Yahoo! Search grabbed 16 percent and Bing 9 percent of searches, while the remaining 53 search engines accounted for just under 4 percent.

This gives Yahoo! and Bing a combined share of 25% compared to Google’s 71% share (admittedly US only)

This is compared to last years search shares which state that in December 2008 Google has a 72% share compared to the Yahoo! and MSN combined of 23%

Basically Yahoo! and Bing/MSN/Microsoft are going to have to pull out something pretty heroic in my eyes to make a major dint in the Google monopoly!

I was wondering what peoples opinion is on how accurate this is mainly because the figures are a LOT different to Google Analytics that I’ve currently got running on the blog.

I’m getting very little traffic at the moment, mainly because I’ve never really set myself a schedule to post anything and really need to start writing up some tutorials when I do stuff because (in my opinion at least) some of it could be pretty useful!!

Strangely enough, since I started writing this post there has been a massive jump to try and syncronise up my Google Analytics data and my bit.ly data… still nowhere near each other (i.e. bit.ly is showing about 4x the hits that my Google Analytics is)

I have briefly spoken to some other bloggers about whether they think the bit.ly data is accurate and strangely enough they seem to be getting exactly the same information…

I’m not sure what to think about it at the moment but here are some screen shots of the other days information and I’ll keep an eye on it to see if it changes much in the coming months and try and update this

InveseSEO Bit.ly Statistics for 27th October 2009

InveseSEO Google Analytics Statistics for 27th October 2009