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**** Strictly No Recruitment Agencies****

An excellent opportunity has arisen with our Blackpool based offices as an admin assistant and blogger.

The job covers 2 primary roles. The first being an admin assistant where you will be responsible for:

• Dealing with phone calls for both Dolphin Promotions and Real Claims
• Logging all enquiries within our customer relationship database
• Updating our client database with relevant information
• Sending invoices or correspondence to clients
• General Administration

The 2nd role will be as a content writer / blogger and you will be required to:

• Blog about  a wide range of subjects including technology, gadgets, finance, home improvements, DIY, etc
• Keep up to date with the news and trends within multiple sectors by reading other blogs.
• Research subject areas in order to product content on them.
  Content writing for client sites

Excellent verbal and writing skills are a must. Ideally you will have a keen interest in technology and gadgets as some of the blog posts can be quite technical. Similar blogs include Engadget, Gizmodo and Bit Tech.

Experience in blogging is not required however you will need excellent grammar and spelling.

The hours will be 9am – 5pm Monday – Friday.

The full-time salary for this position is £12,000 and will be reviewed after 3 months. A part time position will also be considered (3 days per week minimum)

Please note we will ignore all correspondence of recruitment agencies. The job is also strictly located in Blackpool only, we will not outsource any of our work or employ anyone in a work from home basis.

Please send a CV and cover letter to jobs@dolphinpromotions.co.uk or post them to

Dolphin Promotions

First Floor

32 Clifton Street

Blackpool

FY1 1JP

However in BMMs defence it appears that it is less likely to be a penalty and more likely to be a screw up with a server misconfiguration leading to them 301 or 302 hijacking themselves with the domain g-maps.com.

Unfortunately the bad news doesn’t seem to end there, not only have they lost some very important rankings but it appears that a search for their brand name is showing some less than desirable results.

While the results are not returning negative comments from clients it can’t be helping with client confidence or acquiring new clients with multiple domains ranking for Big Mouth Media all documenting a screw up.

BMM are generally regarded as whiter than white so I am sure once they are back the negative results will soon filter out.

These have probably been available to the public for a while I just haven’t used them but under their Labs tools there is:

• Top Pages: Powered By Linkscape
• Backlink Analysis: Powered By Linkscape

I have used Linkscape since its release and it is an excellent tool, unfortunately you have a limited number of credits per month so you need to be cautious about using it excessively.

The above tools do not use any credits and I have found they provide some excellent data for an initial diagnostic on a site if for example your are doing an SEO Competition Report.

The top pages tool does exactly what it says on the tin and identifies the top pages of a domain based on its links. I find this is useful as quite often in the past for an initial diagnosis I look at the links to the homepages or the domain as a whole and then maybe check out some of the obvious strong pages. With this tool you can identify the strongest pages within a few seconds.

If we take Tesco.com for an example:

Here we can see which pages are the strongest and presumably have been optimised the most for. You can then use each of the above URLs in the Backlink Analysis tool where you will get both anchor text and backlink data:

There are also plenty of other tools out there that offer similar functionality. The Link Harvester tool on SEOBook is still one of my favourites but I find the above tools the best at identifying the strongest pages with deep links.

BBC recently did an undercover story uncovering some unscrupulous individuals selling valid UK credit card details.

While this is not particularly unusual by itself it turns out the source of the cards was linked to Symantec.

The cards details were all acquired after users had just bought Norton subscriptions.

A criminal gang selling UK credit card details stolen from Indian call centres has been exposed by an undercover BBC News investigation.

Reporters posing as fraudsters bought UK names, addresses and valid credit card details from a Delhi-based man. The seller denied any wrongdoing and Symantec corporation, from whom three victims bought a product via a call centre, called the incident “isolated”. Card fraud totalled £609m during 2008, according to payments group Apacs.

Symantec said it requires rigorous security measures of any third-party call centre agents and it believed the breach had been limited to a single agent. The BBC team went to India on a tip off after being put in touch with a man offering to sell stolen credit and debit card details.

He told the pair he could supply them with hundreds of credit and debit card details each week at a cost of $10 dollars a card. After the reporters agreed to initially buy the details of 50 cards, the man handed over a list of 14. He said the remainder would be sent later by e-mail.

The man claimed some of the numbers had been obtained from call centres handling mobile phone sales, or payments for phone bills. Back in the UK, the broker continued to supply card details to one of the undercover reporters by email.

Nearly all of the names, addresses and post codes sold to the BBC team were valid. But most of the numbers attached to them were invalid – often out by a single digit. However, about one in seven of the numbers purchased were valid – active cards still in use by UK customers. Their owners could have been subjected to fraud if these cards had fallen into the hands of criminals.

BBC News

The BBC tech show Click bought a botnet to show how at risk we are for cyber crimes. The botnet consists of 22,000 hijacked PCs around the world and was purchased over the net through a chat room.

The Click team will show how effective spamming can be done with a botnet already of that small size. 

After 2 hours of running their experiment the test email addresses used started filling up with thousands of junk emails.

Click also went on to test out a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on a backup site owned by security company Prevx.

Click then ordered its slave PCs to bombard its target site with requests for access to make it inaccessible. Click managed to overload the site with just 60 PCs

Click reported that Computers from the US and the UK go for about $350 to $400 (£254-£290) for 1,000 because they’ve got much more financial details, like online banking passwords and credit cards details.

What would be interesting is how popular this is or could become in the SEO world. We have already seen the term Anti or Negative SEO thrown about, and some say it is becoming increasingly popular as normal SEO becomes increasingly harder.

Being able to buy 1,000 computers for less than £300 that can carry out a DDoS attack sounds like a reasonably affordable investment for the unscrupulous people out there.

Obviously it would look a little suspicious if you targeted  multiple websites that you compete with but it quite possibly would be cheaper and just as effective as trying to link spam a competitor.

Obviously you would like to think people would not sink this low but this is unfortunately not the case with some “Craphat SEOs” even hacking into  school websites to inject porn links.

Without a doubt one of the most important aspects of a business is its ability to connect to the Internet and the internal network of the company.

We find that many SMEs will frequently have an inadequate connection to the internet and quite often a cheap router that is not cut out for the job. Some of the issues a client will typically face include:

• Slow connections (Downloads + Uploads)
• Lack of SMTP server
• Frequent disconnections
• Drops in performance (due to congestion)
• Poor security (if any)

In order to reduce these problems we strongly advise companies to chose an ISP and router that is capable of handling their day to day tasks.

The ISP we typically use is Be and we generally recommend Be Pro. We find Be Pro to be an excellent option for a small office as it has speeds of up to 24 meg download and 2.5 meg with Upload Plus service. It also includes a static IP and access to Be’s SMTP servers which are used for sending emails. There is no official download limit so it should be more than capable of handling any downloads, however as with all ISPs there is a fair use policy so downloading several hundred gigabytes per month may cause issues.

One word of warning with Be is that it is ADSL 2+ and the speeds you receive are dependant on the distance from your exchange.

If you do decide to go with Be they will send you out a free wireless router which is adequate for most situations, especially for home use. However for a business we personally recommend in investing in something a little more capable.

Our router of choice is the Draytek Vigor 2820. This is a fantastic little router that is capable of handling Annex M which is used for the increased upload speeds.

Some of the other features include:

• ADSL/ADSL2+ and Broadband Router
• Dual-WAN ports for ADSL or cable modem or both
• 3G (Cellular) Modem support
• Comprehensive and Robust Firewall
• Twin VoIP ports with PSTN passthrough (’V’ models only)
• Content Filtering (by matched keyword or data type)
• SurfControl Web Site Category Filtering
• Ethernet and WLAN Virtual LAN segmentation (common/distinct)
• Configurable QoS Features (For traffic prioritisation)
• VPN Dial-in/dial-out with VPN hardware co-processor
• 802.11n Draft 2.0 Wireless LAN (’n’ models only)
• Gigabit Ethernet LAN Port for LAN Server connectivity
• USB Port for Printer or 3G Modem
• Highly configurable but easy to install and monitor

We like this router for many including:

• Gigabit Ethernet LAN Port: It would be nicer is all the ports were Gigabit however if you connect the single Gigabit port up to a Gigabit switch you will have a true Gigabit network that should future proof the network for quite a long time.
• The firewall features measure for protection against attacks including DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, IP-based attacks and access by unauthorised remote systems. Wireless, Ethernet and VPN are also protected by various protection systems including WPA, MAC Address Filter, Switchable Hidden SSID, and Wireless LAN Isolation. The new DrayTek object-based firewall allows even more setup flexibility than ever, enabling you to create combinations of users, rules and restrictions to suit multi-departmental organisations.
• Content control features of the firewall allow you to set restrictions on web site access, blocking download of certain file types, blocking specific web sites, blocking IM/P2P applications or other potentially harmful or wasteful content. Using the SurfControl site categorisations enable you to block whole categories of web sites (e.g. gambling, pornography etc.), subject to subscription. You can also block http downloads of file types
• Bandwidth management including QoS and Class-based Bandwidth Guarantee by User-Defined Traffic Categories

We have used this router ourselves since it was released an have had no issues with it. In general we have never had any unwanted re-boots and system uptime is normally in weeks.

Anyway, while the Windows 7 experience has been quite pleasurable there have been a few gremlins to work around. The main one being trying to get Outlook 2007 to work with my Exchange email that is hosted by Fasthosts.

If you set up the email as normal once you start Outlook it repeatedly asks you for your password as if it is not recognising you as a user.
So after resorting to Outlook Web Access for the past couple of days I decided to pull my finger out and figer out what is going on.

Anyway I found a useful post on Vinodunny.com. With hosted exchange account names are normally in the form of name@domain.com, however internally on the Exchange Active Directory they will be stored in the format of ADSDomain\name_internetdomain. So therefore if you use the format of Exchange Active Directory for the username you will be able to set up your email.

Apparantly if access Outlook Web Access go to options and change password you will be able to see the correct username there.

Unfortunately for Fasthosts users this option is not there however if you use the normal username (ie name@domain.com) and change the authentication from “Basic” to “NTLM” it does appear to fix the problem.

This technically should not work as Fasthosts claim they use basic authentication however they may use NTLM authentication internally. Either way it appears to resolve the issue.

I just went to blackpool.gov.uk to try and pay our rates bill and was greeted with an opendns error.

I don’t know about most people but I never type in a URL starting with www. and I am assuming this would be cause for significant confusion for the average person that does not know about these things.

Granted a lot of sites that suffer these issues are for companies/organisations that are not relying on the search engines for success but it is still a basic error that will probably be causing confusion.

I just checked the other sites blackpool.gov.uk links out to and quite a few of them suffer from the same issues including:

• blackpoolunlimited.com
• reblackpool.com
• visitblackpool.com

Please sort it out!

It is an understandable problem, if you have just paid for a brand new website you may of paid thousands of pounds and you want to be getting a return on your investment as fast as possible.

Let’s say we have just developed a website called dolphin-mobiles.co.uk selling Mobile Phones. Luckily we decided to take SEO into account when developing the site and we have an excellent site with keyword rich titles, unique descriptions, proper use of headers, and a text link based navigation that avoids duplicate content.

Then surely it is a realistic expectation to rank for “Mobile Phones” right?

Granted the term Mobile Phones is quite hard to rank for no matter what, but I couldn’t think of an example off the top of my head for a medium competitive term. However let’s say yes it is a realistic expectation, now the problem is why doesn’t that site rank for the term in 3-6 months?

If we look some of the top ranking sites for Mobile Phones we have o2, onestopphoneshop, directphoneshop, dialaphone and mobiles.co.uk.

Onestopphoneshop.co.uk currently has 90,620 external links pointing to the domain so surely if I got 90,621 links pointing to dolphin-mobiles.co.uk we would rank for “Mobile Phones” yeah?

No unfortunately not. Apart from the fact that not all links are born equal (10 good links might be better than 1000 spammy links) Google looks at other factors beyond what links you gain and how optimised your site it.

One of the main things Google is trying to avoid is web spam. A common feature of spammy websites is new domains and websites that have been live for a very short period of time. This therefore means Google likes older domains and websites that have been around for a long time.

If we look at onestopphoneshop.co.uk it was registered in 1998 and has an internet archive dating back to 1999 with the earliest archive being a site selling mobile phones. Therefore it is safe to assume this site will not be spam and deserves to rank higher than my brand new domain with no history.

The other factor that needs to be taken into account is the age of the back links themselves. Google is going to be mighty suspicious if my brand new website suddenly gets 90,621 links over 3 months so therefore it won’t rank the site for the chosen key term.

It is hard to identify the age of the links to onestopphoneshop.co.uk but if they have been acquiring keyword rich links from 1998 and these links have remained in place then it is clear to Google that this site but be about Mobile Phones and therefore deserve to rank for it.

The simplest analogy would be someone applying for a £150,000 a year job when s/he only has 6 months experience. Yes in theory the individual may have the skills to do the job but are you going to trust s/he is telling the truth? Someone with 10 years experience in a well known company would (in theory) a much safer option as s/he has a proven track record.

Obviously we are not suggesting it will take 10 years to get a site ranking however if you have a new website and new domain and want to compete in a competitive market it takes time, you need to prove to Google you deserve that position.

One of the main driving forces behind this issue is SEO companies claiming to achieve rankings in days, weeks or a few months. Yes it is feasible that you will get some long tail rankings in this time I am confident it wouldn’t take me that long to rank for “Cheap Nokia E90 Communicator Smartphone” however what benefit will that ever for a website?

SEO is a long term investment, with long term results. It takes time and money but in the end if it is done properly it will have a better return on investment than pay per click or traditional marketing techniques.

Why SEO takes time and effort

Some further reading:

SEO Is Not a One-Time Fix by Chris Boggs. Recommends that enterprise level contracts should be 3 years minimum

Search Engine Ranking Factors by SEOMoz. A guide of rankings factors including sections about the age of document, age of site, historical performance of the site, and age of links.

Link Value Factors by Wiep. Another excellent guide this time focussing on the factors involved in determining the value of a link. This also references age of the link and age of the domain.

Unrealistic SEO Expectations by Dolphin Promotions. Why ranking for highly competitive terms when you are not directly in that market can be unrealistic, and why focussing on increasing conversions is much more profitable