I wanted to syndicate my content and notify my social sites automatically. The studio’s too busy to build me something so I played about with a few free sites to see if I get get some useful syndication between Google Docs and my network, including my blog…. there may be smarter ways of doing it but for the purposes of testing this will need to suffice.

I wanted to publish my articles once which notified all my social networks something like:

• Google Docs, Wordpress, Feedburner, Twitter, Google Buzz, TwitterFeed, Ping.Fm, Facebook, Linkedin, Tumblr, Posterous, Friendfeed, Delicious & any other networks i use

Google Docs to Wordpress

I wanted to write my articles in Google Docs so i could start spell checking, but then publish to my self hosted Wordpress blog at Hobo, direct from Google Docs;

1. Go To Google Docs
2. Create Your Article
3. Close it and go back to main Google Doc screen
4. Select the article I want to publish to Wordpress
5. Select MORE ACTIONS > PUBLISH
6. You get a chance to configure your blog settings here and you’re ready to publish your Google Doc directly to Wordpress

Wordpress To Google Buzz
I’m considering using Google Buzz as my primary social network (tho I use Twitter at the mo) so I obviously want my Wordpress blog to post the article automatically to my Google Buzz account – see here – http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/documentation/#connect and here http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=14991d6d4220449 1&hl=en and http://www.google.com/buzz/bradfitz/PPjHXDhANAC/Want-to-connect-your-b log-or-some-other-feed-to how to do that but basically all you need to do is add a

<link rel=“me” type=“text/html” href=“http://www.google.com/profiles/your.username”/>

and then your article appears on my Google Buzz account (hopefully)

My blog rss feed is syndicated through Feedburner which has the option to automatically Tweet a feed post, so I could choose this option to notify Twitter, but as (I think) Socialize service only supports Twitter and no other, I’ll leave this option out to avoid duplicate tweets.

RSS Feed To TwitterFeed to Ping.fm

I took my Feedburner RSS feed URI and signed up with Twitter Feed

… which lets me push my article automatically to Ping.fm

… which of course will let me syndicate my article to a lot of other services i might want to add to control later  – I’ll use Ping.fm to POST TO TWITTER (for a test I will also post to the Hobo Tumblr blog – I had to make sure my Tumblr blog wasn’t cross posting to Twitter in my Tumblr settings – and Posterous but that’s all)

Ping.fm to Twitter & Other Services

and

and the *new* Hobo delicious account where I bookmark my blog posts for my network as well as other sites i find of interest

Syndicating My Tweets

So that’s when I blog sorted out. And at some point along the chain (VIA Ping.fm) what I posted finds it’s way to Twitter.

As at the moment Twitter is the main channel I use, I want my Tweet to sync with social media sites too, but I don’t want to create a lot of duplicate noise or create any type of spammy syndicated content loop.

As I don’t want to create pointless noise, I’ll let my Twitter account (updated either by myself when I tweet or via Ping.fm when I blog) notify various other services

will update the new Hobo Facebook page

using RSS Graffiti,

i’ve already connected my Linkedin account with Twitter at Linkedin for my connections

and I have done the same with my Friendfeed account.

This post is actually a test post I wrote in Google Docs to see if it posts correctly to WP and works as expected with the social media sites I browse. There’s other ways of setting this chain up but this one suits my intentions. I don’t expect to use Twitter any more than I do already which is not much at all…so noise hopefully isn’t a problem.

As this is a test post, some things might not work as expected, and I will update the post with probs/fixes and other syndication possibilities…

Google Docs To Wordpress To Twitter & Social Sites

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I wanted to share some thoughts about SEO and how I think about it. A lot of it comes down to trust in my book.

• Use common sense – Google is a search engine – it is looking for pages to give searchers results, 90% of it’s users are looking for information. Almost all websites will link to relevant information content so content rich websites get a lot of lnks – especially quality links. Google ranks websites with a lot of links (especially quality links) at he top of it’s search engines so the obvious thing you need to do is ADD A LOT INFORMATIONAL CONTENT TO YOUR WEBSITE.
• I think ranking in organic listings is a lot about trusted links making trusted pages rank, making trusted links making trusted pages rank ad nauseum for varous keywords. Some pages can pass trust to another site, some pages cannot. Some links can. Some cannot. Some links are trusted to pass ranking ability to another page. Some are not. YOU NEED LINKS FROM TRUSTED PAGES
• Google engineers are building an AI – but i’s all based on simple human desires to make something happen or indeed to prevent something. You can work with Google enginners or against them. They need to make money for Google but unfortunately for them they need to make the best search engine in the world for us humans as part of the deal. Build a site that takes advantage of this. What is a Google engineer trying to achieve with an algorithm – it was an idea first. What was that idea? Think like a Google engineers and give Google what it wants. What is Google trying to give it’’s users? Align with that. What does Google not want to give it’s users? Don’t look anything like that. THINK LIKE A GOOGLE ENGINEER & BUILD A SITE THEY WANT TO GIVE TOP RANKINGS.
• Googe is a links based search engine. Google doesn’t need content to rank pages but it needs content to give to users. Google needs to find content and it finds content by following links just like you do when clicking on a link. So you need to first make sure you tell the world about your site so other sites link to yours. ACCEPT LINKS FROM ANYWHERE – JUST DONT RECIPROCATE JUST ANY. But don’t worry about reciprocating to more powerful sites or even real sites – I think this adds to your domain authority – which is actually better to have than ranking for just a few narrow keyterms.
  
• Everything has limits. Google has limits. What are they? How would you go about observing them or even testing, breaking them or benefiting from them or being penalised by them? It’s not a lab setting – you can’t test much, if anything, 100% accurately, but you can hypothisise based on the sensible approach bearing in mind what a Google engineer would do, and what you would do if Google was yours.
• The best way for Google to keep rankings secret ultimately is to have a randomness to it while keeping somethings stable – surley the easiest way for it to prevent a seo finding out how it works. Well I think that anyway. And I think this randomness manifests itself in many ways. What will work for some sites might not necessirly work for your sites – not exactly the same anyway. Perhaps no two sites are the same (the conditions are different for a start for any two sites) and I’m actually thinking about how to test this for a bit of fun.
• Google may play dice with the Google multi-verse so be ware of that. It uses multiple results and rotates them and serves different results to diferent machines and browsers even on the same computer. Google results are constantly shifting – some pages rank at the top constantly because they are giving Google what it wants in a number of areas or they might just have a greater number and diversity of more trusted links than your do.
• Google has a long memory when it comes to links and pages and associations for you site – perhaps an infinite memory profile of your site. Perhaps it can forvige but never forget. Perhaps it can forget too, just like us, and so previous penalties or bans can be lifted. I think (epending on the site because Google can work out if you have a blog or a ecommerce site) Google probably also looks at different history versions of particular pages even on single sites WHAT RELATIONSHIP DO YOU WANT TO HAVE WITH GOOGLE? Onsite, don’t try and fool Google – we’re not smart enough. Be squeaky clean onsite and make Google think twice about bumping you for discrepencies in your link profile.
• Earn Google’s trust. Most of our more lucrative accounts come from refferals from clients who trust us. Before clients told them of us, they didn’t know about us. ok, they might have heard about us from people in turn they didnt trust that much. Upon the clients testimonial, the refferal now trusts us a lot more. These refrrals automatically trusts us to some extent. That trust grows when we deliver. The referral now trusts us very much. But it’s un uphill struggle from that point on to continue to deliver that trust and earn even more trust because you don’t want to dip in trust – it’s nice to get even more and more trusted. Google works the exactly the same way as this human emotion, and search engines have tried for years to deliver a trusted set sites based on human desire and need. MAKE FRIENDS WITH GOOGLE
  
• Don’t break Google’s trust – if you’re friend betrays you, depending on what they’ve done, they’ve lost trust. sometimes that trust has been lost altogether. If you do something Google doesn’t like like manipulate it in a way it doesnt want, you will lose trust, and in come cases, lose all trust (in some areas). For instance, your pages might be able to rank, but your links might not be trusted enough to vouch for another site. DON”T FALL OUT WITH GOOGLE OVER SOMETHING STUPID
  
• YOU NEED TO MAKE MoRE FRIENDS AND ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO ARE FRIENDS WITH GOOGLE.
• When Google trusts you it’s because you’ve earned it’s trust to help it carry out what it needs to carry out in the quickest and most profitable way. You’ve helped Google achieve it’s goals. It trusts you and it will reward you by listing your contribution in order of the sites it trusts the most. It will list friends it trusts the most who it knows to be educated in a particular area at the top of these areas. IF GOOGLE TRUSTS YOU IT WILL LET YOUR PAGES RANK AND IN TURN VOUCH FOR OTHER FRIENDS GOOGLE MIGHT WANT INFORMATION ON.
• Google can be fooled and manipulated just like you can but it will probably kick you in the gonads if you break it’s trust – as I probably would. Treat Google as you would have it treat you. REMEMBER IT TAKES TIME TO BUILD TRUST

I of course might be reading far too much into Google and trust….I consider trust to be a pyschological emotion Google is trying to emulate using algorithms based on human ideas.

If you do all the above, you’ll get more and more traffic from Google over time.

If you want to rank for specific keywords, you’ll need to be a big brand, be picked out by a big brand and linked to, or buy links to fake that trust, or get spammy with it in an intelligent way you won’t get caught.

I suppose Google is open to the con just as any human is, if it’s based on human traits….

If you like this you might like:

• What Is SEO?
• Hobo Search Engine Optimisation Tutorial

Non-Technical Google SEO For Dummies (No, Really)

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Q – Which keywords do I use to linkbuild with?
A – Look at your analytics.
Use keywords (and synonyms) that already drive traffic that you are not already no1 for (in anchor text in articles). Write 50 articles with 50 of the anchor text variations below (going to the relevant page that Google already thinks enough of to rank and send traffic to) and syndicate.

Virtually no chance of a penalty, either. Of course, I’m assuming you’ve built a decent site (the site below has 50 pages on it - if you are subscribed you would have got even more info

Scenario – New site, optimised, solid architecture, unique content and  3 months worth of traffic….

CLARIFICATION – The aim of course is to get MORE traffic of the type Google is ALREADY giving your shop. By linkbuilding to the positions Google is already giving you traffic for, you’ll quickly improve the amount of traffic to your site via these terms -  your site will rank naturally for SOMETHING – so focus on improving those terms at the beginning, instead of JUST going for the most competitive terms. It looks more natural.

I’ll often throw up a store and see what Google gives me, then link build to these longtail terms to capture quick positions via simple article syndication. Then go for the money keyterms over a realistic timescale. For instance, with the example below, I will happy to be no1 for the single keyword (+ plural term) in 6 months…. but I want to improve relevant traffic now.

This is a linkbuilding tip for a new ecommerce shop for example. I thought it might be of more use than:

get links from the bbc

Using Analytics of course you can quickly identify the most valuable traffic you are already getting…. and improve that traffic first….

Ecommerce SEO – Linkbuilding To Your New Online Shop

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First – What is trust?

comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another - Rousseau

an individual’s belief in, and willingness to act on the basis of, the words, actions, and decisions of another – Lewicki

The need for trust arises from our interdependence with others. We often depend on other people to help us obtain, or at least not to frustrate, the outcomes we value (and they on us). As our interests with others are intertwined, we also must recognize that there is an element of risk involved insofar as we often encounter situations in which we cannot compel the cooperation we seek. Therefore, trust can be very valuable in social interactions.

Trust has been identified as a key element of successful cooperation, information sharing, and problem solving.

Google may use trusted sites to point out other trusted sites through links – that’s why i think a few links from trusted sites are more valuable (and will only get more valuable in the coming months and years) than hundreds of links from untrusted sites.

If you want to find out more about Trust and then think of how Google might be trying to determine such a human emotion – check out:

http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/trust_building/

In Google We SEO Trust

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You can get a FREE Ebook PDF of our SEO Basics Checklist , as cited in Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable, as from today. The easiest way to get it is to subscribe to the Hobo blog by email, or via RSS – you’ll see a link to the guide at the bottom of the mail or feed.

“the Best SEO Guide I think I’ve ever seen… simple to the point, no fluff”.

It is available NOW to all email & RSS subscribers

Some of it’s fact. Some of it’s tips or tactics. A lot of it is theory. If you want a copy, subscribe!

Worried about giving us your email? Well, there’s over 8,000 people subscribed already (about 8000 by email alone) at the moment, and you can see what people think of our blog/newsletter here and also here: comments confirm I don’t really use this to sell services – and I don’t spam ever. This blog and newsletter is all about Google SEO & web stuff you can use on your own site, or I don’t put it in. I do not give your email to anyone else.

So, subscribe and get a FREE copy. I will keep it updated – but only with practical quick and easy to digest tips that will improve your site’s ranking in Google.

PS – Matt Cutts of Google liked it enough to give the guide a thumbs up at Sphinn (along with a lot of other respected peeps in the industry), which was nice. See here.

Warranties

If you have any complaints about the guide feel free to send me your postal address and I will send a few boys around with a  bat. It’s free, based on the infomation I try and discuss on this blog. There’s no warranties – it’s opinion, not advice. Take it or leave it. Hope you find it useful.

It’s a SEO Guide aimed at beginners – hopefully everybody can get something out of it or the links it points out 

Free SEO PDF e-Book – Google SEO Basics Guide

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Anatomy Of A Number 1 Ranking In Google Stripped Bare

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Some time ago I was asked to participate in another group interview of 30 linkbuilders discussing backlink analysis on Search Engine Land. If you read this blog at all, you’ll realise the all importance backlinks still have when it comes to ranking in Google results.

We asked 30 link building experts 9 questions about backlink analysis… and got 20,000 words of response. This article is part 1 of a 3 part group interview series on backlink analysis. Part 1 covers how backlink analysis – of your site and your competitors’ sites, as it applies to link building campaign design.

It’s another great article you’ll probably pick some stuff up from. It’s in 3 parts:

• 30 Link Builders Discuss Backlink Analysis For Campaign Design – Part 1
• 30 Link Builders Discuss Backlink Analysis For Campaign Design – Part 2 (TBA)
• 30 Link Builders Discuss Backlink Analysis For Campaign Design – Part 3 (TBA)

When To Perform Backlink Analysis?

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Unfortunately I was too busy actually doing this stuff at the moment lol to take part in Wordstream’s neat group interview – The Ultimate Guide To Keyword Competition (essentially, determining how competitive a keyword niche is), but it’s neat stuff nevertheless and worth a read and bookmark if you’re drawing plans against a particular keyword vertical.

Before targeting a new keyword vertical, it’s imperative to evaluate the difficulty of the market. This is done through competitive keyword analysis. Search marketers estimate how much time and effort it may take to achieve top rankings for particular keywords or search terms. But the question is, how do you  judge keyword competitiveness? What are the factors involved in gauging keyword competition effectively? Is there a specific keyword tool or tools you can use to analyze the competitiveness of keywords?

I might have a go at posting my tip here, later on in the month…. as it’s different from what I see published.

Still, great article

Identifying How Competitive Competition For A Keyword / Market Is

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I’m not going to publish an article just because it’s timely, or just to get my traffic stats up. I’m just going to do my own thing, hope it’s useful, and hope it continues to satisfy the @8,000 of you who have subscribed.

Upcoming Posts

I’ll be publishing the following in the coming week or two…

1. Can You actually Identify On Page/On Site Ranking Factors?
   
2. How & Where Can I start Link Building To My Ecommerce Site To Improve Positions & Traffic NOW?
   
3. Non Technical Google SEO guide: Google & Trust
4. Anatomy Of A Real Live Number 1 Ranking Site In Google

Hope you like…

Upcoming…

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I’m working with Roddy McKenna, the A&R guy who first discovered the Stone Roses in the late 80s and he told me yesterday:

I think this version is great!!!

I asked Richard Thomas the artist behind the stone roses for piano how this came about…

Richard said:

Well i was and still am a massive roses / ian brown fan and i was at spike island in 1990 with my sister (who was also at blackpool and to my lasting regret i didnt go); i have been playing the roses songs on my piano at home for years; when i started youtubing “spike island” there was nothing filmed there either from the gig or since; so i had the idea to take my camera and just make a film at spike island to show what it was like now; then i decided to dub my made of stone onto the film and uploaded it ; within a month it had thousands of views and loads of people were asking me what i was recording next;  i did “supersonic” in liverpool next and then recorded some songs for my Oasis for Piano album which i released on itunes last year;  however i had more and more interest in the stone roses song so i spent most of november recording 10 stone roses tracks in my little home studio ; i abandoned some of them as they didnt work out (for example she bangs the drums didnt sound right at all on piano) and then chose the 7 that appear on the Stone Roses for Piano album.

i worked them all out by ear , as i know almost every stone roses song off by heart (including most of second coming) ; before i finished the project i checked the keys i had used to see if they were the same as the Roses versions – the only one different was “waterfall” which i played in G major, the original is in F sharp (quite a difficult key to play; i think John Squire used a capo on that track);i contacted an online distribution company who gave me advice about registering with the PRS (performing rights society) in order to pay proper royalties to the publishers in case i made any money out of the sales ; i must say that im not really doing this at all to make money, its just my passion for these amazing songs and the interest of friends to record them;

i must say what i noticed with a lot of the roses songs is that the melodies are so amazing - made of stone for example is a really  beautiful and haunting track when you strip it to the melody and chords; also another favourite is where angels play, which has an amazing john squire outro that i tried to capture on the piano;  the biggest challenge was the coda of i am the  resurrection – not sure if i pulled it off, but i had a good go;

what next?  i love the old roses b sides like mersey paradise, going down, standing here so might record some of them later in the year;  ten storey love song also sounds amazing on piano

Mersey Paradise is my favourite Stone Roses song! Can’t wait to hear the Piano version…. I’ll make do what I can get on Itunes at the moment

SO – If you want to buy Stone Roses For Piano – Buy at Itunes.

Amazing stuff…

PS – I did notice I’m not the first Roses fan (or SEO) to think the tracks are brill either…

Stone Roses For Piano by Richard Thomas – Friday Fun

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Anyway…. David Harry of the SEO Dojo has pulled together an interesting study about Personalised Search (how Google changes rankings based on various metrics included being signed into a Google account)

We decided to take a set of queries to build a session (task) in a space that may or may not be familiar to the respondents. The queries we used were;

‘antique lamps’
‘buy antique lamps’
‘buy lamps online’

We also asked them to tell us;

1. Where they’re located (region/country)
2. Which browser they’re using
3. Cleared search history lately?
4. Is personalized/search history on?
5. Most common Google app used
6. If they had searched for ‘lamps’ or furnishings in the last 60 days

The goal being to start understanding what may or may not be influencing the search result flux. While we had some questions to be answered, there was no initial bias (hypothesis) behind the analysis. It should also be noted that the entire collection process only lasted 4 days so that we could try our best to avoid any temporal anomalies.

Read the whole post and results here – Google re-ranking and personalized search study

This is a very difficult area to monitor and draw conclusions from – and an area I’ve certainly neglected. Hence the link. Worth a read.

Google Personalised Search Study & How It Affects Ranking

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HooRank is a modified polynomial distribution that is calculated every Thursday at 9am local time wherever the website is hosted, and applied to the ranking calculation the following Tuesday at 3pm CET. (http://seocockstars.com/)

Note – the reason I am posting this is I have some seo stuff I am going to publish shortly (including some seo analysis I dont think I see out there) which falls under seo theory so I thought I may as well get this out of the way before somebody pipes in later lol.

There’s many problems with seo theory blogs. Misinformation is an obvious one. Rarely are your results conclusive or observations 100% accurate. Even if you think a theory holds water on some level.

Take for instance a recent post I did about Google remembering all your pages on your site. While the theory may hold water for me, my analysis was slightly flawed, and my findings in retrospect have proven not to be 100% accurate. not 100% innacurate – or I would nuke the post entirely, or strikethrough the text at least.

There’s even a few pages on this site that I don’t think are 100% accurate, so I’ve added listtle disclaimers here and there, and created a main seo page to list some of the seo techniques that are more widely agreed upon.

I enjoy seo theory blogging and sometimes I wish I could blog more about theory, rather then fact, because this blog is after all a brain dump. I love discussion on it and the actual idea generation side of online marketing.

But your not exactly in a lab environment – why I think seo is more art that science – a lot more.

Sometimes it’s scary blogging about SEO, because nobody has all the answers. you can look stupid too.

What’s worse though is seeing a seo theory blog fail to theorise about anything other than diss other people’s ideas – I don’t want a blog like that.

Just remember everything you read about seo anywhere is THEORY and just like how many planets are in the solar system or what clour is water, ‘facts’ can change with a greater understanding over time or with a different perspective.

Remember The Problem With SEO Theory Blogs, Like This One

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Free Screen Capture – With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window – from a small selection, to a complete page…. is an extension that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image – it’s a screen capture tool for Firefox!

On my Mac to take a picture of, for instance, small parts of a screen – I normally use the keyword command Command-Shift-4 (I don’t know how PC users do it) but where this software comes in useful is if I want to take a a picture of an entire web page that is too big to fit in your browser window. It does not capture screen video though if you are looking for that function.

Here’s the link to the extension on Mozilla.

If you’ve got better screen capture software for the Mac (oh well, or PC) let me know in the comments…

Capture Screen Shots Of Websites In Your Browser Window

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The tweet, generated by Google Feedburner, using Google’s URL shortener on publishing a new post, doesn’t have a broken link… it just takes Google a few seconds to get the cogs working….

Maybe something should be speeded up, or something slowed down in the process…. any way, slightly annoying….

Google Feedburner & Broken Tweets (Moan #2)

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Many bloggers like myself show off the number of folk subscribed to their feed (knowing it helps increase subscribers even more, if you have a decent rss count already).

It would be nice if Google used some sort of caching system rather than go with near up-to-date  Google feedburner RSS subscriber counts, as these drops seem to be happening more frequently of late.

I suppose you get what you pay for, but it’s still a mild irritation.

If your feed counter shows half as many readers as you expected, it’s probably a glitch, and you can find out by subscribing to the Google Feedburner Status Blog

Feedburner Subscriber Count Number Drops (Moan #1)

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Showing results for search engine optimization. Search instead for search engine optimisation.

I’m in the UK. I think you spell SEO as ’search engine optimisation’ but Google in it’s infinite wisdom wants to refine my search and give me what it wants, what is frankly, arguably US spellings -  (search engine optimization with a *z*). Cheeky.

And then it’s got the cheek to even ask me again if I actually meant Search Engine Optimization when I specifically tell Google again I really did mean search engine optimisation the first time…..

“Did you mean: search engine optimization “

%$^& LOL!

Way to help the US sites in UK results…….

UPDATE – The cheeky beggars even change your search and results to ’search engine optimization’ by default when you click next through to the following ten results – even when you’vc specifically told Google you WANT search engine optimisation, the UK spelling, with an *S*. (Shout out to Matt Hopkins, Matt Davies and Baiduyou in my Twitterfeed for the heads up)

UPDATE 2 - Even more maddening, is the above modification only happens on the Gogle UK search, not the .com search lol

UPDATE 3 – Obviously Google is working on this SERP.

UPDATE 4 – Many folk have very similar complaints with many other Americanisations of words – moans a plenty in the comments…. thanks to James for the link to the Oxford website discussing this.

How annoying is that for UK SEO? Is Google destroying our language?

UPDATE 5 – Perhaps an interesting comparison on the two terms by Kieron Hughes – see search engine optimisation trends:

UPDATE 6 – There’s more discussion about Google optimizing the ‘American‘ language in UK serps at Latitude too

UPDATE 7 – After Patrick Altoft of Blogstorm blogged & twittered direct to various Google bods, one seemed to reply, and shortly afterwards this issue with the spelling of search engine (whatever) was resolved…. for the time being.

UPDATE 8 – Seems this to be resolved, but there’s more google misspelling fun at Malcolm Coles blog…

Search Engine OptimiZation? But I Searched For Search Engine OptimiSation

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Just some of the questions I get asked all the time, and it kind of gets tiring answering the same stuff over and over again – especially when the enthusiastic Q&A How To Blog session with Fav Clients culminates in, well, no actual action clientside lol

But once again one of the ladies at Outspoken Media (they do blog consulting too) have come up with a great post for those bloggers who are just starting out and stuck for ideas what to blog about.

• 100+ SMB Blogging Ideas to Kick Start 2010

Do check it out! I did share the benefits of corporate blogging recently, but the post above gives you actual ideas what to blog about.

How To Blog – Ideas For Novice Bloggers

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• seo company Glasgow
• seo company London
• seo company Edinburgh
• seo company Birmingham
• seo company Liverpool
• etc, etc

I see Manchester SEO companies have nothing to complain about….

SEO Company Glasgow V SEO Company London V SEO Company Manchester etc etc

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Nice one Google. More crap UK serps (well, where I am based at least), although no doubt a boon to Manchester SEO companies (yeah i know Its a geo location thing but still crap).

Wonder how long we need to put up with that.

UPDATE – It seems if you search for SEO Company *in* Glasgow (for instance) you get a local maps listing, however, just using SEO Company Glasgow without the *in* fails to provide the searcher with a maps option.

PS – It was actually a surprise to see any SEO company in local business results – I thought they had been removed.

SEO Companies Back In Google Local (Good For Manchester SEO At Least)

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I actually voted for Aaron Wall (Seo Book) (who did a neat keyword research guide on our blog a short time ago) and who came No1.

There’s plenty of folk celebrating inclusion, and plenty bemoaning exclusion from the list (which was bound to be controversial or what would be the point of making the list?) but we’ve got a badge, for now, so up it goes…..

Check out the full 100 marketers here.

100 Most Influential Online Marketers of 2009

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Matt Cutts Twittered at the time:

Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while. 4:01 PM Feb 11th, 2009 from web

Google Japan is now Pagerank 8 according to the toolbar (which was updated on Dec 31st 2009). Perhaps I am wrong but I think I checked this last month just for fun, and it was still 5, which means Google Japan’s pagerank must have returned to normal after the last update?

So, does this mean a Toolbar Pagerank penalty lasts 11 months? Or is that just if you are Google?

History at Techcrunch, Search Engine Land and SE Roundtable

Google Japan Pagerank Penalty Lifted?

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A few things to consider. Are we talking about rankings improvement, or traffic?

For traffic, on it’s own at least, in my experience,I don’t think so. Having a ten year old domain that Google knows nothing about is the same as having a brand new domain.

Rankings in Google come down to opportunity and TRUST.

It’s akin to saying you trust an older person over a younger person just because they are older. Is this really a measurement you can trust – ON IT’S OWN?

I also hear if you have no credit history AT ALL, you’ll find it hard to get credit, because of a lack of, well, trust built up over the years, that you can actually pay back.

Likewise, do you trust someone implicitly you met in primary school and haven’t heard of in 35 years?

People judge each other by their actions over time, so would it be reasonable to think Google going into 2010 is the same?

In a better situation, you trust a friend you’ve known consistently for 10 years. Other folks cite them as trustworthy. As you get to know them better, you believe in them more.

A 10 year old site that’s constantly cited by, year on year, the actions of other, more authorative, and trusted sites? That’s valuable.

But that’s not the age of your website address ON IT”S OWN in play as a ranking factor. A one year old domain cited by authority sites is just as valuable if not more valuable.

Perhaps Domain age may come into play when other factors are considered – but I think Google works very much like this on all levels, with all ‘ranking factors’, and all ranking ‘conditions’. I don’t think you can consider discovering ‘ranking factors’ without ‘ranking conditions’.

Some rankings may improve over time if a site is highly relevant (I’ve seen this) and has done nothing to break Google’s ‘trust’ but perhpas this is just because Google is getting better at finding relevent content?

It’s worth noting that this slight ranking improvement probably gets beat down anyway as competitors concentrate on geting more weighty benefits to their site (ie links from other trusted sites).

I work with a lot of domains over 10 years old, and this age metric doesn’t stand up wel, on it’s own, to more likely rewarding Google ranking factors. For instance – I’ve got an exact match domain I made 3 months ago on page two of Google for it’s main term with one link.

I think you’ve really got to be thinking like a Google engineer when considering ranking factors and under what conditions they may be of benefit to your seo, or to its detriment, while it can be fun to surmise about these factors.

I prefer to theorise about the actual psychology of rankings from the engineers point of view, rather than just simple building blocks that form part of a jigsaw.

Domain: 13 factors from SEJ

1. Domain age; (NOT ON IT”S OWN)
2. Length of domain registration; (I don’t see much benefit ON IT”S OWN even knowing “Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year.”) – paying for a domain in advance just tells others you don’t want anyone else using this domain name, it is no indication you’re going to do something Google will reward you for iMO).
3. Domain registration information hidden/anonymous; (possibly, under human review if OTHER CONDITIONS are met like looking like a spam site)
4. Site top level domain (geographical focus, e.g. com versus co.uk); (YES)
5. Site top level domain (e.g. .com versus .info); (DEPENDS)
6. Sub domain or root domain? (DEPENDS)
7. Domain past records (how often it changed IP); (DEPENDS)
8. Domain past owners (how often the owner was changed) (DEPENDS)
9. Keywords in the domain; (DEFINITELY – ESPECIALLY EXACT KEYWORD MATCH))
10. Domain IP; (DEPENDS – for most, no)
11. Domain IP neighbors; (DEPENDS – for most, no)
12. Domain external mentions (non-linked) (I Don’t think so)
13. Geo-targeting settings in Google Webmaster Tools (YES – of course)

I considered doing something similar in 2010 as the above, but you’ll get more benefit from Google sticking to the simple stuff than trying to identify for sure if anything but the very obvious is at play in Google rankings:

• How Niche You are
• How Relevent You Are
• Better Crap Links You Have
• More and Better Quality Links from real sites wether they are relevant or not

Perhaps what I am saying is I focus on other more obvious ways to improve rankings. I try and do what others have done only better. None of these signals on it’s own regarding domain age or registration is a sign of trust Google would take on it’s own merit.

I don’t think it’s where your at, it’s what you do next, what you flag as your intent (! don’t ask !) that is more important to improve rankings in 2010, with a new site especially, using traditional seo methods – not that real time crap.

Do check out Anne’s great post at SEJ, and let me know what you think? I have tweetbacks turned on for this post so you can DISAGREE or AGREE just by tweeting also if you can’t be bothered to comment

Is Domain Age An Important Google Ranking Factor in SEO?

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We all know Google finds out, it knows, but I don’t see many people taking about what Google remembers. If trust is such a big thing in Google, just like humans, it needs to:

• find you,
• know you and
• remember your actions,

…to build real trust.

I’ve heard other folk in forums muse a similar thing before – especially about links, but for the first time in a while, using a variation of the site: operator:

I discovered:

1. 4 pages in Google serps,
2. on one DC,
3. all edited at different times,
4. all the EXACT SAME URI, and seemingly just
5. 4 historic, slightly different versions of the same exact URI.

Is this an indication Google remembers every page and it’s history?

If Google remembers every single historic version of a URI (or page on your website) – then why? I wonder if it might use such knowledge to work things to rank you by – like out how much Google trusts you, for instance.

If it does have that incredible amount of historical data about your actions, surely somebody at Google is tasked with putting this knowledge to use in some way.

For instance.

• Can even the most minor changes to a page indicate your intent?
• Can it build a picture over time about what you are up to?
• Can it be a measurement your site can be held accountable for?
• Could it be a metric which might affect page and site rankings over time?
• In a positive, or negative, fashion?

Is, at any level, Google comparing one version of your page with the page you just changed, or started with, or even just the number of times you’ve modified it?

If this was the case, can you even use this information to your benefit? Of course, thoughts would need to be put into what was an indication of potentially manipulative intent….

Why the seo theory post? This is the sort of things I wonder about  when I see interesting results in Google – purely for discussion if you’re game. You must remember everything you read in any seo blog is theory at best anyway so I thought it wouldn’t be out of place.

Should I just Twitter random thoughts like this post and keep your email inbox free of fanciful pap in future

Does Google Remember Every Version Of A Page, Ever?

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I wrote about 150 posts or so and I did take about a month off blogging at one point. A post every couple of days or so it works out. About 65,000 visitors a month visit the site at the moment and about 30,000 read it via feedreader.

Pages on Hobo were viewed a total of 1,044,114 times in 2009 with 877,466 unique views. On average people stay on the site for about 2 and a half minutes.

1. The most popular page on the Hobo site (created in 2009) was our quick start guide to Google seo we published in April (which Matt Cutts of Google voted for at Sphinn which was cool) – according to GA 30,177 people viewed it. (10 Dec 2008 – 10 Dec 2009)
   
2. Our second most popular page was our free beginners guide to SEO Ebook.
3. Third most popular post was our linkbuilding for beginners post (which we followed up with another free ebook)
4. Fourth most visited page in 2009 was our post sharing which wordpress plugins we use on the Hobo site
5. Our guide to Google Local Business Center mash-up proved popular at the end of the year too.

Creating how-to-guides is a good tip for any blog if your new to blogging.

Older content still proved popular of course, including one page which has accounted for @90,000 visits every year for a while. A lot of the things I write about there are always folks looking for information on for instance keyword density and keyword research.

These stats don’t include feed reader views (305,486 views since we started properly sometime in 2007)

Most Popular Pages On Hobo SEO Blog In 2009

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Hobo Subscribers in 2009

I get asked what’s a blog and how to blog all the time, as if I know. I have been blogging since 2006 after Andy Beard’s blog internet business systems influenced me to stop spamming them and make one. I thought it would be cool if in some way, one day, I could have a blog like my seo hero lol US based link builder Jim Boykin (who in fact was the first seo I ever ended up meeting as a result of blogging).

I do treat this blog as virtually a personal blog, but I always have someone looking over my shoulder these making sure I don’t get us sued (unsuccesful move as it was ) again so I need to remember Hobo is sort of a corporate blog.

On a simple level blogging just about adding content to your site. The more content you have, the more traffic you’ll get, the more links you’ll attract, the more domain authority you’ll build, and around you go again.

We got over 650,000 visitors to our site, most from blogging in 2009. There’s no single way to blog and here’s what I learned and how I did it if you are totally new to blogging.

Every time I blog I have some simple aim in mind, and on a post by post basis, none are really that clever, but together as a whole, I hope to create, well, a resource of sorts that drives traffic.

1. Some blog posts are for attracting links from other sites
2. Some posts are for growing a reputation and influence in social media
3. Some posts are for giving back, helping those who have helped you, and linking out
4. Some posts are about the company, but not many
5. Some posts are about the company’s products, but not many
6. A lot of posts are about unlocking domain authority and ranking in search engines
7. Some posts are about connecting with industry or niche players
8. Some posts are about conversation
9. Some posts are about traffic
10. Some posts are about increasing subscribers (and losing them)
11. Some posts I do because I have an affiliate link
12. Some posts are just to test how Google works
13. Some posts I do because I like writing and putting ideas down
14. Some blog posts are for fun – (dumb posts can often do really well in social media circles)
15. Some blog posts are a bit more serious

Blogging is pretty easy – and it looks as though you get better (or at least it gets easier) the more you do it especially if you copy how others do certain elements of it.

I learned (and still learn) how to blog at:

• Andy Beard
• Daily Blog Tips
• Pro Blogger
• Copy Blogger
• and I like the stuff Outspoken Media pump out these days

These people do it better than me, and/or make more money blogging. Of course everybody loves seo book and seomoz for the way they’ve presented seo to the masses, and I like SEO a bit more geeky these days so I like reading Sebastian’s Pamphlets, SEO Consultants, Huomah and SEO By The Sea to name a few.

My single aim when I started this blog was to add content to my site which, because of the way blogging works, pages appear immediately in Google results.

What I’ve learned in simple terms is most people don’t care about your boring company or products (leave that for the search engine visitors who are looking for your stuff) and most people connect with the individual if the voice behind the blog is at least honest.

Helping others out when you can, seems to be a good way of getting on in the blogging world.

Some savvy marketers might say the biggest mistake I made (probably) was running the blog for 3 years with virtually no ads of any kind, but I’ll introduce some sort of limited advertising on the site in 2010. I don’t want that stuf to get in the way.

Actually, I think my bigest mistake was blogging for nearly two years not giving a damn about subscriber counts, which is actually my most important metric now even above traffic and search engine positions for this site at least. (Compare your feed with others here and learn how to increase subscriber counts here)

We’ve got well over 6,000 email subscribers when at the start of the year i thought I’d set myself a target of 2,000 so, cool, it has seemed to work out just by blindly pushing on.

I think the biggest mistake you will probably make is you’ll be scared to link out to other blogs and send traffic to other blogs (even those in the same industry as your company).

And that is a mistake.

If you’re not even a bit generous with your links in articles, and all your links are to internal pages, you’re making it much harder for yourself. I see blogs do this all the time – being stingy with links – it’s so narrow-minded.

I blog about what I want to blog about and I link to wherever relevent. I don’t care if it’s newsworthy or not and I don’t want to turn into anything like a seo news blog, but at the beginning, tracking industry news stories is always a good way to go.

I prefer to add content which might be of help to folk, and might get me a link at some point. That’s my blogging strategy at the moment lol and I would rather do that than scour Twitter all night for the latest news story.

The benefit of blogging for us is simple -  we’ve never had to pay anybody for advertising, ever, or had to ask anybody for work, ever. Because of it, the phone goes every day. It takes about an hour a day (usually at night) to do. Not that hard to understand.

It’s by no means the end, but I thought I would share some random thoughts about what I’ve learned about corporate blogging to date.

One last tip? I think blogging should be at the centre of any social media marketing you employ and I don’t think it’s too late to start – ever.

If you’ve got any blogging tips, experiences or nightmares you’re willing to share, you could drop them in the comments.

EDIT – This is timely – 50 Corporate Blog Topics

What I’ve Learned About Corporate Blogging

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Here’s the top 10 search engines that sent Hobo unpaid (organic) traffic in 2009 (from 10 Dec 2008 to 10 Dec 2009)

Google still by far and away the best free traffic provider but not surprising as I write mainly about Google SEO.

We nearly got a half a million free visitors from Google which is up from 229,281 visits, so almost exactly 100% more traffic from Google than last year.

All traffic sources sent 632,329 visits via 3,185 sources (up about 80% on 2008) – we didn’t pay for any of our traffic and i don’t do much social media pimping at all for Hobo any more – Twitter is the 8th largest traffic provider to the site).

Note – According to Google Analytics

Top 10 Search Engines in 2009 For This UK Blog

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I think this is the first time I have typed a query into Google and got 100% spam – 10 out of the top ten results for what is bound to be a decent search term shortly…. all spam and even malware sites.

Search for Nexus1 or Nexus 1.

Yup that’s 100% of the search results spam.

Google might be releasing tons of new search products but a quick search on Google UK for “nexus 1″ – Google’s new mobile phone soon to be launched – shows they still have a boatload of stuff to fix in Google UK serps at least

I believe Nexus One is the name of Google’s new phone, (released in January I think) but I didn’t know – so I typed in Nexus 1 and nexus1.

10 of of the top 20 organic Google UK serps are so obvious spam for the search Nexus 1;

Is this why Google wants to fill it’s first page with pages with massive domain authority and trust, google local business listings, news results from authority sites, book results, shopping results and blog posts from authority blogs (a lot of it indeed property it owns)?

The spammers and black hats are having a field day in the UK organic search listings (never mind real time search) and it’s nearly 2010.

The Google UK serps seem to be getting spammed silly and yet Google still seems to open up more fronts for folks to take advantage of.

Crazy days.

Perhaps it’s time to dust of that black hat off…..

EDIT 1 LOL…. mmmm plenty of traffic on that term anyway lol

Turned out to be a pretty cool test on real time search too.

Edit 2 – It looks as though searches for ” NEXUS ONE GOOGLE PHONE” and all related searches to the Nexus One are going to cause Google a few overtime hours in the spam department over the next couple of days….

Spam like this does really show how vulnerable Google seems to be to real time spam – and gives you ideas – what you think?

PS – I should have called this “Google Nexus One – This Query Deserves Spam”

Nexus1 & Nexus 1 Mobile Phone Search – Google Pwned

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To identify all the issues, we had to pay a website development company thousands of pounds so I could just LOOK at the back-end of a content management system because the client “didn’t own the code”. The web company did.

After a golden handsake, I got access, and the result is we’re dumping a brand new content management system costing over £15k because the thing can’t even produce unique page titles on single pages. The CMS didn’t even have a function to delete pages.

At the moment, I can’t access another client’s analytics data because it’s not the client’s – it’s the web development company who installed it (yeah, that free thing you get from Google).

They same company added a @60 page blog to the client site as part of a seo campaign – now that’s over, they’ve deleted the blog and it’s content because it was, in simple terms, “theirs”.

I’ll not comment further, just to say if you are paying money for a website, ENSURE:

1. You own the website
2. You own the domain
3. You own the copyright and code (if copyright is applicable)
4. You own the analytics data
5. You own all data, logins and subscriptions (like Google local business) and can access them via a email account YOU CONTROL
6. You own the content
7. You can safely move the contents to the website to another host

…in fact, just make sure you own everything and can access everything and can indeed transfer everything easily, and at no further cost to you, or you could end up thousands of pounds out of pocket for something you thought you owned… and don’t.

Just ask your web dev company – find out what you own -  and get them to sign something saying so, too. Any reasonabe company (like Hobo) agrees to this.

Remember if it all goes belly up, you as the client will be held accountable for not getting these basic things agreed in the first place – leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, believe me.

PS – Everything set up to do with your website should be in your name. Give the web company strict instructions it’s YOU who are giving THEM access to this data, and you are paying them to do this for you.

—————–

Hobo has been nominated to be included in the top 100 online marketers of 2009. You can vote for us here if you’ve found any value at our site – which would be much appreciated of course.

Who Owns Your Website Design, Code, Domain, Blog and Traffic Analytics Data?

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I emailed before about SEO service pricing…and mentioned I would “like” to pay around £75/£150 month, however I would like to know your prices anyway if it is higher than that.

I appreciate it’s a recession, and small businesses haven’t got cash to spend, but there’s a problem here

I have an office I pay rent for, computers and software to buy, equipment to rent and service, staffed with web designers, web developers, managers, copyriters and seo folks.

It took me 10 years to learn and practice what I do, and I spend hours every day learning new skills, just like everybody else in this office. It’s a skilled practice.

For SEO to work, you need to do site audits, keyword research, onsite reconstruction, onsite optimisation, content analysis, site tests, industry and competitor analysis, and link build (through, essentially, article submission networks )while attempting to identify real authority links, and more….. constantly, and repeatedly, in some instances.

If for instance we were to charge £75 an hour (it’s a lot more for an hour of my time), and had one hour a month to work on it, you can quickly see, it’s going to take a long time to complete even the initial analysis. Keyword research can take a whole working day, just to kick off the campaign.

If you took out an ad in a local paper for £75 you would get 2 lines of text on a page that most people won’t read. You will not get into a national newspaper for that amount, full stop.

More often than not, cheap means just that…

I’ve tried in the past to acommodate smaller clients, but in my experience, they get a lot more than they pay for and usurp a lot of my time, as I am constantly thinking about every client. Clients who pay a lot more deserve all our time.

I could for that price recommend and action the most important changes to the site and then immediately include them in an article submission program. I could take the £75 and outsource directory submissions (af) but on their own those types of links, while building domain authority over time, are not going to capture top ranking accross many keyword searches. I can’t even guarantee the quality of the work.

SEO is a long term comitment. It takes a lot of time to do. It takes time to see the fruits of your labour, and your competitors are spending more money than you, probably. They are probably serious about SEO – £75-£150 a month is not being serious about promoting your business. I wonder just how commited you are to your business model (relevant to your competitors) if you only want to spend less money than you would for one night in a local newspaper?

There are seo companies out there who will say they can do SEO for a £100 per month, or £150 etc but I wouldn’t ever use them – you’d be better off getting a freelance seo guy just starting out in seo and hoping he was good, for that price.

Companies that charge that probably just bung you into lower quality directories, add links to their cheap networks that they will take away when you stop paying them, or submit you to Google Local Business, which is free anyway.

You’d probably be better off learning SEO for your self – it’s not that hard, but it takes a lot of time to understand the nuances of it – and putting your cash into Adwords. There’s no guarantees either.

I’ve tried to help by writing up a beginners guide to Google seo and free guide to linkbuilding pdf to introduce you to the finer elements of seo.

Your rankings in Google are a puzzle that needs to be solved – solving it takes time – time costs money. I’m afraid that’s the way of the world.

We went back and forth with someone recently who mentioned (about our prices):

Cash is a problem for me at this time

I saw a £10,000 100 inch television recenlty. I thought it would be cool. Fact is, that sort of cash is a problem for me at this time, so I won’t be getting that television anytime soon.

I’m not trying to be mean, I know some small businesses will go on to conquer the world. I just don’t have a business model that takes that amount of money and gets you the rankings YOU WANT and the ROI you need while giving me a profit to make it worthwhile (after spending ten years learning this)

Cheap SEO

It was also be pretty cool if this page ranked for “Cheap SEO For £75/£150 Per Month” or something similar to educate you a little so you won’t get, frankly, scammed out of your money.

In a private conversation, Aaron Wall recently told me the name Hobo will attract people who want things for free or on the cheap. Is it just my name, Hobo, or as a seo, do you encounter unrealistic business people with unrealistic budgets? Or do you just think I’m being mean….

Hobo has been nominated to be included in the top 100 online marketers of 2009. You can vote for us here if you’ve found any value at our site – which would be much appreciated of course.

Cheap SEO Services For £75/£150 Per Month

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Hobo has been nominated to be included in the top 100 online marketers of 2009, which is nice, if perhaps a little premature.

You can vote for us here if you’ve found any value at our site – which would be much appreciated of course.

It would be an honour and good for everyone at our small scottish seo agency to get even close to being included in the list, as you can imagine.\

Voting is closed Thanks to those who took a few minutes to vote

Vote Hobo! At Top 100 Online Marketers of 2009

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Recently I highlighted an example where my fav music mag, the NME, had their forums/message boards possibly removed from Google because of it (or is it because of poor moderation?)

What about my favourite social media news site?

Yup, Mashable has plenty of it too….

Albeit on a subdomain on Mashable, so it’s not as much of a problem as the NME spam, but left to continue unabated, it could well end up seeing this useful part of the Mashable site nuked in Google too and hard work building this site go to waste.

And UNLIKE the NME forum, Mashable do seem to be trying to combat it (unsuccessfully on some levels).

Here’s an example on Mashable – http://bit.ly/5MIWXr

Google is handing out page level penalties for spam, as well as sub folder penalties and domain penalties these days.

It’s easy to check for any of this type of spam on your site. Just use the site command in Yahoo and add modifiers like ‘v**gra’ or “p*rn” and see what comes up (yeah, i’ve had enough of those keywords in my posts).

Sometimes, it’s interesting.

I’d wager you could find this sort of spam on a lot of popular sites who have no idea it exists, too.

Just as a test I looked at the Daily Telegraph, a mainstream news site I read and who definitely seems to ‘get the web’, and you guessed it, spammed – and inviting page level penalties at least.

I don’t want to scaremonger here – while not TOTALLY out of control at this stage, it might be worth having a look at current moderation policies.

It must be a nightmare trying to moderate such sites – glad I’ve only got a blog!

Look at me. Reformed spammer. Giving back :p lol

PS That’s the last of my spam investigations….

Mashable & Daily Telegraph UGC Spam May Invite Trouble Too

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I’m asked quite a lot these days about server speed and Google rankings. I’d imagine it is already part of the algorithm on some VERY minute level (why not?) and probably is going to be turned up a notch in 2010, but small differentials in page speed load will be clearly NOT as important as just about every other onsite seo factor and even more important external factors which encourages Google to rank your site higher.

If your server is dog*&^% and your website takes minutes to load it’s a bad user experience (why SEO have always advised don’t use crap free hosting) and your site probably doesn’t deserve to get high Google rankings even as it stands.

Website & Page Load Speed Tests & Tools

1. Pingdom Page Load Test tool
2. Website Optimization Speed Test Tool
3. Uptrends Page Load Test Tool
4. Submit Plus Page Load Test
5. Link Vendor Page Load Test tool
6. Compare Yours & Competitors Page speed
7. Tools to speed up your site (defo worth a read)

… and you always have Page Speed by Google (extension for Firefox browser)

Shout out to Mani @ Daily SEO Blog for some of those tools (I’ll add more later)

PS – Google’s Matt Cutts talks about Google Caffeine & Page Speed here.

Website/Page Load Speed Will Affect Google Rankings, Just Not As Much As Links, Good Titles & Writing Content That Matches A SE Visitors’s Intent

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UKFast have really helped us the last few weeks/month with our dedicated hosting and moving the site too, and the uk based server we’re on is FAST to say the least (which is cool because actual page load speed is rummoured to being playing more of a role in rankings in Google in 2010).

So if you’re looking for fast UK hosting – check out, er, UKFast.

1. Fast Hosting
2. UK Based Hosting (Manchester in England I think)
3. Excellent customer service
4. Dedicated Hosting & Managed Servers
5. Windows & Linux Servers

For us, they’ve delivered on product and service. Customer service and technical has been excellent – they’ve always been quick to respond to us – so I can’t do anything more than actually highly recommend them if you need to have your website hosted in the UK (which again is better if you want to rank in Google UK, especially if you have a .com domain and haven’t geotargetted it in Google webmaster tools yet).

Disclosure – this is an unpaid, un-asked for testimonial, in the same vein as laid down by Google when they do testimonials. It took me 10 minutes out of my day to write, and reflects exactly my thinking at this time about our current hosting provider. No affiliate links either, although in 2010 UKFast will be one of the few affiliates on the Hobo SEO Blog, once I sort out my privacy, disclosure and policies page.

Shaun Anderson
Director
Hobo

Fast UK Hosting & Excellent Customer Service – UKFast Review

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But what a waste of 184,089 threads and 2,173,238 posts in their online forum…

and I don’t really think of NME as where to buy viagra.

As a result of poor moderation, “buy viagra” and all other kinds of spam, Google has nuked it’s forum.

• No Pagerank.
• No threads in Google.
• No traffic from Google.

At least to this part of the site.

You can see the reason why, using Yahoo, who will index anything:

Clean those viagra sales pages up (and anything else in there), ask Google for a reinclusion request, and watch NME traffic go up by 90% lol.

Hang on. Viagra Jelly, Free shipping to the UK, same day delivery, and free comparison on viagra, cialis, and levitra?

Might be some good viagra deals in there after all…

On a serious note – this is a good example of Google nuking a particular part of even a trusted site for poor moderation and spamming. Effectively, www.nme.com/boards/ is a bad neighbourhood.

For the rest of us small fry, Google just takes your entire site out if you let this sort of, for instance, “buy viagra spam”, go on.

I’ve seen this on NME for ages, and seen it talked about before, but I thought it was timely to check what was happening after that vague spam advice from Google yesterday.

NME.com SEO

I don’t usually talk about other sites in detail in public, but while you are at cleaning up that viagra spam NME, you might want to do a bit of basic SEO on the site and at least remove default meta stuff.

Need help? No probs.

PS – It’s not just the NME that has issues – check out Mashable & News Sites Spam.

NME.com

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At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links

One of the reasons I moderate all comments, and use a custom wordpress comments plugin so only returning visitors get a search engine friendly link.

It’s probably kind of easy for Google to spot comments on blogs.

On first crawl, it gets the fresh page, second, the page with some comment links, third, more comment links (Google does seem to have a long memory). Probably easy to devalue comments even without knowing the system involved.

If you are going to comment, probably best to get in early, and keep it intelligent.

It seems to be getting more and more these days Google is actually telling US (you and me) to clean up OUR existing link profile.

I wonder if this failure to do so will feature more heavily in the 2010 algorithm, in terms of your own site rankings.

If you used this approach in the past and you want to solve this issue, you should have a look at your incoming links in Webmaster Tools. To do so, go to the Your site on the web section and click on Links to your site. If you see suspicious links coming from blogs or other platforms allowing comments, you should check these URLs. If you see a spammy link you created, try to delete it, else contact the webmaster to ask to remove the link. Once you’ve cleared the spammy inbound links you made, you can file a reconsideration request.

The question is of course… why bother? I don’t see anything on that post that mentions penalties. And of course, if there was, you could just mass spam blogs to take out your competitors.

posting tons of links that point back to the poster’s site in an attempt to boost their site’s ranking

Ah, Google means…. tons. Mass spamming, cross scripting then?

Yeah no wonder Google is posting this I am watching a well known SEO company in England cross script a popular comments plugin for a client, just in time for Christmas – it’s working too.

The odd link shouldn’t be a problem then?

Others might tweak this approach a bit by posting a generic comment (like “Nice site!”) with a commercial user name linking to their site.

Has Google got a range of crappy comment types it’s going to start trying to find? That would actually be sweet lol.

But it’s kind of vague. Who’s blog is getting nuked? The blog the comments are on, or the site the comments point to?

For this reason there are many ways of securing your application and disincentivizing spammers.

• Disallow anonymous posting.
• Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming.
• Turn on comment moderation.
• Use the “nofollow” attribute for links in the comment field.
• Disallow hyperlinks in comments.
• Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.

Above, I’ve bolded the one thing you actually need to stop comment spammers.

Comment spammers are a pain – why I outed one, but this post doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know….

Block comments pages using Robots.txt?

Not likely.

Blog Comment Spam Advice From Google

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This looks like a decent link for those linked at Google Press Center….. a single outbound contextual link on a cached PR7 page on a very trusted domain.

If your following Google’s example, it’s perfect for sites with exact match domains, too.

Best practice (if your looking to get a link, or at least host such a page on your own site)?

• Link to the home page
• Use The URL keywords or domain name as in the example
• You don’t need to identify the person who gives the testimonial outright
• One external link to a non related property on a page? (I surmise)

If Google does it… it must be ok? Right?

Build Links Via Testimonials – Like Google

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• You contact webmasters of other, related websites and let them know your site exists.
• If the value that you have worked so hard to instill in your site is evident to them, they will assist their own customers by linking back to your site. That, my friend, is the essence of link building.
• Relevance is important to end users… We see the content they possess and the content you possess. If there is a clear disconnect, the value of that inbound link is significantly diminished, if not completely disregarded.
• If relevance is important, the most highly regarded, relevant sites are best of all. Sites that possess great content, that have a history in their space, that have earned tons of relevant, inbound links – basically, the sites who are authorities in their field – are considered authoritative sites.
• When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction. If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.

Interesting and it gives an insight into linkbuilding and penalties for manipulation – we know the same sort of thing is happening at Google too.

Bing’s policy on link building

Bing’s position on link building is straightforward – we are less concerned about the link building techniques used than we are about the intentions behind the effort. That said, techniques used are often quite revealing of intent.

I saw this post at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021217.html and WebmasterWorld are currently discussing it. Thought it worth a copy and a share…..

Bing SEO & Link Building

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Free Link Building For Beginners Ebook

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I’m well surprised at some of the well-known sites that carry adverting banners for these home business kits, despite the amount of bad press they seem to be garnering.

This is an example headline:

How Did This Computer-Illiterate Mother of Two Start Making £10,000 a Month Posting Links on Google?

Hell I’d like to know that one lol.

Here’s an example post:

October’s Success Story: Emily Harris

Posted October 2nd, 2009 by Editor

Actual cheque from Google. It’s like a dream come true, good money, work while spending time with my kids, and true happiness. Read how I did it below.

How Did This Computer-Illiterate Mother of Two Start Making £10,000 a Month Posting Links on Google?

Emily Harris’s success story takes the cake for our success story for the month of October! Learn how she gets paid £5 to £30 for every website link that she posts on Google. She accomplished this through working from home 4-8 hours per week on her personal computer. Read her inspirational survival story below:

A year ago I was a receptionist for a real estate company called Savills Real Estate Agents UK. Not exactly my dream job but I had to help provide for my family of four somehow. As the real estate industry took a turn for the worst, I was let go of my job. Desperation kicked in, and I was was forced to take a much less paying job at Asda’s as a grocery store cashier making nearly minimum wage in order to keep food on the table (as the job market seemed like it was at an all time low). Credit cards started to max out. We started paying our credit card debts by applying for other credit cards to make the minimum payment. Within one year we ended up racking up £37,500 worth of debt. We did not know what to do. Our rent alone was only £1200 a month, meanwhile our credit card monthly minimum payment was well over £800. And out of that £800, most of it was going to interest and fees. Panic started to set in. How could we ever get ourselves out of this much debt? We were extremely desperate and had no where else to turn.

How I turned my life around

I have always seen Internet offers all the time talking about some great business opportunity. Things that are supposed to make you millions of dollars instantly. Ya right. I always wondered if any of that stuff really worked, but I was not going to put myself into more debt by wasting more money on scams.

I then found this information in my local newspaper about how regular people in the UK are making money off a company called Google, one of the largest internet companies in the world. Things still seemed too good to be true with some of the success stories I read, but I was intrigued as to how people can make so much money off Google. For starters, I have a hard enough time even using a computer to check my email (I am very computer illiterate) and I therefore thought there is no hope in heck of making money online. But there has to be a reason why people can be so successful with such limited resources.

A week after I read about Google, I coincidentally signed up for a free information seminar held at the Longbenton College about Google and the power of the internet. I sat and listened to what four guest speakers had to say about how they basically started with nothing and are now multi-millionaires. Yes again, too good to be true but I stuck around afterwards and networked with some of the attendees and speakers. I quickly learned how I could earn money, but still was worried about my lack of technical skills. One member told me to go to this website called “Internet Home Business Kit” which offers free kits to get started with this business. He also advised me not to disclose this information to others before I receive my kit as the website runs out of kits fast (as they’re free), and usually has a 2-3 month wait time before new kits are available. Let’s just say I went to the website, received my kit in the mail a week later, and now I can pass this information onto others.

To make a long story short, within four weeks I was generating £1400 a week at home through posting “links” on Google. Please note that I accomplished this in my spare time, as I have two kids and a full time job. The kit simplified all the technical lingo and jargon, and explained things step-by-step at a beginner level. Now, I have seen scams out on the Internet that talk about making £50,000 a month online. But that’s it exactly what they are…scams. Any website that asks you to pay hundreds of dollars up front promising thousands is too good to be true. After the first four weeks, I quit my job and am now making £1,400 a week at home. Alot better paying than even my receptionist job! Reason why I can make this much money is because the internet is a 24/7 business so once setup correctly, you will make money in your sleep and on weekends. It is almost like a “set it, forget it” mentality, where I now just keep setting up new things and the already established links run themselves automatically. The sky is the limit in how much I can earn, the internet and Google are truly amazing in terms of earnings. Also remember that there is zero overhead (as a normal brick and mortar business owner would require to pay rent, pay for merchandise up front, hire employees etc). I can work the hours I want, and expense things in my house such as my mortgage, car, gas, and even some lunches! Of course, my computer and internet plus phone and utility bills can also be expensed. It’s like a dream job come true!

Internet Home Business Kit: Pay some ridiculous cheap shipping fee of £1.75. And have Google pay you cash every day. Starting in one week you can literally have Google send cheques directly to you without putting out any of your own money.

How To Get Started

Below is the link that I was given. Go to the website, fill out this basic online form, and you should receive your free kit in about 1 weeks time. Simple as that. Good luck!

• Step 1: Get your free Internet Home Business Kit. Pay £1.75($2.95 USD) for shipping. I found out this kit is available to residents in the UK.
• Step 2: Follow the directions in the Internet Home Business Kit and set up a Google account. Then they will give you the website links to post. Start posting those links. Google tracks everything.
• Step 3: Google will start sending their first check to you in about 1 week. Or you can start to have them wire directly into your checking account (but you have to pay wire charges). Your first checks will be about £500 to £1,500 a week, then it goes up from there (depends on how many links you posted online).

For all the skeptics out there, you are not spending hundreds to thousands of dollars to start this. There is no risk, that is the beauty of working with Google. All I needed was some handholding, and thankfully the Home Business Kit is such an awesome guide tailored to computer illiterate people like myself! £1.75 is not much of a risk if you ask me, even if you are tens of thousands in debt like I was! I wrote this to let the world know that you don’t have to go through what I ended up going through. I certainly wish someone would have helped me out when I was at my lowest point, but thankfully I attended that conference and met the people I did meet. Now I can safely pass this information onto others.

Sincerely,

Emily Harris

Supposedly this franchise has been featured (in the UK) on the BBC, ITV, Sky and Five…. I can’t find it.

Maybe this story is true, and it’s not a scam…. oh wait, there’s a bit at the bottom of the site that says….

THE STORY DEPICTED ON THIS SITE AND THE PERSON DEPICTED IN THE STORY ARE NOT REAL . RATHER, THIS STORY IS BASED ON THE RESULTS THAT SOME PEOPLE WHO HAVE USED THESE PRODUCTS HAVE ACHIEVED. THE RESULTS PORTRAYED IN THE STORY AND IN THE COMMENTS ARE ILLUSTRATIVE, AND MAY NOT BE THE RESULTS THAT YOU ACHIEVE WITH THESE PRODUCTS. THIS PAGE RECEIVES COMPENSATION FOR CLICKS ON OR PURCHASE OF PRODUCTS FEATURED ON THIS SITE.

LOL

Now of course I don’t know if EVERY Internet Home Business Kit or Google Online Cash Kit and all the other many make money online deals are scams, but I’ve worked on the net for ten years and I wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole.

Here – a typical complaint….

These people stated that I could get this kit for $1.00 and that I had a 48 hour trial period, this was Sunday evening. By Tuesday morning, they charged my account an additional $79.86 which I never saw coming. When I tried to cancel believing that I still had time within my 48 hours, they told me that they were sorry but my time had ran out. Meanwhile I haven’t received anything from them after they took my money. It seems that I have no recourse; so this company can just take our money and walk away free and clear. Someone has to do something about this type of bad business, but even more importantly, as consumers we must be vigilant and read all fine print; better yet DO NOT BUY ANYTHING ONLINE UNLESS YOU KNOW FOR A FACT THAT IT IS A REPUTABLE COMPANY AND BUSINESS.

Internet Home Business Kit / Google Online Cash Kit Scams Everywhere

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A lot of press release sites are crappy, but some do a job. Google makes it simple for you to idnetify which press releases are decent ones by including them in their News Results.

1. Examine your niche in Google – by typing in varying keywords related to your industry – it doesn’t even have to be your industry
2. Observe if any of these keywords bring up “News Results“
3. Go to the site and see if it is a free press release site (a lot are)
4. Spend 15 minutes crafting a unique original article about your business and submit it with a link back to your site – NOTE – ensure you include valuable keywords in the article TITLE!
5. In 15 minutes you might find you’re at the top (or at least on the front page) of Google results (and you can stay there I’ve witnessed for up to 6 days)
6. The residual bonus effect is that these sites might even have the domain authority for the article itself to rank in organic listings (so do it at least a couple of times on the same site to get double listings in Google etc) – that’s why you want to have unique articles, too.
7. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum if you like

If you’re a small business in a less competitive niche or in a particular geographic area – you might find yourself at the top of Google for a week – for free.

I could have listed ten free press release sites ( I never pay) to submit to but in all honestly I like to see the sites that Google likes at that instant and you do that by using Google.

Press releasees are pretty useful to get the word out especially about events and product launches etc.

Free Press Release Tips & Process Step By Step

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If your site is hacked, your supposed to submit a review in webmaster tools, which I always thought should be a bit unnecessary.

Anyway, we cleaned up the code immediately (or rather got the web dev company we took over from to do it), and WITHOUT submitting the site for review, Google removed the malware notice.

Cool.

If I was hacked, I’d probably jump immediately to rectify it. But it’s good to know these malware notices can be removed without notice as quickly as they appeared (although I’m not certain if this is A) widespread and B) if Google wants folks to know this).

John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, was kind enough to confirm Google will rescan your website without prompt in the comments below:

We generally rescan them from time to time, but it’s certainly faster if you can tell us when to check

This Site May Harm Your Computer – Hacked – How To Fix

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We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox. Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given. Google

This might be a bit (or a big) shake up for a lot of (or some) seo and website owners as well. It was interesting to see the developer preview of Caffeine while it was available and no doubt some will be happy with the changes and some will not be.

Shout out to SEJ for spotting it

Anyway don’t be surprised to see your sites rankings dance around a while – that’s Caffeine coming

Indeed.

What is Google Caffiene? Well, it’s supposed to be a faster more improved version of how Google works (under the hood) not necessecarily a new immediate way of ranking sites according to some sources – though in the analysis I completed some websites did seem to have improved/dropped rankings in SERPS (but this might have been because of a number of factors).

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

As a “web developers and power searcher” I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of changes coming in the next few months when it’s confirmed live. Find out more here.

Update – Matt Cutts says -

I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays (I don’t think you’ll see Caffeine on multiple data centers before January)

Google Caffeine Live Soon

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Google Local Business listings get your business featured for various keyword phrases in your local area, as well as your business name, including a map to your business and contact details. It’s FREE, so your crazy not to do it.

Optimising for Google Local Business – In my experience, giving Google as much information as possible about your business is just about the best policy. Get listed in as many local business directories as possible.

Best Practices (From Google)

• Guidelines – Only business owners or authorized representatives may claim their business listings on Google Maps.
• Guidelines – Use a shared, business email account, if multiple users will be updating your business listing.
• Guidelines -If possible, use an email account with a domain that matches your business URL. For example, if your business website is www.hobo-web.co.uk, a matching email address would be me@hobo-web.co.uk.

{smartads}

Submit Your Free Listing:

1. Submit your information, from basic contact info to photos and video. Visit the Local Business Center.
2. You will need a Google account – click here to go straight to the sign-up page.
3. On the Local Business Center homepage, click Add new business.
4. Fill out the basic information about your business. This includes:
   • Company/Organization: This is the official/registered name of your business.
     • GUIDELINE – The business name on Google Maps must be your full legal business name.
     • GUIDELINE -Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords or a description of your business into the business name.
     • GUIDELINE -Do not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name.
   • Address (required): The address should look exactly the way you’d write it on a paper mailing envelope. If your business services several areas, you can create one listing under a PO Box.
     • GUIDELINE – Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist.
     • GUIDELINE – PO Boxes do not count as physical locations.
     • GUIDELINE – Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
     • GUIDELINE – Businesses that operate in a service area as opposed to a single location should not create a listing for every city they service. Service area businesses should create one listing for the central office of the business only.
     • GUIDELINE – Businesses with special services, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
     • GUIDELINE – The precise address for the business must be provided in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
     • GUIDELINE – A property for rent is not considered a place of business. Please create one listing for the central office that processes the rentals.
   • Phone Number (required): Be sure to include your area code with your phone number.
     • GUIDELINE – Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible. For example, you should provide an individual location phone number in place of a call center.
     • GUIDELINE – Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or ‘refer’ users to other landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.
   • Website: This can be a maximum of 255 characters.
     • GUIDELINE – Provide one URL that best identifies your individual business location.
     • GUIDELINE – Do not provide URLs that redirect or ‘refer’ users to other landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.
5. Click Next. You’ll now have the opportunity to provide the following information about your business:
   • CATEGORIES: Enter several categories to describe your business, to make it easier for others to find when they search Maps. Google will automatically suggest categories as you type. You can enter up to 5 categories for your business. I THINK THE FIRST ONE NEEDS TO BE FROM GOOGLE’S CATEGORIES, THE REST BE SURE AND USE VALUABLE KEYWORDS RELATED TO YOUR BUSINESS (Or CUSTOM CATEGORIES)
   • HOURS OF OPERATION: Select your hours of operation using the dropdown menus. If would prefer not to specify your hours of operation, keep the radio button selected next to ‘I prefer not to specify operating hours.’
   • PAYMENT OPTIONS : Select the checkboxes next to the payment methods that your business accepts.
   • PHOTOS: Use the photo uploader to add a photo from your computer, or specify a URL to add a photo from the web. You can add up to 10 photos to your listing. To learn more about adding photos, check out this section of the User Guide.
   • VIDEO: To add a video, upload it to YouTube and enter its URL. You can add up to 5 videos to your listing. For help with uploading your video to YouTube, read the article on how to upload in the YouTube Help Center.
   • ADDITIONAL DETAILS: Use this section to add your own information fields to your listing. For example, parking availability, or whether your business allows pets.
     • GUIDELINES – Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title, address or category fields.
     • GUIDELINES – Please see this page of the LBC User Guide for examples of acceptable custom attributes.
6. You can see your listing as it will appear in Maps on the right side of your screen, and new information will appear as you enter it. When it looks the way you want it to, click Submit at the bottom of the page.
7. Choose how you would like to verify your listing and click Finish.

Once you’ve submitted your business information, you’ll be asked to verify it before it goes live. Google allows a maximum of 100 listings per account for manual verification. For more information on verifying your listing, check out this section of the User Guide.

You Need To Verify your listing by PHONE or POSTCARD

You’ll have to:

• verify a new business listing,
• or to verify phone number or address changes in an existing listing.
• You can verify your listing by phone call or postcard.
• Keep in mind that if you don’t want to verify your listing right away, you’ll see your verification options in your listing status when you return to your Local Business Center home page.

Verification by phone

• Verify your listing this way & you’ll receive an automated phone call
• During this call, you’ll be given a unique PIN that can be entered into your Local Business Center account.

Verification by postcard

• Once you’ve received your PIN on a Google postcard, you can then use it to verify your business listing in the Google Local Business Center.
• It generally takes 10 business days for a PIN mailer to arrive.
• If you’ve been waiting longer than this, visit the Local Business Center to request a new mailer.
• Keep in mind that only one PIN mailer is valid at a time, so requesting a new mailer will make the previous mailer invalid, even if you do end up receiving it.
• Note that you can only receive a PIN at the business address you’ve submitted to Google Maps. This way, we can verify ownership of a business in part by validating who received the PIN at the business address.
• DANGER DANGER – If you enter an incorrect PIN 5 times, you’ll receive a message indicating that your verification failed, and you will no longer be able to verify the listing.
  • When this happens, you’ll need to delete that listing from your Local Business Center account and start the process again, creating a brand new listing.

Wait for your listing to appear in Google Maps. In most cases, it shouldn’t take more than 12 hours.

Once it is submitted it will be in one of the next stages:

Status – What Does It Mean?

Status	What it means
	This means that your listing is publicly available by searching on maps.google.com and through google.com. If you’re unable to find your business right away, try performing a search for [ your business name in your city, zip code ].
	This means that the listing you’ve submitted needs to be verified. Until you do, your listing won’t be displayed in Google Maps. You may verify by phone or mail. To find out more about verification, go to this section of the User Guide.
	If your listing is Flagged, it has been selected for additional review before it can appear on Google Maps. This might be because there’s something in the content of your business listing that isn’t allowed on Google Maps. Perhaps you’ve used certain ‘trigger words’: these can be ‘bad words,’ or simply trademarked words that you don’t own. WHAT GOOGLE MISSES IS THAT YOU NEED TO CHECK YOUR LISTING! SOMETHING ISN”T QUITE RIGHT – CHECK YOUR DATA AND YOU MAKE THE CHANGES. NOBODY AT GOOGLE GIVES A S^%$ – THEY WONT BE CHECKING IT
	If your listing is suspended, it means that you have chosen to remove it from Google Maps. Click Resume display on Google Maps to make it visible again.
	The means that your listing is verified and has passed our content check, but it is awaiting our next data push. It should be live within two weeks, but may take up to four.If your listing has been ‘Awaiting Next Update’ for over a month, we recommend verifying this listing manually by phone or PIN Mailer (note that you can’t verify listings in bulk. A listing that was uploaded as part of a bulk feed will have to be verified individually). If you uploaded a a bulk listing, it could be that there was no information in it that isn’t already on Google Maps. If this is the case, then we don’t add the bulk feed to our index.

Google local Statistics

You can get cool stats from GLB too (some below)

As i said, especially if you are a small business or a brand new business just starting out, you should claim your listing – it’s 100% free and gives you a measure of increased visibility on Google if folks are looking for your type of business in your area.

Useful external posts about GLB

• Report Spam on Maps. Google gives people the option of outing you!
• Request Reinclusion if your Local Business Center account has been suspended.
• Request Verification for your bulk upload.
• Check out the Google local business Help Forum.
• Compare Past & Current Google Local Business Guidelines side by side
• Google Targets Spammers With New Local Business Listing Guidelines

Guide To FREE Google Local Business Centre Listings

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There’s been some excitement on various news blogs.

Google Commerce Search is hosted in the cloud, meaning it lives online, so e-commerce sites can get up and running quickly. Using a cloud search tool will also help site owners meet the rise in demand from the holiday rush without having to devote extra time or resources to worrying about their capacity or infrastructure. Online retailers are free to focus on their business, while Google focuses on search, and shoppers can find what they need faster. GOOGLE

and

When combined with Google Checkout — as shown in the introductory video (also embedded below) — this is nothing short of an all-inclusive e-commerce software package, SearchEngineLand says.

and

Leveraging Other Google Products: Google promises integration with other Google products like Google Analytics and Google Product Search. Using Commerce, retailers can measure clicks, conversion rates, number of transactions, average order value and other data via Google Analytics. And e-commerce vendors can provide a single feed of products and catelogue items that will power Commerce and indexing of their products on Google Product Search. Product Search (formerly Froogle) was blends shopping results with Google search, TechCrunch comments

Looks promising.

Google Commerce Search

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Wordpress plugins add functionality to the core wordpress CMS we create, design and develop web sites with, if you don’t know.

Active Plugins

  • Hobo WP Custom Link Love 0.9 Beta
» Shaun Anderson / Martin Gardner of Hobo SEO (url)
Custom Variation of Lucia LinkyLove to conserve Google Pagerank, Instead of adding rel=”nofollow” we wont Link to the Authors URL at all until they have contributed a number of intelligent comments.

  • Remove Links from Home 1.0 Beta
» Shaun Anderson (url)
This plug-in removes links from the posts on the front/home page only.

  Akismet 2.2.7
» Matt Mullenweg (url)
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.

  All in One SEO Pack 1.6.10
» Michael Torbert (url)
Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. Options configuration panel | Upgrade to Pro Version | Donate | Support | Amazon Wishlist

  Analytics360 1.2.1
» Crowd Favorite (url)
Allows you to pull Google Analytics and MailChimp data directly into your dashboard, so you can access robust analytics tools without leaving WordPress. Compliments of MailChimp.

  BackType Tweetcount 2.0
» BackType (url)
The BackType Tweetcount plugin shows the number of tweets your posts get and allows users to retweet.

  Comment Approved Notifier 2.2
» Yakup Gövler (url)
Send an e-mail to your commenters when you approve their comments.

  Cross-linker 1.4.3
» Jan Hvizdak (url)
A plugin which allows you to set-up words which are automatically hyperlinked to desired URLs

  DoFollow 4.0
» Kimmo Suominen (url)
Selectively disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments. Configuration: Options » DoFollow.

  FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3.1
» FeedBurner (url)
Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

  Force Word Wrapping 1.0.0
» Jim Wigginton (url)
Prevents long sentancesconstructedlikethis from horizontally stretching the page. Ported from the phpBB MOD of the same name – Force Word Wrapping. For support / comments / whatever, visit the support forums.

  Google Analytics for WordPress 3.2.5
» Joost de Valk (url)
This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.

  Lifestream 0.99.9.6
» David Cramer (url)
Displays your activity from various social networks. (Requires PHP 5 and MySQL 5)

  No Self Pings 0.2
» Michael D. Adams (url)
Keeps WordPress from sending pings to your own site.

  Ozh' Better Feed 2.2
» Ozh (url)
Your feeds, on steroids. Add a feed footer with a copyright, “Add to delicious”, the number of comments… Add anything to your feed. For WordPress 2.8+

  PagerFix 1.1 for WP 2.1
» Jaimie Sirovich (url)
Makes the paging in WP more SE-friendly.

  Permalink Redirect 1.0.1
» Joost de Valk (url)
Redirects all crap away from the end of the URL

  Post-Plugin Library 2.6.2.1
» Rob Marsh, SJ (url)
Does nothing by itself but supplies common code for the Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments plugins. Make sure you have the latest version of this plugin.

  Recent Posts 2.6.2.0
» Rob Marsh, SJ (url)
Displays a highly configurable list of the most recent posts. Instructions and help online. Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed.

  Related Posts 2.02
» Alexander Malov & Mike Lu (url)
Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches.

  Robots Meta 3.2.5
» Joost de Valk (url)
This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.

  RSS Footer 0.9.6
» Joost de Valk (url)
Allows you to add a line of content to the end of your RSS feed articles.

  Simple Pull Quote 0.2.4
» Toby Cryns (url)
Easily add a pull quote to blog posts using a custom field and shortcode.

  Smart Ads 2.2
» John Kolbert (url)
Automatically adds advertisements before and after your post’s single page content based on word count or post age. You can also ad custom ads using the built in shortcode. Just type [smartads] into your posts to display the custom ad.

  What Would Seth Godin Do 1.7
» Richard K Miller (url)
Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.

  WP-Announcements 1.8
» Brian Messenlehner of WebDevStudios (url)
Provides checkboxes on add/edit post pages to either display a marquee anywhere you call wp_announce_marquee() on your website and/or display a pop-up window using shadow box that shows the content of your announcement post (only once per visitor). Admin page included to toggle announcements on or off and to manage all posts saved as announcements for easy retrieval and reuse.

  WP-PluginsUsed 1.50
» Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan (url)
Display WordPress plugins that you currently have (both active and inactive) onto a post/page.

  WP Greet Box 5.5.8
» Thaya Kareeson (url)
Show a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from. For example, you can ask Digg visitors to Digg your post, Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, and more! Best of all, this plugin is compatible with various WordPress cache plugins.

  WP Super Cache 0.9.8
» Donncha O Caoimh (url)
Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.

Which are your best Wordpress plugins? Have I missed any?

Note – This page should automatically update with new / deleted plugins using the cool WP-PluginsUsed 1.40.

Wordpress Plugins That Power This SEO Blog

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We’d like to extend an invitation to any registered charities interested in taking online marketing training (regardless of global location) to get in touch. We’ll choose up to 25 charities and send them a coupon for one of their staff to take a self-study course of their choice. When contacting us, please use the phrase “charity training” in your email subject line or comments field and include your charity registration number if you have one.

Courses are available in the following disciplines:

• Copywriting for PPC
• Search Engine Optimization
• Article Marketing
• Link Building
• Web Site Copywriting
• Pay Per Click Advertising
• Web Site Usability

So – Run a registered charity? – Want FREE sem/seo training? Ask Kalena

PS – Do pass it on to anyone you think might find this seo/sem training useful.

FREE SEO Training For Charities – Search Engine College

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Some new sites have PR. Some have stabilised. Some the same PR. Internal Pages with new PR….

Now that that’s done my advice would be to forget about it – it’s not a metric I use on any of my sites…. ranking and traffic are much more important!

Question – Will Having a Higher Toolbar Pagerank Improve My Ranking? NO!!!

Google Toolbar Pagerank Update October 2009

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and complete this poll for me? I just want to get an idea of the numbers and types of folk who’s reading the Hobo blog to give me an idea of the audience I should be writing for.

Cheers

Help!

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Hope you like it and find it useful – it’s based on linkbuilding tips from the Hobo SEO blog for those that prefer to read it in a PDF Ebook format – there will be a post or two where to get links (in a responsible way) that’s not at this time available on the blog

If you’ve not subscribed by email – it’s 100% free of course so just add your email in the box on the right or below (you do of course get our FREE Google SEO Guide For Beginners (150+ pages) as standard) when you sign up and you’ll get a free copy of the updated version next year when i get around to updating it.

Free Link Building Tips & Tactics Ebook PDF

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I’ve decided that I’d mark up a typical Hobo blog post with these new elements and then document how everything was achieved. Obviously the page will still look the same as any other blog post but one look under the hood will show you that everything is different. If you’re interested in checking on how I got on you can view the page here.

Any questions (or even tips) please let me know in the comments or catch me at my personal blog – Jack Osborne

Converting Hobo SEO to HTML5

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