Late last week I was told of a secret cell of dark Blackhat SEOs operating in the city of Leeds. These cunning and potentially evil blackhats were pretending to be white hat SEOs by day and only at night in their secret lair do they reveal there true nature.

I decided to take it upon myself to investigate this cabal and here is my tale of ranking terror.

My initial investigation told me of an innocent white hat gathering called "Northern SEM" this I was led to believe was nothing more then a front for these fiends praying on young innocent search marketers. I decided I would join this gathering in disguise as a "SEO" and if I could keep my mouth shut I maybe be able to gain the Evil doers trust...

The evening arrived and I stepped into Mr Foleys a pub at the centre of the geek community in Leeds hoping no one would give away my cunning disguise (wearing a math joke t-shirt...) I proceeded to engage in the conversation. It quickly became apparent that the Cabal had its eyes on two SEOMoz Acolytes and as they regurigitated the rights of Rand they were seemingly unaware of the danger they were in! The first Acolyte who went by the name of Sara Godwin (remember not her real name) was being piled with beverages designed to entice her to the dark side along with her rats and with Stew Turnker who arrived late also being not far behind. I realised these two young impressionable people could be the next victims of the blackhats so had to act quickly.

I decided the leader of this group must be the one the large brute was were referring to as "yeshun" and quickly approached her with news I to was a blackhat and ranked for Viagra too...

Quickly I was whisked to their secret lair, relieved I had saved two innocent lives I now feared for my sanity and my rankings what if Matt Cutts found out! There was nothing for it I would have to play along as I underwent a strange induction to their cabal the horrors of which I shall not speak except to say it involved Yoghurt make me say no more. The key I had gained their trust and they revealed their master plan...

World SEO Domination...

I realised I needed proof of what I had seen and so secretly took these exclusive shots of inside the secret lair... Sadly no shots of "Yeshun" came out but I can now reveal the identities of the two other members of this group.

Look carefully for the signs to help you identify Blackhats they are subtle and ones such as the devil eyes can only be seen through the use of a camera... Also note the map indicating the state of their world conquest and how they plan to divide the spoils.

Our talk went into the night but I was growing tired and I fear they may have rumbled me, not even my disguise could protect me any longer....

So dear reader I made a run for it, to bring you this news the Blackhats they are among us!!!

Northern SEM

The above was a work of mostly fiction... Northern SEM however is a monthly meetup for people interested in search and geekery or just beer. If your in the area pop by to Mr Foleys in leeds on the first Friday of every month. Big thanks to Dom, Carolyn and no I won't upload the other photo on a public blog for your mum to see Heather.

Why is timnash.co.uk changing now?

Well to be honest I have gotten bored of people pigeon holing me as an "SEO" its not a title I have ever been comfortable with and as far as I'm concerned there are less then a handful of true SEOs in the world the rest are failed web designers who need to convince people that rather than do a real job they should be paid to fix bad code mistakes and write crap to gain links. Don't get me wrong many of these people are my friends and some are incredibly talented writers, programmers and developers but virtual none of them are "Search Engine optimisers" as an industry there is little or no understanding of what a search engine is, the mathematics or logistics behind large scale information retrieval or even the process of crawling, retrieving and indexing. This is not a problem for me and I think its on a whole a good thing certainly has been for our clients, while the industry sits in the mud throwing its own muck at each other a silent group have just been getting on with the job but I just don't want to be associated with the mud slinging. Some say change should come from the inside but lets face it a quick look at SEO cesspools such as Sphinn will quickly show that it's not going to change soon. Plus as my personal interests shift away from SEO to different aspects of information retrieval and data analysis I find it harder to be interested in the day to day politics and winging of the industry I have already stopped attending or speaking at SEO conferences with the exception of smaller ones such as Think Visibility and then I pick and choose based on what other things the conference is bringing.

Venture skills is a data analysis company

We really are and always have been! We act as a trouble shooting think tank, we collect, measure and report data sets making recommendations on how to proceed, be that on helping clients optimise their sites for search engines, improve conversion rates or predicting the spread of flu within a region. We work both online and off with a clients as diverse as the government through to high street stores to online businesses. Venture Skills will no doubt continue to brand itself as an Information Architecture firm we believe ultimately that is what we do, but we shall put a renewed emphasis of the IR and data analysis side of what we do. In part to help this we plan on introducing a new website though we will not be including a blog the current Venture Skills blog will remain live but not be updated after this week. The new site will introduce what we do and why hopefully will answer the age old question what exactly is "stuff" I'm sure we as a company will put some sort of press release like thing out as unlike certain organisations this is my personal blog and not a mouth piece for Venture Skills so until its announced officially this is just here say.

What is to become of timnash.co.uk?

It will evolve the SEO course, Q&A section will be taken down, the front page will no doubt have newer text and I am slowly introducing new ideas (such as the additional post notes which are in the side bar, you can see them being used in this article) to be honest the content probably won't change to much. Recently I have been discussing profiling, metrics and analytics more then SEO and this will continue with my goal to make these more accessible and hopefully open peoples eyes to this fascinating aspect of data analysis. I will also be introducing some more programming and examples (even if I have to fake the data to protect clients privacy) what this blog will not become is a "how to make money online" blog tried that it's boring! Occasional articles on how I have improved conversions on one of my own sites maybe but I'm not going down the internet marketing guru route.

Will you be offering SEO consulting services?

Nope timnash.co.uk will not offer dedicated SEO services, all the courses,Q&A pages will be removed though I will be introducing a "have Tim in the office for a day" option for companies that need a total boost and change of perspective. The idea comes from the original idea for Venture Skills, rather then money introducing Skills into a business and while the company never went down that route it's something I have always thought was worth exploring. I still have to think about how best to implement the idea but more to come soon.

Will the new timnash.co.uk feature the old picture what about old features oh and the mannequins?

No to the photo since I have gone through age regression I feel no shame in updating the photo with the younger, beardless, hairless person I have um become In addition I have a few new idea, including a calendar I promise to keep up to date with which events I will be at and what I'm doing maybe even before I go to them! Finally while I will be updating the look the mannequins will be staying and may even become more prominent if anyone has any 3d skills and once to help me create some more then get in touch!

Tim Nash you said SEOs are crap I hate you!

cool, bye!
I no doubt I will loose a couple of subscribers but lets face it I have never been in the cool club, I was always the person you came to when everyone else had said they had no idea best go and ask the geeky ones in the corner. So if you feel where I'm taking the blog and hopefully you is not somewhere you want to come then farewell, I hope you found the previous posts useful and will still pop by occasionally. I doubt the move will bring in new subscribers going from a niche to a tiny niche but hey if I wanted subscribers I would write top 10 lists!

I don't want this post to be overly negative or personal within the "SEO Industry" I have made some great friends and while my opinion of the industry is harsh that doesn't mean I think any less of those people nor does it mean I have had a bad time I have enjoyed debating, testing and sometimes arguing with people and for that reason I want to say:

So long SEOs and thanks for all the fish!

For those still wanting to carry on this journey then you can always subscribe to the RSS feed and you can find me on Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter
Please note: if I don't know you I'm not likely to accept a friend invite on Facebook and if I do and your attached as a limited profile don't get to upset so are most people

This article is the opinion of Tim Nash not Venture Skills see footer for details

Passive Profiling

From the moment a visitor enters a site a wealth of information is provided by them including hopefully where they have come from, their browser, their physical location (of their ISP at least), their language all of this can and is faked by a small minority but for the vast majority this information can be treated as reasonably accurate. Even with this limited information we can make educated guesses about a user for example we can guess if the user is at work or not.

Once the visitor starts to interact with the site we gain even more information for example once a suitable number of clicks have been recorded we can start to use behavioral models to attempt to estimate gender and age See Post notes for details. Return visitors provide even more information how do they return direct or through the original referrer? All of this builds up a picture which helps to determine how to present the site to the visitor and change them from a visitor to a “user” but this sort of profiling requires the user to stay on the site long enough to profile the visitor. 10 clicks may not sound much but that could easily be a completed transaction or a lost sale before passive profiling has had a chance to determine the best route for the visitor.See Post notes for details

Active Profiling

Active profiling in this context is confronting the visitor into a decision making process rather then allowing them to wander around the site on their own. This sort of profiling is not without risk people baulk at being told what to do and especially when a site does not operate in preconceived boundaries of how a site should behave. For many people the website asking questions just isn't cricket!

The key to active profiling it to force the user into making a decision which can then be profiled this is usually done by removing navigations or hiding content behind some sort of form. By giving the user no real choice (other then to bail) but to tell us something we can then use to show them the next step in our profiling. Let's take a really simple example if I am selling software I may want to identify larger corporate customers from small businesses I therefore present visitors with a screen with two options one for small businesses and one for corporate customers. Each leads to a different landing page selling the same software but highlighting different features of the software simple and pretty un-invasive we are adding a step between getting the information and this will increase the number of exits at that point but if those that stay convert higher percentage it's worth losing a few visitors to gain the information needed to improve conversions.

Pros of Active Profiling

• Gather information that you just couldn't gather through other means
• Confirm information gathered through passive profiling
• Can be introduced directly into visitors funneling process
• Much quicker and more reliable data then passive profiling

Cons of Active Profiling

• Higher bounce and exit rates
• Can cause confusion to visitors

The best method is of course to combine the two methods to gather as much information as possible while keeping the active profiling limited and filling only vital gaps.

Landing Pages - Case Study

Lets take an example of a site selling laptops to households it's target demographic is 18-30yrs olds in the UK.

On arrival to the site notices the top of the site has a loading icon in reality the site is well optimised however the site is generating the new arrivals profile to put them initially into one of 6 groups. Male/Female/Neutral UK/Not UK to do this the page is pulling the IP address to confirm country if not able to identify assume not UK, and using css history to determine gender (if this fails pesky firefox user! Then gender neutral)

Once the initial profiling is generated the assets are loaded a “British male” is presented with a female “Kirsty” , “British female” would get “Craig” while other would get “Barry” each have certain charms designed to entice and more importantly distract the visitor similar but more generic characters appear for the other 3. These characters then ask a question with four choices (this is our active profiling) Once loaded the characters have a hover element track on them to help determine how distracting the characters are being so that on future pages they can be brought to the fold or are pushed back into the background. The only two pages where the visitor is not determining the character position (though of course the visitor has no idea they are or it would ruin the effect) are this initial page and the last checkout page where they are always at the front almost egging the user on.

Once the user has “answered” the characters question they are further subdivided into groups from this point the wording, colours and location of buttons are determined by the profile they are in. In effect it determines if “Kirsty” talks tech to you or blue is your colour!

This sort of segmentation is highly effective if you already have a tight demographic you are targeting.

Preventing Comment Spam and Payment Fraud – Case Study

Something we have been working on for a little while is the way to identify users that are most likely to be spammers prior to them actually leaving the comment rather then just relying on identifying the comment as spam. For truly automated spam this is pretty easy to do, for human spammers (those people being paid through systems like amazon turk to leave comments) it's a little harder to identify but not much. By using a first past post point scoring system so no one issue will cause the visitor to be considered a problem you can build up a passive profile and compare it to a typical spammer who will have a specific click pattern, hover over search words and many using blocks of known IP, or indeed from a certain country in some blog cases. Once the passive profile has been matched the active profiling is engaged and forces the user into a simple question “Are you a spammer?” ok so not quite however when the visitor makes a comment rather then an immediate submission the user is presented with a logic puzzle or simply a question this is not to prove they are human as we actually know that already! But to see if they have engaged with the site or the post. If they pass through this active profiling then the normal spam prevention kicks in, if they don't then they can be subjected to what ever torments the webmaster has in store for them (a java applet is always cruel).

Similar techniques can be used to identify potential fraudulent transactions where users passive profiling might indicate their behavior is “suspicious” the active aspect would be used to reiterate part of the transaction process.

Over using Active Profiling

This post was inspired when my friend Andy Beard pointed me to a marketing tool which uses active profiling (though being marketers they added 400 additional buzz words) via a quiz to generate sales pages in what you could consider to be traditional quizes. When he initially pointed me to the program I was presented with a quiz asking quite leading and obvious questions before I could “see the video” after the second question I simply started randomly clicking until it went away it was only then did I realise the thing that was irritating and annoying was in fact what Andy wanted to show me!

So why did it fail? Well over use of active profiling results in “oh get out of the way” mentality where the user blindly clicks or feeds false information to just get rid or past the profiling system. This is a triple disaster you not only haven't gathered useless information, you don't know you have gathered duff information (unless you are confirming passive profiling and are double checking for errors) and you have an upset visitor more likely to bail. The solution is to use active profiling sparingly and only as part of a funnel sales process.

Do you use any of these techniques? If so have they helped?
If you have found this article interesting you might also like to take a look at my recent introduction to this type of user profiling.

On the 3rd and 4th of October to be precise!

Myself and Dom "The Hodge" Hodgson are planning on inviting you to the first HackNorth, we have managed to convince the guys at AQL to lend us an amazing building for a weekend and we along with a team of volunteers will be on hand supplying food, drink and generally preventing total anarchy. For those unfamiliar with a hack day they are a 24 hour code/design marathon you turn up, team up and build something for the betterment of mankind or to make drinking beer that bit more fun your choice! Prices will be awarded in a range of categories by the judging panel of our "experts".

Why run HackNorth?

Dom and I have been planning to run a hack event for sometime and while both of us have organised marshalled events (Bar camps, rock concerts, conferences) this will be the first time either of us has taken on a 24 hour event with such a large number of people it will no doubt stress us both out, potentially ruin our friendship all so you guys can have the best time possible. Oh did I mention it's a free event

HackNorth Registration?

so get yourself over to the site and sign up to the mailing list to be notified of when tickets become available.

You can also follow myself, Dom and HackNorth on twitter should you feel so inclined.

What is SENSE Tim?

glad you asked SENSE is the uk largest deaf blind charity (note no and) it's dedicated to people who are both deaf and blind normally from birth it is an amazing charity and the work they do is vital to help give some hope to people who live in utter isolation caused by their own bodies. If you want to know more about what SENSE does I really suggest you check out their website sense.org.uk

So back to my day while I appreciate her enthusiasm her timing sucked so I cut her short and said very bluntly what's the website address.

She looked blankly and said well Google SENSE but I think it's .com (it's not it's sense.org.uk) anyway I dashed off but made a mental note to visit the site which I duly did while sitting on my train it's pretty terrible and so I spent some time making notes which I will send them though I doubt anything will be implemented but the whole incident got me thinking.

How do you record an off-line campaign accurately?

The simplest and most obvious route is when handing out information use a separate domain name for all offline promotional info that redirects to your main site. It's cheap to implement and assuming it's just a top level domain name change not going to cause to much confusion. you see larger companies do this on TV adverts normally with the .tv version of their trading name. However lumping all the traffic from your campaign really doesn't help you from an analytics side it also makes working out what promotion is working harder particularly as off line campaigns can have long lag times mail shots going astray for 5 weeks that old poster being seen in the railway station a year after it was put up. Getting any more detailed information and we are going to have to start going beyond domain names.

The problem is simple the longer the url the more typing the person needs to do the less likely they are to complete the whole url but give up and either go to the domain root or worse Google it. Yet to give each campaign a new domain would seem impractical for most businesses and a management nightmare.

Shorturl vs domain name

we are all familiar with the idea of using shorturls for social media campaigns where we are limited to a set number of characters but would they be usable for our offline campaigns.

Pros - Short equal less characters, hopefully means less likely to abandon type-in
cons - Any domain recognition goes out of the window, often short urls will use strange domain extensions and might prove hard to type in.

So the question is a potential customer more likely to type in:
www.mydomain.com/mytrackingurliscool or sen.se/wrt4

Well this afternoon I managed to convince a client to test it, here is the proposed plan.

3 separate mail shots each will include a unique shorturl for that mail shot (indeed we could go to that mail/poster etc) the shorturl domain is purchased and is 7 characters long including the dot. The domain root logs visit and redirects to the main site, the unique urls act like any normal domain shortner.

To test we will be split testing against long url equivalents though with an extra /m appended to the end for tracking purposes.

I will let you know the results but what do you think is this a good idea have you used such tactics? oh and if you happen to know anyone who was canvassing for SENSE in Sheffield today point them at this post and to the nice blonde lass I'm sorry if I was rude to you but I hope I have made up for it.

Well now I have the solution I have developed an Age regression therapy, a simple clean method of returning you to the age you should be.

No Chemicals, No Pills, No fuss

For just a few dollars I will show you how you can take 10 no 20 year of your current age don't believe me here is the proof...

Still not convinced here are just some of the things people have said about this amazing therapy results...

you look the same as you were at school Old School Friend

you look like a 12 year old that has just had his favourite toy confiscated. Al Carlton - Self Made Minds

The secrets of my amazing transformation are yours for just $200 yes $200!

ok so maybe not, this is after all not an april fools though you are welcome to donate as little or as much as you want to the Dyslexia Research Trust via my Just giving page.

For those who have not heard I went through with the chop yesterday, flu ridden I might add (so to the really nice hairdresser both apologises for not talking much and congrats on your award! and sorry for next week when my flu hits you) I just want to thank everyone including Caius, Karyn, Sean, Chris, Gary, Simon, Gaj, Melanie, Scott, Joanna, Al, James, Jack (you need a blog mate ) and to all the people without websites or who provided support and ridicule thank you all on the day £230 was raised but the page is still open if you want to donate.

The final thanks go to the two people who caused it to happen, you know who you are and bah boo sucks to you!

oh and I almost forgot -> The best conference organisers in the world <- yes Hodge thank you to and I can't wait for the results of Bar Camp Bournemouth for revenge

The donation page is up till september so please feel free to donate now!

Update: Thanks Dave!
Update 2: Dom went and had his head shaved! Not only that but in true web spirit it was a crowdsourced Haircut

Dear dave naylor acoylites like in most things Dave is a little behind I had the haircut on 31/3 to avoid april fools sadly some people did not notice - to see the new look try taking my Age regression therapy oh and if you click on the right hand side under advanced SEO their is some actually useful SEO content for you!

I have had long hair for nearly 10 years its very much part of my identity but recently friends have started to criticise the look I won't repeat what one friend said she wasn't being flattering but ultimately it takes a comment of "I bet you would never cut your hair even for charity" to inspire me to take the plunge.

After discussing the idea with friends the response was hahahhahahaha (thanks hodge, and an even bigger thanks for being the first donator!), horror, disbelief and from a friend who is a social media consultant "cool that will make great linkbait" which is not a normal reaction!

Therefore before I chicken out on the 31st of March I will (the barber will) be chopping of my long hair however this will only happen if you guys pull out your cheque books and credit cards and give generously to my chosen charity The Dyslexia Research Trust.

How to sponsor the chopping of the hair?

I'm using the webservice "Just Giving" to manage all the donations, basically they handle all the money and make sure the charity receive as much money as possible as quickly as possible Just click the link and then the "donate now" button! If your in the UK and in employment please tick the gift aid option so no fees are taken out of your donation!

Why the Dyslexia Research Trust?

I make no secret of my dyslexia, and while I find it annoying to be labelled as dyslexic it is a part of me for both good and ill. Even today we as a community do not know enough about what the causes, the changes and best methods to cope with the limitations dyslexia causes. Because the issues surround dislexia are considered minor and because it has been treated as a buzz word many people now think of dyslexia as a trendy phrase for lazy.

If you have ever sat in a room crying because you can't read from the book in front of you because the individual letters are shaking so badly and words literally "wander" off the page you might feel differently, the frustration at having ideas but with no way to express them on paper and to be labelled a failure or worse shown sympathy rather then help and told its ok your "special". These are some of the problems I have had to face and I was lucky, I had a support network and people willing to come up with ideas and new ways to teach me to adapt to me and my needs. Most kids still are thrown into a system that doesn't provide the level of support I got or even close.

The Dyslexia Research Trust, provides educational resources, support and financing into dyslexia research and helps promote the issues surround dyslexia to psychologist, journalists and parents.

More importantly it brings together cutting edge research into dyslexia both in terms of looking at cause but also looking at how it effects people both good and bad.

So guys and girls 31st of March the hair goes, please give generously, oh and if you have a website and you donate please include the website address in the comment section on the Just giving site so I can send you some link love.

http://www.justgiving.com/losethehair
Please note Just giving will take paypal contributions straight away, don't worry I have two strong armed friends to escort me on the day you will get your money worth!

The kind soul that is DaveN was kind enough to point to a flaw in my plan, if you are going to put a search for "that bloke in a white coat" be bright enough to actually make sure you rank for it and not well Dave still we live and learn.

The standard of talks has been fantastic so far, from Chainsaw wielding usability guys through to Patrick, and Dave. Tom from Distilled did one of the best jobs in explaining the basics of reputation management in a long time even if he did perhaps assume we all have a google engineer on speed dial.

I will start getting links together for both my stuff and links to everyone else probably tomorrow while waiting for Al Carlton to recover from his hangover!

I also worry conference organisers, I can turn up and just give a slightly boring and complex presentation with questions and answer sessions, these are normally popular but over run as I tend to want to engage and answer questions mid presentation.

The alternate is I go the whole way total mad presenter, Think Visibility is on Saturday (there is still time to sponsor and get a ticket) guess which way I'm going?

Dom - erm probably not

Tim - I shall bring my own should I shall assume they won't have a safety guard either?

Dom - urgh um (why?)

Tim - it's a visual demonstration of a successful linkbait campaign on link juice some food colouring, caustic soda, magnsium filings and a small amount of water

Dom - ....and you were on first? so you were gonna cover my floor in colouring
and audience?

Tim - not the floor thats what I wanted the sheet for! Fear not I will be wearing a white coat and safety goggles no health and safety issues at all.

Dom - ...this must be what a heart attack feels like

So Saturday Leeds 9am Old Broadcasting House the risk of death has been decreased substantially the chance of you having a fantastic day with some of the great speakers and guests is still just as high, if your in Leeds Friday/Saturday night come find us as we sombrely discuss SEO and affiliate marketing.

Her Majesties Privacy document

The British Monarchy web site, with the exception of the subscription system, does not store or capture personal information, but merely logs the user's IP address, which is automatically recognised by the web server.

We do not use cookies for collecting user information, and will not collect any information about you except that required for system administration of our web server.

http://www.royal.gov.uk/Contactus/Aboutthissite.aspx

While the above is technically true it is let down by


< script src='../TemplateAssets/GoogleAnalytics1.js' language='javascript' type='text/javascript'>< /script>


Queens SEO

Patrick from blogstorm who also was wandering through the Queens source code noticed the amusing use of meta tags.

< meta name="keyword" content="Queen" />

The single keyword per tag is down to the ASP content management system they are using, actually it seems to do several odd things but at least no SQL errors (unlike the assumed developers site)

Talking of which I did think the web development company (I assume that's the connection) leaving in their URL was a nice touch

< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:Abseil="http://www.coraider.co.uk">


Staying on the SEO front, no h1 or 2 tags, and the h3 tags are nicely keyword rich with headings such as "Quick Links" and "Latest Videos" at least most images had an alt tag though no title tags on either images or links.

Royal duplicate content - yes I'm sure you are not surprised that the site itself is an indexed mess, most articles have at least 3 versions (ignoring the welsh and Gaelic language versions) with no order or priority in terms of indexing so some articles the text only version is showing, others the full content. The URL structure is also confused with some pages appearing as

www.royal.gov.uk/output/Page5140.asp

while others are:

www.royal.gov.uk/OutPut/Page6369.asp

Camel casing on a non unix server is not a disaster but if you have a url structure stick with one, but fear not because the new site has done away with these and now use categorised urls...

Only they are not indexed and the old ones, you guessed it 404s

Anything else? I really only spent a few minutes, to be fair the site is no where near as bad as most government websites but still a total fail. When making high profile launches your site will be picked at but sometimes it pays to actually check for the little things.

Update: Even the telegraph is having a dig six points for Search engine optimisation for the queen let's hope Queen Elizabeth trusted website team corrects some of their faults.

One final thing and its not SEO or privacy based, why when I look at the site do I think it looks like an old Nuke site?