Domain Names Important For SEO?

If there wasn’t any further proof that domain names have a major impact on rankings, check this out:

Look! No optimised title or relevant description tag.

Posted in Google, SEO Blog News, Search | 1 Comment »

Torrents Flooded With Malware?

Everyone with some reasonable computer knowledge has downloaded torrent files before. Rocket science it ain’t! One thing that was noticed when trying to download films was that when a user activated the .avi file a message came up saying that this movie clip had to be viewed by a certain program. “Download program here” the page announced! Now the lure of seeing the latest movie isn’t that strong with me and it certainly isn’t strong enough for me to trust some weird HTML page telling me to download a dodgy viewer program I have never heard of. But unfortunately it is for some, in fact, 530,000 computers according McAfee, the security company which says that the number of computers infected with Trojan viruses. These viruses are not malicious as in stealing data. They simply serve advertising. Could there be more than meets the eye here?

According to the Guardian, last year Media Defender was exposed as deliberately placing thousands of dummy media files into the path unsuspecting downloaders. They did this on the instruction of the big media corporations. This of course, simply changed the way Torrent sites operated with many now putting a ratings system on files so users can give the thumbs up or down (also can be manipulated though it’s something of a fight back). Hmm, dummy files and now possibly virus hit files?

Big Companies can take even more drastic measures. The MPAA(Motion Picture Association of America) recently successfully sued TorrentSpy for $110m on grounds of Copyright infringement. They are now actively targeting Pirate Bay now for $15m of lost revenue. The Torrent Spy case has effectively opened the door for companies to go after Torrent portals. I predict that a few of these sites will eventually disappear but the internet is a big place and there’s always somewhere to hide in most cases.

Now, lets look at this in a different way. Despite, companies crying foul of Peer-to-Peer torrent wares destroying their businesses, we still have of plenty of success stories. The latest Grand Theft Auto game generated a staggering £255 million sales worldwide and the latest Iron man movie took $98m worth of ticket sales over three days. This isn’t pocket money for the big companies. At the end of the day, if the product is good, we’ll want to see it, play it, listen to it. However, the torrent sites are only the tip of a big iceberg. The big corporates will always have tricks up their sleeves but Torrents are here to stay.

Posted in My Web World, SEO Blog News | No Comments »

Searching Semantics

Semantic search has been the focal point of some intense blogging and opinion of late. What is semantic search? Essentially, it disseminates meaning of words and their context within the text to determine whether it is relevant to the search query or not. This is different from the approach given by Google which uses link authority to determine higher ranks.

As widely reported in the tech media in March, Yahoo has begun adopting some of the key aspects of semantic search into their engine: . Amit Kumar explained the shift in the Yahoo! Blog: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000527.html. Through supporting microformats and a variety of web standard friendly practices, Yahoo! Search intends to to use this to increase the quality of information given to the user. An interesting note which I noticed was that fact that Yahoo! will embrace the Dublin Core initiative which has been discounted by myself as just code padding and superfluous to the crawl process given that the HTML meta tagging are already well established. I could be wrong there but now that Yahoo! Search has been opened for third party development anything is possible to improve its search services. Before we know it, the ability to tag and label content on a page will be widespread and will have to factored in on any optimisation process.

Google has recently been noted to have improved their own semantic search routines with stemming (e.g. run vs runners vs running) becoming more sophisticated. Also, recently Google group members noticed that synonyms (e.g sprinter) are now capable of ranking for sites. These observations bode well for the future of semantic search but will Google ever dump its PageRank formula? Unlikely given that PR has been a lynchpin of Google since day 1. Certainly we’ll expect the handling of semantic search to get much better over time

Posted in Google, Search, Web 3.0, Yahoo! Search | No Comments »

Thread Baiting: Going for the Forums

Remember days before social networking as we know it today. Well, forums are still very much alive a well and us SEO marketers still find them a source for our information and amusement. But fourms by nature must evolve and although the basic premise of a forum has not changed, it’s governing rules certainly have. The typical forum owner is well aware of flaming but also spamming. Any whiff of porn or commercial linking with no intention of furthering the conversation thread, then in comes the moderator and the post is gone within the next ten minutes. It certainly isn’t an outright tool for SEO link building. It is certainly rare to see forum posts ranking highly

However, there are a few tricks which a modern SEO-er can employ to get the most out of forum linking. Take for instance a great site called money saving expert set up by Martin Lewis back in 2004. He’s managed to build a very authoritative and quality website helping people manage their finances better. Over the past few years studying client’s analytics I have noticed significant spikes in traffic to their websites which can be cultivated just by having a link on money saving expert forum. These links come through totally legitimate reasons ie. people wanting to talk about latest ads or products they have seen. However, a forum like this would probably see spam coming a mile away. I have devised a way to approach forums:

Thread Baiting

Firstly take your website (or whatever) and take careful consideration about related themes. For example; a competition about how many keepy-uppys (football term) you can do in a minute. This competition is organised by a famous brand. The direct approach for a link would kill off any interest and alert moderators to spam. I’ve seen the direct approach crash and burn time after time. In this instance, firstly, I would go and post a link to a YouTube video of a professional footballer performing this skill. I would go in the forum and post the youtube link and say how fantastic it is. This should start the ball rolling so to speak.

Posters take up the thread and then respond. It doesn’t matter if they say the Youtube vid you posted is good or bad. Although, I’ll have to say mildly negative is better as you can go back in with another YouTube video. Don’t worry at this stage, just keep the thread growing.

The point where you have to move in is a tactical one. You don’t want to kill the conversation and you don’t want to reveal your purpose too late when everyone has gone. When the time comes, go in with your sales pitch although never, never ever sound formal. A forum is like an informal chatroom. Play innocent and always sound upbeat. At the end of the day you’ll have a popular thread and people clicking on your link. Lovely traffic into your intended website.

Posted in Link Building, Online Brand Reputation Management, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimisation | 1 Comment »

Social Media Optimisation – One Man’s Journey

There’s an excellent article about social media marketing here written by young Tibi Puiu which outlines all of the basics in regard to this new online phenomenon.

My first experience of the Web 2.0 version of it was I came across Del.ici.ous during its infancy in 200. To be honest, I didn’t know what to make of it. I was then getting to grips with SEO and did not know where this website could fit in to my tasks. It certainly couldn’t improve my SEO directly and I was left stumped on who precisely would want to occupy their time on this site. It was until the phrase: social media marketing was first coined to me in an article in 2007 when I realised its significance as a powerful tool to draw in traffic. I immediately sort out MySpace and then Facebook. Signing on these services was easy enough but the main process of setting up a profile and then contacting people was where the attraction was.

All of a sudden, I was contacting friends about what I’m up to and joining groups and discussions about my favourite bands. My personal MySpace profile became my place to express my devotion to my football team. That then branched off into a full blown blog which I now actively write news and optimise today.

Nowadays, there are approximately over 200 different SMO applications available online ! That’s a staggering amount of personal comments, blogs, news, reviews and everything. The term Social in Social Media certainly lives up to its name.

Posted in Social Bookmarking, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimisation, Social Networking | No Comments »

Taking On Link Building Campaigns

Link building is a laborious, slow and sometimes painful task of contacting webmasters and bloggers for that elusive link back. However, it’s not as easy as it seems as many people are looking at your website and thinking: “What’s in it for my users and my website?”. Many people have suggested ways of approaching linkbacks. Jai Nischal Verma suggested the ten commandments of link building:-

1. Link Exchange
2. Social Bookmarking Websites
3. Link Baiting
4. Web Directory Submissions
5. Article Submissions
6. Press Releases
7. Blog Commenting
8. Forum Posts
9. Link Programs
10. Creating Contests

If we examine the list , I’ll be critical of Link exhanges as we well know reciprocal linking is not beneficial for your SEO. It can bring traffic but won’t bring the desired boost needed. Blog commenting only works for some that do not implement the no follow tag and forum posting also has its drawbacks. It’s not a list that could be easily implemented as a solution for all websites.

Depending on your website theme, the ten commandments of link building is helpful but should only be followed in part. For example, I have a client that specializes in parking solutions(!). I would certainly have a problem going about blog commenting or social book marking into the website without usable content which would excite a reader!

Let’s have a look at Google’s own take on Links:

1. Avoid Me-too or irrelevant content that gives users no reason to visit your site.
2. Avoid broken links and incorrect HTML.
3. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)
4. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
5. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines.
6. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
7. Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.
8. Avoid valueless links from unrelated websites
9. Avoid links from low PageRank pages with many outgoing links
10. Avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web.

The most interesting point is #9 which states that people should avoid links from pages with low page rank with many external links. Obviously this is referring possibly to the practice of link farming. However, it is interesting that Google emphasizes its own PageRank measurements as a yardstick to a good or bad site. It is still a controversial point amongst SEO but I have taken more notice of PR of late ever since Google began dropping sites which engaged in Pay per linking. Not to say I’m completely won over by the whole PR argument but I do take notice of it when sourcing potential websites. The main thing I look for over and over again is the quality of the website (authority), how recently it was updated and of course, theme relevancy.

Posted in Link Building | No Comments »

Directories – A Forgotten SEO Technique

I was recently posed a question regarding directories and their usefulness in today’s SEO armoury. Directories unfortunately belongs in the past now although I still find that there are a very select few which work on non competitive terms. I did a few directory submits for a client recently and they did rank on that term but to be honest it was unsustainable as they had not implemented my on-page recommendations.

As far as I know, you can’t get banned from having many directory links however, I’d always be careful with submitting directory links by bulk. The trick is to stagger submissions so not to arouse suspicions of unnatural linking from the search engines.

Someone mentioned to me that a competitor has many links from directories and still rank well. Obviously, link popularity isn’t fully maintained on backlink numbers alone. Check if they don’t have backlinks from authoritative sites as well. Look at PR, Domain age and relevance as usual. Also, check if they are listed on DMOZ (Despite some of DMOZ’s shortfalls). Many directories are weird these days as you have to be aware of the nofollow tag or if they javascript redirect to website. These two methods are worthless to your website. I also rarely find myself paying for directory listings either.

Posted in Link Building, SEO Blog News | No Comments »

Google Lets Slip On Social Bookmarking Rules

Interesting article today published here about Google’s attempts to curb rampant social bookmarking activity to a particular site or page. Wary of bookmarking spam, Google intends to penalise any detection of ‘un-natural linking activity’ it sees from two of the major social bookmarking sites being Digg and StumbleUpon.

Google’s spokesman, Jeff Waltz says…

“We are working on strategies to level the playing field, effectively bringing back natural search patterns enjoyed in the pre-social bookmarking days. For webmasters who use social media responsibly, this is nothing to worry about – we will be targetting mainly a small minority of prolific bookmarkers with a new algorithm that looks at linking patterns over time.

Webmasters who rely heavily on bookmarking their own sites to gain traffic will likely see a drop in pagerank before the end of 2008, and we will be working closely with two major social bookmarking sites to find a solution that will have no detremental effect on the average internet user.”

The original article appeared on Google Blog but was later taken off but the cat is out of the bag and will be implemented soon. How Google will be able to recongise the difference between a story which generate rapid buzz and a spammer is anyones guess but Google obviously sees social bookmarking as a threat to its service.

Posted in Google, Social Bookmarking | 2 Comments »

Searchme – A Visual Approach to Search

A new search engine is about to appear with a difference. Echoing much of the same interface as the Apple iPhone, Searchme uses a slide navigation showing you the homepage of each website found. The video link below better demonstrates its technical flair. Of course, I can speculate that this search engine still takes it’s cues from keywords placed in the code and body text but this snazzy new approach to search may catch on to an increasingly savvy web audience.

Posted in SEO Blog News | No Comments »