Hopefully next year I’ll be in Ireland to attend the 2010 awards.

Want to read more?

1. Realex Irish Web Awards 2009
2. Golden Spider Awards – The Results
3. Irish Web Awards – Nominate Now

If you’re not Irish, and your nation ever gets itself into the same sort of mess Ireland now has on its hands it may still be a useful read…

Via Damien.

Want to read more?

1. Search Marketing World 2007, ShareIT Cork, and A Few Other Pieces of Irish SEO News
2. Irish Road Safety

Want to read more?

1. How to lose half your subscribers in 15 minutes…
2. Euro Business Guide Spam and Scam Warning
3. Bad Technology Day

Want to read more?

1. Merry Christmas
2. St. Patrick’s Day Fun – Yahoo! Calls Irish Politicians ‘Snakes’
3. Merry Christmas

I’m sure this will come as a fantastic validation of the new site, and all the hard development work that must have gone into creating the new online home of the paper.

Just a real shame I couldn’t attend on the night, but from all reports it was a fantastic spectacle for the attendees and winners. And of course it’s all down to one person – well done Damien on returning some credibility to the Irish website awards scene.

Want to read more?

1. Irish Web Awards (and hello Maryrose!)
2. Well Done Kildare Street
3. Well Done Blacknight

But First…

While at CreativeCamp in Belfast a few weeks back I got talking to Maryrose from Brightspark. She mentioned that she’s sick of seeing the title of my VHI post in her reader, so I thought I’d personalise this post to say hi! (the downside being that if I keep my current post frequency poor old Maryrose will see me saying hello for God-knows-how-long).

BTW Maryrose, a quick SEO tip – you should lose that META refresh on www.brightspark-consulting.com/latest_blog.htm as Google is still indexing the wrong page for your blog

Back to The Awards

This year sees the inaugural Irish Web Awards. Organised by Damien ‘Dynamo’ Mulley, the Awards are going to be a fresh take on the until-recently stale awards scene. And given that my friends over at the Golden Spiders are a bunch of spammers*, I’m doubly delighted that Damien is taking on the big-boys with what be inevitably be a far more transparent and credible awards for Irish web properties.

(*While the folks over and Business & Finance might have had the wherewithall to avoid spamming me at Red Cardinal, they managed to spam me at another email address they had on record from some years back. Of course I hadn’t signed up for GS drops, or any other drops from Business & Finance for that matter…)

Best Online Publication – Sponsored by Red Cardinal

I was thrilled to sponsor a category for the awards, and duly convinced Damien to put my company name next to the Best Online Publication category. Today the shortlist for the category was announced, and the following sites made it through the initial round to the final shortlist:

• The Clare People
• The Belfast Telegraph
• The Irish Independent
• Silicon Republic
• The Irish Times

I took part in the initial judging, although I did not judge any of the sites in this category’s shortlist. The judging criteria was well thought out, and I have to say that Damien is doing a fantastic job in pulling together an awards event that truly is underpinned by merit rather than vested interests.

Supporting the Irish Web Awards

If you can support the Irish Web Awards I strongly urge you to do so – given that the Golden Spiders have been shown to have little or no credibility left it really is important to build a strong foundation upon which to promote innovation in the Irish web industry. While the IIA does a great job to recognise individuals with the Net Visionary Awards, I think we really need to recognise web innovation in general. I think the Irish Web Awards are taking a brave step in this direction.

Come along if you can

The Awards take place on October 11 2008 in the funky Radisson SAS Royal Hotel in Golden Lane (that’s just off George’s Street). Register here now and you can hang out with the bright and brilliant of Ireland’s web scene at the inaugural Irish Web Awards. Tickets costs €30, and you wont feel all stuffy as it’s definitely not black tie.

Finally… For 2 Free Tickets…

As a sponsor I was given 2 golden tickets to the event. Unfortunately I’ll be out of the country, so I’d like to offer those tickets to anyone who cares to tell me below which of the five sites shortlisted for the Best Online Publication they think should win the category and why. I’ll pick a winner shortly after getting a few comments.

Best of luck to all sites nominated this year, and I look forward to hearing how well things go on the night.

Want to read more?

1. Best Online Publication – The Irish Times
2. Realex Irish Web Awards 2009
3. Best Blog of a Business – Irish Blog Awards 2009

Hi Richard

We’re trying to promote the 2008 Seedcorn competition using the web this year in order to spread the word even further and I wonder would you like to help us out.

The Seedcorn competition is now in its 6th year and has a cash prize fund of €280,000 which is awarded to the best 9 start up companies on the island. Through the competition we are trying to re-create the investment process so we are looking for companies with the best investment potential. The competition is ideally suited to high tech high growth potential companies. For more information visit www.seedcorncompetition.com

What we’re looking for is for bloggers to mention the competition to their readers (if you think it might be useful to your readers of course) and point them to the Seedcorn website and perhaps encourage their readers to tell people who might think the competition is worth entering. We’re not looking for better Google rankings just people to come along to the website and read about the competition so “no follow” the links away! Maybe it’ll be because of you that someone finds the competition and wins it!

If you wanted to go much further (but you don’t have to) maybe you could put a small button on the side of your blog so visitors can see it and click on it? I’ve taken the liberty of attaching one just in case.

If you know of any people or companies that you think fit our criteria, please pass on the word to them too, we want the competition to reach as many people as possible so we can highlight the great talent we have across the island of Ireland.

Thanks for taking time out to read this email. If you yourself want more information, please don’t hesitate to contact me or send others my way.

Kind regards,

Grá¡inne

Grá¡inne Lennon FCA
EquityNetwork
InterTradeIreland
The Old Gasworks Business Park
Kilmorey Street
Newry, Co. Down BT34 2DE
Northern Ireland

E-mail: [removed for privacy]
Web: www.intertradeireland.com
Tel: [removed for privacy]
Mobile: [removed for privacy]
Fax: [removed for privacy]

Now you have to hand it to Gráinne – I’m not sure if I’ve met Gráinne previously, but she’s come across in a very friendly way. She opens the email to me personally, introduces me with to-the-point content, and she stresses that the purpose of the request is not SEO (although this could indeed be counter-productive?).

I’ve been working with clients in highly competitive industries, and link building is one of the most difficult areas of SEO. The initial approach to any site owner can make or break your request for a link, and this mail is definitely worthy of consideration (and sure here I am blogging about it now!).

Just about every box is ticked for me:

• Personally addresses – TICK
• Useful content – TICK
• Contact email details – TICK
• Contact phone details – TICK
• Address details – TICK

If I were to fault the mail in any way, (and being who I am this post would barely be authentic if I didn’t) I’d say maybe look to see if you can compress the copy to just a quick paragraph or two. Then include more information (or perhaps the text of a PR) beneath your signature for anyone who needs more info.

Good work InterTrade Ireland, and worthy of a link to www.seedcorncompetition.com.

Want to read more?

1. Did Someone Say That Internet Scams Were Becoming More Sophisticated
2. SEO Spam From Cork
3. One More Reason For Damien To…

Vodafone.ei Homepage Broken?

At least I don’t feel so glum now

Want to read more?

1. Vodafone.ie – Problems With Robots META Tag

So just in case you’re one of my 4 RSS subscribers (no one actually visits here any more) here’s an update, in no particular order, on the madness that is my SEO life:

1. I’ll be speaking at the Search Marketing World 2008. Although you wouldn’t know it, I’m actually speaking on the Blogs and Search panel.
2. This Saturday, February 9, we’re having the first Webmaster and SEO Meetup. The venue is The Harbour Master in Dublin’s IFSC. Should be a great night, and I hope the turnout is going to be fantastic. Starting at around 7.30PM.
3. I can no longer crib about the Google Geo-Targeting Tool being out of order. It’s finally kicked in and the site now ranks well in every ‘pages from’ Google index it was registered for. Cool. Very Cool.
4. Considering the complete lack of activity on my blog I’m quite pleasantly stunned that I’ve been nominated in two categories for this year’s Blog Awards. I certainly don’t deserve either nomination, but thank you to whomever put me up.
5. And finally… you’re not a real blogger until someone threatens to sue you. So I’ve finally arrived. The letter arrived just this week. About bloody time – I cant let this guy have all the fun

If you can make it along this Saturday to the MeetUp please do – it’s going to be a great night. I’m looking forward to meeting all the folk who come along.

Want to read more?

1. A New Year, Some New Ideas, and My Time for Free!
2. Irish Blog Awards *cough* *cough*
3. Well Done Blacknight

Leverage Your Site Network

If you own more than one website it often makes sense to interlink your sites. You can share some traffic. You can also share some link juice and pass some relevance and/or theming signals. And with this in mind I’m going to take a (belated) look at Conor O’Neal’s site. [I'm a bit ashamed to say there are still a few sites I haven't gotten around to from my Blog Award review offer.]

But not his Argolon.com blog. Instead, and I hope he doesn’t mind, I’m going to write up a review of his LouderVoice site.

The Review Enabler

Conor is the creator of LouderVoice a Web2.0 Review platform that let’s users quickly and easily create and find user reviews.

I’ve really left this far too long, and given that we’re now on the verge of a new year in which I’m hoping to move into the split testing and multivariate testing world I’m going to split this post into two sections:

1. SEO Considerations, and
2. Messaging/Marketing Considerations.

1. SEO considerations

Loudervoice is a great example of building an application on WordPress. But WordPress generally needs a lot of tweaking to get things working smoothly from an SEO perspective.

Update: Conor let me know that Loudervoice is built on Turbogears. My bad. But the advice below still holds.

The main areas of concern I see are Duplicate Content and Pagerank Distribution.

Duplicate Content

If your site contains a large number of generic objects – in Conor’s case reviews – and you offer functionality which requires login, then very often you’re going to end up with vast amounts of duplicate content and Pagerank leakage.

Here’s the test review I created many moons ago:

Loudervoice review of Red Cardinal

On each Loudervoice review page there are a number of functions available:

Review functions – and major duplicate content

Like many membership sites, you must be logged in to use many functions. So you’re redirected to a login page when you click any of those links. The rating function actually contains 5 different unique URLs, so all in all there are 7 different URLs there that all land you on a login page. Why does this matter? Well, Google cant login, so for every review you end up 7 duplicate login pages all with unique URLs. Multiply that by each review… you get where I’m going.

Possible solutions are to block these URLs using robots.txt and/or NOFOLLOW the links. I’d do both personally, but due to the Pagerank distribution (more later) I’d definitely go for the NOFOLLOW in this instance.

Other things to watch for are URLs that sort/order different lists. For instance, when you look at a tag page you have the option to sort reviews by rating and date. These too can lead to dupe content issues, and you have to carefully consider how to address such issues.

IA and Site Architecture

I haven’t spoken to Conor about the goal of the site. I’m not sure if the priority is to get traffic to the Loudervoice site, but given the prominence of the search box I assume so. This is where architecture and Pagerank distribution can be so important in order to squeeze as much Search Engine traffic as possible.

In my view sites like this have to push as much link juice down to the primary pages – in this case either the review pages themselves, or the tag page those reviews belong to.

The more I look around the more I like the architecture. Actually, more correctly, the more I like the potential for a really good architecture. It’s just perfect for an internal linking strategy based on a slightly modified ‘Third Level Push’ (for a great run-down on this topic see Halfdeck’s post). The basic premise of third level push is that you push Pagerank down to your post pages and out on that tier, but not back up to either the adjacent category pages or the homepage. You do this by funnelling Pagerank.

Here’s what I’d do to spread the link love:

• On all tag pages I’d NOFOLLOW the tags in the right-hand column.
• I’d also NOFOLLOW the louderminis tags IF the tweets carry a link back to the tag page. I’d have to do a lot more investigation before doing this however.
• I’d do the same with the tags on the people pages.
• I’d NOFOLLOW all utility links (homepage, terms, about us etc.) and the login link on tag and people pages.
• I’d muck about with the links that are published on people’s blogs for rating each review. Could I get targeted anchor text into those links?
• Some cursory investigation shows that people tend to search for ‘[item] review’ or ‘[item] reviews’ rather than ‘review [item]‘. I’d think about that when it comes to page titles and some internal text.
• I’d also try to give some subtle hints to reviewers to use just the product name in the review title. Then automatically append ‘review’ to that.
• The homepage may need some serious surgery. Apart from the messaging (more in a minute) I think it’s important to have a well defined permanent path for spiders to take.

This last point might need some elaboration. I think that a good trick here might be to list the top tags rather than all tags up to ‘kitchen’. Then the related tags on each of the top tags pages will funnel Pagerank out. And adding the NOFOLLOWs as per above should mean that Pagerank channels directly to the review pages. Again some thought will hav to be put into this to ensure you don’t end up filling the less popular tags.

I have another wee suggestion regarding tags – give reviewers an auto-suggest as they type tags. Reason being that the more people use the same tags the more links will point at those tag pages, and from benefits will cascade down to the related review pages. (I’ve only used the system once many moons ago and cant remember how things work, so this might not be feasible.)

Final idea from the SEO perspective – add a robots.txt and exclude all that dupe content I mentioned earlier. You also need to NOFOLLOW many of those links, because as we recently found out even pages excluded via robotos.txt can accumulate Pagerank. Robots.txt is also a great way to funnel bots – the addition of a HTML sitemap might also help in this regard.

Messaging and Marketing Considerations

Okay, first off I think Loudervoice has to lose the Adsense. I know there is no other source of direct revenue, but nothing puts me off than such in your face Adsense blocks.

Second thing that strikes me is that I haven’t really a clue what the product is. The homepage needs to spell this out to me in about 2-5 seconds or I’m gone. Currently it’s just far too busy in my view. Content goes below the fold, and most worryingly the primary call-to-action is located below the fold. (I’d be interested to see the bounce rate on the homepage.)

Analysis of Loudervoice homepage

Now since I’m moving into conversion optimisation in just a few days it makes perfect sense to suggest that Conor redesigns his homepage completely and runs some split testing to see what difference this could make.

Personally I’d look at removing at least 60-70% of the copy and replacing with strong imagery. I’d pay a lot of attention to the call button. Also the header and sub heads. And I’d remove/relegate the post-it image and the tags from the right hand column.

But I wouldn’t rely too much on gut feelings here – I’d put everything to the test and let your visitors decide what works best. Afterall, they’re the reason the site is there.

Final Thoughts

I think Loudervoice is a great idea. I’d like to see the architecture come along and perhaps see more community features (which I didn’t discuss, but alerts and subscriptions come to mind). But perhaps most importantly I think the messaging could be greatly improved. Maybe the homepage shouldn’t try to explain in detail what Loudervoice is – get people to sign up and find out for themselves. Just an idea.

As a final parting gift, and to apologise for the loo..ong delay in getting to your site Conor, I’d be happy to help you set up the tests if you get someone to redesign a few homepage variations for you.

If anyone actually reads down to here I’d love to hear your views – leave a comment below.

Want to read more?

1. Review of My blog – test review
2. PageRank Flow, Comment Feeds in Supplementals, NoFollow & robots.txt – bifsniff.com
3. SEO For Thin Content Sites – Making A P h o t o B l o g More Visible

Want to read more?

1. Merry Christmas
2. Season’s Greetings to One and All

The Reds Hit Pubcon

Myself and Dave decided to hit the annual webmaster pilgrimage better know as PubCon. Staged in Las Vegas, the event is one of the best known SEO conferences with a speaker line-up that includes virtually every well-known name in the SEM industry.

Fabulous Las Vegas

Everything is big in the US. And boy oh boy, the Las Vegas Convention Center doesn’t let down on this count either. We had a good laugh walking through the cowboy convention the first morning. You’d never believe the cowboy products you can actually buy unless you saw it with your own eyes

The Highlights

A lot happened during the 4 days in Vegas, so best bet here is to cover some of my highlights:

• A lot of attention was being paid to link buying. Interesting that so many speakers fessed up to buying links. Matt Cutts scribbled away in his notebook throughout the Link Buying session. Speaking of links, met Jim Boykin and now understand how fruit figures in the SEO industry.
• Sat down with Mr. Patents Bill Slawski on a couple of occasions. Bill is one of the nicest and approachable people I’ve met during my travels online, and shooting the breeze with him for a couple of hours was pretty cool.
• Matt Cutts the blackhat. Lots of folk probably joked about this, but the fascinating part of watching him play werewolf was that the all-around nice guy can certainly play the game when needed. Interesting insight IMO.
• Meet the Engineers means 40 people circling Matt Cutts, and groups of lesser-know Googlers huddled together. Maybe next time you guys should wear Google t-shirts so folk can find you? On a further negative note – the geo-targeting tool within Webmaster Console is either slightly broken or very broken depending on which member of the Webmaster Tools team you corner (that deserves a post of its own). I better apologise about my Webmaster Group rants – hope none of you took it personally. On a positive note – had a great laugh with Jonathan Simon who is a real fun down-to-earth Googler.
• Domaining is seriously hot. Lots of quiet chat amongst SEOs about domaining. I noticed that searchengineoptimization.us sold for $2k at the live auction. Wonder how much the .mobi would fetch? Had a drink or four with Nick Wilsdon who has set up camp in Russia and seems to have many fingers in many pies. Very nice unassuming guy.
• Leave it to the Brits and Irish to prop up the bar late at night! We managed a 6am finish on day 2 – myself, Dave, Rob Kerry and Lisa Ditlefsen were the last wo/men standing. Good laugh that.
• Best session for sheer entertainment value has to go to Jake Baillie’s take on Competitive Intelligence. Laughed a lot at his collection ‘techniques’.
• Sat in on the enterprise Level SEO session – it’s more about politics, setting expectations and managing people than actual SEO. I’m learning this myself these days.
• You can meet people anywhere. On the bus from the airport we got talking to Erik Gough who we had quite a few drinks with during our stay. And apparently not all afilliate marketers are scum – Richard Kershaw was great to chat with over the few days. The Canadians were nice guys and really up for it – Tony Clifton was a master stroke IMO
• Most speakers were wearing suits – just goes to show how it’s gone mainstream and the serious money is now entering the industry. Was I born in the wrong country?
• Although everyone told me to take Vegas for what it is, I have to admit the place just doesn’t ring any bells for me. Really happy I made the short hop to the east coast for a few days in Palo Alto and San Fran (yet another post).

All in all it was a great way to turn off from the day-to-day client stuff. I’m not quite the socialite that Dave is, and networking isn’t really my thing, but it was great to make the journey and open my mind to just how big SEO is outside of wee little Ireland.

Certainly came away with some new ideas about what to get involved in next year and how to extend my career. More to follow as semi-regular posting will recommence shortly.

Want to read more?

1. Yet more Video Blogs from Matt Cutts
2. SES London – Linkbait, and When It’s Not
3. Matt Cutts Video Blog

Not sure whether I should care, or whether I’ll do something a lot more elaborate than last year.

I have some ideas on how I would like to evaluate, and allow others to be involved in evaluating, the nominee sites.

Thoughts on this would be appreciated!

PS: you would think that they’d at least make the effort this year with their own site…

http://www.goldenspiders.ie/
11 error(s): HTML: 8, WAI A: 3

http://www.goldenspiders.ie/enter.cfm

8 error(s): HTML: 7, WAI A: 1

http://www.goldenspiders.ie/news.html

10 error(s): HTML: 8, WAI A: 2

http://www.goldenspiders.ie/categories.html

16 error(s): HTML: 11, WAI A: 5

http://www.goldenspiders.ie/contact.html

8 error(s): HTML: 7, WAI A: 1

http://www.goldenspiders.ie/judges.html

8 error(s): HTML: 7, WAI A: 1

http://www.goldenspiders.ie/index.html

11 error(s): HTML: 8, WAI A: 3

http://www.goldenspiders.ie/shortlist.html

36 error(s): HTML: 21, WAI A: 15

http://www.goldenspiders.ie/book_online.cfm

8 error(s): HTML: 7, WAI A: 1

Want to read more?

1. Golden Spiders Take #1
2. Golden Spiders Awards 2007
3. If You’re Going To Promote Your W3C Credentials…

I imagine that job will involve working on some very interesting projects.

Why am I posting this? Simple – because Lar asked nicely

If anyone would ever like me to mention something fell free to drop me a line. Now what does the Eagle Star page say through Jaws?

Want to read more?

1. Review of My blog – test review
2. Interesting Look at How To Recruit Top SEOs In-house
3. Another Great Free Online Maketing Offer

Some Bits ‘n Bobs

So here are a few things of interest should you find yourself with a few moments to spare:

1. Jason Roe is looking for a few minutes of your time to complete a survey on co-working. If you work for yourself co-working is a great idea, so head on over and fill in his quick 2 minute survey [that's a direct link to the survey].

2. I’ve made up my mind to go to Paddy’s Valley. Well sort of. Just have to work on my schedule. If you’re wondering what the heck is Paddy’s Valley – here ya go. And Damien is hoping to get some some ideas for accommodation in Silicon Valley, so if anyone has any ideas/experience perhaps you could leave a comment over there please?

3. Alastair (aka ‘Trojan’) has come out of the closet with his new and improved logon.ie. Logon is a new Irish Internet Marketing company with a fantastic corporate image. I don’t know about you, but I think site and the message are both excellently defined. I think the future is going to be very bright for Logon.

4. I got a sneak preview of Blacknight’s new website – you gotta love those spoilt designs. That’s coming soon.

5. What about me (I don’t hear you say )? Well I’ll be back in Ireland for 4 weeks from June 25, so if you’re looking for an Irish Internet Marketing expert I have some windows opening up shortly so why not get in touch.

Well there’s my Monday round-up. I’m sure I’ve probably missed something in there. Anyhows, happy Monday to everyone

Want to read more?

1. A New Year, Some New Ideas, and My Time for Free!
2. The Future Is Mobile
3. Houston Search Engine Optimization Spammers Promoting thehoustonseo.com

A Very Large Apology

First and foremost, I have to offer an apology to those Irish Blog Awards nominees who still have not received their promised SEO review. My schedule has be quite hectic over the last while, but I hope to have some free time over the coming weeks to complete the task as promised.

So far I’ve managed to post the following in response to my offer:

1. Getting you site out of supplemental index (Krishna De)
2. Page titles and SEO (First Partners)
3. SEO for Blogspot (Blogger) sites (multiple sites)
4. SEO for photoblogs (McAwilliams)
5. Corporate Blogging SEO (Bubble Brosthers)

Which leaves the following reviews to complete:

1. http://bifsniff.com/
2. http://www.argolon.com/
3. http://blog.roam4free.ie/
4. http://www.mneylon.com/blog
5. http://siopaeile.com/blog/
6. http://www.headrambles.com
7. http://www.mediangler.com

Those reviews are in the pipeline, the first of which I hope to roll out in the coming days.

So What Have I Been Up To?

The projects I’ve worked on recently have all been really interesting. I’ve had the opportunity to work with sites and clients who are both on-line leaders and global brands. I’ve also helped smaller indigenous firms with their on-line visibility, usability and overall strategic positioning.

Strategic Internet consulting is an area that is taking up an increasing amount of my time. I’ve been working with a number of companies providing guidance not just on SEO, but also on their overall on-line strategy. I’ve always believed that my skill-set goes beyond generating search traffic for my clients, and recent consulting experience has greatly reinforced this belief.

Irish Internet Association National Congress

Last Thursday I sat on a panel at the 2007 IIA National Congress. I was flattered that Fergal O’Byrne (CEO, IIA) asked me to sit in on the Making Money Out Of Blogs and Podcasts breakout session. Together with Michele Neylon (Blacknight), David Johnson (Google – don’t think they need the link ) and Richard Delevan (Tribune) we discussed issues around blogging and podcasting and whether it is possible to make money from same.

There was some great audience interaction, and the most interesting theme for me personally was that many Irish media buyers cannot actually find a home for much of their on-line budget. So there you have it – Irish advertisers are crying out for decent on-line media to pay for carrying their advertising inventory.

The second of the three sessions didn’t go too well for me. I was carrying a nasty headache which didn’t help my concentration. But I think all-in-all I did a decent job during both the first and third session. One member of the audience actually emailed me mid-session asking for a copy of my ‘interesting presentation’. I responded saying that he must have me mixed up with someone else

A big thank you to Fergal, who I met on a panel for an Enterprise Ireland podcast some weeks ago, for asking me to take part.

A Second Apology

I really have to also apologise to anyone who enquired about my services over the past few weeks. It’s been virtually impossible for me to respond in a timely manner as I just haven’t had the resources required to assess the requirements of your sites. My sincere apologies to anyone who expected to receive a response and did not – it is not in my nature to let people down, and I will follow up personally with everyone who has contacted me recently to offer my apologies for not responding sooner.

Normal services will resume shortly

Want to read more?

1. Irish Media, News Websites to Readers – ‘Don’t Read Us’
2. Want Loyal Customers? Give Them What They Want How They Want It.
3. For IBA Nominees Accepting My Offer – Please Read

Just testing LouderVoice

Rated as 5/5 on Apr 03 2007 by Richard Hearne

Want to read more?

1. The Importance Of Architecture and Messaging – Argolon.com
2. €15k Conversion Rate Optimisation, Free, No Questions Asked
3. Who Said META Tag Optimization Was Dead?

Bugatti Veyron At Top Speed Video

Tyres last 15 minutes at full speed. But that’s not a problem because the fuel tank is empty after 12.

Tell me that video isn’t cool.

Discovered this video over on Ina’s blog.

Want to read more?

1. Internet Video Eating Into TV Time
2. Matt Cutts Video Blog
3. Yet more Video Blogs from Matt Cutts

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Want to read more?

1. My Favorite Keyword Tool
2. Keyword Data Is Often Very Skewed – Internet Marketers To Blame?
3. Serious About Keywords? Wordze Coupon Inside

But I’m going to try and get some advice out to a few more people now. And this is going to be the toughest task I’ve had in a while. You see it never dawned on me that so many folk would be on hosted blogs. Let’s just say that optimising Blogspot is not a straight forward task.

As a result I’m amalgamating the site reviews for all Blogspot blogs into one post. Apologies, but BlogSpot limits much help I can give to these hosted blogs. Here’s the post navigation to make life easier for you.

Internal navigation (this is another mammoth post)

General topics:

1. Taking Control – getting your own domain
2. Blog titles and META tags
3. Best use of the Header tag
4. Using blog categories to theme your site
5. Linking to other blogs and content
6. Keep comments on the same page

Site-specific topics:

1. bocktherobber.blogspot.com
2. twentymajor.blogspot.com
3. elblogador.blogspot.com
4. skinflicks.blogspot.com
5. theangrydome2.blogspot.com
6. greeninkpen.blogspot.com

The Blogspot Conumdrum

I’m going to jump to what I hope is a logical assumption – if you asked for some SEO advice you must be passionate about blogging. So in that vain I’ll try to offer advice that might help your blogging careers:

1. Taking Control

   If you are really serious about blogging the best advice I can give you is to take it to the next level. Hosted blog platforms are a fantastic way to get started. You don’t need much technical know how, and you can be up and blogging in a flash. There are downsides however, and the natural progression is to buy yourself a domain and publish to your own blog.

   Before I go any further I better give a warning: This isn’t a trivial matter. You will need some technical prowess (or borrow someone for a few hours to help you out).

   A search for blog hosting Ireland returns hosting with a free domain name for €42.99 p.a. That’s fairly reasonable, and you’ll find that WordPress (the same platform I publish this blog from) is highly customisable and extendible thanks to the thousands of plug-ins available. WordPress also helps you to import all your Blogger posts (beware – the new Blogger no longer supports this function. See here for more.)

   If you do decide to take the jump then many of the comments I made on the Bubble Brothers post should also be useful.

2. Blog titles and META tags

   I notice that the default title on Blogger posts are <blogtitle><posttitle>. My advice is to flip the order. It looks much better in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) because the page title is used by the search engines as the title of your listing. If you want to see what I mean go to Google and search for “site:yourblogname.blogspot.com” (stick in your own blogspot domain and remove the quotes). That should give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

   The page title is probably the most important element for on-page SEO. You really want to get some keywords into your titles. I know this can be difficult when you’re trying to write quirky titles that grab attention, but have a think about the phrase you would type into Google if you wanted to find a page like the one you’re writing. Test it out in Google – when you get relevant results you know you have good keywords (you can also use keyword tools, which I’ll describe in a follow-up post). Then try to include that phrase or words from it. You wont get it right every time, but chances are that you will get a bit more search engine love.

   Blogspot seems to have a built-in function for spitting out your META data. The main problem here is that there doesn’t appear to be any quick and easy method to create unique description and keyword elements for each page.

   A quick Google search for “blogspot meta tags” should provide a few resources to help with your META data. I wrote previously about the benefits of META Tag Optimization – you can find out how a well crafted page description, which the Search Engines use for your snippet, can increase clickthroughs and site visits.

   The other META I think you should ensure exists is the RSS link auto-discovery. If you include a META link to your feed visitors can easily add you to their reader of choice from the address bar in their browser.
   <posttitle><blogtitle>

3. Use the Header tag

   If you write long posts you should definitely break up your content with paragraphs and sub-headers. It makes life easier for your readers, but the search engines also give a wee bit more weight to content found in <h> elements. So you might find your in-page post title (not to be mixed up with your page-title, although usually the same text) will be in a <h2> element.

   If you are prone to long posts (looks in mirror) you should further break up the page with a sub-header, perhaps in a <h3> element. I use <h4> for my sub-headers and style them via CSS to my own preferences.

   Search engines will also pick up some theme signals from the text you use in your sub-headers so try to retain and extend you primary post title through the sub-header text your choose.

4. Blog categories

   Unfortunately this wont work so well for Blogspot blogs, but the category names and URLs you use also help to theme your content. If you look at my blog I include the category name in the URL and try to use descriptive anchor text to help silo and theme my content (siloing is an architecture technique used to theme areas of a website). Again, as with post titles, try to think of the terms you would use to search for the theme or category your writing about, then try to use those words as your category names.

5. Linking to other blogs and content

   If you are blogging about more serious content then it can help to link to authority content on the web. Linking to a Wikipedia article or a post by an authority blogger can help the search engines apply theme (did I mention theme already?).

   Links out also help get you traffic. You probably know about trackbacks and pings, but basically if you link to another blog you will more often than not appear as a comment in the post you linked to. If the opening sentence or two of your post is interesting you will get traffic from the trackback.

6. Keep comments on the same page

   I know that some bloggers leave the comments on a pop-up page. Personally I like to see the comments on the story page. Others may differ. But from a search engine perspective it is often better to incorporate the comments into the story page, especially if you do not have a strong back link profile. If your comments are not published on your post page then you should probably read my advice to John McWilliams on site architecture.

   I believe the way to change how Blogspot publishes your comments is Dashboard->Settings->Comments->Show comments in a pop-up window?->NO.

Some specific advice for the Blogspot bloggers

1. bocktherobber.blogspot.com

   There’s not much wrong that I can see. If i could I would exclude the search pages via a robots.txt file (or through the METAs) as these pages are turning up in the supplemental index. You could try hunting down the links that the bot is crawling to find those pages and add rel="NOFOLLOW NOINDEX" to those links.

   I cant see too many links from your site to anywhere (checked a few posts – MSN Live LinkFromDomain: operator is kaput at the minute). If you want to add relevancy and theme to your pages I would link out to related content if possible. You seem to have, how shall I put it, unique content however

2. twentymajor.blogspot.com

   In fairness Twenty didn’t ask but I said I’d drop him in the pot anyhow.

   First things first, Twenty no longer posts on Blogspot. Yippee. One convert. Twenty can now be found at www.twentymajor.net. A couple of things:

   Now that you have your own domain I would look into transferring your content if you haven’t already done so. Then take a look at my Bubble Brothers post, in particular the “Redirecting Blogspot with a 301 Redirect” section. In your case you may be able to set up the redirect, your visitors will all automatically be sent to your new blog, and, best of all, you will keep all that authority and link love you’ve built up (Twenty’s old site was a PR7 site). Whatever you do don’t let that Blogspot domain lapse.

   The other thing I would do is fix the canonical URL issue. Your new site resolves to both

   http://twentymajor.net/

   and

   http://www.twentymajor.net/

   You’ll find some more info about Canonical URL in Point 9 of my Google Best Practice article.

3. elblogador.blogspot.com

   This blog looks well and the content seems very well written. But there is one gaping issue that I can see – the bandwidth consumption. The homepage is a staggering 1.32MB. This is primarily down to the images used. You should look into compressing those images if possible because for the majority of Irish Internet users your page load times would be really off-putting. The header image (top_div.gif) alone weighs in at 55KB.

   A would reduce the number of posts on both your homepage and archive pages:
   Dashboard->Template->Page Elements->Blog Posts->Edit->(Pop-Up) Number of posts on main page
   And as you seem to be quite a prolific blogger:
   Dashboard->Template->Page Elements->Archive->Edit->(Pop-Up) Frequency->Daily or Weekly

   If you already on a daily frequency there’s not a lot you can tweak (apart from blogging less which isn’t really a solution).

   As a political blog I would also take a look at the post titles – some could be more descriptive in my view and could contain more accurate references to the content:

   Outrage!

   to perhaps:

   Outrage! – Mandelson Bent Over Backwards for Sinn Fein

   (Having ‘Mandelson and ‘Sinn Fein’ in title will help with post theme, but to me the idea of Peter Mandelson bending over backwards is considerably more catchy and more likely to grab my attention.)

   You seem to have a lot of posts in the supplemental index, including some fairly recent stuff. This is a it worrying, but perhaps you could try a bit more internal linking from one post to another. So in one post you might reference in an earlier post. This might help.

   The other possible solution is to leave internal links when commenting on other blogs – rather than leave your URL as

   http://elblogador.blogspot.com

   leave a post URL like

   http://elblogador.blogspot.com/2007/03/arthur-m-schlesinger.html

   Of course this will only make a difference from non-Blogger blogs, and blogs where the owner hasn’t NOFOLLOW comments.

   I suppose you could also try building a few links here and there – more backlinks will lead to more pages coming out of the supplemental index.

   There’s not a whole lot more I can add apart from taking the dive to your own host. You’re doing as good a job as you can with Blogspot.

4. skinflicks.blogspot.com

   Without sounding like a broken record, I think that quite a lot of the same issues I see with elblogador also apply here. Not so much the images, but the number of pages in the supplemental index really surprises me. You actually have a decent amount of backlinks, and I a couple of directory links in there also. If you have the time then I would keep adding a couple of directory links a week. You can find new, free, human edited directories over in the Digital Point directory sub-forum. Just a couple of directory links alongside your regular links will help. Just make sure to use appropriate anchors and deep-link (link to page other than your homepage) at every given chance. Again, my Getting into Google post might help, particularly point 6.

   If there is a way to NOFOLLOW the category labels I would do this also. In my Blogspot Dashboard (the newer version) I can edit the templates, but they are in xHTML with XML flavouring so it’s not clear to me if it is possible to manually NOFOLLOW those label links. If anyone knows how to edit in NOFOLLOWs please leave a comment.

   Otherwise I suppose your blog titles are a little generic. I would try to get some more focused keywords in there where possible. Of course this may not be appropriate for your readers – bear in mind that my advice is primarily for the Search Engines.

   Apologies I cant offer any more.

5. theangrydome2.blogspot.com

   I’m afraid it’s more of the same – lots of pages in Google’s supplemental index. Good to see you using video. I think readers like to have text content mixed up with some rich media.

   You seem to have plenty of links showing via Yahoo!, but from a quick glance there seems to be a high proportion of blogroll links (Google is only showing 1 link currently – either a glitch or they don’t like the blogroll links). If this is the case you should try to get a few editorial links (links embedded in blog posts) to mix it up a bit. In my experience embedded links will give you a far greater boost than blogroll links. Not sure how you should best go about that, but maybe try to start discussions that go back and forth between blogs.

   As with others, you have quite heavy pages – about 200KB for your homepage. You could try tweaking the default number of posts shown per page from 7 to 4 or 5 to reduce this somewhat. You might make some poor dial-up soul a bit happier.

   Again, you might find some of the general comments I made above useful when it comes to your on-page stuff like titles and headers.

6. greeninkpen.blogspot.com

   Right last Blogspot blog I’m going to look at. And again I can see about 1/3 of indexed pages in the supplemental index. I’m beginning to be at quite a loss. Google shows 32 backlinks to your site, Yahoo! shows 422 backlinks. There really doesn’t seem to me any good reason that a blog with 140 odd pages can’t be supported by those backlinks. Again I have to fall beck to a belief that Blogspot is inherently weak when it comes to search engine indexation.

   Similar issues to page size, with a 610KB payload for your homepage. Images seem to be the culprit so any attempt to reduce the image weights will certainly help you retain any dial-up visitor.

   One other thing worth mentioning – I would try to ensure that you have at least some text in most posts. I can see a couple of posts that just have an image or perhaps an image and some links. It’s nigh on impossible to rank most posts that don’t contain at least some plain text.

Conclusion

The more I look at Blogspot the more I think that there is something wrong with the architecture of that platform. When I see pages that had received Pagerank (yep, it’s only toolbar PR) that subsequently go supplemental I have to wonder whether the archive architecture is the problem. And I wonder if the problems would persist if the same blog was on WordPress or similar?

I want to apologise to the Blogspot bloggers who asked for my advice. I really hadn’t considered the implications of hosted blogs – I’m so used to viewing Blogspot as a spam platform that it didn’t dawn on me that many people actually use the platform for quality content. (I probably should mention that Blogspot is absolutely notorious for splogs and sneaky redirects. If you want proof then just head over to www.blogspot.com and check the recommended blog link bottom-left of screen. It’s NOFOLLOWed – they don’t even trust the blogs they recommend!)

Individual advice to each blogger is limited because, to be honest, you will all suffer from the same deficiencies in the Blogspot platform. My wish is that I could offer more, but the blogging platform that is Blogspot has become my nemesis. I do hope, however, that you will all find something of use in this post (and if you only read the small piece relevant to your blog I strongly advice you read the whole piece – most of this applies to all Blogspot blogs).

I hope to make some amends by publishing a guide to blog post keyword research using freely available tools. The guide should help you write posts that increase your search engine visibility. It may take me a couple of weeks to put it all together (and finish the rest of the reviews), but I will post something here ASAP.

Oh, and one final observation for this post. Is it just my imagination or do Irish bloggers tend to curse a lot?

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2. Are You Confusing Search Engine Bots?
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The following fun facts about St. Patrick’s Day were gleaned using Yahoo! Search in about 10 minutes:

• The Irish Gaelic phrase, Erin go Bragh, literally translates to “Ireland until the Day of Judgment,” which is a cheeky way of saying what almost every culture says now and then: “We’re number one”
• St. Patrick’s Day is a national holiday in Ireland
• Despite St. Patrick’s best efforts, there are still a few snakes in Ireland, but most of them, as in other places, are in politics
• Slainte! is Irish Gaelic for “cheers!” and is pronounced “Slan-jah”
• The first St. Patrick’s Day Parade in the Americas was held in New York City in 1766, though the first observances took place in Boston
• Today, some 150,000 marchers take part in the New York City parade
• Irish tartans tend to go by district, unlike Scottish tartans, which are usually tied to a family surname or clan
• About 34 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, and the Irish diaspora worldwide is said to comprise some 80 million people
• The population of Ireland in 2006 was just under 6 million

Yahoo! wishes everyone a happy and safe St. Patrick’s Day weekend.

Slainte!

[Emphasis added is mine.]

So I wonder exactly which politicians Yahoo! was referring to!

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1. Yahoo.ie Launches 2 Years Later, And Still Not Irish
2. Yahoo! Comes to Ireland (properly)
3. 100m Reasons Why We Can’t Live Without Search

Stemming from this a couple of the guys checked their desk calendars. Here’s how two of the desk calendars spelt that most difficult of months:

And here’s another calendar that was sitting on another desk:

How is February spelt on your calendar?

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3. Is Google Analytics Updating Intra-Day?

I hadn’t seen this before but it is absolute class:

I cant see a way to contact Ian Kenny – I wonder does he do freelance animation work?

Want to read more?

1. How Would You Let Them Know? Broken Website, and No Email Contact

Now after putting smiles on so many US consumer faces (isn’t it funny how corporates are least happy when consumers are at their most delirious) he’s launched a similar service here in Ireland.

allfreecalls.IE

Yep, as the name suggests, you can make all your international calls for free. No sign up, no new account, no extra bill. Doesn’t need too much more explaining than that – check it out here.

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1. Yahoo! Comes to Ireland (properly)
2. Search Engine Market Share June 2006
3. Did Someone Say That Internet Scams Were Becoming More Sophisticated

Can’t wait, and looking forward to a quick jaunt to the UK for 3 days

If anyone from Ireland is heading over and would like to meet up drop me a mail.

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1. Web Marketing Specialist Contract Available
2. Tales From SES Part 1 – Flights, Hotels, Lifts from ExCel Security, Drinks with SEOs & Chatting with the Googlers
3. Search Marketing World 2007, ShareIT Cork, and A Few Other Pieces of Irish SEO News

Automated competitive analysis ‘radar’

First a word about keeping tabs on your competitive landscape. For many, many years I’ve been receiving e-mail alerts from www.googlealerts.com. GoogleAlerts is a service that allows you to automatically track Google results for your targeted search phrases. You receive automated e-mails if a new site enters the competitive SERPs for your phrases.

A new site comes onto my radar for ‘seo ireland’

The search phrase ‘seo ireland’ is one I set up in GoogleAlerts a long time ago. The phrase itself doesn’t generate much decent traffic at all, but seems to be targeted by most newcomers to the field. (Funny, but the longer I watch my stats, the more convinced I am that search traffic is not quality traffic for my line of work. Buzz and word-of-mouth are far better signals.)

www.activate.ie

Yesterday I got an alert that a new site had appeared at rank #20 for ‘seo ireland’. The site is www.actvate.ie. I decided to take a peek at who they were and what they were up to.

Under construction, but still high PR?

The first thing that got my attention was the fact that a thin-content ‘under construction’ site had a toolbar PR of 5. So a quick look at the WHOIS:

% Rights restricted by copyright; http://www.domainregistry.ie/copyright.html
% Do not remove this notice

domain: activate.ie
descr: Martina Skelly
descr: Sole Trader
descr: REGISTERED BUSINESS NAME
admin-c: ACS958-IEDR
tech-c: AAM456-IEDR
renewal: 07-December-2006
status: Active - LOCKED
nserver: NS.BLACKNIGHTSOLUTIONS.COM
nserver: NS2.BLACKNIGHTSOLUTIONS.COM
source: IEDR

person: Martina Skelly
nic-hdl: ACS958-IEDR
source: IEDR

person: Blacknight.ie Hostmaster
nic-hdl: AAM456-IEDR
source: IEDR

Hmm… I’m not a domain expert. But even for me that doesn’t provide much to go on. In fact it looks like this is an old domain that looks set to be dropped.

Before I go any further a word about domain age and trust. Domain age is a very strong variable in Google’s ‘trustrank’ algo. In many competitive niches the top spots are virtually insurmountable as a result of the aged domains that reside there. So much so that Google has been accused of forfeiting relevancy in an effort to tackle the spam that has entered their index on so many occasions.

On the Internet time travel is possible

Did you know you can look at the historical contents of a website? You can look back and see what the site owner published over time. And that’s exactly what I did next.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://activate.ie gives me snapshots of the content that resided on this site over time. I can see results going back to November 2001. So this domain is well aged. But the next bit is interesting. From the Archive snapshot for November 2003:

ACTIVATE is a year long EU funded research project which started in July 2001 and based in Ireland. More in Project Description. This project is being tested by libraries in Cork and Clare who are creating local history websites linked to a portal. These can be viewed through the Irish Local Studies Portal link. To create a similar network click here.

So the domain not only has age, but it has provenance – a former EU funded research project. Unless they did something really nasty this domain probably has oodles of trust over at Google.

A little bit more digging…

So I mentioned that I’m no domaining expert (I know enough to get me by ). But I know someone whois (excuse the double pun). John McCormac was probably at this stuff when I was just a mere twinkle (ok, I’m not that young any more… *sigh*). And John was able to give me the following:

activate | 2001-09-24 00:00:00 | NEW |
activate | 2004-11-25 00:00:00 | DEL |
activate | 2004-12-09 00:00:00 | NEW |
activate | 2006-11-16 00:00:00 | DEL |
activate | 2006-12-07 00:00:00 | NEW |

The 20010924 whois is:
domain: activate.ie
descr: An Chomairle Leabharlanna
descr: Statutory Body
descr: Discretionary Name
admin-c: Annette Kelly
tech-c: Register. ie Hostmaster
zone-c: Register. ie Hostmaster
nserver: knox.host.ie
nserver: quark.host.ie
source: IEDR

Sweet. The domain was originally owned by a statutory body. It rarely gets any better.

So who is Martina Skelly?

It can be quite humorous running vanity checks on your own name. You’d be surprised just how much info there is on-line. After searching for “Martina Skelly” (with the quotes) found a couple of references.

The most likely candidate is a Martina Skelly who works for Digino, an Irish Internet marketing agency. I see a lot of Adwords ads for Digino targeting SEM type phrases – Digino is one of the better established SM agencies here in Ireland.

Conclusion

Regardless of the owner, the domain itself has given quite an advantage to the current website by way of its history and providence. By picking up a domain that previously hosted such a well trusted website, Activate.ie can now compete for Search Engine traffic that a new domain could take a number of years to acquire.

It might be time to cosy up with Mr McCormac to see if his vast databases can throw up other potential .IE domain gems.

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2. Eubrowser.com .ie Domains Released – nike.ie, reebok.ie, irishindependent.ie
3. Keyword-Rich Domain Names

I’m going to crack all the SEO related sites/blogs/forums that I can… Maybe once in a while a non-SEO site will slip into the list but what the hell! Who cares anyways?

And the hacker goes on to list future targets:

The list

www.mattcutts.com – Mess with the best, die like the rest? He scares me… Just typing his site in this list makes me tremble

www.spamhuntress.com – That bitch needs some AdultFriendFinder love ASAP!

www.shoemoney.com – A bald “guru”, he is like the Buda of the SEO “gurus” (See eliteretreat.info)

www.pronetadvertising.com

www.forumtrends.com

www.askdavetaylor.com

ha.ckers.org – The hardest one of the list. Hats off to RSnake and iD!

www.v7n.com – Actually I’m just going to target blog.v7n.com and their forums

forums.digitalpoint.com – Hard

www.webmasterworld.com – They have the ugliest backend (and forum!) I’ve seen in my life

www.seoblackhat.com – The blog and the private forums (I help out n00bs over there once in a while)

www.boogybonbon.com

www.syndk8.com

www.stuntdubl.com

www.wolf-howl.com

www.seopedia.com

www.digg.com – I’m not aiming for a deface; rather I will find & release ways to game their “democratic” system (This will make happy some webmasters out there)

www.techcrunch.com – Had access to their server until they updated their stuff. This is the biggest target on the list…

www.johnchow.com – Dude wtf?! You came out of the blur and now your blog is everywhere

www.seobook.com – Your book is not that good anyways so get lost…

www.pearsonified.com

There are some serious big-hitting names in there. Gaming Digg.com? Somehow I don’t think he’s alone in that endeavour :mrgeen:

The above extracts are taken from a post made on Michael Gray’s blog before it was taken down. I flashed off an email to GreyWolf in case he’s unaware (and found out that www.seoblackhat.com is listed in www.surbl.org/lists.html in the process).

We’ll have to wait and see if the Anti-SEO Hacker comes good on any of his threats.

[EDIT] I see that the hacker may have been using an exploit similar to one found by Jason Roe recently. Well done Jason on your find.

If you use WordPress and haven’t already done so, you should upgrade to the latest release – 2.0.7 available here.

I probably don’t deserve to be nominated for any of those categories… but if anyone fancies fanning a poor SEO’s ego

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1. Last Chance Saloon – Web Awards Nominations Close Today
2. Irish Web Awards – Nominate Now
3. Irish Web Awards (and hello Maryrose!)

I hop everyone enjoys the very best the festive season has to offer. A special thank you to everyone who has read, commented and got in touch with me over the past few months. 2007 will be a very special year for Ireland’s on-line community, a year in which our appreciation for the Internet will grow and grow.

Thanks for reading and my very best regards.

Richard

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1. A New Year, Some New Ideas, and My Time for Free!
2. Sometimes A Spell Checker Wont Save You :-)
3. Merry Christmas

Going to the URL in question delivers you a very slick website:

And background on the hospital:

Except it’s copied wholesale from here:

While the homepage seems to be copied from deti.msk.ru:

To be quite honest, I cant say for sure that I would trust any of these sites.

I do know, however, that the slick site that is spamming everyone has got to be fake. So slick, in fact, the only real give-away is the lack of contact details (and the obvious spamming techniques).

The DNS Lookup gives the following cached info:

Using 25 day old cached answer (or, you can get fresh results).
Hiding E-mail address (you can get results with the E-mail address).

Domain Name.......... savechilds.net
Creation Date........ 2006-10-31 17:56:04
Registration Date.... 2006-10-31 17:56:04
Expiry Date.......... 2007-10-31 17:56:04
Organisation Name.... Chuyi ZHU
Organisation Address. Kurchatov sq, Moscow 123182
Organisation Address.
Organisation Address. taiyuan
Organisation Address. 19473
Organisation Address. WG
Organisation Address. RU

Admin Name........... gufty htfy
Admin Address........ Kurchatov sq, Moscow 123182
Admin Address........
Admin Address........ taiyuan
Admin Address........ 19473
Admin Address........ WG
Admin Address........ RU
Admin Email.......... ************@hotmail.com
Admin Phone.......... +7.2147483647
Admin Fax............ +7.2147483647

Tech Name............ he wenjie
Tech Address......... 706,huanandianli building,shennanzhong rd
Tech Address.........
Tech Address......... shenzhen
Tech Address......... 518031
Tech Address......... SZ
Tech Address......... CN
Tech Email........... *************@126.com
Tech Phone........... +86.61280100
Tech Fax............. +86.61280100

Bill Name............ he wenjie
Bill Address......... 706,huanandianli building,shennanzhong rd
Bill Address.........
Bill Address......... shenzhen
Bill Address......... 518031
Bill Address......... SZ
Bill Address......... CN
Bill Email........... ************@hotmail.com
Bill Phone........... +86.75561280100
Bill Fax............. +86.75561280100
Name Server.......... ns2.pokerbotmakemoney.com
Name Server.......... ns1.pokerbotmakemoney.com
Name Server.......... ns7.kindofbullats.com
Name Server.......... ns8.kindofbullats.com

They dont look like the type of name servers a charity would use?

While the real-time DNS lookup returns:

Domain Name.......... savechilds.net
Creation Date........ 2006-10-31 17:56:04
Registration Date.... 2006-10-31 17:56:04
Expiry Date.......... 2007-10-31 17:56:04
Organisation Name.... Chuyi ZHU
Organisation Address. Kurchatov sq, Moscow 123182
Organisation Address.
Organisation Address. taiyuan
Organisation Address. 19473
Organisation Address. WG
Organisation Address. RU

Admin Name........... gufty htfy
Admin Address........ Kurchatov sq, Moscow 123182
Admin Address........
Admin Address........ taiyuan
Admin Address........ 19473
Admin Address........ WG
Admin Address........ RU
Admin Email.......... vince_stebbi@hotmail.com
Admin Phone.......... +7.2147483647
Admin Fax............ +7.2147483647

Tech Name............ he wenjie
Tech Address......... 706,huanandianli building,shennanzhong rd
Tech Address.........
Tech Address......... shenzhen
Tech Address......... 518031
Tech Address......... SZ
Tech Address......... CN
Tech Email........... adminspeed123@126.com
Tech Phone........... +86.61280100
Tech Fax............. +86.61280100

Bill Name............ he wenjie
Bill Address......... 706,huanandianli building,shennanzhong rd
Bill Address.........
Bill Address......... shenzhen
Bill Address......... 518031
Bill Address......... SZ
Bill Address......... CN
Bill Email........... vince_stebbi@hotmail.com
Bill Phone........... +86.75561280100
Bill Fax............. +86.75561280100
Name Server.......... ns2.3fn.net
Name Server.......... dns195.3fn.net

Domain registered on October 31… vince_stebbi@hotmail.com seems to be in both Moscow and Schenzen… This is just plain nasty.

I’ve received about 8 copies of the email. I know most people don’t take any notice, but some might just be taken in by the headline and the slick website.

I called the number on the Dutch website and spoke to a guy called Sergei who is in Spain. Odd? Yes. But he sounded legit and has sent an alert to some group that monitors these sites. Still no harm in putting up the message here.

NASTY, NASTY, NASTY

(If you do want to be charitable this Christmas why not head over to OxfamIrelandShop.com)

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2. Forresters Fund For Children – Vardis Scam Warning
3. Seedcorn – A Perfect Example of HOW TO ASK FOR ONLINE ATTENTION

The following is taken from a press release from Movistar.ie’s Public Relations firm Thinkhouse PR:

“Best Website Launched in 2006! We are absolutely thrilled,” said Gavin McConnon of moviestar.ie. “We spent a lot of time researching and trialling the website ensuring that it was designed in a browser-friendly way.”

The press release goes on to say:

Beating off stiff competition from sites such as callcosts.ie; sellityourself.ie; the Golden Spider was awarded to Moviestar.ie for its performance, as a functioning site in addition to design, innovation, content, navigation, technology, interactivity and ease of use.

An apology

I try very hard to not be subjective. I feel the quality of what I write here is dependent on being as objective as possible. The next line is purely my subjective belief:

If the above is correct, and the judges did indeed award a Golden Spider to Moviestar.ie (the site has been updated since the GS awards) for “its performance, as a functioning site in addition to design, innovation, content, navigation, technology, interactivity and ease of use“, I think they should hang their heads in shame.

As a business I think Moviestar.ie may well be exceptional. As a website it most certainly is (was) not. Had the award been for the ‘Best New Internet Business in 2006′ I would have little or no complaint.

Moviestar.ie currently ‘owns’ the top 10 Google.com positions for the search phrase ‘moviestar.ie’.

Want to read more?

1. Golden Spider Awards – The Results
2. If I Had Taken My Own Advice….
3. Who Said META Tag Optimization Was Dead?

Well, not to dally about too much, the archive search facility is a tad bit broken. I’m not quite sure what the problem is. First I thought that perhaps each word of the search query was being truncated. But then I noticed some search words coming back with different spellings.

Here’s what I searched for and the returned query:

• searched for ‘ireland house’ – matched ‘ireland: 423756, hous: 101978′
• searched for ‘ireland house prices’ – matched ‘ireland: 423756, hous: 101978, price: 102252′
• searched for ‘irish property prices’ – matched ‘irish: 715996, properti: 164708, price: 102252′
• searched for ‘house price inflation’ – matched ‘hous: 101978, price: 102252, inflat: 13885′
• searched for ‘minister cowen’ – matched ‘minist: 134897, cowen: 5678′
• searched for ‘the irish times’ – matched ‘irish: 715990, time: 703415′
• searched for ‘mystery guest’ – matched ‘mysteri: 6967, guest: 10148′
• searched for ‘cavity’ – matched ‘caviti: 271′

I tried those last two to see if the results were correct. ‘mysteri’ would match with ‘mysterious’ but the search yielded pages without an occurrence of ‘mysterious’. While a search for ‘cavity’ returned results.

It appears, therefore, that the search is based on the correct phrase, but the results page is displaying the wrong search query.

As I mentioned, I thought that perhaps queries were split along word boundaries and then mistakenly truncated, but the appearance of i’s instead of y’s threw this theory. And then of course not all words seemed to suffer the chop.

Perhaps someone can see an obvious cause of this that I cant?

Oh, and there are absolutely no prizes for guessing how bad the mark-up in there is

Want to read more?

1. Yahoo! Comes to Ireland (properly)
2. Dresses Ireland
3. Interesting Look at How To Recruit Top SEOs In-house

I started this blog on July 22 2006. The first post is dated July 18 and the site went live 4 days later. Since then I’ve met a whole bunch people through Red Cardinal. Clever people. Witty people (*glances at snr.*). Disgruntled people (*glances at snr.*). And quite a few souls who seem to spend disproportionate amounts of time on the Internet.

It’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve received a lot of emails and calls about SEO and Internet marketing. In this short time I’ve also discovered that Ireland has a long way to go in terms of Search Engine marketing and promotion.

I can see an eagerness to do better. I can see attention focusing more on Internet marketing strategies. And I hope, in some small part, that I can help bring about change.

But there’s one thing I really have to do before I can go any further.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a North American holiday commemorating a feast first held in 1621 by Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. It falls on the fourth Thursday in November in the United States (and the second Monday in October in Canada).

Thursday last was the fourth Thursday in November. It was one of the biggest holidays in the States, a day on which to give thanks for what you have.

Well something special happened on Thanksgiving. Something that lifted a weight from me, a dark cloud disappeared and brightness shone forth.

Someone gave me a gift:

The gift of ‘trust’. After just 4 months of blogging and actively building links, Red Cardinal came out of the sandbox on Thanksgiving. I had expected to wait at least nine months for that privilege…

Thank you Google and many happy returns

Want to read more?

1. Advanced SEO Course in Dublin this coming July 7-8
2. If You’re Going To Steal Someone’s Design…
3. A New Year, Some New Ideas, and My Time for Free!

I’m looking now and it seems to be far better than Google’s poor attempt (outside of major cities).

Here’s the link.

Want to read more?

1. Yahoo Site Explorer – checking your backlinks
2. Yahoo! Comes to Ireland (properly)
3. Yahoo.ie Launches 2 Years Later, And Still Not Irish

If you’re curious about where all that spam originates, it makes for an interesting read.

Want to read more?

1. A Dose Full of Comment Spam, Long Copy Referrer Pages & SEO Tools – What Do YOU Think?
2. Click Through Rates Can Soar With The Correct Copy
3. Spammers Crack Me Up

Bus Eireann is a wholly-owned subsidiary of C.I.E., which in turn has a single shareholder – the Irish Government. In 2005 C.I.E. received €283.4m of tax-payer funds to supplement their operating cash flow.

The C.I.E. group website makes reference to it’s accessibility credentials:

When I first entered the Bus Eireann site a noticed that the root directory was redirecting with a 302 header to site/, and the site/ directory was, you guessed it, redirecting with a 302 to site/home/.

I spidered 17 pages of the Bus Eireann site for validation. The 17 pages contained 2205 errors and 230 links to files producing either 404 or 302 response codes. The homepage is framed.

But I think the jewel here is the icon in the navigation bar on the left of the page:

Here’s the mark-up behind that particular image:

<div align="left">
<a onmouseover="MM_swapImage('Image28','','[...]',1)" onmouseout="MM_swapImgRestore()" href="../home/vip_index.asp">
<img width="205" height="43" border="0" src="[...]" name="Image28"/>
</a>
</div>

[Note: I removed the paths to the image files for admin purposes.]

I am curious how any visually impaired person is expected to find this link? If I use a text reader it has no idea what that link is for. The ALT attribute is omitted on each of the navigation images – to any screen reader those image anchors effectively mean nothing.

I won’t even start on the design….

[Thank you CreativeIreland.com for the inspiration ]

Want to read more?

1. BOTW Ireland Part Of UK
2. $65m, And Some Of The Worst Use Of Javascript Ever
3. Really Simple Guide to RSS

So if anything breaks or just seems a bit weird that’s probably the cause

Users (including myself) have reported receiving alerts from TB of new mail that does not appear in any mailbox within the client. Manually scanning INBOX files in a text editor does reveal the mails.

It is not clear if this problem only affects mail with X-Spam-Flag: YES headers.

Do not compact our mailboxes as this may cause the permanent removal of mails that are hidden.

For the moment the best bet is to downgrade to 1.5.0.7.

More details can be found here.

Want to read more?

1. Did Someone Say That Internet Scams Were Becoming More Sophisticated
2. Keeping your PC safe
3. Seedcorn – A Perfect Example of HOW TO ASK FOR ONLINE ATTENTION

I just received the old sign-up for their CD-ROM. They seem to be cutting down on costs though – I’ve received it previously in hard copy but today it was a beautiful PDF attachment to a very short but sweet email (maybe times are tough?):

Please print and fill the enclosed document and send it back to:
Euro Business Guide,
P.O. Box 2021,
3500GA UTRECHT,
The Netherlands,
updating is free of charge!

If you want to unsubscribe send an email to ***

For anyone who might feel tempted here’s the fine print from the PDF:

I HEREBY ORDER A SUBSCRIPTION WITH SERVICE PROVIDER EU BUSINESS SERVICES LTD “EURO BUSINESS GUIDE”. I WILL HAVE AN INSERTION TO ITS DATA BASE FOR THREE YEARS. THE PRICE PER YEAR IS EURO 965. THE SUBSCRIPTION WILL BE
AUTOMATICALLY EXTENDED EVERY YEAR FOR ANOTHER YEAR, UNLESS SPECIFIC WRITTEN NOTICE IS RECEIVED BY THE SERVICE PROVIDER OR THE SUBSCRIBER TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE EXPIRATION OF THE SUBSCRIPTION.

Please take care and if you receive this just throw it in the bin.

Want to read more?

1. Euro Business Guide Scamming Again
2. Waldberg&Hirsch Global Collections – More Scams To Simply Ignore
3. Deceptive Practices Will Never Go Away

Unfortunately I had one of those horrible technology days today. First the server decided to lose all my email for 13 hours then I discovered that the voice mails left on my VOIP service are devoid of any sound.

I have managed to get all my email back, but

if you left me a voice message I would ask that you please send me an additional email.

I did try calling back numbers, but gave up after the first disgruntled recipient (someone from TCD?) wasn’t too happy to converse.

My apologies to anyone who tried and failed to get me. And thank you very much for all the emails and comments

Want to read more?

1. Coming Out
2. Moved Server – Apologies to Subscribers
3. Euro Business Guide Spam and Scam Warning

Dear Sir/Madam,

Recent email scams have attempted to consume customers into disclosing their Online Banking security log-in details by re-directing them to a fake site.

Well apart from the reference to scams ‘consuming’ customers that opening sentence states a fact that the banks have been trying to get across to all their customers.

We publish details about such scams on our security pages. However, we would like to get security warnings across to customers as many as possible.

That’s why we’re asking you to take a few minutes to check and update your account details. This will allow us to update your occasional security and Online Banking service information.

Hmm.. so a bit of reverse psychology to draw us in. So you’re telling me about the risks of phishing schemes. Then you mention how important it is to get the message out about these scams. Seems fare enough. You couldn’t possibly be trying to pull the wool over my eyes. God knows, I might even have missed the obvious grammatical mistakes had I been reading this in a hurry.

But it’s your call to action that I love. After warning about the dangers of ‘recent email scams’ you want me to follow your link so I can ‘check and update’ my account details:

Due to the recent security update, you are requested to follow the link below.

And of course you have reinforce that call by preying on that most vulnerable human emotion – fear:

*Important*
You are required to provide all necessary information completely and correctly otherwise, due to security reasons, we may have to close your account temporarily.

Security Advisor
Permanent Tsb

The scary thing here is that should these guys get a native English speaker to create their copy I have no doubt these mails could get some conversions.

Of course if you have Firefox 2 installed you get this nice little message when you click on the link:

The site in question has been removed.

Want to read more?

1. Forresters Fund For Children – Vardis Scam Warning
2. Enterprise Ireland Doesn’t Look Too Good
3. Seedcorn – A Perfect Example of HOW TO ASK FOR ONLINE ATTENTION

The Internet can also become a very powerful means for change when enough of the community want that change. And so Damien Blake, a Donegal councillor has set out on a campaign to leverage the power of the Internet to make our roads a safer place.

Before I go any further, I would like to say that this blog is a place to discuss my work and the industry I serve, and generally I will never discuss politics here. However, on this occasion I think it’s wholly appropriate to help this campaign in any way possible by offering any support I can.

(To add a little current context here, if the story of Google misplacing a post from Damien Mulley’s blog is newsworthy then surely the constant news of road-related deaths deserves a lot more Internet attention?)

For anyone who is not aware the Irish roads unfortunately inflict quite an horrific death-toll on our country, most especially so to our young drivers. The daily news stories of yesteryear about the ‘troubles’ have now been replaced by morbid announcements of the death tolls almost daily on our roads. It really is a shocking indictment that with so much new-found prosperity this country seems completely unable to manage the safety on our roads.

These deaths are in my opinion the effect, not the result mind, of one major factor: a clear lack of political will to do anything to stop the carnage.

I make no apologies for my simplistic view – if the politicians wanted this stopped they could make a very significant impact on the problem right now.

They could instruct the Gardai to patrol pubs and licensed premises across the nation each and every night and to randomly breathalyse individuals leaving those premises behind the steering wheels of vehicles.

The Gardai should be instructed to enforce the current laws of the land, and to do so paying regard to one interest only – the safety of our citizens. Absolutely no other vested interest should come above that of conserving human life.

Why is this not happening, now, today? In my view that’s the question we should be asking the politicians and leaders of this country.

Well done Damien Blake for actually trying to make a difference, unlike those that simply ‘appear’ to run this country.

Want to read more?

1. Unison.ie Cloaking – Will They Be Banned From Google?
2. Search Marketing World 2007, ShareIT Cork, and A Few Other Pieces of Irish SEO News
3. Golden Spider Awards – The Results

It’s amazing what the slip of a keypad touch can do:

Here’s the search that found this little gem (and the image above links to the actual post [FIXED NOW] – they deserve a bit of link-love because TBH I’m still laughing).

Even the spellcheck in FireFox 2.0 (which I got earlier to test out) wouldn’t have saved them from that

I really want to let them know put part of me just says no! No prizes for guessing which part is winning

Want to read more?

1. Running Conversion Optimisation Tests? Save Time – Copy Google
2. Google Phone Number
3. It’s Official – Aliens Prefer Firefox

The real beauty for the RSS publisher however, is that by offering multiple channels for your content you are absolutely maximising the possible coverage you can receive.

People are more likely to remain loyal when you offer what they want on their own terms.

The other day I came across Downloadsquad.com and what really caught my attention was their RSS feed page (sorry for the long image but you’ll see why):

Alongside their main feed they offer feeds based on categories, feeds based on platforms, feeds about companies – the list goes on. Quite simply Downloadsquad.com are giving me what I want how I want it. Personally, I think it’s a fantastic feature.

Now, I wonder how long it will take Ireland’s main news and media properties to offer us this kind of choice?

Want to read more?

1. Another Distraction
2. Really Simple Guide to RSS
3. Irish Media, News Websites to Readers – ‘Don’t Read Us’

To everybody who commented, I have also removed references within your comments. Sorry – I very much appreciate your comments and would rather never censor this blog, but I’m quite sure the lesson has been learnt and there is little to be gained by ostracising the company in question any further.

<rantWarning>

After a very fruitful week in Holland I arrived back today to this gem of an e-mail from the kind [REMOVED] spammers:

Dear Business,

Hope all is well. We are a Cork based web design company who offer a variety of services. Your company may be interested in our Search Engine Optisation service where we submit your website every four weeks for a year to all the major search engines.

We can also optimise certain keywords you want to come up on searches.

If you would like to find out more about this service please log onto http://www.[REMOVED].net/search_engines.html

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Kind Regards
[REMOVED]

The above was sent to the public e-mail address of my sister’s catering company. I created the website a few years back and have been adding links ever since (it’s showing it’s age and certainly doesn’t represent my best efforts at on-page optimisation – a new super-duper website is in the pipeline as I write).

But I digress. Back to the original e-mail. While they *may* have manually collected the mail address (I seriously doubt it, and if they did surely they would take a quick look at the rankings?), addressing your sales-related e-mail to “Dear Business” doesn’t tick any of my boxes.

I particularly like the misspelling of the word “Optisation”:

our Search Engine Optisation [sic] service where we submit your website every four weeks for a year to all the major search engines

and to be fair I should add:

We can also optimise certain keywords you want to come up on searches.

Personally I find the above [REMOVED] e-mail just about as annoying as another beauty that’s doing the spamming rounds:

(If you want to see a magic trick entitled “How to Disappear £149 in 2 Easy Steps” these guys can show you.)

But back again to the [REMOVED] SEO spammers

As a professional courtesy I did check out some of the claims on the page the e-mail lands on. Some stand up, some are slightly fickle (e.g. ‘pages from Ireland’ only) while others have very dubious keyword selections [REMOVED].

And what about Amitan?

How about 40-50 search referrals per day. Here’s some ranking & visitor statistic reports generated earlier (click to enlarge):

Lessons to be learnt?

Lesson #1
Don’t spam people with SEO offers – it’s bad for recipients, it’s bad for your reputation, and most of all, it’s bad for the SEO industry.

Lesson #2
If you want to judge the results of any particular SEO company ask them about the traffic levels generated as well as the rankings achieved.

</rantWarning>

PS – did anyone else get this email from [REMOVED]?

Want to read more?

1. Seedcorn – A Perfect Example of HOW TO ASK FOR ONLINE ATTENTION
2. Spammers Target Moscow Children’s Hospital – savechilds.net Nasty Xmas Scam
3. Web Marketing Specialist Contract Available

Politicians have yet to wake up to the impact of the internet, which will expose them to online “truth predictor” tests and affect the outcome of general elections

That’s a quote from an FT article published yesterday. The article refers to the presentation given by Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman, to the UK’s Conservative Party Conference yesterday.

Here’s the video (his comment is about 10 seconds in):

Now I wonder what Irish politicians would make of all this

You can watch the full video of Eric Smhmidt’s presentation to the Conservative Party’s website. The direct download link is here.

Want to read more?

1. SES London – Linkbait, and When It’s Not
2. Can Third Party Cookies Kill Your Sales?
3. Note This Feature in Google Search

Links to your site are one of the most important factors used by the Search Engines in deciding whether your site is listed #1 or #500 for any given search phrase. (I previously discussed the importance of ranking using the AOL data.)

Every link to your site found on the Internet counts as 1 ‘vote’. Oh, didn’t you know? Democracy rules on-line!

It’s an Election Every Day

Just like in the real world not everyone’s vote is equal, and rigging the count isn’t as difficult as you might imagine.

So which votes count more than others? Well they happen to be the votes that the counters ‘trust’. In our case that means links from websites that the Search Engines ‘trust’.

Who Do You Trust?

Link ‘trust’ is a function of a number of factors, but suffice to say that older websites that contain shed loads of quality content and are linked to by similar sites would generally be trustworthy.

One Person, One Vote?

In the real world each individual should have just one vote. It doesn’t quite work like this in the virtual world. On the Internet it is easy enough to vote over and over again.

Search Engines count links to determine how popular you are (link popularity). But more importantly, they check the anchor (this is an anchor) text to decide what your popular for.

Working The Phrase

The key to getting listed in most Search Engines for any given search phrase is to have enough links pointing at your site containing that phrase in the anchor text.

If you want your site to rank well for ‘purple monkey dishwasher’ then you would try to create as many links as possible (on trustworthy sites of course) pointing at your site using the anchor ‘purple monkey dishwasher’.

Google Bombing

Creating an overwhelming number of links is referred to as ‘Google Bombing’, the most famous examples of which are failure and liar.

And closer to home, it appears that a certain broadband lobbying group may have inspired its own mini Google bomb for the term ‘telecoms poodle‘. Well deserved it is.

So now you know that the anchor can be your friend, but it can also be your enemy. Just ask Comreg!

Want to read more?

1. Say Goodbye to ‘Google Bombing’ & Hello to ‘Take Care with Your Anchor Text’
2. Links Form The Fabric Of The Internet
3. Interesting New Statistics on Irish Search Engine Usage

While the website is very professional, what really makes this viral special is a 3 min promotional video (also available from the website) showcasing ‘the biggest construction project in the state’ which will include ‘the world’s only giraffe-only zoo’, Howth 2 ‘an exact replica of Howth on the southside’, and is ‘a world on water that can be seen from space’:

(Did you notice the caption )

(Again the video is so slick that you would be excused for missing those captions the first time around)

I have to say I really like this and I will be very curious to see just how many people register on their site for this ‘development’.

Best of luck to Funda when they start operating here.

[UPDATE 26 September - last night I saw a news report that costed this project at over €30,000. Today I saw the following banner over on boards.ie:

I think that they want to fill that database with as many email addies as possible.]

Want to read more?

1. Funda Ireland, €30k (excluding the SEO)
2. Dublin Coastal Development a LOT Slicker Than Funda.ie
3. Funda Ireland Pulling Down The Shutters

Hanging around in Internet cafes has reminded me just how much I hate MS Internet Explorer – pop-ups here, new windows there. Just gives you a real wake-up call to how MS have ignored their customers for the past decade or so.

IE7 is long overdue, but I for one will be sticking with my trust-worthy Firefox installation.

Want to read more?

1. Did Someone Say That Internet Scams Were Becoming More Sophisticated
2. Does Google Know Your MSN & Y! Searches?
3. How To Block IE7 in Windows Update (if you’re not too late!)