Archive for August, 2009

I am sure that I am not the only SEO who’s inbox and PM box on forums has been full of ‘My site has gone from the rankings’ type messages during the last few weeks. This is always the case when Google ‘stir their secret sauce’.  This latest incarnation appears of have had far more wide ranging impact that they might have envisaged, Possibly this is the only problem with having such a wide ranging interconnected algorthim.

One of the big changes has been the ‘slackening’ or perhaps lowering of the bar on non UK specific domains appearing in the UK SERPS. Read the rest of this entry »

Question:
I recently changed hosts, and at the same time I moved the store from domain.com/store to the root domain.com/ Sales have disappeared and I am getting loads of 404 errors, what can I do? this is an absolute nightmare for me and the business.

Answer:
Sadly you have made an all too common error in assuming that it is OK to simply move your site around without it having an affect.  The search engines know all the URLs on your site, and expect them to be there. People will have bookmarked pages to come back later and buy from you. Now they are all getting 404 errors. The spiders feel unloved, and worse, potential buyers think you have gone bust. Read the rest of this entry »

The big buzz around the SEO world is Google Caffiene! Is it new, is it different, is it better is it worse, is it knee jerk reaction to Microhoo Bing .  On the webmaster central blog, Google  Software Engineer Sitaram Iyer and Senior Software Engineer Matt (I love cats I do ) Cutts wrote  :-

” For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions ”

Read the rest of this entry »

Q: (privacy requested for obvious reasons) 
Hi OWG, for some odd reason, Google has suddenly started spidering our site under the wrong domain name. The home page and a couple of others have been spidered under XXX.co.uk while the rest are under the original domain of yyy.co.uk. We really are at a loss as to why this has happened, can you help please, as yyy.co.uk is just an old domain name that we foreward to our real site.

A: No problem! This often happens and is a timebomb waiting to happen in many cases. It is a way of setting yourself up to be knocked down, due to poor redirection of domains. Read the rest of this entry »

At long last the site has had a  makeover. It was about time as it had been a few years and i thought it was looking like smelly pants.

Any comments appreciated as well as any glitches or brain farts the site might have!

I intend posting a bit more, and getting back to the original format of replying to questions asked.  so

ASK ME ONE and maybe I will answer.

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