Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category

Does Google own a white cat, and do their employees take turns sitting in the big chair stroking it, while saying  “ah <insert name here> we’ve been expecting you?”

I can’t help but post about how things have changed at Google. I have been around since before google, and have witnessed it from birth as a brilliant new search interpretation engine, to its current form, of being a disgusting corporate piece of scum,made all the more worse by them attempting to hang on to their ‘don’t be evil’ motto. At a time when Larry Page and Sergey Brin issued  statement of

Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.

How ridiculous that statement now appears, and how much more saddening that they STILL claim it to me a true mantra. After the recent court cases, of them consorting with pharmacy companies to illegally sell drugs in the US $500M ‘agreement to pay’ for that baby.

We had the LIES to the UK government aboutGoogle hacking UK private networks and stealing data where first they lied to everyone, THEN Google lied to the UK government, then they agreed to delete the data, but decided not to, only for us to discover that FAR from the data being an accident, they actually deliberately hacked users and grabbed the data. Now the UK government has re-opened the investigation, and lo and behold, the guy they are now dealing with at Google is the very same guy who PREVIOUSLY worked for the UK government information commissioners office who dealt with the problem in the first place. strange co-incidence that originally they were not even fined fro the breach

The ICO are now looking nto this again, and are now working Europe wide with the Article 29 working party and the Gpen network. this is likely to see google fined heavily although if they are not open enough about the privacy issues that are now patently obvious to a man of the visual capabilities or Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, they the EU will simply stop google operating inside its borders!  A bit harsh you may say, BUT.. this is in direct breach of the European Union Bill of Human Rights, and THIS piece of legislation is at the very core of EU belief. the rights of EU citizens are more important than ANYTHING, in the eyes of the EU.  Googles browser hacking case where again they were forced to shell out $20.5M sums up the fact that for Google, hacking in order to gain an advantage is par for the course, be it safari, internet explorer, or simply going into peoples home computer networks and stealing their personal data!

laughably the following system is what Google are now actively doing.  It is a real nasty system Google have running at the moment, and it goes like this

1. involve social signals especially google owned property, in the algorithm
2. leak this out
3. encourage people to get social signals using Google systems
4. force people to get google accounts to leave feedback etc.
5. mwha mwha mwha.. ‘all your search terms are belong to us’.

What I am saying is that Google want people to use Google systems (signed in accounts of ANY type) as that way they claim to be ‘protecting’ the privacy of that user as they will no longer provide search data to the servers, i.e they block you from knowing the search terms used to get to your site.

THIS is why Google are doing this, they want to completely block search term referral so that you the business owner are working blind. It is little short of criminal and ironic to the ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM, that they are claiming to be doing this to protect the privacy of google users. while at the same time hacking the known world INTENTIONALLY.

Google are becoming bottom feeders guys, they abandoned their ‘don’t be evil, do no evil’ mantra a long time ago. Now they are no different to any bond villain that want world domination at any priceand their behaviour of late shows this to be the case. It is easier to sign yourself out of Guantanamo bay than sign yourself out of a Google account, as no matter what you do, they will always find a way of tracking you.

They can say what they like, and do as much good work as they like, but as my old grandmother used to say “actions speak louder than words”

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on my rant

This topic came up on UKBusiness Forums, I started writing the post and realised it is a good blog post so here it is:-

Q: I have no idea what google means by too many, too much, too often etc. There is the problem!
A: <crouches down and whispers> Shall I let you into a secret?  Neither does Google

Serious answer now.  The Algorithm is a base 5 sliding scale algo, that is applied on over 250 elements, plus sub algo’s such as paneguin etc.  The sliding scale thing is the key here and base 5 + or – that means that the value of any element can be increased or decreased by the power of 5 plus or minus.

E.G. the X factor started tonight, the xfactor website will get tens of of thousands of backlinks in the next week. Will it hurt it? Not at all! WHY? Because the site its anchor text, it keywords etc will ALL be trending on twitter, will ALL be mentioned, and as the site is so strong anyhow, the sudden rush will not hit it at all.

My forum went viral, I got bucket-fulls of links in a 72 hour period, it was not affected, I put it down to the sheer volume of social chatter that ‘justified’ the link rush.

NOW THEN… – Dai the Bike, puts up his website, 30 pages, 12 months later, hardly any traffic, same content as 12 months ago, nothing fresh, Dai goes out and employs Dai the Link (A well known Internet guy in abercwmouwsyourfather). Dai the link goes out and gets 5,000 links to the site. Google get excited as a website has become popular, so they, like everyone else, run along to the site to see WHY the site has become so popular.

NOTHING HAS CHANGED!

Same as it was 12 months previously, they scratch their heads and think.. It was all a scam to get us visiting his site. Bad BAD Dai the bike, they slap him and walk off.

Take 2

Dai the Shed, (A well known shed building guy in abercwmouwsyourfather) also launched a site at the same time. DaiTS is unhappy, not enough sales. So he reads up on tinternet about this bookface thing. He puts up a page on his site, and adds some images, and  runs a competition for some shed racking, and then he joins that there Bookface, and lets people know.

Lots of people are talkign about it and liking his page, pinning his images and his pages, and bookmarking him to their bookmark page or other social page.  Dai TS then employs Dai the link (A well known Internet guy in abercwmouwsyourfather). Dai the link goes out and gets 5,000 links to the site. Google get excited as a website has become popular, so they, like everyone else, run along to the site to see WHY the site has become so popular.

Google visit the site and notice he has a competition running, and that is why so many people have linked to this new page. They like the fact that so many real people like the fact Dai TS has this, so Google give it the big thumbs up, as well as the leg up, Dai TS goes to page 1 where he sells lots of sheds and is happy.

Dai the link is convinced his methodology works, and goes to work for a guy with a flow shop called Dai the stem, where he falls flat on his arse as the site gets banned from google.

Dait the link sits down and looks at the success he had with Dai the Shed, and asks himself.

What did I do wrong in my link building? I gave him the Platinum Dai the Link Package that worked for Dai the Shed?

WHY did google ban him talking about unnatural linking patterns?

what do google mean by too many?

what do google mean by too much?

what do google mean by too often etc.

It worked for Dai the Shed…. STUPID GOOGLE

The moral of the story being…

In Link Building, not all sites are equal, as a result, not all outcomes to the same actions are equal.  SEO by numbers died a long time ago, it’s just that nobody told him he was dead

First off let me say this Flash is GREAT.

There you go I have said it. Flash is not the spawn of the devil, it is not some mad dog roaming the streets frothing at the mouth. It is a well behaved dog, that is ideal for purpose. PURPOSE, that is the keyword where flash is concerned.

A common question across forums and other resources is with regard the way Flash works with optimisation.  put simple flash SEO is it possible?

The answer as with many things SEO related is yep, possibly. The first thing to do is to make a clear distinction between full blown flash websites, and the use of flash as elements within a site. Below are the main considerations. Read the rest of this entry »

I post on a few forums, and this week came across  a real sad case.  I will keep it deliberately vague as I don’t want to identify anyone or anything.

A company that had been trading for over 20 years woke up to find their website down. they chased their supplier who told them he would sort it. He then came back and said ‘your domain is in redemption’, don’t worry, I will sort it…. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi Old Welsh Guy,

I would like to ask your advice. I work for a **identifier removed** clothing company and we have a very active and loyal customer base for the brand. We update our product range 5 times per year which means that the URLs that are indexed for those products use a redirect when a new season goes live to direct the visitor to the newer version.

On many occasions we pick up thousands of inbound links from fashion journals, social networks and social bookmarks to product pages.
 
I would like to know if there is any SEO benefits in keeping old products live on the web?

Do we lose link equity when we remove the previous season’s products? We usually have some key products each season that people love to link to so are we being penalised for removing these?

Reply.

Dear Concerned in Oxford,
The quick answer is that

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I have been getting a lot of emails asking about the merits of so called multilanguage optimisation. These are normally from so called ‘SEO’s’ who offer this service for anything from $200-500 per language.

Is it worth it OWG I get asked. Well the answer is NO… and YES

Is it worth having multilanguage pages on your site? YES if they are done well AND provided you can deal with an enquiry in that language, because f you can’t then you are going to appear like a big ole fraud to that potentially large customer. Large in the meaning of spend, not calling them fat or anything like that.

Another thing to consider is the quality of the translation. Let me tell you a story about that. A while ago someone came up with a script that exploits the translation facility of the Google toolbar and also Yahoo toolbar etc. This script was circulated around, and eventually it, or a script LIKE it was sold for a chunk of money in one of these fantastic ‘use it or lose it , the next big thing on the web’ type broadcasts.

Google has now decided that as it is against the acceptable use terms and conditions to auto-query Google, and as these scripts ARE auto-querying Google, it will block the IP of the site that is using them. So think about the implications of that for a moment if you will.

To put it simply, using these scripts is against the terms and conditions of Google and yahoo etc. While not getting your site banned (apart from for the translation side of things), it might well raise a Google flag above your site, and might gain you unwanted notice.

Most of these SEO’s offering multilanguage promotion use these tools.

So to everyone who has asked me if it is worth it, I say… Draw your own conclusions

This is a response to a question about relevance and trustrank. Hope you like it! 

Relevance and trustrank are different things. To appreciate them you have to step back!

Trust rank is a system that shores up the original back rub aglorithm. Links are STILL a good way to work out how important a site is, PROVIDING, you can work out how important the sites are in the beginning.  I have written an article about trust rank here http://www.umbrella-consultancy.co.uk/art1-trustrank.htm

So if the BBC sports site, link to my rugby site, and I link to your football site, then there is a definite sports theme going on there right? BUT, and this is the thing here  another football site might link to yours, but they have hardly any trusted links pointing to them, so even though they are more closely relevent, their link will not carry as much weight as mine!

There is a lot more to it than this though, for example……… Read the rest of this entry »

Recently there has been a pagerank (PR) update in the Google index. so, I thought now would be a good time to blog about PR and its importance.

OK firstly what does this PR update actually mean, and will it have an effect on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s)? Well what it means is simply that Google has updated the public facing PR values., will this affect rankings? Not in the least! (sorry to break hearts) WHY is this OWG ‘I hear you ask’ . well I shall explain… Read the rest of this entry »

This is the argument that many have been making for a few years now. But while all this debate has been going on, those who knew who the real king is sat, smiled, and got on with earning money. Those who knew and understood what it is all about just kept doing it, and watching the money roll in.

So if neither copy content nor links are king, then what IS? I will tell you what is king, it is…. Read the rest of this entry »

I was over at Small Business Ideas Forum where I moderate, and someone brought up cold calling on the telephone. Now cold calling is something I loved, as I did a LOT of it way back in my sales and advertising early days. I have also helped clients with their cold calling setup, so this was right up my street  

One thing that sales people and sales trainers often fail to get across is exactly what the job of the sales person is. They say it is to sell products, (which is true), but they do not sum it up properly.

You see your job as a sales person, be it teleselling, face to face selling, or selling online is the same, selling is selling no matter what medium you sell in. Your job is to ensure the person you are talking to has the information they need to make a decision. Note I said a decision not a purchase? No matter how good your product or sales methods, some people will either not be able to, or not want to buy your product.

To sell you must listen more than you speak, but you need to get the information to the client, to get that information to the client you need to know what THEY need to know. You do this in the time honoured way that any parent will know. You ask questions! Kids by the way are the best salespeople you will ever meet, they master the skill of open and closed questions with ease. How many of us have gone through this

Please can I have an xxx?
NO!
Why not?

note the use of open and closed questions there! 

I will explain the difference between an open and closed question, and explain how as a top salesman I used it shamefully to speak to pretty women without fear of rejection. (when like me you have a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, you need all the help you can get in order to not be rejected). Read the rest of this entry »