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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So here they go again, first it was search advertising, then it was printed, then it was billboards, then it was a browser, now they have made the logical step, and announced on the official google blog that they will be releasing an operating system to work hand in hand with Chrome browser, but aimed at notebooks.

To me this shows that Google are seriously attacking Microsoft etc at the next gen of online growth, the notebook.

So is this a good thing? A bad thing? or a nothing?

Time will tell, but personally I have no problem with it. I search using google, I mail using google I am happy to run a google operating system on a notebook that is not likely to have many apps on it.

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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 »

Lots of things going on with Google at the moment.

1. Google earth street view has launched in the UK. 

2. Google mail (GMail.com) went down again for the second time this month

3. Google keyword tool went nuts, showing all sorts of results due to a ‘glitch’

4. I have seen more instances of Google confusing dropping index pages.

So onto the detail Read the rest of this entry »

The cases are unpacked, the tans are fading, the memories of a great honeymoon are still fresh in the mind, then BOOM!!! The bomb drops as the credit card bill arrives, and you realize you now have to get back to reality and start paying for everything.

YES. The Honeymoon is over!

The same is now true for all those people who married Google’s payment system (Google Checkout) to their shopping cart checkout systems. Lured by the HUGE carrot of 10 times their ad spend as free processing, they switched. Well now that honeymoon will be over from may 2009, and the loving willing bed-mate you had for that brief period, has turned into a distant, selfish money grabber, same as all the others… Read the rest of this entry »

Odd as this may seem, Google.inc has applied a penalty to google.co.jp with its pagrank being downgraded from PR9 to PR5 (Googles words) . In a recent interview Matt Cutts said that unfortunately, while promoting a new gadget, google used the outside agency services of a company who used paid blog posting as the method of SEO!

As anyone knows, Google frown on unnatural link building, and have a war on paid links. Because of this,  Google.co.jp was nailed, and the reputation of Google has been damaged

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

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Google has come up with a great (in my opinion) service that is placing archived newspapers online and available. Google has teamed up with over 100 news sources around the world to improve on its existing agreement with the New York Times and the Washington post.

The service is Google Archive Search and old news is good news.

Hard to believe isn’t it!

Google as of this moment is now 10 years old! So how did they go from being a computer in a Lego block, to the worlds favourite Search Engine?

In a word? Relevancy.. And here are another couple of words that made google famous.  Viral marketing. Google took over purely due to the word of mouth generated by the web marketing industry.

For me though their greatest achievement is convincing people they are a search company, when in fact they are just one big advertising company