30 Nov06

Should the price of a link be valued by the PageRank?

Every now and then this old question comes up, it never ceases to amaze us how much webmasters want for their links. As with any SEO Company we all have to negotiate links and advertising real-estate, very often this involves parting with money.

But how much is an advert or text link worth? It has been reported recently that Yahoo! will charge up to a million a day for a banner on their home page. Of course like all media channels any advert depends on it's perceived value, if the advert is to attract traffic then obviously the amounts are dictated by the volume of readers, click throughs etc. If the reason for the advert or link is for authority gathering where the migration of traffic directly is second place there are some strange attitudes appearing.

Some site owners feel that the level of PageRank dictates the price of the advert. To all those ad and text link sellers out there - no it doesn't, other factors such as relevance, traffic (Alexa rank) and even the number of other external links on the page carry more of a weighting when it comes to link buying.

28 Nov06

Meta Tags and Plagiarism, getting it wrong can be painful.

For a long time, we as an organisation have been promoting the need to "tick all the boxes". There is no single thing you can do to get to the top of the search engines and stay there. But the combined effect of doing everything that is within the rules will, with time, deliver results.

So how can duplication and having the wrong meta tags actually hurt your site. If a page is identified as duplicated either on your site or someone else's -i.e. plagiarized there is a real risk of that page being placed in Googles Supplementary Index, which means you'll find pages not having PageRank and the page content not being searched by Google.
SEO Plagiarism and the Supplemental Index

13 Nov06

Google keeping you guessing?

There is significant discussion around the office that something is a foot with the Google index. We are seeing from hour to hour over the last week, a Rollback on the number of BackLinks Google are showing along with a rotation of different SERPs (Search Engine Results). There is also some debate concerning some pages we witnessed having been awarded PageRank a few weeks ago don't have it any more. I say debate because I (for one) haven't actually seen this.

However towards the end of last week we noticed a few "significant SERPs climbers", there appeared to be little change from the previous months as far as content, keyword densities etc or link structures. On closer scrutiny there were some interesting changes to some of the BackLinks, we noticed that there appears to be a move to the more "influential" links, links from reputable sites with less links per page. So the answer of course is online PR and more the better.

On checking the Google DataCentres we notice there has been a small change but on the whole the results are pretty flat with very little fluctuation. So what is going on, difficult to say - we know that the last update appeared to be incomplete, it could be that we are seeing Google completing the process. It could also be the introduction of yet another spam filter, tightening up on all those bad link building practices.

10 Nov06

SEO's are getting everywhere!

Yesterday I was invited to attend a meeting in London, Hendon to be specific. On the journey down I had to take a "comfort break" at Luton Service Area on the M1. I'm not going in to too much detail but whilst there, in the gents wash rooms, I noticed an ad on the wall, not the usual sat-nav systems or tracker systems, but in my experience, for the first

time ever there was an ad for an SEO Company.

SEO, to the populous, is still very much a non entity. Listening to my parents telling their friends what I do for a living "...he's into computers and Google" for Leadbank, the company advertising, to take the step of assuming people understand what SEO is quite refreshing, and probably about time.

It would be very interesting to get some feeback from Leadbank as to how well the campaign goes, although I suspect they may not want to share it with anyone competing in the same industry.

29 Oct06

111 and 8th Avenue.

	With Google looking to create a new office in New York, the proposed site is a building completed in the 1930's, having 18 floors and standing 264ft (80m) tall. Google is expected to take just two floors of the building, each floor is approx 150,000sqft. Other tenants.
Google already has approx 100,000sqft (over four floors) of offices at 1440 Broadway in Times Square.

18 Oct06

CHILL OUT!

For those "stress heads" that have contacted us today following on from my earlier post... CHILL OUT!
I am well aware that looking at the Google update history tables that this time last year, when Google updated it's PR and Backlinks, a week later Google went bananas and launched the now infamous Jagger Update. I wouldn't even try to second guess Google, but there is a difference from last year to this - BigDaddy!

18 Oct06

Google Backlink and PR Update..but will it stick?

After last weeks false start, it would appear that Google is now showing an updated BackLink status.Looking across the datacentres they would all have appeared to have flat lined.
The Big News however is there appears to have been a PR Update as well. Before you all go dashing off to check what Google has awarded you, there is one small change to this PR Update.
Normally when Google updates PR it only updates the PR on the pages it was seeing approx 4 wks earlier. So any pages uploaded after then have to wait until the next time round. The last update on the 14th July was awarding PR to pages it saw early June. This time round the cut off date is somewhere between the 21st and the 27th of July. Making this PR Update approx three months old.
Will these results stick? As I said earlier the datacentres are completely flat lined so unless they start shifting again in the next few days...it would appear the update may just do so. Google update history.

10 Oct06

Google to buy YouTube.

Google is hoping to buy video-sharing website YouTube for an estimated $1.6bn (£857m). The price reflects the phenomenal growth of YouTube which has gone from 58,000 visitors just 14 months ago, to more than 12m per month according to ComScore MediaMetrix. Youtube buyout

9 Oct06

Google Backlink Update.

Google, as usual. finds it very entertaining to be inconsistent. The last few updates both BackLinks and PageRank have been updated simultaneously. Over the weekend the Google toolbar was updated to show a revised set of results in its BackLink checker. Google update history.
..UPDATE
the BackLink update we were witnessing some six hours ago has been reversed back to where it was before the weekend.

4 Oct06

UK- Internet Adspend up 40%

According to figures released by Price Waterhouse Cooper and the Internet Advertising bureau, for the UK, spend on advertising has climbed 40% for the first half of 2006. Internet Adspend UP 40%

26 Sep06

Is content still king?

In the world of SEO, content has been regarded as all important. Whilst this is still the case it is not for the reasons you might expect. It is true that content gives something for the spiders to read, it is also true that without relevant content it would be difficult to score in the search engines. However content on it's own is only part of the storey...So is content still king?

24 Sep06

BT Broadband services "STINK", how difficult can it be to get connected?

We moved offices a little over 2 weeks ago, our move in date was the 11th September where everything was in place for a swift relocation. Everything was planned, all the logistics were in place, all the comms ordered and confirmed, so how is it that we were left high and dry after the move with no internet access. Considering the internet is our business, being without it for any period of time effectively shuts us down. BT Broadband

11 Sep06

XSEO move offices again.

Xseo has resided at Forge Bellows house in Stafford for two years and whilst the building has served our needs for this time, we realised that it gave us very little scope for expansion. Read more.

Adv

7 Sep06

Google launches Click to Call

In November last year we heard a rumour about Google experimenting with click to call technology in it's Adwords system. The idea is to place a telephone icon beside the advert, on clicking the icon you can enter your phone number and Google will connect you for free to the advertiser. In the last few days the icon has been appearing on some Google UK ads.

17 Aug06

What's the difference between engines?

We are one of the only search engine optimisation companies currently in the top 10 of all three of the major search engines Yahoo , Google and MSN for the phrase "search engine optimisation". This puts us in a unique position, given how competitive this sector is, but apart from the obvious benefits it also gives us an exceptional understanding of the differences between the engines.

16 Aug06

Microsoft's Adcenter goes live in the UK.

The long awaited Adcenter, Microsoft's competitor to Google's Adwords and Yahoo!'s Search Marketing, finally goes live in the UK.

Adv

14 Aug06

Google's sense of humour failure

In June Google attained the enviable place in the Oxford English Dictionary "to google". However the US giant is reported to have just issued a series of legal letters to various organisations warning against using the brand as a verb. This seems to be a far cry from the once relaxed, youthful image that Google has previously promoted. It would appear they have developed a degree of paranoia regarding their trademark. Funny that...it never did Hoover any harm!

Adv

10 Aug06

Is your Accessibility policy damaging your listings?

Last week yet again I found myself reviewing another poor sole's web site who had no Google ranking, not cached pages and no PR beyond the home page. On the face of it the site was well written, Google had obviously been there as the home page was a PR4. It had link structures with html pages and no obvious reason for its failure to rank....so what's wrong with my site?

4 Aug06

Credit card cloning, spare a thought for the trader.

This week I joined the ever increasing and fastest growing clubs on the planet, who's only membership criteria is having your credit card cloned. Being computer and web savvy, I always apply the cautious approach when using credit cards on the Internet, so how they could have got my details to clone worries me. Credit card cloning

Adv