This about change that Gordon Brown is making seems to be far more of a publicity and voter collection stunt. He’s in a crisis situation and hopping on the tax reduction parachute to keep him in office. I’m not sure that the voting public are that easy to mislead anymore. The Labour Government have pulled too many stunts in the last few years that have gone against public opinion so as happened once before, I’m waiting to wake up one morning to find that we have a new brush sweeping up in Number 10. They’re going to have a rough time clearing up the mess, but I’m pretty sure they can’t make it much worse than it already is!

(small shout out to the London SEO company that has just helped the Marketers Rag with some website marketing).

I have search on yahoo for links to ###### that has been found in the last 3 months. It has returned 61 good results. Which I have then gone through manually, these are my findings.

Out of the 61 links 47 of them will not be counted in google for these reason (20 not Cached, 2 no live links, 3 the link had been removed, 8 were no followed, 2 javascript redirects, 5 errored and 5 were rejected as duplicates)

Out of the 15 links that did count 13 of them were rated as 0 in the google pagerank.

The two that had page rank were:

######

Which was a really nice PR 4 links page that had multiple links back to the site with good anchor text.

and

######
This was PR 2 blog roll link, this was pretty good to, should stand the test of time.

I did the same report on google to see what pages it had picked up in the last month and it returned 4 pages, not all linking, but google only reports 12 links in total (but as we all know google lies).

Press release:
I had a quick look at a press release related to the website and found that it had 9 pages in the google index, probable discredited by the duplicate filter.

######

I have seen little follow up news stories related to this, press releases are only really worth something if website pick them up and run stories about them. I saw one press type story when looking at the links:

######

This is the only useful news I could find connect to the site. I might have found more if I had increased the time period I was looking at.

Type of links built
Another thing that is worth noting is the manner in which the links have been built apart from the two mentioned above. 70% of the links built were from directories, mainly free low quality ones, 10% were from press release which got caught in the duplicate filter.

I hope this help anything else you need please give me a shout.

It's nice to look at someone else handy work. I really do believe we can do a so much better job. We just have better resources and we know what we are doign more that sounds silly but the big boys charge so much more than us and they are lazy by the look of it all they are doing is submitting to hundreds of free or cheap directories.

Anyway just a couple of shout outs to friend Calf implant uk and snack and drink vending machines all very good people. Thanks for the support.

Google planned to protest eBay’s payment policies by holding a Let Freedom Ring party to pressure the auction magnate into giving their customers the choice of which payment system to use.  The party would be held at the same time and in the same city as the eBay Live Annual Seller’s Conference, and could therefore attract a number of irate eBay users.  “We’ll use the same spot where revolutionaries launched the Boston Tea Party to celebrate freedom with free food, free drinks, free live music — even free massages,” Google trumpeted.

EBay wasn’t about to take a slight like that sitting down.  They responded by pulling all of their AdWords advertisements from Google’s system.  Google immediately realized that the party was going too far and cancelled it.

Despite the party's cancellation, eBay has not restored its AdWords advertisements, which are estimated to be worth more than $200 million to Google, about 2% of the search engine giant’s annual earnings.  eBay ranks well in Google’s natural results, so they may not have to go back to paying for their advertisements at all.  If eBay drops AdWords ads, Google’s profits could take a big hit.

However, the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog has chimed in on the topic, clarifying that there is a responsible and acceptable way to use these kinds of pages.  Pages of links to provide quick and easy navigation through useful content for the site visitors can actually be a helpful SEO practice.

The Google Bloggers refer to a Dutch practice known as startpages, which was started by a website called Startpagina.Nl.  Startpages have become popular in the Dutch market, and are NOT against Google webmaster guidelines.

The Google Blog highlights three major differences between doorway pages and startpages:

1. The linked content is unique and useful to visitors
2. The pages provide useful navigation for visitors
3. The links are not primarily a paid service designed to boost Google rankings.

I think this is a great clarification for webmasters.  If you have a lot of content that can be grouped by different navigational methods, this could be a really useful tool for you.  Now you have Google's blessings to test out the idea, as long as you keep your users' needs firmly in mind.

Sites have evolved through many technological trends over the past few years.  Even with the 3 things in place that ShoeMoney mentions, I think the most important thing has to be the foundation of the site, the design itself.  Even with faster connections the gimmicks of some marketers, the pop-ups, the pop-unders, the animated banner ads, the floating cursors – none of these will make me do anything other than close the site and move to the next one.  A site that’s selling needs to be professional.  It should be the pin-stripe suit of websites – all information and no gimmicks.  

Once the foundation is in place, the site needs to be full of information that the search engine can feed from.  The site owner needs to think about his business and what the average buyer of his product/service will search for in order to find him.  Then he must create short keyword rich content on his site to pander to the search engines current criteria for “great site information” containing the search words he has identified.  This could be how he words his advertisements, additional articles he keeps on site, or even a forum where these words are used.  Once the site is launched, the siteowner must then keep up-to-date with the criteria that the search engines are using to prioritize their search listings, and update their site content accordingly.

Although viral marketing, advertising and financial planning are important to a successful launch, search engines can’t be ignored and must be fed, and the site must be created in such a way that people want to come back to it – because otherwise, it won’t matter how many newsletters you send out to your subscriber base, visitors will still choose a competitor that offers a similar product/service but with a more user-friendly and quicker loading time.

What is a RSS?
RSS syndication is one of the many ways websites get in touch with their visitors outside their pages. With RSS, visitors are notified of the site’s most recent content updates and additions. It is then safe to say that a site’s RSS is a condensed copy of the site’s significant contents. Typically, sites with article dominated contents such as news and blog sites offer RSS subscription to their visitors and members in the form of XML. In addition, webmasters can choose to syndicate other contents such as new products, promos, user profiles, site logs and just about any content worth publishing. People who subscribe to RSS feeds are then free to use their preferred RSS reader to convert RSS feed XML into human-readable form.

There are lots of RSS readers available. Such ranges from desktop-based to online readers. Some even offer voice-narrated RSS feeders famous among users with reading disability. 

But these are just features of a typical RSS feed reader. What, then, makes Google reader unique from other RSS readers?

Another feature worth mentioning is Google Reader’s the ability to share your favorite RSS contents to other people. How?  You can choose to make your chosen feeds be seen by everyone (public), email the link to your friends or even incorporate the RSS feed’s content to your own site.

Lastly and most importantly, like most Google gadgets around, Google reader is free and available to all registered Google users.

Downsides of Google Reader
Luckily for their competitors, Google Reader has some bugs of its own. Recently, it has been showing duplicate entries from the same RSS feeds. This may be happening when the site hosting the RSS feed changes the location of the entry being pointed to by the feeds, thus resulting to the same entry with different location.

Though incorporating choice RSS feeds into one’s own website may look like a lazy webmaster’s friend, sad to say, it is not. Codes Google provide to do this comes in javascript format which means instant content for your site but totally useless to search engines.

Until next time.

Here are some quick alterations that could lower the chances the link would fire off this filter, for example remove any ‘sponsored links' or ‘advertisements' lables that go about the links. Another idea is to put the link within a paragraph alternatively place the link in the internal site navigation, at least ry to avoid sticking them in a easily identifiy able chunk.

The main problem with links buying is figuring out the ROI, If I buy links purely for the effect they will have on my ranking I try to avoid paying monthly. Bear in mind you will have to wait upto 6 months before you know if it was worth it. To add to that their are other filter about, like a aging of links filter. Anyway I'm scared, don't know about you.

—-off topic—
Now for some killer sites I found whilst surfing. Here is a selection of the worst short stories you have ever seen, they don't promise to be anything else, but can be quite amusing. Every fancied getting some plastic surgery done? Check out these guys here

And it goodbye from me and goodbye from er me.

Which all sounds great what with everyone saying that standard rec linking no longer works.

But I'm not so convinced, that this is really such a god send. Article marketing in my opinion is very hard work.

Take for example getting inbound links to help get a good position in the search engines. The problem is the duplicate filter, because because everyone is picking up the same article it will alway be limited by the duplication filter, so even if your article gets published on 100 websites, the search engines are only going to give you credit for one and then they might have policy against putting live links in the articles they include.

So to get 10 links you would probable need to write at least 15 good articles.

"But articles themselves will bring you traffic in themselves" I hear you say! Maybe, maybe not. To get people to publish your article they have to be done in a certain way. The main reason writers don't get their articles published is because they write advertisements, they write the articles just to plug their product. People pay them to put these kind of article on their sites, chances are they won't do it for free. To get published they need to be informative/entertaining. However if you write a article that primary function is to give useful information or to entertain, then if probable won't be that effective to draw people to your website.

Usually webmasters publish article to make their site better rather than to send people away.

In 6 months time, most people will be bored of article submission after seeing very little results.
I know you've all been waiting for the killer stuff I found whilst surfing. Do have a website? Check out the free articles here. This is the latest property job I have been working on H.I.P.S. (Home information packs!! they will become compulsary by law in two years).

Until next time. I leave you with a tear in my eye.

"Google's 'democratic' vision of the Web will never be achieved by manipulating algorithm criteria based on content. It will only be achieved by factoring in what is important to people, and people will always remain the best judge of what that is. The true challenge for search engines in the future is how to incorporate web searcher input and preferences into their ranking algorithms."

All this makes some sense with what google releasing Urchin for free. it is a fantasic reporting tool, but it gives google pretty much all your traffic information.

Now if they can get enought of this type of information, it could massively alter the way they calulate the ranking.

These are some things that I think they will soon be capable to do quite effieciently.

1. Identify irreleval links: basically if a link is never clicked on, you can persume it is just their for the search engines benefit.

2. Identify spam pages: If someone goes to a page and then immediately click the back button. Then you can persume that is a vote agaisnt that page.

However this is not without it's problems, mainly google will have huge black spots in it's research, google analytics and toolbar will not cover everything.

Here is a quick tool that can help you find out if your site is upto scrath.

Check your site here

The law now says that the all websites in Europe shoudl be accessible to all disabled people, so that you don't fall foul of the Disability Discrimination Act. You can get more details on the act here

This is the warning I got from someone attempting to sell their consulation service to get my website up to scratch:

\"It only takes one complaint to the Disability Rights Commission about your website for them to start an investigation, and if they decide to proceed with legal action, you could face a huge cost not only in compensation, but also for your company?s credibility.\"

- Anne-Laure Dupuis

Very few website will actually need to worry about it. For example website that provide a paid for service to public. Their are only a couple of orginsation that would bother to sue over this, and I doubt they woudl sue my little websites.

Anne-Laure Dupuis service isn't really fraud, it is ligimate and coul dwell be useful (by the way both of her websites don't compile). However it is attempting to scare people so that they pay for her service, quite underhand. in my opinion.

To end with some killer sites I found. I have another stupid but addictive game, it's called ALAIS it's a strange combination of mouse plus keyboard, try it. Did you ever want to buy nut and bolts on bulk? A lot of my readed do, they say hey that stuff all funny but where can I get a shed load of stainless steel nuts and bolts on the cheap. Well here. Now leave me alone.

Hay the Simpsons is on, I'm outta here.