Last year, on 11th April 2011, my main site (certainly not this one!) was mercilessly ripped to shreds by the now infamous Google Panda update. I lost over half my traffic and three-quarters of my revenue overnight. I was so desperate I started doing jobs for other people. But, I made a full recovery about 8 months later and all was well. Penguin – Low Quality SEO On 24th April 2012 Google rolled out its latest major update, Penguin. While Panda tackles low quality content, Penguin tackles low quality SEO. OK, before I carry on waffling I must point out that this is not fact, just my thoughts. If you ever meet me you will quickly learn that my thoughts are not the most coherent or logical at the best of times, and at the moment I am feeling a bit peckish. On the 24th one of my sites was affected by Penguin. The site was also affected by Panda, but I also recovered this site. The final recovery only came about a week or so before Penguin! Fortunately the site was not a big money earner, although I always had hopes that it could become something much better in [...]

Infographics graphics are still a buzzword in the SEO industry. Initially infographics were used by SEO’s specifically to generate natural links for a website. The idea is twofold really: A great infographic on a webpage will get people talking, and hopefully linking to you Other websites love publishing infographics which can send a link back (most infographic terms of use insist that there is a text link within a description, usually below them). More recently infographics have been used by SEO’s to help explain the SEO process of link building. Also the latest social media buzzword comes in to play – Pinterest. All of these infographics have been shared on Pinterest. So today I decided to review the 10 best link building infographics, and use Pinterest to help display some of them. Warning: this page is going to be long and probably take a while to load! Also the titles are a bit wonky, the div codes from Pinterest do not seem to want to play ball and somehow stop the H2 headers having their own line. No time to try to fix this though, so you will have to put up with it 1. The Four Faces of Link [...]

I just came across something odd on Pinterest. The BBC page is full of images that although intially link to the BBC, they are then redirected off to another website. The end website is trying to look like Pinterest, but it is not. I raised my concern with the BBC and then mentioned it on Google+, adding the BBC Click team in to have a look. Then I looked again, and realised what is happening. This is my “complaint” to the BBC (I could not see a better way to alert them): Type of complaint: BBC Online What is your complaint about: Other BBC Online Website URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/redirect.shtml?http://auoff.info/pinterest Complaint category: Other Contacted us before: No Complaint title: That URL is being shared on Pinterest. It redirect Complaint description: An image is being shared on Pinterest:http://pinterest.com/pin/196399233720065774/ that alleges to be a BBC photo. On clicking the image we are taken to http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/redirect.shtml?http://auoff.info/pinterest and then redirected to http://pinterest.helixzone.info/ It looks like spam. Sorry if it is not, I was just worried that someone was somehow exploiting a vulnerability in the BBC. #bbcclick - maybe the BBC Click team can check if it is indeed some sort of exploit? I then found that the BBC redirect page can be used [...]

Due to the numerous problems I have had with Talk Talk Business (some blogged here) I have decided to leave them. After some research I chose to have my telephone with BT and my broadband with Titan ADSL. The change over date is 10th May 2012, which is still 3 weeks away. This should be very straightforward. But it is not. Here is a copy of my 3rd request to BT. I am really copying it here as after sending an enquiry through their online form, that is the last you see of it. No copy is sent to your email for future reference. In short, I am having a real headache getting BT to cooperate with my broadband supplier. So far the 2 people I spoke to cannot even grasp the concept of having telephone and Internet with different people. 3 times I had to tell one customer care worker on the phone “no, I do not want broadband with BT, do not sign me up, I am getting it from Titan ADSL”. For clarification, here is BT’s explanation of LORN: “LORN: Linked Order Reference Number. Used to link the two orders together in our computer systems to switch broadband [...]

OK, I finally moved to a better platform for my newsletters. I was using PHPList, but was getting very annoyed with it as it took forever to send out emails and I had no idea if people were reading them! My webhost server only allows 350 mails to be sent an hour and with PHPList sending needed browser refreshes (a bug I think) which meant it would actually take me about a day to send to my list! So I moved to MailChimp, as suggested by +Mat Bennett, and sent out my first email last night. So far today (it has been almost 25 hours) 10.1% of people have opened it. This is about half the industry average (according to MailChimp). Better news is that 4.2% of people followed a link to the site, which more than the 3.4% industry average. So I must have done something right. But I was wondering, how long do people leave it before deciding that if anyone is going to open an email, they would have done it already? Is 24 hours about right, or do some people open emails days / weeks after? I guess it depends how many mails they get each day. [...]

I am reaching out for help on this one. Today Google finally switched off its old Analytics interface. Now, I am sure that the new version will provide many useful tools, but unfortunately the few tools and reports that I did use are now no longer available. Or, if they are available, I cannot work out how to access them. In a desperate attempt to get some help I posted to Google+, included various people who consider themselves experts in Analytics (although I am not actually sure if they will see my post … ). Google Analytics Help Needed In the old version I mostly checked Landing Pages and the percentage of visits to each page. This was my way to quickly spotting any big changes to traffic going to particular pages. I cannot work out how to show this in the new version. Is there a way? Also, when I log into Analytics I used to see my dashboard (which had the most important reports at the top). Now when I log in I first see a page that tells me the language of my visitors and some system / demographic data – none of which I use. Is [...]

Am I getting old? Or is this just bloody impossible to work out? CAPTCHA = Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart But sometimes even humans cannot work them out! Suggested Reading:How To Use Pinterest and the BBC To Spam The InternetNew Google Homepage Design – Planning for a New Google?Annoying Opt Outs on SitesGoogle Adds Authors To SearchDo You Need a Website? Use This Flowchart to Determine if You Really Need a Website

A week or so ago, just before Link Love London 2012 (if you missed it, read these blog posts about Link Love 2012) a new website was launched. It is called ShitForLinks.com. Now, this may sound like a pretty terrible name for a site, but there is a reason. As any seasoned SEO knows (or even most noobs), links are what webmasters affectionally call website hyperlinks, which is the code that is used to create a clickable link to allow you to surf the net. What’s more, Google, everybody’s favourite search engine, uses web links as a part of is PageRank calculation (PageRank being named after Larry Page, not web pages). Finally, ever since Google started using links to help rank pages, websites owners and their marketing teams have spent their days (and nights) building more links to their sites. A Little Link Building History Let’s hop back in time …. there was a time, before PageRank, that the only people who linked to other sites were doing so because they personally liked other sites. This gave rise to “web surfing”. People would surf from one site to another, following the links. Google decided to put a stop to that by [...]

Facebook has made a major Internet acquisition today – it has bought Instagram, a photo sharing website. Instagr.am is a lot like Pinterest but designed more with mobiles in mind. This is really the first big social step that Facebook has taken into the mobile market. Although their website is available on all smartphone and mobile devices, their main focus has been with text updates. Justin Bieber famously used Instagram in the summer of 2011 when he shared a photo of traffic he was stuck in (“La traffic sucks http://instagr.am/p/IMhuj/“). The result was a lot of new Instagram users as the image went viral across the Internet. Snoop Dog is also an avid user. Sharing photos online seems to be a new trend. Photo sharing sites have been around for years, with the likes of Flickr being major players. Photos can also easily be shared on other social networks such as Google+, Twitter and Facebook already. So why has Facebook bought Instagram for a million dollars? Well, let’s ask Mark Zuckerberg: “For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer [...]

From March 30, 2012, Facebook is making some pretty dramatic changes to fan pages. If you have been on Facebook recently, you’ll notice that normal profiles were transformed a few months ago into something called the timeline. Now fan pages will be forced to go through a similar transformation. Naturally, there is a lot of controversy and whining surrounding this change. You would think that internet marketers would be all for change- after all, their entire careers were only made possible by recent innovations. In reality, some marketers don’t like change. They like to learn a system and create predictable money-making processes around it. Sure it is a pain to have to revamp your brand page in order to neatly fit into the Timeline format. Once you have put in the effort, however, you should see the rewards. The new timeline format allows you to communicate some very powerful things to your fans. The timeline format gives you the opportunity to show the history of your brand as opposed to just talking about it. Seeing is more powerful than discovery, and that includes establishing your company’s history. You can gain an enormous amount of credibility by showing the viewers of [...]

Ranking factors are again a hot topic for local SEO professionals because of Google’s recent announcements, called the Venice Update.  Because of this, SEO professionals will need to look at using what worked for their organic searches in ranking local searches. Google has also given out the three pillars of ranking higher on Google Places: prominence, distance and relevance. Relevance means that elements of your business, such as the business name, description and other profile information, should match the search query. Prominence is determined by several factors or signals that Google looks into to see just how popular your company is compared to your competitors. Distance, meanwhile, is your location from the city center.  The sad truth is that higher ranking business listings are often those that are closer to the geographical city center or what is called the centroid.  If you are around one to two miles away from the city center, then you have a good chance of ranking an A for that city. The good news is, it seems that Google is looking to degrade the importance of being proximate to a city center by focusing more on domain authority and page authority. What These Mean So [...]

In the world of hackers, there are many players. Some hackers are paid to find the weaknesses in computer systems to help companies enhance security. Others become involved with illegal security breaches in order to expose wrongdoing. And still others are only concerned with stealing personal data for monetary gain, such as the obtaining of credit card numbers and passwords. Hacktivism is one type of hacking which falls under the ethical hacker category. Hacktivists, like other types of hackers are defined by their motivation, which in this case is political or social. There is much debate about whether this type of activity should be considered illegal, as it revolves around free speech, and the protesting of such. Stolen Data and Hacktivism Hacktivists are considered by some to be of major concern. And the data seems to back this up, with recent findings stating that they were responsible for more than half of the data stolen as a result of cyber attacks in 2011. This recent data also revealed that hacktivists were the ones who engaged in the rampant looting of data once system security had been breached. The Changing Face of Hacktivism The motivation of these rogue characters, along with [...]

The DroidAnalytics app review Whether you’re an SEO or just someone who likes to check your site’s SEO parameters all the time, the DroidAnalytics app is definitely for you! It’s basically a pretty private story because I fell in love with the app at first site. So, please don’t talk too bad about the app in the comments. Just kidding. OK, now let’s talk business, guys. Profiles One of the first features that will catch your eye is that thing that you can have lots of profiles at the same time. Just login to all of them and then you’ll be able to switch over to the one you need at a particular moment. In case you happen to be an SEO manager, you’ll need this very feature left and right. Main screen Once you click on the profile you want to check stats for, you’ll be redirected to the main screen of your profile. Most of the screen is occupied by the stats table that gives you the details of daily page views, visits, visitors, P/V (page view per visit), Bounce (bounce rate), and time (time on site). At the bottom of the screen, you can see the other [...]

On the morning of August 15, 2011, a glaring headline in every newspaper caught the attention, and baffled, many technology buffs: “Google Buys Motorola Mobility.” The Players For anyone that does not know better, Google is a technology behemoth and is one of the heads of the three-headed technology beast- the other two being Apple and Microsoft. On the other hand, Motorola was a once successful mobile company that has since gone downhill and was near bankruptcy when Google bought them out. Newspaper columnists around the country were confused by Google’s move (and still are, more than half a year later). Especially, considering the whopping pay-out Motorola received: $12.5 billion! Was it the Patent Portfolio? Google paid good money for Motorola and according to many insiders Google bought Motorola in order to get their hands on Motorola’s stash of more than 25,000 patents. Over the past few years, there has been a “patent war” between Google, Apple and Microsoft- which has led to numerous, very costly legal battles over who owns what and who is violating whose patents. All in all, it is a huge mess that is extremely costly to the U.S. judicial system and every company wants as [...]

The means by which humans can telecommunicate over long distances has with time progressed in regards to both speed and space, and continues to increasingly rapidly. The development of technology in the modern world are so astonishing that were you to showcase such tools to people from even just 500 years ago, they’d perhaps liken it to black magic and think you a sorcerer. In fact, our methods of communication are so advanced that someone just 200 years ago wouldn’t even be able to illustrate much of it in words. For example, how would a man living in 1843 describe the workings of broadband? It’s even a struggle to explain Near Field Communication Technology for people today, and yet the development of such telecommunication forms the very cornerstone of our lives. Therefore, as a treat to those blessed with a love for all things old and new here’s a brief history of telecommunication – from the very beginning to now. The Prehistoric Era Enter, the prehistoric age. By its very definition this is an era before conventional historical documentation, which means that any information gathered from it is largely inconclusive. However, based on archaeological findings it is widely believed that [...]