Firetop

I’m not as obsessed with Google PageRank™ as I used to be, but was disappointed to see Firetop’s score lowered from 5/10 to 4/10 last week. For those that don’t know, PageRank™ is Google’s scoring method for determining which websites are most popular and therefore in all likelihood contain valuable content. The algorithm behind the scoring looks at the volume of in-bound links from related websites, which also have high PageRank™ scores… of course it’s a bit chicken and egg. If you use the Google toolbar in your browser you probably already have a little green PageRank™ bar at the top of your page. Interestingly it seems that there are now only ten ‘PR10′ websites - down from twenty or so earlier this year, probably not the sites you would think of either. (more…)

‘Cloaking’ is a word that for some years has come to be most often used in the search engine optimisation industry. It is used to describe a website which has been configured to show one page to a visiting search engine spider such as the Googlebot, and a very different page to you and me. The idea is that Google finds a page loaded with keywords and perfectly optimised, awarding it a top ten search position, real visitors increase as a consequence but are presented with the actual webpage… which may or may not be as relevant. For about five years ‘cloaking’ has been pretty heavily penalised and as an SEO technique all but dropped. However, I am still aware of several large publishers using what appears to be a form of cloaking to drive traffic whilst protecting content with a subscription barrier / log-in. (more…)

Whilst searching for an SVGA cable supplier today, I saw my first live ‘Google Checkout’ button below a Google Adwords advertiser message. This new service, launched in the UK in April, is Google’s attempt to rival Paypal as a common secure payment processing facility. Google Checkout is being given away free to web merchants until 2007, and then from January 1st 2008, for every £1 spent on AdWords, the merchant can process £10 in sales for free through Google Checkout. Google claim that the service improves conversions and generates more leads too. Even for merchants who are not regular Adwords spenders, it’s very tempting to switch e-commerce suppliers immediately; commission charges are by no means small for high volume sellers using Paypal or Worldpay etc. But why would Google be interested in taking on this new service offering? (more…)

For seasoned SEO experts like myself this article won’t blow you away, however, I recently came across a few forum comments from people still in the dark on the subject of SEO and server IP addresses… In order to decide which search results index a website will be listed in i.e. google.com, google.co.uk or google.de, the country code top level domain (or ccTLD) comes into play. For example, if your website is hosted on a .co.uk domain, Google should assume that your content is relevant to the UK. However, what happens if you’re the UK owner of a .com TLD which by rights should me matched to the US, along with any .net or .org domains? (more…)

I should have remembered how disappointing I found Internet World to be last year at Earls Court, but with free mini seminars on offer covering SEM, PPC and Web 2.0 it again seemed to be worth a visit. Unfortunately within minutes of arriving I was reminded of why the free seminars are NOT a good reason to attend the Internet World show; over subscribed presentations causing a massive shortage of seats and some very basic topics being presented. Quite why a packed crowd was sitting listening to one guy go over slides on SEO which I could well have written seven years ago I don’t know. (more…)

Whilst reading BBC online today I thought I had accidently entered the BBC’s archive from 1998 but it seems not… apparently the Beeb’s ‘Spencer Kelly’ has just discovered that webmasters have it in their power to alter search results in Google and Yahoo!. Known professionally as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for over a decade now, I’m not sure it warrants an article in 2007 pointing out what it’s all about. Furthermore we certainly don’t need misinformed editors suggesting that the industry is full of ‘cheats’ or founded upon ‘dirty tricks’. SEO is about understanding the algorithms and weights that the likes of Google place upon a website’s access, content and link popularity - that’s all, nothing ‘dirty’. What’s next Spencer an article about the ZX81 or Commodore 64? (more…)

Some of my more regular readers will recall that in early November I looked into the popularity of ‘Celebrity Sex Tape’ downloads. This followed a Channel Four documentary detailing the history of the top 10 celebrity sex video downloads – a documentary which I felt compelled to correct on its statistical inaccuracies (I reordered the popularity chart based upon actual search volumes not just search results). As it turns out, that blog entry is now one of my most popular; bombarded with searches for ‘celebrity sex tapes’. However, we all know what these visitors are really searching for… and it’s not the correct video download chart. (more…)

Last night I attended the Autumn Reception of the ‘Academic and Professional Division’ of the Publishers Association (there’s a mouthful!). The evening featured a guest appearance from the Shadow Minister for Higher Education – Boris Johnson. Boris was his usual cheeky self but this time not commending parents on feeding junk food to their children through playground fences. I felt very much that he had modelled himself on TV detective ‘Columbo’ – portraying himself as a man who isn’t really with it, blundering his way through a speech as required… but beneath it all being completely switched on. In his speech to the fifty or so of us present at the Royal Society, Boris made one thing completely clear – he isn’t scared of Google despite what some academics in the room had discussed with him prior to his visit to the lectern. (more…)

Channel Four very kindly broadcast ‘Celebrity Sex Tapes Unwound’ a week or two ago… not a show you deliberately set out to watch but hey, if it’s on late at night you’ll watch it for sheer amusement won’t you? It featured a run down of the top ten celebrity sex tapes of all time. The order was based on the number of returned results in Google, I got quite annoyed (shouting at the TV etc.) because this implies that there are millions of people downloading this stuff all the time. In addition, the programme makers seemed not to understand that the number of text references to a given video, does not dictate real audience popularity in terms of downloads. I decided to take 5 minutes to see what the real order should have been. Channel Four can thank me later.

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I was revisiting the TouchGraph Google Browser again this evening to see if it had changed at all in the past year. It hasn’t, but its core functionality remains interesting - utilising Google’s data on ’similar sites’ the tool provides information on Internet nodes and a website’s respective position within one. By entering a URL, an interactive virtual map is generated of a website’s popularity in its main fields. This ‘nodal view’ is useful for understanding why links from relevant websites are worth more than links from irrelevant ones in search engine optimisation, whilst making it easier to visualise how the World Wide Web looks to search engine crawlers like the Googlebot. (more…)