Firetop

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…)

Sometimes I get asked why I decided to call my company Firetop Ltd; there were two factors influencing this decision. Firstly, I needed a name that was applicable to getting people to the ‘top’ of search engine results, since this was the original web marketing service provided through optimisation techniques or pay per click advertising. ‘Fire’ ‘Top’ seemed to be suitably gimmicky, memorable and short for typing. In addition I was able to register the relevant company and domain names whilst purchasing firetop.com from a ‘wizard workshop’ guy in the US. The reason a ‘wizardy’ guy owned Firetop in the first place does tie in with the second influencing factor. (more…)

It could only happen in California I guess but a company called ‘Kinderstart’ (no, they’re not a German fertility clinic) have decided to launch a class action against Google over the PageRank zero score allocated to their website. Allegedly they’ve lost 70% of their traffic since this happened and they’re claiming Google have penalised them deliberately because they’re scared of the competition (they have a search box)… what does this mean for search engines? (more…)

One of my UK clients recently received a link to a company that offers ‘multilingual SEO services’ - they build ‘optimised’ (and I use the term loosely!) landing pages in multiple languages.This led my client to ask me if I thought it was worth them shelling out some cash. My answer seemed like it should be posted on here for wider reference in case this ever comes up for you too, in SEO or PPC promotions…

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