I pointed out that the Mail has failed to shake off its Jan Moir sidewikis by moving URL. But it seems that the power of Carter Ruck may prevail where the Mail cannot.

I pointed out the other day that someone had Sidewikied the Carter Ruck homepage. But the Cater Ruck Sidewiki has now vanished. Try and read it directly and you get an error page (Note to Google - work on your 404s).

The furore over Jan Moir has thrown up several interesting SEO issues. Here's a basic one - how should you link to something you detest?

The problem with linking
Put simply, Google counts a link to a ...

I thought it was interesting to compare two graphs as they seem to go in opposite directions:

SEOmoz's new one on the relationship between word count and the likelihood of people linking to you
Nielsen's ...

There's a lot to remember when you're running around in a social media storm, as Jan Moir discovered last week. It would seem that updating meta descriptions isn't high on the list ...

The meta description on the Jan Moir article about Stephen Gately's death still reads: Our columnist asks why no-one will face up to the sordid reality of the Boyzone star's demise.

The PCC is supposed to deal with complaints about sensitive matters. To cope with this, it should put in place (1) scaleable web hosting to ensure it can cope with any surge in traffic and (2) top-quality security measures to ensure its backend is secure.

It appears to have done neither.

As part of the fuss over Jan Moir, the Daily Mail ended up changing the headline and the URL of its story and 301 redirecting the old URL to the new one. I wondered what would happen to the Sidewikis written on the original URL. The answer: the Sidewikis remain with a message saying they were originally about a previous URL.

I've pointed out that any concerned parents searching Google for information on the cervical cancer jab (in the tragic wake of a schoolgirl's death) see a mass of negative and inaccurate information about the vaccine linking the girl's death to the vaccine.

It turns out she died of an unrelated tumour. However, the results are likely to give parents second thoughts about allowing their daughters to be caccinated, even though the injection will save hundreds of lives a year.
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Anyone turning to Google to look into the cervical cancer jab is unlikely to be reassured. Although these results are generated algorithmically, Google's results are anti-jab. There is very little in the way of balance in the results, with a mixture of old and new scare stories, and only a couple of positive stories.

Google has updated its sprite again - the one image it uses to display all its graphics (to understand what a sprite is, see my post on July's sprite update). The only change is the addition of a large and a small version of what looks like a video play button.

Carphone Warehouse has slammed Microsoft as 'useless' and 'crap' - making use of Google's new sidewiki feature to make sure that everyone visiting the Microsoft site knows it too.
At least, I assume that's what's going ...

Following on from the SEO of A to Z, here's which sites rank first for the numbers one to 20.

I overwrote my wp-content folder as part of my wordpress upgrade - deleting all my blog's images, CSS and theme PHP files. I'll be returning to that ...

Anyway, I, and a few others who answered my plaintive plea for help, thought using the Google cache (the copy of your webpage that it stores) might help. Here's what it can and can't help with as a backup if you've ever deleted your whole website ...

I've been trying to get people I work with to stop filling out meta keywords fields for ages, with varying degrees of success.

Google has come out and said this: "Does Google ever use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking? In a word, no."

The Express's home-page template truncates the introductory copy of each featured story if it's too long. I'd been hoping that this would lead to a hilariously rude half-sentence one day. This has never happened. So I'm reduced to using this example.

Rather than bookmarking Google Analytics, for some reason I type a random letter in the Google toolbar, and navigate to my Google account. Anyway, as a result I thought it would be interesting to list the top sites that Google returns for single-letter searches. At the bottom are links to other people who have done something similar in the past outside the UK.

However, the Mirror wants to beware how its links look. Let's take a look at a few pages - stories which share these characteristics:

* All contain exactly three links to a MoneyExtra page.
* All three links use different anchor text.
* The text happens to be competitive search terms.
* And MoneyExtra isn't mentioned in the article itself.

There are several ways you can use Google to find out what terms people are searching for, and how popular those search terms are.

I've used them to check search terms related to The X Factor (ITV's talent show) - and I reckon Google Insights is better than the Google Adwords Keywords tool.

Digg has started nofollowing links below a certain threshold of popularity. From a quick hunt around, I reckon it's somewhere above 200 Diggs. However, some sites appear to be trusted and need fewer. Other sites need more.

I'm giving up comparing websites using Alexa.com's data. Checking the accuracy of Alexa data using ABCe numbers led me to believe they were good enough to rely on. But the Times reckons the Alexa numbers in my latest post relating to referrals from the BBC were rubbish - and the Guardian agrees.

thelondonpaper is closing - with a reported pre-tax loss of £12.9m in the last financial year on £14.1m turnover. Maybe if they'd sorted out their SEO strategy, they'd have got more website visitors and sold more adverts?