Stuff I think about or notice on the internet
My iPad and iPhone autocorrect “Van Persie” to “Van Perdue”. Clearly Arsenal’s striker isn’t well known enough at Apple HQ. If as a result you end up searching for Van Perdie, Google asks if you mean Van Persie. Auto spelling has eaten itself.
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If you add “nofollow” to a link (in the HTML code), it tells search engines to ignore the link – so the site you link to gets no benefit from the link. Last December, the BBC replied to a blog post of mine promising to link to bloggers without using dofollow as part of its new Buzz tool. They’ve now apparently kept that promise.
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Want a job as SEO manager at the Daily Mail? Check out their robots.txt file (just don’t tell them you saw it here …) in the middle it says:
# August 12th, MailOnline are looking for a talented SEO Manager so if you found this then you’re the kind of techie we need!
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It looks to me at the moment that if you do a search for some term (EG football) and the name of a big brand, Google will treat most of the first page as if you had searched for that term and done a site:bigbrand.com search (the site: operator will make google show results only from that site).
So before, if you searched for Guardian football I’m fairly sure you only saw a couple of results from the Guardian. Now if I do that search, all 10 of the first page of results are Guardian pages.
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I pointed out last week how awful Google Trends UK was – because it was full of American results. In some good news, Yahoo’s trending list seems a lot better (although it doesn’t give much in the way of explanation of how it’s put together).
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Fresh from pointing out the problems with Google’s keywords tool, here’s why they need to sort out the list of hot UK search topics in Google Trends. Here’s the top 10 at 5pm on Friday (surely the best time to blog, no?).
gm ipo – an American company is selling shares.
elias abuelazam – a Michigan, America, [...]
Here’s a screenshot showing “impressions” for my blog – that’s the number of times my blog appeared in search results for any queries – from June 18 to July 18. as you can see, I was trundling along at nearly 50,000 a day, nearly wholly driven by people searching for “Youtube UK” and my post on the demographics of UK Youtube users appearing in position 6 to 10. Then the number of impressions falls off a cliff:
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The internet is full of advice that, if you want to work out what terms to optimise for, you should use Google’s keyword tool. I’m going to explain why you shouldn’t do this – and what you can use instead.
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There was a curious end to yesterday’s Dragon’s Den when Evan Davis turned to the camera and said: “Why not tell us what you think of today’s programme by joining the conversation on Twitter.”
But then, although someone is clearly running the account, they haven’t actually replied to anyone’s tweets. Odd.
Having enjoyed the genius that is the Old Spice social media / YouTube campaign, I idly wondered how quickly it would take someone to grab the silverfishhandcatch.com domain – apparently very quickly.
The link to the video below was tweeted by @oldspice at about 8am UK time. Silverfishhandcatch.com was registered at 7.30am – so about 2.30pm UK time, or a mere 6.5 hours later.
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Google has a series of things it will tell you if you search for them, such as how many horns a unicorn has. More usefully, it can tell you stuff like how many metres are in a yard or when sunrise is in London.
It also seems willing to try to tell you celebrities’ dating status, although it appears to be quite rubbish at it …
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When Bing launched www.bing.com/social (Bing’s combined search of Facebook and Twitter updates) back in June, it forgot (I presume) to update its robots.txt file (which had previously, and still does, disallow results from the more limited forerunner – bing.com/twitter). As a result, 154,000 pages of its search results are in Google’s index.
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The Sun decided last week to run a story about the rumours circulating about Steven Gerrard. I don’t know what Gerrard’s lawyers made of this story but they might want to have a word with Google. If you get as far as typing Steven Gerrard into Google News, the auto complete function throws up this list …
Read the full post ...The Guardian has poked some fun at the Edinburgh Fringe website for banning people linking to it in its terms and conditions. Can this still be going on, more than a year after I revealed that most newspapers banned deep links, as did brands like Apple, Royal Mail, Channel 4 and, er, the Association of Online Publishers (which culminated in the hilarity of my attempts to get the Royal Mail to post me the paper licence they insisted I needed to link to them)?
Here are some more sites that still think they can – or should – ban people linking to them. YOU ARE ALL CLOWNS.
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Lovechips.co.uk: It lies about the nutritional value of potatoes. The people who commissioned it don’t know or care that it’s rubbish. But shutting it down won’t save us a penny, even though the government claims it will.
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The iPad doesn’t do Flash. This means that, if you want to look at Google Analytics on your iPad, you can’t obviously change the dates you’re looking at – as the date range setting, pictured, is a Flash file.
You can still change the dates manually, however
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Google’s Matt Cutts says that the search engine has taken action to improve search results for people searching in the UK – the “UK SERPS” problem.
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I was invited to a preview of the Times / Sunday Times paywall tonight, which revealed some interesting things they’re planning.
It also threw up a number of questions – which no doubt they’ll be mulling over before the new site goes live. The most difficult one for me is why users would want to pay for two different websites covering the same subjects?
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There’s a fascinating Q&A with the Google search quality team over at Digital Inspiration. Here’s some analysis of what they had to say, which includes:
If you don’t nofollow affiliate links, your search engine rankings will suffer.
Links in copy ARE worth more than other ones.
Rel=canonical is suggested for cross-domain redirects – 301 isn’t mentioned.
Google doesn’t seem to like guest blogging.
Linking out both benefits you and doesn’t benefit you at the same time.
Bing says xRank is “an insightful ranking formula that tells you who the world is searching for most. The result is a cultural snapshot of who’s hot and who’s not!”
Er, no. It currently thinks Ash is the hottest band around right now because people are searching for volcanos.
