malcolm coles

If you look at your user profile at guardian.co.uk, it looks like this:

That all looks OK - even a nice URL to link back to my homepage. How very kind.

But if javascript is off …

Only if you look at the HTML, there’s not really a link there at all. Just some wierd javascript that goes off and gets the URL. But only, obviously, if javascript is turned on.

So what google sees is this:

Why? Some sort of SEO trick to avoid linking out to other sites, as per my previous post? 

I’m so lazy, I type my name in the google toolbar to log into wordpress. It’s a few keystrokes shorter than typing the URL. Anyway, I noticed this in the results today - why does it say [TRANSLATED], when it obviously isn’t translated? I can’t get google to do it for anything else.

So I’ve been using the google keyword tool. It used to show you relative weightings of search terms - you could see that people searched for ‘tyres’ twice as much as they did for ‘car tyres’, that sort of thing. 

Recently, Google added exact numbers - showing exactly how many people searched for each term (3,350,000 a month for tyres, 1,500,000 a month for car tyres as you ask.)

How exact is ‘exact’?

Anyway, I downloaded some of the data. And I pretty soon noticed that the approximate search volumes are always certain fixed numbers, no doubt carefully chosen to look random. For instance, the following always turn up: 49500, 33100, 22200, 18100, 14800, 12100, 9900, 8100, 6600.

Have you had any numbers near those ones that aren’t these ones? It’s no surprise that Google rounds the numbers up  to the nearest hundred or thousand. But why then try to hide that by rounding anything near 10,000 to 9,900? Or anything near 18,000 to 18,100?

So, if you search for the Immigration Advisory Service on google, it comes with a warning saying ‘This site may harm your computer’. 

This is a warning that google puts in its results if the site in question has been hacked and contains ‘malware’ - software that damage your computer.

I’ve seen a few of these lately - but this one’s the first for a big site, rather than a blog.

Question is, how do you warn the IAS when you can’t go to their site to find out their contact details …

If it happens to you, read this.

There seem to be increasing numbers of sites who suck up weblinks, but don’t link back out in a ‘proper’ way - ie in a way that helps the site linked to do better in google.

Instead, they use funny internal redirects, stick ‘no follow’ on external links, or just don’t bother making them hyperlinks.

Offenders

I’ve started a list of offenders. Add any others you know of - don’t worry, Wordpress will add nofollow to them all …

• Wikipedia - all links, even the attributed sources of its facts, are given the nofollow tag.
• BBC - redirects via some funny internal redirect.
• Myspace - redirects all new links added vis MSPlinks.
• UK newspaper sites - even when they include web addresses in their stories, they don’t bother to make them hyperlinks.
• Youtube - the link in your profile is ‘nofollow’ed.
• Newsvine - Someone writes an interesting news story, people vote it to the top of the list … but rel=nofollow means no link benefit to the site that wrote it. But newsvine gets all the keywords from its summary …
• Spock.com - So, I’ll spend time telling you which sites are relevant to me for your person search engine. Then you’ll create a profile page for me, to help you do better for my name as a search term. Then you’ll nofollow all the links to sites about me. Nope.

My own sites

You can see me at:

• Malcolm Coles on Facebook
• Malcolm Coles on LinkedIn
• Malcolm Coles on YouTube
• Malcolm Coles on MySpace
• Malcolm Coles on QDOS
• Malcolm Coles on del.icio.us

Company website

My company website is here:

• Digital Sparkle

News stories

News stories that feature me include: