My iPhone autocorrects "Van Persie" to "Van Perdue". Clearly the ever-injured Arsenal and Holland striker isn't well known enough at Apple HQ.

Van Persie to Van Perdue

If as a result you end up searching for Van Perdue (because you don't notice and so don't undo the autocorrect), Google asks if you mean Van Persie.

Van Persie to Van Perdue to Van Persie

To sum the process up:

• You try to seach for Van Persie on your iPhone.
• Apple changes this to Van Perdue.
• Google asks if you meant Van Persie.
• You click and finally get to results for Van Persie.

End to end process sorted.

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 SEO benefit from the link. The BBC has now lived up to its promise to provide links without nofollow to people who blog about its TV programmes (Update although see the points in the comments about the redirects ...).

Last December, I pointed out that:

Shownar is a BBC site that tracks online buzz about BBC shows. Despite being paid for by the licence fee, it's pulling the wool over bloggers' eyes by claiming that, if you link to it, it will link back - but it's nofollowing the links.

The BBC replied that:

Shownar will be retired in a few weeks. The good news is the version we are creating for bbc.co.uk is going to be backed by the moderation support that means we should be able to remove nofollows for those non-commerical blog posts that are significantly about a BBC programme.

The old Shownar

It's now followed through on that with its about to go live Buzz service, explained here (cheers to Martin Belam for the spot):

We've built a tool that finds where on blogs, Twitter and other online communities people are discussing BBC programmes, and presents links to them on the relevant programme page.

If people are talking about a programme, a section called 'Buzz about this programme' appears on its programme page. Clicking on the links in that section will take you to online conversations about that programme.

As to how the links work, that's explained here - the bit about nofollow reads:

We use an automated system to find our blog links which means if you link to a BBC programme page and your blog passes our external link guidelines we will usually link to it. This opens us up to possible abuse with people linking to us just to boost their page's search positioning. To counter this we add a nofollow tag to pages we've looked at and decided are not fully relevant within the context of the programme (find out how we judge relevancy here). We don't put this restriction on relevant posts, so if the post is very much about the programme and not trying to gain search positioning it does get the authority from us.

Please note we only check blog post relevancy during office hours and it may take a while to get through any backlogs that have built up. So if your blog is recent, relevant and has the nofollow tag it may just because we've not checked it yet.

Anyway (1) well done the BBC (this presumably counts as part of its promise to double monthly clickthroughs to external sites) and (2) I must go and write about some BBC programmes (don't forget this tip to get links from the BBC to your Twitter page) ...

As far as I can tell, the new service isn't live yet as I can't find it anywhere on the BBC site. Let me know if you spot it ...

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 you're the kind of techie we need!

Daily Mail's robots.txt file contains an SEO job advert

Genius! You could also contact Mail Online MD James Bromley on Twitter.

For those who don't know, the robots.txt file is how you tell search engines which pages they can and can't crawl on your site to include in their index.

In the past it was worth occasionally checking out newspapers' robots.txt files as they listed the URLs of stories that they've had to withdraw for legal reasons (or joke Polish editions). Sadly, they don't seem to do that so much these days (and they'd get lost in the Mirror's massive file). Plus there's no easy way to check if they've been updated - Google Reader's ability to track changing webpages doesn't work with robots.txt files. Boo.

If you liked this post, I've got lots more about SEO (try this story analysing Google's keywords tool). I also blog about newspapers a lot - such as the Daily Mail (this story was popular recently on iDosing) and lately a lot about the Times paywall.

This is the sort of SEO issue that I'm always a bit worried about blogging - in case it's been going on for ages and I look really stupid. But here goes.

It looks to me that if you do a search for some term (EG football) and the name of certain big brands/sites, Google has started to 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 (click any of these pics to see them bigger, though most are only the first 7 results or so so they're not too big):

Guardian football results

And if I search for Sky Sports, I see 9 web results for the skysports.com site (even though BT and Virgin offer Sky Sports channels) plus 3 skysports.com news results, one for wikipedia and none for anyone else:

Sky Sports results

If you search for Apple help, I'm seeing the first 9 results for the Apple website, then one page from mactricksandtips in at 10th:

Apple help results

Likewise, if you search for Amazon TV, the first 7 results are all from the Amazon site:

Amazon TV results

I'm sure it didn't use to be like this - I'd expect these searches to return two results from the obvious site, and then the rest of the page be other sites (or occasionally subdomains of the main site).

If it is a change, and not just a glitch, it is surely a massive boost to certain brands ... (if you likes this post, you might like this one on the google keywords tool and its (lack of) effectiveness as a keyword research tool).

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).

Here's the Yahoo trending list from uk.yahoo.com on monday night. They all look very UK, including Corrie and Man U vs Newcastle...

Yahoo: trending topics

And here's the Google trending list at the same time, featuring a plane crash in America, David Hasselhoff's roasting on a US comedy show, a US TV show (Weeds), and a film that's in, er, America.

Google's trending list

Please, please fix it.

As I've written elsewhere, there's some confusion over at the Times marketing department about how the paywall works. The basic idea ought to be that if content is behind the Times paywall, people might pay for it. If it's not, they won't.

Before you agree to hand over your money, here are 11 bits of the new Times site you can access for free, despite its new paywall ...

1 The main category pages

At first glance, you can't get past the home page of The Times - click on the any of the categories along the top header (News, Opinion, Business etc), and you're told to log in.

Times top categories

But you can still see what's in the categories by using the back-door listings view. Here are the URLs to check the stories in the following sections: News, Opinion, Business, Money, Sport, Life, Arts.

2 Sub-section pages

OK, not that exciting so far. But use a URL of the right form, and you can even sneak through the paywall and check out some sub-sections further down. You just change the ending, so here are the URLs for:

• Football: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/?view=list&section=Football
• Travel: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/?view=list&section=Travel
• Health: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/?view=list&section=Health

But actually, it gets better than that ... If you were on the home page, and tried to click to the Football section via the top menu like this:

Home page mega dropdown menu

You'd be told to log in.

But, conveniently, you can access some subsection pages via hacking some URLs to include /public/.

So here's the public version of the football page (this is on http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/football/ - but it's the same page as the unreachable http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/football/):

Times football page

There's also an accessible version of the cricket page and the River Cafe recipe page, even though they're deep beyond the paywall.

3 Free stock market information

Want to know what's happening with the FTSE 100?  See a graph just 15 minutes old, together with info on key movers and sector changes. There are also figures for currencies and commodities and bonds:

Stock market info

Don't like the FTSE 100? You can click the links along the top to see other indices like the Dow Jones or Nikkei225.

4 Guides to countries for doing business

The Business City Guides section has guides to countries if you want to do business there, covering the economy, infrastructure, workforce and business costs - such as Switzerland and Malaysia.

5 Young Photographer of the Year

The 9th Times Young Photographer of the Year is available to anyone, it would seem, including tips for budding photojournalists.

6 Summer with a twist

Summer with a twist: free

Suggestions for things to do this summer (sponsored by Courvoisier). With a twist.

7 Monthly science quiz

It's not very interactive, but here's August's science quiz, for instance.

8 Enter competitions

You can enter the competitions at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/competitions/ - such as the Times travel photo competition.

Times travel photo competition

You can also win tickets to the Barclays Premier League game of your choice.

9 Mapping British Business

OK, this one's on the http://www.mappingbritishbusiness.co.uk/ URL (and sponsored by Lloyds TSB) but it's got the Times header and colour scheme - and the articles themselves are on thetimes.co.uk URLs, such as:

• Interview: Adrian Bowles, chief executive of Helius Energy
• Driving Longbridge along the road to recovery

10 Need to know

The Need to Know page (sponsored by Accenture - there may be a pattern here ...) is available to anyone (as I mentioned in the intro). There's a video and a heat map so you can see which stories are most popular.

Need to know: heat map

11 Search for things for sale

On top of all these, you can also search for:

• Jobs
• Obituaries
• Cars for sale
• Holiday deals

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?).

1. 

   Google Trends: UK hot topics. All very US.

   gm ipo - an American company is selling shares.

2. elias abuelazam - a Michigan, America, based serial stabber.
3. call of duty black ops - I'll give it this one.
4. border security bill - the passing of a US bill by Obama.
5. javier mascherano - they can have this.
6. iowa flood - it's a flood. In Iowa. In the USA.
7. wifi - Er, not sure.
8. us retail sales - Retails sales. In the USA.
9. terror babies - Stupid US conspiracy theory.
10. steven slater - A flight attendant who went off on one. An American flight attendant.

It's like this every day. Please fix. (And if you thought this was bad, check out Bing XRank's problems)

I am the first to admit when I don't know something. Alright, I'm not. I probably try to cover up it. But instead of claiming that there is something wrong with something (eg the google keywords tool), I'm going to ask who can explain this data to me.

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. The data is what Google shows you in its Webmaster Tools service.

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:

Impression data, June to July

Staring at specific days, here's June 20th. As you can see my bog appeared in position 6 to 10 of Google's results 40,500 times that day for a search on "Youtube UK".

Data for June 20

Now on July 12th, it only appears 260 times in that position.

Data for July 12

If we use Google Insights, we can see that there hasn't been a significant fall in searches.

Searches for "Youtube UK"

So what explains the wierd data ...? If the searches for that term haven't collapsed, why have the impressions?

I don't really care - I get no benefit from it. I just want to know what the hell's going in ...!

Update

So one of the reasons for the graphs above is that the second one is for "you tube uk" and not "youtube uk". Oops. So here's the correct data for "youtube uk" on July 12":

July 12 correct data

Here's the overall data for 21 June to 26 July:

Overall data - 21 June to 26 July - high, low, high again

And here's the data for 26 July:

Youtube UK searches - I'm back ...

Who knows what all this means - the search volumes haven't gone anywhere. But in the middle, I stopped appearing for the thousands of "youtube uk" search term and then I came back again. Odd.

The internet is full of advice to use Google's keyword tool to work out what search terms to optimise for. Here's why you shouldn't do this - and what you can use instead.

On the face of it, Google's tool looks promising. You put in a keyword or search term you're interested in (perhaps because you want to know what words to use in a headline or what tags or sub-category names to use in your navigation). You get a list of related keywords. And you can see how many searches there are for each one. You then know which are the most popular - and can target those.

Except you shouldn't do this. Here's why.

Karen Gillan

Let's start with Karen Gillan, who plays Amy Pond in Doctor Who.

Logged out

If you use the keyword tool when you're logged out, you see this - and a warning to "Sign in with your AdWords login info to see the full set of ideas for this search" (the tool is free - but you have to register and log in to see all the data):

Karen Gillan logged out

(All these screenshots are based on google.co.uk searches (though see the warning at the end of this post) with a phrase match type - ie any searches which includes the words shown in the quote marks in that order.)

Logged in

Log in, and you see this:

Karen Gillan logged in

Annoyingly with a phrase search, the straightforward term you entered ("Karen Gillan" here) isn't showing.

But more importantly, as you can see by comparing the two screenshots, the logged out version of the tool didn't show you the most popular search term with the phrase "Karen Gillan" in - namely "Karen Gillan underwear" (nice).

Logged out again ...

You can force the logged-out tool to show you the result for "karen gillan underwear" by searching for that specific term:

Karen Gillan underwear - logged out

Comparing logged in and logged out

Now, fair enough, there was a warning to log in to see all the relevant keywords. But if you've been paying attention, you'll have noticed something a bit odd about the search volumes

Logged in:

• Karen Gillan underwear - 1,900
• Karen Gillan pictures - 590

Logged out:

• Karen Gillan underwear - 9,900
• Karen Gillan pictures - 3,600

The numbers aren't the same. But I suppose they're at least out by about six times each, so the same order of magnitude ...

Only, that's not always the case.

Jennifer Aniston

Let's look at Jennifer Aniston.

Logged out

If you're logged out, you see these results:

Jennifer Aniston logged out

Logged in

If you log in, you see these results instead:

Jennifer Aniston logged in

You should notice two things. First, "Jennifer Aniston pregnant" is at number two when you're logged in, with 18,100 searches a month. This search term didn't show when we were logged out, but fair enough, there was that warning to log in to see the full set of results.

But, secondly, the numbers don't match again. When logged out, "Jennifer Aniston's hair" was shown as having 60,500 searches a month. When logged in, there are only apparently 12,100 searches a month.

Logged out again

Again, you can make the missing search terms appear when you're logged out if you know what they are by typing them in the box. If we do that, we get this for "Jennifer Aniston pregnant":

Jennifer Aniston pregnant - logged out

Comparing logged in and logged out

To sum up, we're looking at these numbers:

Logged in

• Jennifer Aniston pregnant - 18,100
• Jennifer Aniston hair - 12,100

Logged out

• Jennifer Aniston pregnant - 49,500
• Jennifer Aniston hair - 60,500

It's not just that the numbers are different, they are in a different order. When logged in, the tool says people search for pregnant 1.5 times as much as hair. When logged out, hair is 20% more popular than pregnant.

What Google News thinks

To make matters worse, if you go to Google News and start typing Jennifer Aniston's name, you see this in the Autosuggest feature - which is supposed to show you what people are searching for right now:

Jennifer Aniston - Google News autocomplete

There's no mention of hair, and "Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt" is more popular than pregnant - even though when logged in, the keywords tool told us that people were twice as likely to search for her pregnant (18,100 searches) as with Brad Pitt (9,900 searches).

Katie Price

Here's a similar story.

Logged in

This is what you see when you search on Katie Price's name logged in:

Katie Price logged in

Logged out

And here are the logged out figures for two search terms.

Katie Price and Peter Andre:

Katie Price and Peter Andre - logged out

Katie Price video:

Katie Price video - logged out

Comparing logged in and logged out

Compare the figures again:

Logged in - the same:

• Katie Price and Peter Andre - 14,800
• Katie Price video - 14,800

Logged out - one is 50% higher than the other

• Katie Price and Peter Andre - 40,500
• Katie Price video - 27,100

When you're logged in, the tool says the search volumes are the same. When you're logged out, it says there's 50% more searches for "Katie Price and Peter Andre" than there are for Katie Price video.

What Google News thinks

Go to Google News, and you can see that the current second most popular Google Autocomplete is Katie Price pregnant - behind "Katie Price and Peter Andre" and with Katie Price video nowhere to be seen.

Katie Price Autocomplete in Google News

When you're logged in, though, the number of searches for Katie Price pregnant is negligible:

Katie Price pregnant - logged in

Which means that the term people are searching for right now, according to Google News, isn't even worth looking at according to the keyword tool.

What all this means

You can't trust the logged-out version of the tool, as it doesn't show you everything.

The search volumes you see for a specific search term are different when logged in or logged out. I've seen a supposition that, when logged out, you see total search volumes but when logged in you see searches that triggered an Adwords ad. This would make the logged-in version of the tool useless for SEO, as what it's showing you is determined by PPC budgets (when the money's spend, there are no more Adwords ads, so those searches are ignored). Alternatively, it's just a bug as suggested here. Either way, the data is screwy.

However, you shouldn't trust this data anyway, even if it was unscrewy, as the Adwords tool doesn't show search volumes. It shows "the approximate 12-month average of user queries for the keyword on Google.co.uk and the Google Search Network". This basically means it's counting EG adwords panels on parked domains as "searches" - and inflating the search volumes.

Even if you did trust it, for the search terms above, which do tend to be fairly newsy, I'll give you, the Adwords keywords tool isn't reflecting what people are searching for now.

To sum up - the data's odd, inconsistent, and out of date. Don't use it.

Well, what shall I use?

To decide what to optimise pages for, I tend to use a combination of Google Insights, Google Autocomplete for web searches and Google Autocomplete for News. The latter have their issues (such as these).

But by plugging what you see from the Autocomplete data into Google Insights, I think you get a much better picture of what people are really searching for. If you're up to APIs and stuff, rather than copying what you see, you can automate the autocomplete discovery. Or you can use this awesome keyword discovery tool that does the same thing (hat-tip to @rishil).

There was a curious end to tonight's Dragon's Den when presenter Evan Davis uncomfortably turned to the camera and said:

Why not tell us what you think of today's programme by joining the conversation on Twitter.

Dragons' Den

I'm not sure it looks like much of a conversation, though ...

This is what the Dragons' Den Twitter account looks like an hour after the programme finished:

Dragons Den tweets - no conversation

Leaving aside the hashtag confusion, they don't seem to have actually replied to anyone's tweets. A blanket "thank you" to people for their comments doesn't quite seem the same as the "conversation" promised in the programme itself.