malcolm coles

Whatever you do, don’t follow the wordpress advice on SEO …
It seems to think keywords are really important but meta descriptions aren’t.

Exacting revenge on a company that secretly added links to clients’ sites by targeting their analytics data …

So, just as Search Engine Land has issued some SEO advice for Bill Gates’s blog, I thought I’d help the Pope out with some SEO and copywriting tips.

Searchers in the UK are starting to prefer the US spelling of some words. Although we can still spell centre and theatre, with the following words the US spelling is now searched for more often than the UK version:

* donut vs doughnut
* yogurt vs yoghurt
* fetus vs foetus

More evidence that Google has changed how it handles spelling errors. It is now fixing spelling in autocomplete (the list of suggestions it offers as you start to type in the web-based search form).

Unlike yesterday’s example, where Google was just deciding for itself which version of alternative, correct spellings you meant, I approve of this – partly because it’s helpful, and partly because the user retains control (so they can search for wrong spellings if they want to).

We’ve all been running round worrying about Google forcing us to search for search engine optimization when we want to search for search engine optimisation.

I think we can relax, as it turns out hardly anyone searches for either …

Not content with its various other spelling problems, Google is now trying to make us spell colour the US way.

There have been various posts about how Google is returning results with the American spelling (search engine optimization) when people search for search engine optimisation.

But it’s got much bigger problems with spelling than just -ise vs ize.

NewsNow revealed this morning that it’s heard that News International will soon be blocking NewsNow from crawling The Sun’s site – just as it has done with the Times.

This has now happened, as the Sun’s robots.txt file shows.

I wrote yesterday that I was sympathetic towards NewsNow and its ongoing row with newspapers, especially the Times. I’ve now decided that I’m not.

NewsNow crawls the Times site in order to gather information for its paid service to businesses.

I am sympathetic towards NewsNow over the newspapers attempts to block it linking to them. The site has been blocked from showing Times Online stories. But I think it’s campaign is a little overblown:

I needed to know how much it typically cost to replace the suspension on a car (not mine, fortunately). The results are another good example of why the UK search results are often rubbish.

rel=canonical is a way to tell Google which the primary version of a URL is. It’s handy if you have substantially the same content on several URLs – perhaps because you have a shopping site and allow users to sort a list of products by price or name, and this is reflected in the URL.

Adding this meta tag used to work only on the same domain.

But Google has announced today that it will support rel=canonical across domains – ie if you have the same content on more than one website, you can tell Google which is the main version you’d like it to index.

If Murdoch wants to put the Sunday Times or the Sun behind a paywall but still wanted Google to index his content, he would have to join first-click free.

If he decides the Sun is really the Wapping News Journal and joins Google Scholar, then the rules would be different. He could have his content indexed without having to let anyone see it unless they paid a subscription. On top of which, Google would give his content priority if was the original source of a story.

For some off reason, ITV released the X factor results for each round in a PDF. I’m an SEO whore, so here they are in HTML ..

Shownar is a BBC site that tracks the online buzz around the broadcaster’s shows. Despite being paid for out of the licence fee, it’s pulling the wool over bloggers’ eyes by making out that, if you link to it, it will link back – but it’s nofollowing the links.
The BBC should either make them normal links – or be much more transparent about its “you link to us and we’ll link to you” statement.

Google’s rolling out personalised search to everyone, even if you’re not signed in. It means that: The results you see aren’t what everyone else sees, making SEO analysis that much harder.

And If you do a rubbish job of selling your site (either through the title in the results, or in terms of what they see when they click through) to people who commonly perform the same search, your site is going to drop out of their results. Gulp.

Google’s new layout (only on google.com, not .co.uk, so far) has increased the importance of local SEO about a million times. Check out these two screenshots of a search for “St Albans offices” – one on google.com and one on google.co.uk.

Search Google for I’m a Celebrity, which starts today, and ITV’s site is top – as it should be. Search Google for I’m a Celebrity 2009, however, and the ITV site is only fourth – behind Digital Spy, the Metro and Free Betting Online.

I’m a Celebrity 2009 results
I’m a Celebrity 2009 results

Even worse, the Free Betting site is an affiliate site with a massively optimised page designed to get I’m a Celebrity traffic – that links out to free sports (not TV-related) betting sites.

Wordpress has a habit of replacing normal quote marks with “curly” or smart quotes – the ones that look different at the start of a quote than at the end. They look nice – but they tend to break copy and paste (especially when you’re pasting code, such as my wordpress title / description code).