My posts about: seo
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.
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.
Channel 4 is keyword stuffing the Title of its Big Brother homepage:
Home - Big Brother - Channel4.com - Big Brother, bigbrother, BB, BB11, 4oD, Live Stream, Live Streaming, Live Feed, Channel 4, Channel4, C4, housemates, house, Ben, Caoimhe, Corin, David, Govan, Ife, John James, Josie, Mario, Nathan, Rachael, Shabby, Steve, Sunshine
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
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.
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.
Google says it has "taken action" and no longer trusts links from a major UK newspaper group - apparently referring to the Daily Express website.
The Express and OK sites appeared to suffer page rank penalties in April - and Google has now confirmed it has taken action against a UK newspaper site.
Google appears to be trialling some new related-search links over at Google.com - a list of "brands for ..." when you search for products. (Update: official confirmation).
So search for digital cameras at google.com (NB not ...
As with their party leaders' websites, the parties' online approaches to their manifestos leave a lot to be desired - although Labour has a clear victory over the Conservatives.
YouTube has a tool - YouTube Insights for Audience - that lets you check out which sorts of people use YouTube, and what sorts of videos particular subsections watch.
So by checking UK viewers only, we can see their age ranges (40% are aged 18-24, for instance) and gender split (72.7% of UK viewers are male).
Google's planning an online property portal. For now, it seems to be attempting to soften up the market by suggesting estate agents belong inside - as this search for "Estate agents in Islington" showed ...
Following on from yesterday's Cash Gordon debacle, the site is now live again. I thought I'd offer some SEO tips as they seem to be floundering about the place .
Ever done a search for Ann Widdecombe? No, me neither until today. There's an interesting image shown, as you can see.
I wrote a guest post about when you should pay professional rates for great copywriting - as opposed to 2p a word via some content mill, or even less for some automated keyword spewer.
If you fancied reading it and retweeting it, I might get invited back to do another one (and you might find it interesting, too).
I might be going bonkers. But I have a Firefox stylesheet that reveals which links are nofollow. And 'm fairly sure that, last time I looked, @ mentions of people's names weren't nofollowed - but now are, as this screenshot demonstrates.
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
