Recently Google has been getting a lot of flack for the quality of the SERPs in the UK.

This included a post by Dave Naylor regarding the results that were shown for “Tennis Court Hire”.

At the time of Dave’s post the top 6 posts were showing Australian sites, however at the moment these sites have dropped but they are still on the first page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This made me wonder how much better Bing and Yahoo was, and in Bing’s case it is quite disappointing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So 5 out of the top 10 results are currently Australian sites, with the top 2 being Australian, making the Bing results just as bad if not worse than Google’s

Finishing on a more promising note I tried out Yahoo with the following results:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At least Yahoo managed to show some more appropriate results with all of them being UK based.

• Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-07-20: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-07-13: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-07.. http://bit.ly/nUtoX #
• Have Toshiba buckled : Blu-Ray player due this year!: After Toshiba’s HD-DVD lost the HD format war to Sony’s Bl.. http://bit.ly/F8MTP #
• Wohoo, Microsoft Action Pack subscribers should be able to download Windows 7 on 23rd August http://bit.ly/4kz6UP #
• Google wins a landmark ruling for UK defamation law.
  :
  A high court judge in London has ruled that Google is.. http://bit.ly/3XJx0E #
• Second watch Phone this Week : Samsung S9110: After we told you all about LG’s plans for a watch phone, it’s Sam.. http://bit.ly/UaobA #
• Has anybody heard of "Google Easy" a product from searchengineeasy.co.uk. Just had a hard sell and sounds v much like a scam!! #
• @AlanHowarth You have something weird going on with your rel=canonical. Two sets of quotes are used. Probbaly isnt helping in reply to AlanHowarth #
• Don't think I will use Google Checkout again seeing as they wont take Maestro after the 27th July! #

• Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-07-13: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-07-06: RT @patrickaltoft Google brand upd.. http://tinyurl.com/nw2qdh #
• I seem to be getting a lot of gocompare.com link building/content writing spam today! #
• Apple to release touchscreen Netbook in October????: China’s InfoTimes is reporting via Foxconn(the makers of th.. http://tinyurl.com/m9c4r7 #
• It really grinds my gears when a random referring site shows up in analytics and you can’t find the reason why! #
• RT @aaronwall: http://bit.ly/Hzc72 AP SEO = epic fail fail fail #
• i despise nominet #
• NYPD still using typewriters! Just invested $1m for thousands of new ones. http://bit.ly/wvUu9 #
• Feature Packed, yet cheap LG BD370 Blu-Ray Player: If you’re looking for a top quality feature packed Blu-Ray pl.. http://bit.ly/14NxSW #

• Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-07-06: RT @patrickaltoft Google brand update hits the UK http://tinyurl.com/ksz8.. http://tinyurl.com/ontcdp #
• LG Watch Phone to appear in UK this August: Apparently T3 Magazine has heard from Orange that the touchscreen LG.. http://tinyurl.com/mar2q7 #
• Palm Pre will officially be on O2: Palm have officially announced that the Palm Pre will be exclusively on O2 in.. http://tinyurl.com/m4s6ne #
• Real Heroes play #bfheroes during their lunch breaks at work. – I'd like to be the site is down for maintenance #
• RT @Costume_Finder: Pirate Panties!?! #Pirates -And they are plus sized :S #
• Is anyone else having a lot of issues with Fasthosts recently? And I mean beyond the usual cr*p service they offer #
• @lyndoman Good question, I don't think I would take them on, I think that my personal opinions would effect the quality of work I did in reply to lyndoman #
• @wiep I do love a bit of Fatboy Slim in reply to wiep #
• RT @tomcritchlow: From my posterous: Free Mr Scruff Megamix http://post.ly/1CR6 #
• Toshiba TG01 Launched today on Orange: Toshiba’s TG01 phone, the first one to house the Qualcomm Snapdragon proc.. http://tinyurl.com/lhhn3w #

 

**** Strictly No Recruitment Agencies****

 

An excellent opportunity has arisen with our Blackpool based offices as an admin assistant and blogger.

The job covers 2 primary roles. The first being an admin assistant where you will be responsible for:

• Dealing with phone calls for both Dolphin Promotions and Real Claims
• Logging all enquiries within our customer relationship database
• Updating our client database with relevant information
• Sending invoices or correspondence to clients
• General Administration

The 2nd role will be as a content writer / blogger and you will be required to:

 

• Blog about  a wide range of subjects including technology, gadgets, finance, home improvements, DIY, etc
• Keep up to date with the news and trends within multiple sectors by reading other blogs.
• Research subject areas in order to product content on them.
  Content writing for client sites

Excellent verbal and writing skills are a must. Ideally you will have a keen interest in technology and gadgets as some of the blog posts can be quite technical. Similar blogs include Engadget, Gizmodo and Bit Tech.

 

Experience in blogging is not required however you will need excellent grammar and spelling.

 

The hours will be 9am – 5pm Monday – Friday.

 

The full-time salary for this position is £12,000 and will be reviewed after 3 months. A part time position will also be considered (3 days per week minimum)

 

Please note we will ignore all correspondence of recruitment agencies. The job is also strictly located in Blackpool only, we will not outsource any of our work or employ anyone in a work from home basis.

 

Please send a CV and cover letter to jobs@dolphinpromotions.co.uk or post them to

 

Dolphin Promotions

First Floor

32 Clifton Street

Blackpool

FY1 1JP

Big Mouth Media appear to be having a few issues as of late. A few days ago Site Visibility reported about some ranking issues that may indicate a penalty that has been applied to the BMM homepage which caused the homepage to be completely de-indexed.

However in BMMs defence it appears that it is less likely to be a penalty and more likely to be a screw up with a server misconfiguration leading to them 301 or 302 hijacking themselves with the domain g-maps.com.

Unfortunately the bad news doesn’t seem to end there, not only have they lost some very important rankings but it appears that a search for their brand name is showing some less than desirable results.

While the results are not returning negative comments from clients it can’t be helping with client confidence or acquiring new clients with multiple domains ranking for Big Mouth Media all documenting a screw up.

BMM are generally regarded as whiter than white so I am sure once they are back the negative results will soon filter out.

Recently I have been going through some of the tools on SEOmoz to see if there is anything new I have been missing out on, and I came across 2 little gems.

These have probably been available to the public for a while I just haven’t used them but under their Labs tools there is:

• Top Pages: Powered By Linkscape
• Backlink Analysis: Powered By Linkscape

I have used Linkscape since its release and it is an excellent tool, unfortunately you have a limited number of credits per month so you need to be cautious about using it excessively.

The above tools do not use any credits and I have found they provide some excellent data for an initial diagnostic on a site if for example your are doing an SEO Competition Report.

The top pages tool does exactly what it says on the tin and identifies the top pages of a domain based on its links. I find this is useful as quite often in the past for an initial diagnosis I look at the links to the homepages or the domain as a whole and then maybe check out some of the obvious strong pages. With this tool you can identify the strongest pages within a few seconds.

If we take Tesco.com for an example:

Here we can see which pages are the strongest and presumably have been optimised the most for. You can then use each of the above URLs in the Backlink Analysis tool where you will get both anchor text and backlink data:

There are also plenty of other tools out there that offer similar functionality. The Link Harvester tool on SEOBook is still one of my favourites but I find the above tools the best at identifying the strongest pages with deep links.

 

BBC recently did an undercover story uncovering some unscrupulous individuals selling valid UK credit card details.

While this is not particularly unusual by itself it turns out the source of the cards was linked to Symantec.

The cards details were all acquired after users had just bought Norton subscriptions.

A criminal gang selling UK credit card details stolen from Indian call centres has been exposed by an undercover BBC News investigation.

Reporters posing as fraudsters bought UK names, addresses and valid credit card details from a Delhi-based man. The seller denied any wrongdoing and Symantec corporation, from whom three victims bought a product via a call centre, called the incident “isolated”. Card fraud totalled £609m during 2008, according to payments group Apacs.

Symantec said it requires rigorous security measures of any third-party call centre agents and it believed the breach had been limited to a single agent. The BBC team went to India on a tip off after being put in touch with a man offering to sell stolen credit and debit card details.

He told the pair he could supply them with hundreds of credit and debit card details each week at a cost of $10 dollars a card. After the reporters agreed to initially buy the details of 50 cards, the man handed over a list of 14. He said the remainder would be sent later by e-mail.

The man claimed some of the numbers had been obtained from call centres handling mobile phone sales, or payments for phone bills. Back in the UK, the broker continued to supply card details to one of the undercover reporters by email.

Nearly all of the names, addresses and post codes sold to the BBC team were valid. But most of the numbers attached to them were invalid – often out by a single digit. However, about one in seven of the numbers purchased were valid – active cards still in use by UK customers. Their owners could have been subjected to fraud if these cards had fallen into the hands of criminals.

BBC News

 

The BBC tech show Click bought a botnet to show how at risk we are for cyber crimes. The botnet consists of 22,000 hijacked PCs around the world and was purchased over the net through a chat room.

The Click team will show how effective spamming can be done with a botnet already of that small size. 

After 2 hours of running their experiment the test email addresses used started filling up with thousands of junk emails.

Click also went on to test out a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on a backup site owned by security company Prevx.

Click then ordered its slave PCs to bombard its target site with requests for access to make it inaccessible. Click managed to overload the site with just 60 PCs

Click reported that Computers from the US and the UK go for about $350 to $400 (£254-£290) for 1,000 because they’ve got much more financial details, like online banking passwords and credit cards details.

What would be interesting is how popular this is or could become in the SEO world. We have already seen the term Anti or Negative SEO thrown about, and some say it is becoming increasingly popular as normal SEO becomes increasingly harder.

Being able to buy 1,000 computers for less than £300 that can carry out a DDoS attack sounds like a reasonably affordable investment for the unscrupulous people out there.

Obviously it would look a little suspicious if you targeted  multiple websites that you compete with but it quite possibly would be cheaper and just as effective as trying to link spam a competitor.

Obviously you would like to think people would not sink this low but this is unfortunately not the case with some “Craphat SEOs” even hacking into  school websites to inject porn links.

One of the problems many we find many of our clients suffer from is a poor internet connection and various issues with their network. While we do not specialise specifically in networking services we do offer some basic services for out clients in order to make life a little easier for them.

Without a doubt one of the most important aspects of a business is its ability to connect to the Internet and the internal network of the company.

We find that many SMEs will frequently have an inadequate connection to the internet and quite often a cheap router that is not cut out for the job. Some of the issues a client will typically face include:

• Slow connections (Downloads + Uploads)
• Lack of SMTP server
• Frequent disconnections
• Drops in performance (due to congestion)
• Poor security (if any)

In order to reduce these problems we strongly advise companies to chose an ISP and router that is capable of handling their day to day tasks.

The ISP we typically use is Be and we generally recommend Be Pro. We find Be Pro to be an excellent option for a small office as it has speeds of up to 24 meg download and 2.5 meg with Upload Plus service. It also includes a static IP and access to Be’s SMTP servers which are used for sending emails. There is no official download limit so it should be more than capable of handling any downloads, however as with all ISPs there is a fair use policy so downloading several hundred gigabytes per month may cause issues.

One word of warning with Be is that it is ADSL 2+ and the speeds you receive are dependant on the distance from your exchange.

If you do decide to go with Be they will send you out a free wireless router which is adequate for most situations, especially for home use. However for a business we personally recommend in investing in something a little more capable.

 

Our router of choice is the Draytek Vigor 2820. This is a fantastic little router that is capable of handling Annex M which is used for the increased upload speeds.

Some of the other features include:

• ADSL/ADSL2+ and Broadband Router
• Dual-WAN ports for ADSL or cable modem or both
• 3G (Cellular) Modem support
• Comprehensive and Robust Firewall
• Twin VoIP ports with PSTN passthrough (‘V’ models only)
• Content Filtering (by matched keyword or data type)
• SurfControl Web Site Category Filtering
• Ethernet and WLAN Virtual LAN segmentation (common/distinct)
• Configurable QoS Features (For traffic prioritisation)
• VPN Dial-in/dial-out with VPN hardware co-processor
• 802.11n Draft 2.0 Wireless LAN (‘n’ models only)
• Gigabit Ethernet LAN Port for LAN Server connectivity
• USB Port for Printer or 3G Modem
• Highly configurable but easy to install and monitor

We like this router for many including:

• Gigabit Ethernet LAN Port: It would be nicer is all the ports were Gigabit however if you connect the single Gigabit port up to a Gigabit switch you will have a true Gigabit network that should future proof the network for quite a long time.
• The firewall features measure for protection against attacks including DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, IP-based attacks and access by unauthorised remote systems. Wireless, Ethernet and VPN are also protected by various protection systems including WPA, MAC Address Filter, Switchable Hidden SSID, and Wireless LAN Isolation. The new DrayTek object-based firewall allows even more setup flexibility than ever, enabling you to create combinations of users, rules and restrictions to suit multi-departmental organisations.
• Content control features of the firewall allow you to set restrictions on web site access, blocking download of certain file types, blocking specific web sites, blocking IM/P2P applications or other potentially harmful or wasteful content. Using the SurfControl site categorisations enable you to block whole categories of web sites (e.g. gambling, pornography etc.), subject to subscription. You can also block http downloads of file types
• Bandwidth management including QoS and Class-based Bandwidth Guarantee by User-Defined Traffic Categories

We have used this router ourselves since it was released an have had no issues with it. In general we have never had any unwanted re-boots and system uptime is normally in weeks.

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