• 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 #

Recently I upgraded my home PC to Windows 7 Beta. Yes you might think I am a sucker for punishment with Microsoft being notorious for releasing buggy software however many people are reporting that Windows 7 is supirior to Vista even in the Beta stages.

Anyway, while the Windows 7 experience has been quite pleasurable there have been a few gremlins to work around. The main one being trying to get Outlook 2007 to work with my Exchange email that is hosted by Fasthosts.

If you set up the email as normal once you start Outlook it repeatedly asks you for your password as if it is not recognising you as a user.
So after resorting to Outlook Web Access for the past couple of days I decided to pull my finger out and figer out what is going on.

Anyway I found a useful post on Vinodunny.com. With hosted exchange account names are normally in the form of name@domain.com, however internally on the Exchange Active Directory they will be stored in the format of ADSDomain\name_internetdomain. So therefore if you use the format of Exchange Active Directory for the username you will be able to set up your email.

Apparantly if access Outlook Web Access go to options and change password you will be able to see the correct username there.

Unfortunately for Fasthosts users this option is not there however if you use the normal username (ie name@domain.com) and change the authentication from “Basic” to “NTLM” it does appear to fix the problem.

This technically should not work as Fasthosts claim they use basic authentication however they may use NTLM authentication internally. Either way it appears to resolve the issue.

Opera recently carried out a report on websites that pass W3C markup validation. The study is part of the Metadata Analysis and Mining Application Project (MAMA) and tested 3,509,170 URLs with the W3C’s markup validator.

The study found that only 4.13% of the URL set passed validation (with 4.33% of the domains having at least 1 URL that passed validation).

While this is a relatively low figure it is an increase on previous years.

In December 2001, 2,034,788 URLs were tested, 14,563 passed, equalling a pass rate of 0.71%

In June 2006, 1,002,350 URLs were tested, 25,890 passed, equalling a pass rate of 2.58%

W3C Validation is arguably not that important, as it does not have an effect on functionality of the website, nor does it affect the rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages.

However it is regarded as important to help ease of maintenance, cross platform compatibility, and access by people with disabilities along with other benefits.

Having a website that is cross browser compatible will help improve traffic and sales conversions as the bounce rate of users viewing a site that appears “broken” will likely be considerably higher than a website that is fully functioning.

Having a website that is accessible to people with disabilities will help improve the number of people able to view your site, which in turn should help increase sales. It is also worth noting that a website that does not take into account people with disabilities is theoretically breaking the law as there is a legal requirement to conform to the disabilities discrimination act. At the moment in time there have been no known cases of these causing webmaster legal issues but as the web becomes more ubiquitous providing access to the disabled will likely become more important.

North South Media have been doing an SEO league table over the past few months based on the rankings each company achieves within the search engines. As part of our on going SEO on our own site we have gradually moved up in the table and finally been ranked at No 1 for the UK results and No 2 for the International Results. While the league is not official or even that serious it is nice to be identified as one of the top SEO companies in the UK. Congratulations to Hobo Web and Just Searching for achieving No 1 in the Scottish and International results.

Regional results as follows:

UK National results as follows:

International results as follows:

I’m easing myself into work by doing a couple of blog posts before I start work on our clients! Along with neglecting blogging have have neglected reading Sphinn and other blogs recently. One of the Sphinn topics I noticed was by Copy Brighter on SEO techniques Google has smashed in 2007. One of the reasons I like posts like this is because I see so many SEO companies still practicing these techniques or advising their clients to use them. I have no doubt many of these companies will continue using the techniques throughout 2008 and onwards. One of the key jobs as an SEO is to actively read Blogs, Forums and other information sites in order to keep on top of the regular changes search engines make to their algorithms/rules. While it is impossible to know the exact Google algorithm it is often publicly announced when Google make an important change. Some of these changes include:

1. Reciprocal linking. This is an out of date technique still widely used by many SEO companies and webmasters and it is important to realise that it is no longer a valid technique. In May of 2007 Realtors who relied heavily on reciprocal links were hit with a -30 penalty from Google, severely harming their business. If really need to do a reciprocal link it is best not to use a links page but to embed the link within an article or news item, this makes the link look more natural. Google also say it’s the excessive reciprocal linking that is not allowed, so swapping links with select sites that have a good authority within your industry should be fine.
2. The “site: *** -sljktf” command (to show the supplemental index results). It used to be common practice to check which WebPages were in the supplemental index, as it would identify which pages needed some extra work doing to them. However Google has now merged all the pages into the regular index making it harder to identify which pages are under-performing.
3. Directory Links. Another outdated technique still widely used. During 2007 Google hit many directories with a reduction in Page Rank. Sites using the directories should not be directly affected / penalised but have the value of the links from the directories reduced.
4. Sponsored blog post networks. Google made quite a controversial move in 2007 when they penalised Bloggers who accepted payments to provide blog posts about websites, products, services and companies. Many websites had their Page Rank completely stripped away and has upset many Bloggers that generate some extra money from their Blog.
5. Paid for links / Sponsored Links. Similar to the Sponsored Blog posts Google hit many sites that sold link placements on their site. This is due to people trying to increase their Page Rank artificially by paying for links from high PR websites. This is another move that caused much upset as many sites had a big drop in PR, many of the site did not even sell links.
6. Dominating the SERPs with sub domains. Often used as a Reputation Management Technique allowing companies achieve multiple results from several different sub domains. This technique was devalued with Google making it more difficult for each sub domain after the first 2 to good achieve rankings.
7. 10 Blue Links. This is not really a penalty but Google has shifted from provided strictly 10 website search results on page 1 to a mixture of results including Images, Videos, Blog posts and News Items. Google is making a big push towards relevancy and quality of search results making it harder for websites to rank in the top ten. This will mainly effect website with little content and deliberately made for Adsense.

After a previous post regarding Tindall Marsh & Co using our design we are in discussion about resolving the situation. I have spoken to the owner and hopefully the problem will be sorted without too much incident. It would appear the situation occurred due to a rather foolish designer whom has now left the company, and the owner has expressed his apologies. So thank you for the quick resolution.

Ok I am being petty again, but I have decided that I am going to create a page dedicated to all the crap SEO spam emails we get. If I remember correctly another SEO company was listing them on their own site, so if anyone remembers the site let me know and I will give them some link love for the idea.

My main reason behind this is because it is funny how stupid SEOs make themselves look when they spam other SEOs with SEO services. I assume they are automated requests so I guess they can’t help it, but then using an automated technique is pretty stupid too.

Today WebSearchPR.Com were kind enough to take some time out of their day to send me an email. Apparently my site only has 155 links in Google, and that they used the Google link count because that is the most important.

“A higher number of links will help me achieve far higher rankings on Google.”

Really? Links are important? Why did no one tell me?

Apparently they have achieved excellent results for their clients and they have increased profits for 100’s of their clients.

Strangely enough they do not seem to have any links in Google themselves, Yahoo shows seven and MSN (+link:) shows none. Maybe they should spend more time building their own links rather than spamming other SEO companies.

Ok so I know they are not going to stop spamming but I am still going to moan about it.

Approximately 2 days every month we get an email from this seoedge.com, either through our main email or our contact form. Every single email has been regarding buying links on one of their sites or link exchanges. One email even apologised for disturbing me and they will not do it again!

One of the amusing things I noticed many of the links they were trying to sell is on their own site seoedge.com, apparently it used to be a PR6 but it now appears to be PR0. Guess no one told them selling links is not allowed in Google’s eyes.

If an SEO can not keep up to date with correct practices for their own site what hope do their clients have? I suppose the fact that their SEO packages cost $99 and $199 a month goes to show you get what you pay for. At least they do not guarantee 1000s of top ten listings within X days and they seem quite honest about the service you pay for.

SEO Edge are not the only culprit and they are probably not the worst it is just that I noticed they were repeat offenders.

While this is some what of a pointless rant it is partly due to the fact that companies like this make winning clients more difficult. Certainly in the UK, SEO is still quite an un-developed industry, there is a very mixed bag or good SEOs and awful SEOs with very little in between.

Unfortunately I find that many small firms / SMEs are quite uneducated about the industry and will go to the cheapest SEO possible. I am happy to to lose a potential client to a better SEO or at least a good SEO that undercut me/presented themselves better than me. If you are paying £50 a month and targeting a competitive industry my personal opinion is that the money would be better spent on buying SEOBook and maybe a member ship to SEOMoz and do the SEO yourself. Both them resources will probably make your more skilled at SEO than the SEO company that charges £50 a month for SEO that is way out of date.

If you are considering paying for SEO then no matter how much the company charges I think you should always read up about some of the techniques to avoid, look at the clients the company has had and the results they have achieved. If any of the techniques used on the site look suspicious then it is probably best to stay away from them. Techniques to look out for and avoid include:

1. Micro Sites / Shadow Domains that redirect to the client site. Google mentions using deceptive redirects but I would also avoid a company that uses Micro sites with a keyword rich domain name, keyword rich content and dozens of links back to the client site. It looks rubbish, and it is a bad practice.
2. Does not distinguish between paid for and organic results. You want to be the top ten in Google for No Win No Fee? Yes I can get your site to the top by the end of today. It will cost you £10 a click though and it is called AdWords.
3. Guaranteed rankings, we have all heard it before. You can not guarantee rankings for competitive terms. Yes anyone can guarantee you 100s of top ten rankings but they will be obscure terms no one searches for.
4. Hidden Text through various techniques include NoScript, White on White, CSS visibility:hidden etc. It may get good results for a while, you may see competitors having a great success from it. Sooner or later the site will be penalised and you will lose all rankings. This maybe ok for sites generating short term income from adsense etc but if your business is dependant on your company name, website, etc then I would stay well away from this technique.
5. Excessive duplicate content. Some SEOs may add numerous pages per month to the site. This is quite frequently duplicate content, it probably will not get your site penalised but it is unlikely the pages will get indexed for anything. If the content is scraped from a limit number of sites then the sites the content is scraped off could file a DMCA request and have the content removed from the index.
6. Paid Links. Again the site should not be penalised in the Search Engine Results Pages for using paid links but Google does not like it and most likely will devalue the links and possibly strip away the Page Rank of the site.
7. Reciprocal Linking, it has not been much use for a while, do not even bother with it especially it is obvious too. If the file name is has links or resources in it and there are a 1000 links on the page, it is kind of obvious that the site is using reciprocal links.
8. No FTP/Site access needed. Not really a technique, more a lack of one, but the site needs to be optimised as well as gaining links. If the SEO makes no changes to the site then the results will be limited.

There are many other things to avoid I just listed a few that came to me. There are also loads of good SEOs in the UK but unfortunately a few seem to give the rest of the industry a bad name. I hope as the demand for SEO increases the overall awareness about the techniques that should and should not be used will increase too.