Dan The SEO

Google Needs To Sort Out It’s Sitelinks

Dan — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:33:03 +0000

This made me chuckle when I saw it this morning. A Google search for “google insight” (because I’m lazy) brought up this

Really Google? You want the error page as one of your sitelinks??

It’s ok, Dan The SEO can help you with this, give the Webmaster Tools Help on Sitelinks a read. That will tell you how to fix that.

YouTube Testing A New Related Video Screen

Dan — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 06:03:08 +0000

It seems YouTube are testing (possibly launched) a new way of showing related videos at the end of a video. From what used to be only a few choices with big buttons to share, replay etc has now turned into 12 thumbnails with titles overlaid and simple share, replay and vote buttons at the top.

I quite like it, and it should keep more people on YouTube (not that thats hard) and hopefully it will also increase related video views.

So everyone wins!

Adobe Edge – Flash For SEO?

Dan — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 09:06:12 +0000

In a press release, released today, Adobe announced that they are releasing an early preview of “Edge”, their new web-motion and interactive design tool.

It works in a similar way to Adobe Flash and looks very similar too with a “stage” and time lines for editing the animation transitions and so on. The main difference is that Edge uses HTML5, CSS and javascript which should allow web designers and developers to create sites like they would in Flash (or “an SEO’s nightmare”), but with the use of HTML5 and CSS it should be more search engine friendly too, as long as there isn’t a massive amount of javascript.

Another big positive is it will be supported across all browsers (although Internet Explorer needs to be version 9) and also mobile devices including iPhones and iPads which can’t display Flash.

I used Flash a lot during my time at university creating small animations and interactive pieces, so I am really interested to see just what Edge is like, especially now, as an SEO, I can have a play with it to see just how well optimised a site created in Edge can be.

Edge is available for free to download at Adobe Labs so anyone can have a play about with it. Once I have, I’ll write a follow up post on here.

Adobe released a preview video of what Adobe Edge can do which you can view below.

Evernote Help!!!

Dan — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:50:34 +0000

For many many months now I have had Evernote installed on my Mac and iPhone BUT I hardly ever use it…

In fact, I have only ever written one note! Which is pretty rubbish.

So I ask you (well those who use Evernote) how do you use it? What do you like about it? What’s useful? Does it help you sort out your SEO tasks?

Please leave a comment below and huge thanks in advance!!

SEO Chat-up Lines

Monty — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:55:09 +0000

Are you a single SEO? Are you in a relationship and need to spice things up? Well Dr. Montgomery (not accredited in anyway, so please don’t show me your gross bits) can help. For years, I’ve been perfecting the art of love in the SEO community and can now reveal a selection of SEO related chat-up lines (pick-up lines if you are Team America) that 100% Guarantee you will not be alone for much longer*.

SEO chat-up lines in action

*If you try any of these then you are in danger Will Robinson, not only will you be greeted with blank expressions but most likely a slap, I have done no research, just shouted round the office like a maniac, made me realise how creative some of the guys are at MEC Manchester.

So let’s break the ice and feel free to add your own in the comments, still can’t believe Dan let me post this…

I will give you multiple links…
Will you be the anchor to my text?
If you were a link I’d make you I don’t want to share!
Can I get a listing in your directory?
Did it hurt…? When you fell from the first page.
I’ve set my robots.txt to allow you
Do you fancy a 3 way? No wait I mean a link…
If you were Google I’d let you rank me!
Please don’t break my link!
Do you know how to find the “top” spot?
Once you go black hat you never go back…
Look we both knew this was 302!
Wow your links look juicy!
“A rose canonicalised would smell just as sweet!”
Can I have your CTR?
I’ve been checking out your analytics – can i make you my landing page?
I Digg you
My title tag is “Available”
What part of didn’t you understand?
You had me at algo…
?
If I said you had a beautiful would you hold it against me?
Your homepage or mine?
Get your code love, you’ve pulled
fancy a blog roll in the sack?
Is that a long tail keyword in your meta description or are you just pleased to see me?

Baidu and Bing – Partners in search

Dan — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 07:35:25 +0000

A statement from Baidu, the largest search engine in China with 75% of the market, has stated that all English search terms will go through Microsofts Bing search engine in a service starting later this year.

This expands on the current relationship between the two engines and will also increase the share that Baidu has in China over it’s next rival Google. Also it should increase Bing’s presence worldwide as Microsoft look to try and close the gap to Google worldwide.

Overall a good move by both engines, although I feel Bing is getting the most out of it considering Baidu’s already high market share.

Rocking Google Doodle

Dan — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 09:14:01 +0000

Todays Google Doodle is probably my favorite ever! I play quite a bit of guitar outside of time spent doing SEO, so obviously I love it.

It’s to celebrate what would have been Les Paul’s 96th birthday. Sadly he died in 2009 but with the legendary Les Paul guitar it’s not like he is every going to be forgotten. So it’s good to see Google hasn’t!

It’s quite fun to strum your mouse over the strings but click the keyboard button and start playing!

The intro for Metallica’s Enter Sandman can be played a bit like this

X-V-,-V-N-.-X-V-,-V-N-.

If you have made up your own tune share it in the comments below!

Google +1 out of beta

Dan — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 07:34:39 +0000

Googles latest attempt to get more social, the +1 button, has finally come out of testing and given us all the ability to add our own Google +1 buttons on our websites.

Currently it’s only for .com users. For us in the UK we will just have to wait a bit longer for +1 to appear in our search results but adding the button now does make sense! Might as well get the votes in early!

Advantages of Google +1

Google has gone pretty social recently, with it’s attempts with Google Wave and Buzz, but also it’s inclusion of real time twitter results in the search results. Matt Cutts has also announced that social factors do indeed influence the rankings and it’s likely that +1 will have some ranking factor.

Negatives of Google +1

Some people won’t trust it because your giving Google data about you. But it’s your choice to use the +1 button or not. Personally I can’t see any reason to not use +1, any data Google will get from this will only help your site (as long as it gets views) and also help provide you as a searcher with sites that your “trusted circle of friends” have determined to be relevant and useful. Now thats no bad thing right? (actually we will see how useful it is… but that can wait)

Adding +1 to your site

Those nice people at Google have made it super easy for us mere mortals to install Google +1 on our site/s. Just a couple of lines of code and we even get a choice of designs to use. Handy!

What about wordpress?

It’s not taken long for wordpress plugin developers to build their own +1 plugins but the one I recommend using is Google +1 by Alex Moss (a fellow MancSEO). I use it on this site and it’s really easy to use. Almost too easy!

SAScon 2011 Rap

Dan — Fri, 20 May 2011 19:45:31 +0000

Today I attended the 2nd day of SAScon 2011 which was a great conference and I now have a load of notes which will be written up and posted on here over the weekend and on the MEC Manchester blog over the next week.

For now enjoy Neil Walker (@theukseo) doing a rap which was pretty much the perfect way to end the conference.

And here Neil is rapping live (let’s not mention the false start. No one mention it. Ok. Thanks)

Porn and File Sharing Sites Gain From Google Panda

Dan — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 12:49:53 +0000

From looking at the data provided by Search Metrics of the winners and losers from the Google Panda update it’s clear that some of the top 100 “winners” may raise a few eyebrows from some as amongst the YouTube’s and the Techcrunch’s is a bunch of porn and file sharing sites.

This is quite interesting considering Google Panda is supposed to help people find more high-quality sites in it’s search results. So does this mean Google regard perfectgirls.net as a good source of high quality porn? Possibly. Perhaps Googles motto of “Do no evil” should be changed to “Do no evil, and go here for girls girls girls!”.

I joke of course, and maybe the sites do offer good quality content, but I think the most surprising site is filestube.com. For those who don’t know, this is designed to make searching for files to download easier and it’s commonly used by people looking for sources to download music and film (and porn… ahh it all makes sense now! ).

Another interesting aspect is some of the sites which had a lower win % compared to those above. User content sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr and Soundcloud all recieved lower win % compared to the porn (except from youjizz) which I would consider to be of higher quality compared to others.

Google Panda sure is interesting!

What are you thoughts? Leave a comment below.