SEO Rocks

In a recent video Matt Cuts has confirmed again that Google will be toning down the importance of keyword rich domains. In the video Matt talks about whether a webmaster should use a keyword rich domain and his response to that leans more towards using a domain that can be more brand-able instead of keyword rich.

This does not mean however, that google will not still weight keywords in domains heavily. At the moment it’s not impossible to see a blank web page ranking number one with a keyword rich domain. Proof of this is the following search term and results ibz.cc/h6ZNOB (image below for when it changes)

Caution also needs to be taken when interpreting  what matt says about using a brandable domain or a keyword rich domain. The examples he used were extremely large brands and although he makes a very good point, it may not necessarily apply to small companies trying to get a look in their online market.

What it all means is you can’t be a lazy SEO, this is nothing new though, your SEO campaign can not rely on one factor e.g. keyword rich domain, if this is all you are doing then i would put some work in now.

 I’ve been eating for the last 3 days, in between eating, ive been trying to get to grips with GIMP on my netbook, which im actually getting to grips with!

At the same time ive been talking to my brother about the latest Facebook changes and how cool some of the profile pages look, then it started to dawn on me the opportunities that may arise to spam Peoples profiles (i know im a little slow on this uptake!)

Perfect! I thought i would use my new-found GIMP skills to create an advert for one of my other websites and use it to spam my friends profile pages.

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Jump To: Google Penalty | Filter | Duplicate Content | Hacked | Google Is Wrong!

You have a website so people can use it, for that to happen it needs to be found, to be found, you really have the best chance being in Google (other search engines do exist).

You spend months, years building up your website then one day you realise that the amount of pages Google has indexed for your site is going down. Your first reaction is to panic and shout at someone, then you might perform a google search about de indexing and why!

There are many reasons why your website may start to be de indexed, below are the most common reasons i have seen and how to fix them.

I need to say to this point that there are several levels of penalty that i refer to, I have been told that ‘google filters’ do not exist and they are simply penalties, however i disagree and below you will see my thinking as to why there is a difference.

Google Penalty

A google penalty is when google have withdrawn your website from its index. The main reasons for this is a direct breach of Google’s guidelines, serious things like, Cloaking, being part of a link farm or generally using any aggressive black hat techniques. If you have been penalised then the chances are its for something you have done and you would normally know what has happened.

How To Detect

Detecting a penalty is easy, simply do a site command and it will show you if you have received a penalty. if you wanted to check this website then simply past the code below into google.

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A few days ago i showed people that Wayne Rooney was close to leaving Manchester united through the magic of Trends.

I said that Rooney will leave the club when he becomes bigger than the club, after all no player is bigger than Manchester United.

After i wrote the blog post, it was announced that Rooney was to leave Manchester United. Today is the 22nd and it has now been announced that Wayne Rooney will stay at Manchester United. I didn’t believe believe sky news, or BBC news, or the statement on the clubs website, i had to go and check with old faithful for my confirmation, and yes it was correct, Rooney had in fact announced he is leaving and then perform a U turn and it was confirmed by Google trends. It was confirmed by the chart showing Rooney becoming bigger than united but today he came back now which coincides with him not leaving.

This morning i have been seeing some strange looking search results in Google.fr, They made me think back to Patrick Alofts blog post about site previews in the search results.

This seems to be something similar except it doesn’t seem to work!! I am using Firefox, this is only appearing on Google.FR, i have not updated or installed any plugins since yesterday when i last viewed Google.FR, I DO have JavaScript enabled and i am NOT logged in.

Hovering over a search result adds a blue border around the result and there seems to be a magnifying glass icon, These results are slightly different from the reports on Blogstorm, however, Google is deffinately testing something again.

When i click on the magnifying glass nothing happens, i have checked i have got JavaScrip turned on which it is.

The screenshots are not as impressive as seeing the full site preview but something is being tested on Google.fr today

With the guardian finding it suitable yesterday to publish 14 different news articles online about Rooney it made me wonder weather Rooney was actually bigger, and more important than God, after a moment i decided that maybe wrong!

A lot of the articles are basically evolving around Rooney and Alex Ferguson who is known for bringing down the axe on greedy money grabbing w**r*s and people who generally cross him. One thing i like about united is that no player is bigger than the club. But is Rooney bigger than Ferguson? is Ferguson and Rooney as a tag team bigger than the club?

There is only one way to find this out and that is to ask Google, People may remember Google predicting Obama becoming president so surly it cant be wrong?

Google trends is the answer to any question based on popularity, to prove this as fact i ran a very simple query.

Daddy or chips?

As you can see below, Daddy wins and apart from the blip daddy has always been more popular than chips. (probably financially driven but still a fact)

Now proof has been shown that Google Trends tells the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth its time for the big reveal.

Is Wayne Rooney bigger than Alex Ferguson, or Manchester United?

As we can see, Rooney has always been a notch above Alex Ferguson but not by far, this will corrolate to youth, if we remove the amount of searches made by Rooney himself then it will be even more even. In all this time it has been clear that nobody is bigger than the club.

However, over the last few days Rooney has started to climb, he has almost become bigger than the club which as we know is not aloud, Being so much bigger than the boss will rustle feathers.

If no player can be bigger than the club then once the blue line crosses the orange line, Rooney will definitely be leaving the club, if it happens before January then Rooney will leave in the January transfer window. If the blue line stays below the orange line, then Rooney will stay.

Personally i hope the lines never cross.

There seems to be a bug that is spreading round twitter like wild fire! within the 30 seconds it has taken me to write this, a twitter search for ‘onmouseover’ has returned over 30K results!!

If you are receiving status updates that look like this

Then its because the person has hovered over a JavaScript link which has re tweeted and changed the font size to something extremely large so all you see is black! The code from one tweet i found was style=”font-size:999999999999px”

It seems to be harmless what is currently going round, though i did get an error about Direct Messaging someone so it obviously tried to direct message from my account.

The issue with this now could be security, so far it seems harmless, tomorrow it may be a different piece of javascript which looks to be doing the same thing but is in fact doing something different.

Dave Naylor blogged about this last year and yet it is still a problem.

The new twitter does not seem to be effected by this problem so hopefully in the next few weeks we will be banished of the problem.

In the mean time i would recommend using tweetdeck!

P.S by the end of me writing this, the search had 127,000 new search results, that is a lot if the JavaScript being spread was malicious.

I hate the use of the term ‘Viral’. Over the last 6 months or so, i have heard a lot of talk about viral video’s and viral marketing and on the large people have been getting it completely wrong.

I want to start this of really simple with the question, What is Viral Marketing, for the answer and to give the definition a little more credibility i asked my friend at Marketing Chatter who defined it as

Viral Marketing – A marketing message which spreads unaided from person to person either online or offline.

The reason im doing this is because i find people banding the term viral around and they are either using it out of context or they are referring to something as viral when it isn’t. There are also lots of companies popping up now and they will produce and provide ‘viral media’.

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I have recently been reading through a few SEO websites when i noticed a blog post reporting on a Hack on the krispy kreme website. The blog was written on the 8th July, that was 11 days ago, remarkably, the hack still seems to be in place.

For such a large organisation i would expect something like this to have been dealt with quite swiftly, It’s a brand site and i expect it gets a lot of traffic so google updating its cache wont be the problem so i thought i would take a look.

If you do a site command in google you can see the problem straight away.

The titles and descriptions have been changed in the listings and as you can see they are now promoting a Canadian Pharmacy which obviously isn’t doughnuts!

If however you go to the website and view the source code you will be able to see that the title and description are different to what Google is seeing.

If you want to see what google is seeing then you need to look at the website as Google. There are many plug-ins for Firefox that will allow you to do this. The best i found is User Agent Switcher, set it to browse as Google Bot and you will see the problem.

This has happened because the hack is detecting whether the user is google or not, if the user is google then it displays the hacked content. If the user is anyone else then it displays the normal page. Essentially, this is cloaking.

What do they need to do?

Well it’s not easy without access but i would hazard a guess that they have a compromised htaccess file on their server or they have had some php injected into the website which is doing this, it seems to only be affecting the inner pages, maybe this is part of the hack so it lies undetected longer.

Having a search around it seems this is a very common hack with wordpress.

Why Have I Blogged this?

Well its simple really, its easy to explain what can happen when a site is hacked, its easy to tell people how to see it for themselves but without a real life example it is nothing more than theory.

Hopefully this can be used to show people a hack and how to detect it. Also krispy kreme may read this and fix their site!

****UPDATE****

Its been a few days since i wrote this blog post, checking back today, it goes from bad to worse, The homepage of the website has now no longer cached in Google, it now looks like Google is starting to penalise the website.

Their social media people should really check their twitter stream and listen to what people are telling them!
****UPDATE**** 28th July

It now seems to be safe to buy doughnuts again! the hack has been removed, hopefully it wont happen again, if it does, lets hope they fix it faster next time.

I was reading Peter young’s blog post earlier about google getting its own geo targeting wrong and returning what looked like a polish site link in a UK result.

Earlier this morning i noticed google using a different URL when you view a cached page. Webcache.Googleusercontent.Com. After reading around the subject a little i saw that its been around since about May this year. It doesn’t seem to be anything more than a text representation of the IP address Google uses when you click the cache button on a search result.

While i was having a look round i noticed something else you wouldn’t expect to see on Google. Google has indexed over 60k queries for this domain.Most of them seem to have been blocked as the site does have the standard 1 mile long Google robots.txt file, however there are still some results that have been properly cached.

Im sure on the grand scale of things its not going to harm them. It is another example of Google not being perfect