Came by thise recently from a good mate PaulH

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=t3fr0gs

Just in case it disappears as I am sure it will sreenshot below:

It is with regret that I have had to remove a post that I made about First Search Consultancy who cold called me and I wrote about what was said to me, quite a bit of which was incorrect and false. If you have been redirected here from an old link that post is now gone.

There were 117 comments made from lots of different people that First Search Consultancy did not like as many were unfavourable.

First Search Consultancy had their legal representatives contact my host and as such the posts and comments have been removed.

There are other locations where reviews can be seen of First Search Consultancy who still have content up so get searching if you want to find out more.

If I had the time and inclination I would fight the problem, but for now I simply have other stuff to do that is more important.

cheers

ukgimp

Added // I have had to close comments on this one also as several comments, the type FSC don’t seem to like have been added. Sorry.

Well I am sure you all know JasonD or have seen him about, if not check out an interview I did with him a while back ….JasonD Interview.

Anyway Jason now has a blog of sorts. Weird mental colours and fonts, but Jason never likes to conform.

Check is out…. Jason’s Shell

Oh, happy day, Google have been granted a patent on web link spam.  Right, Bill may say it better, and may even look over the maths, but in very rough terms, I think the patent says this :

A site may seek to improve it’s apparent importance by acquiring spammy links. This can sometimes be detected by examining the derivative graph of average PR (NB this is a gross over simplification, but it’ll do) of newly acquired links, since such spammy links often come in 2 varieties :

1) Link farm : often composed of many low PR pages pointing to a single site, hence the graph of d(PR)/dt will be sharply negative

2) Clique attack : often composed of many high value sites linking amongst themselves, but not outside the ring, hence the graph of d(PR)/dt will be sharply positive

Neither behaviour is terribly natural, and can be examined algorithmically. Also, although it’s not clearly stated, there must be a temporal component to this – only links acquired within a given timeframe can truly be considered to be coupled, else madness ensues. Personally, I’d put a damping factor into the coupling that relies on time separation between discovery of various links. It’s known that Google timestamp new links when they find them, so it’s not a problem

Another critical line here “A naturally occurring structure, in contrast, will tend to have more links to nodes outside the ring, thereby dissipating the importance of mutual reinforcement of the links.” – link out from your spam, for protection from detection +3. Fortunately this merely reinforces my own practices, really. I’ve noticed that a lot of “new wave” SEOs think that “PR bleed” is some horrific disease, and not a stupid name for the perfectly normal practice of linking to other people’s sites, like an actual webmaster might do. Repeat after me, hublike score, LocalRank, Hilltop.

Back to the patent… Interestingly, they propose taking the modulus of the normalised derivative value, and comparing that to a threshhold to find candidates for spam status, which may imply that the “natural” graphs of link acquisition vary very little. In clearer terms, that means that you’d expect a site to pick up a mixture of high-value and low-value links, and that the derivate contributions of each of those types of links ought to produce a fairly flat graph overall. That may go some way to explaining why the Digg / SMO boosts don’t always work.

Note that the patent was submitted in 2004 – it’s likely they’ve been using this for a while, and I suspect we’ve all seen the effects. It strikes me most immediately as a huge helping hand to negative SEO – thanks for spelling out more clearly what I need to do to make someone look like a spammer Sepandar D. Kamvar, Taher H. Haveliwala, and Glen M. Jeh. I owe you all a beer.

Footnote:

This analysis was sent to me by my good friend Brendon Scott (Aka TallTroll) who has been involved in SEO for a lifetime. If you can find him maybe you could hire him, a bit like the A Team really.

Those of you who have been around for a while will likely remember Martin Schaedel, aka lazerzubb.

Sad news, is that he died in a plane crash.

The dude was ahead of his years, he was a bit of a business and web genius at and age when I was still climbing trees and setting fire to things.

Best wishes to all his friends and family.

ukgimp…rather stunned.

Medal Tally Olympics

For me at this time there are some “news” results in #1 and #2 is

2. Full Medal Tally. Results. Athens Olympics 2004. ABC Sport.
Medal Tally Live Results from the Athens Olympics. ABC Sport.
www.abc.net.au/olympics/2004/results/medaltally.htm – 25k -

Number 4 is relevant though. But surely they should have this sort of query hand promoted?

Just a bit cack really!

A company boss whose personal details were put on Facebook under a fake entry has begun a landmark claim for damages.

A false profile of Mathew Firsht was entered on the social networking website with his name and date of birth, incorrectly stating he was signed up to gay groups.

Read More

Personally I think it is super easy to do this sort of stuff, I do fear for the spammers who have been using profile building bots to make thousands of fake profiles. Lets hope they cover their tracks, this is getting heavy (if you have ever been through those doors you know how serious it can be).

About time really. I don’t trust anyone on there. It is definitely “buyer beware”. But then if you really think you can get a Luis Vuitton bag for £3 you are a bit of a muppet anyway.

Ebay Fined £30M for fake goods

Red Bull win the battle over redbullsucks.com and make Carl Gamel have to hand it over to them.

This is an interesting result especially in the hotting up sector of reputation management.

“Thus, the Panel concludes that a domain name is ‘identical or confusingly similar’ to a trademark for purposes of the Policy when the domain name includes the trademark, or a confusingly similar approximation, regardless of the other terms in the domain name. In other words, the issue under the first factor is not whether the domain name causes confusion as to source (a factor more appropriately considered in connection with the legitimacy of interest and bad faith factors), but instead whether the mark and domain name, when directly compared, have confusing similarity,”

To read where the story broke try Out Law

To view the full WIPO ruling click this that link WIPO Ruling

I had a post all lined up to talk about “calling people out”, which was inspired by The Wolf, re Seth Godin, but I have scratched that in favour of actually calling someone out.

As the title of this post says, at this point I think Michael Gray is talking shite when he says that bloggers, unless uber big names, should quit blogging as they are just regurgitating the already over blogged about news.

Maybe it is rather nice bit of linkbait, but like every man in the known world, if you see a sign that says “wet paint” you have to touch it, or “hot surface” you have to try it to see if it really is hot.

Well GW says that seo bloggers should step away from the keyboard, here’s why you should not (quick thoughts):

1. It’s your right to blog, to do whatever you like.
2. You should not be put off by a killjoy.
3. You have to start somewhere, if you are serious and passionate about something then don’t let anyone turn you off.
4. People write in different styles and have different hooks, find your hook and write (if you can be arsed), and some people will prefer your coverage of the same old news. I have canned people from my feed readers because they simply bore me!
5. Stick to your guns, all the successful people I know have focus and have not deviated from what they wanted to do, even in the face of the nay sayers.
6. Have fun!
7. If they don’t like you they can turn your feed off or read somewhere else, so screw em!

Now here is a disclaimer, I may have just fallen for the link bait, and the reason I have bitten is that I respect GW immensely, always have, so when someone you respect talks poo you need to prod them.