I have always bleated on about website standards and how accessibility can and should be incorporated in any SEO programme. It stands to reason that you will have to do some on page SEO, therefore why not do the accessibility at the same time.

Google could flip the whole web for the better simply by including the part that make sites rank well in Google Accessible Search

Why should you give a damn?

Well there are organisations that are taking to the fight to the large corporates , where Target got targeted and the court ruled that:

“The court has ruled that “clicks” as well as “bricks”, are covered by the US Americans Disability Act (ADA) and E- commerce is now a “place of public accommodation”.

Now you may be an SEO for a company as large as Target and I fell that in that role it is your duty to point out potential pit falls of discriminating. If you can’t get it past the committee get it noted on recored becasue someone will get the bullet one day, or if you can do something about it, do it. It is not a fruitless task, a massive proportion accessibility is indeed top level on page SEO. Plus don’t forget you can shout about it.

The point is, and if you have not worked this out yet, when cases of website discrimination get to court you don’t want it to be your bad press and problem. So how about this:

Open dare to Google: I dare you Google to include website accessibility and web standards into the main search algo and publicly say so.

Open dare to SEO’s: I dare you not to do anything about accessibility when Google bring in the algo changes!

I know a few domainers and I know more than a few serious SEO’s. One or two of those SEO’s cross over into the domain world and do something about it. Far too often people with amazing domains park them on services like SEDO which means there is no upward progress of the domain. What I mean by that is that they do not age in Google or get extra links and therefore increase its value.

It has long been known that a Google aged domain with some traffic (not just type ins) will be worth more that one just sitting there with a crap parking page. So why do all these people not put a real site on them. I am not talking about building a massive online social networking site I am talking about at least 1 decent textural holding page.

Ask yourself this did cruises.co.uk sell for £560K because of the name alone? You damn right it didn’t, it was because of the name the business connection, the userbase and probably the SEO status of the page. A mate of mine bought recycle.co.uk not long ago for many reasons not just the name I promise you.

You have two simple scenarios as I see it.

1. Spent as shit load on a domain and then leave it with a rubbish landing page and maybe oneday someone will come along and offer you that killer price because they want the domain. Also you will likely earn some revenue from type ins and a dodgy landing page.
2. Spend a shit load on a domain and put some content on, links will come your way slowly as it is likely that you have a real generic gem. Then oneday when the right person comes along you can add into the negotiation that the domain has been sitting in Google for some time, has links and is well primed for SEO from here on in.

Which do you reckon would be best? It’s a tough one isn’t it?

If you really think I am talking cack that is up to you. But may I make suggestion? At least put is on a holding page that can be optimized in terms of maximum click outs using something like Taguchi Testing.

I have had a few projects that have taken me away from the SEO world more that I would have liked. I am getting those finished off and I have some great plans starting to unfold. Many of which I can’t post about.

Any getting to the point, in this game as it is, you need to read around. It used to be a case of reading at a few select places like WMW, Spider Food, Pandia etc. Well the landscape changed and people got the hump with giving their content away and Blogging started to become the main place to post your nice little tips. Threadwatch was born and was great as Nick managed to find lots of stuff for you, then times changed there it became a bit of and animal pen (fun though) and it died. That left a huge hole.

To fill that hole you need to read around, there are millions of blogs and stuff, but you need to keep the time spent reading down as there would not be enough time to do actual work!

Asking around and talking with mates there are a few that I have on bloglines. I use bloglines as it is nice and clean. I wanted to use Google reader, but that scare the poo out of me, as they would know more about me than they already do.

Apart from some forums (Syndk8, Acorn Domains)and IM here are the mains ones I look at to see what is going on out there. I do check others, just not as regular, plus anything I miss I see hear about or get pinged about it.

Are there any gems I have missed?

Andy Beal’s Good quality read
Bruce ClayA big name from wayback
Dave Naylor Old school SEO and mate, regular posts
fantomNews Cloaking legend but doesn’t post much
Matt Cutts You have to have Matt Cutts
Michael Gray Well respected industry name
NickyCakes.com New on the scene, nice writing style
Paulh Good mate, when he can be arsed good posts
Search Engine Land Well it’s Danny!
SEO BlackHat You need to know the dark side
SEO Book.com Aaron, good allrounder
SEO by the SEA Quality stuff and I like the fact that he looks like Dave Grohl / Dave Grolh (Which one is Bill??)
Seth’s Blog Starting reading this after readin “The Dip”
Slightly Shady SEO Dark side stuff again
Stuntdubl I love the strapline
Tropical SEO Recommended by lots including the Squirrel Boys, so on the list

Joost Wordpress expert

Lots of people go on about footprints and how to avoid them, well there are oodles of things that the bad people (Google) can do to find your sites, which you may or may not be linking together in a sneaky fashion.

I have seen Data in Star Trek and I get the idea that patterns can always be found. In this case Google and Data are the same, trust no one, least of all them..

The footprint should not only be the concern of the Blackhat, it should be part of what the cleanest of clean SEO’s look into. Why is that, well Blackhats anticipate losing sites, but when your real site goes MIA it can be teary eyed times.

Also competitor people snooping around, you don’t want them seeing what works if you can help it or let them know that you may be behind some good raking.

I have seen grown men nearly cry (the big Jessies is what I am saying and sticking to it) when losing a lot.

Now this is not an exhaustive list, just the sort of thing I would be looking for in clients SEO programs or link networks etc etc before I get bored or have to take my dogs out for a poo. The dog is ticking!

1. Whois details. If you have daft enough to buy all your interlinked sites with the same whois info you have done a major faux pas. Sorry to say I would reckon that Google have access to all whois, with history too. If they say they don’t have access it, it is your duty to not believe them and assume they do. I would, if I were them sneakily buy this info, they have lots of cash and this is a cold war of sorts. Bad search results can make share prices drop! Vary NS, registrants, have legit whois info. You need real for real sites as you can get that letter from Nominet saying you ain’t real

2. Loose lips sinks ships. If you tell no-one or not many people about your stuff you can’t get it outed or investigated. A friend of mine has some amazing rankings and pushes the boundaries. But loads of us know his sites so we can look at what he is doing and maybe recreate it. If he never told us who his client was we would not have mooched around in the SERPs to find his stuff. If you value your private cutting edge stuff, keep it that way. That means, not sneaking a link from a performing site for your own private stuff (cheeky!) or getting that not really needed foot link.
3. Same templates. Using the same designer or free templates might not be the best thing in the world. I like to adapt (ahem) other people templates to remove footprints of links home. Naughty I know, but hey no-one is going to die, it is not brain surgery is it? To mix it up fella, keep it random. I suggest using different designers as even when told they need to be different some designers flip things around with CSS and an image change but 99% of the template is it the same.

4. Coding footrints or onpage footprints. Ok obvious stuff like saying the same think on all your sites (simple example) can find your whole set of sites. Taking it a stage deeper and on a similar line to CSS faux pas below.
5. Same CMS. If you always use the same CMS, or blog or whatever, well you don’t need me to tell you more do you?
6. URL structures. Always using the same structure, be it folders or html, htm, underscores etc will be a big obvious no no. I have seen sites in sectors I watch and I know who owns them before I even check it out thoroughly.
7. Same webserver techs. Well this is more or a mixing it up thing. You work it out.
8. Same IP blocks. If you always put your sites on the same IP start looking at new Cat C’s (or whatever it is called these days). You have seen the IP command in MSN I presume. That’s what we have access to. To be uber safe maybe try and hunt down different Cat B’s.
9. Stupid linking. Linking back to one source or even worse heavy cross linking could get you dinked. You need to ringfence those suites of sites, so if you do get a direct hit, you only lose a %, not the whole lot.
10. CSS naming conventions. Always using the same naming id’s and class’s could get you a good shoeing. The argument that lots of people may use them and they can’t kill everyone is not a good one. Why? Cos they don’t just nuke everything, they could build up a pattern, a number of black marks, to piece together the whole story, then you get a kicking.
11. Same onsite monetization. Yes sites need to make money, but making $2 a week for some cack feeder site and losing a whole network is not worth it. If you are daft enough to put Adsense on all the sites, at least make sure you have several accounts. Which is not that easy and requires serious discipline not to let them know.
12. Crazy surfing patterns. What do you check out on a daily/weekly basis, do you do nutty things like SERPS checks using WebPosition Gold? Or maybe other things like flick home to Google after looking at your sites with the Toolbar installed or being logged in. Whilst they say they may never use that data, it was a long time until MediaBot was acknowledged as doing some indexing. To me that always seemed obvious, but what do I know :-).
13. Avoiding others peoples footprints. Keep this one short, if you buy links, how good are they. Are there lots of other links going from the pages to 100% different things? Best maybe not take those links, you could get entwined in a web of shit.

Ok, well that’s it for now, there are lots more things to look out for, but not sure if I want to out them, as I would like to keep something back. You could always offer me money to tell you.

Cheers for now

I was speaking with DaveN earlier about his trip to Live.com and the way things seem to be moving. Moving away from a link based algo and into something all the more personalised.

Link based algo’s have been with us for some time and I even remember the days before them (they were cool btw - read easy- if you are not old enough) but what happens when that does not cut it any more?

Make no bones about it one day the SEO business as it is now will be no more, of course there will be angles, but there will be less opportunity and things will be much harder. Harder in the sense that it will probably take large budgets or a killer idea and the luck/skill of the tipping point. There will be many casualties and many non starters!

Don’t get me wrong things always change but what I can smell in the future is an all together different way of life. I have been seeing a shift to things like Taguchi testing and usability/user retention for a long time, which was why I was keen to get involved over 5 years ago with things like focus groups, and quantitative research. I also worked on a portal project which had great potential and had things like user profiling driven searches built into it etc etc, but the tech was not available, or the resource to get it running to a mass audience. Google and Microsoft have that resource and that tech, so I for one am looking forward to seeing what they develop.

There are still many options open to the SEM specialist, a couple that spring to mind that I am happy to write down include:

• Revert to another industry – don’t knock it, you may need a fall back, this life is about safeguarding and looking for how you can protect yourself, if that’s not how you think, I worry for your existing clients!
• Adapt, look for the new niche.
• Build the “on the side project” that is search engine independent?
• Something else?

So if things changed tomorrow, ie SEO as we know it today would no longer work, what would you do?

Cheers

Rich

OK, I have been uber busy on a few projects of late, some offline as well as online but I had a meeting the other day and said something that I thought was obvious but few people actually do it.

I am of course referring to catching mistypes of the www.

No I like to catch non www and 301 them to the root, which is easy and good safeguard in the potential dupe content, but what about actual users who try and type your url in. Lots of traffic is lost when only 2 or 4 “w’s” are typed in direct.

Solution: Create extra DNS entries for “ww.yourdomain.com” and “wwww.yourdomain.com” and then 301 these to the www version.

I don’t do it on this site as I can’t be arsed, but that does not mean it is not worth it. If you have a brandable url or one where you get significant type ins then you need to think about this.

Cheers

Rich

This has been lacking for some time, but the old timer 4eyes has had a hand in the setting up of a forum specifically aimed at meetings and SEO type events.

Before long this will be the place to suggest meetings, from big, large scale events to the 3 blokes in a local pub who can make it out on a Thursday night to talk SEO.

Take look at :

SEO Circuit 

I was reading Joost’s blog over the weekend and he was talking about Wiep’s post about Google SEO Mythbusting and I could not help but think about what my PhD supervisor used to give people grief about….statistically sound sampling.

Well this isn’t me being provocative, I don’t know Wiep but Joost does and having met him and read his blog that’s enough for me.

On 1, 2, 3 and 4, how long were they left, how many sites were these tried on, one single site does not maketh a fact :-). So each theory does not have enough data to be conclusive, or maybe it does, but those figures were not included.
With respect to the Adsense and indexing, many moons ago, it was the first thing that we did on large scale sites to get Mediabot looking. Then the speculation that it would be silly for MediaBot NOT to index the main index came about. I always thought this was a very good possibility which was why I never cloaked pages with Adsense and I could not be bothered with full IP cloaking. And of course:

AdSense mediapartners bot adding to the Google search index

Anyway, just my thoughs.

Cheers

Rich

I have to say that this is rather damn cool. Maybe it is old, but this is very slick

Google’s new Street View allows you to walk around the map with pictures to help you familiarise yourself with the surroundings. Drag the little yellow man around and click on him to see the picture of where you are. You can then pan around ‘walk’ down the street in the picture.

Google Street

When Mel Carson presented at SEOdays he spoke of this sort of technology being used as part of the new MSN. Seems they missed out.

You have to laugh at this sort of thing.  Some very interesting choice of words on this one, hehe