Twitter and nofollow is the topic of this week’s Twitter column: While even Google who has introduced, along with other search engines, the nofollow attribute to combat spam a few years ago does not propagate the use of it anymore, Twitter went nofollow big time just recently. What does this mean?

Twitter distrusts everything you say.

Not only outgoing links get the so called link condom so that search engines ignore them. No, now also internal links from your tweets on Twitter get wasted. This means that even when you address us with @seoptimise we don’t get the Google juice due. Continue Reading »

We’ve covered the importance of Google Buzz and we offered a list of Google Buzz tools and resources. The list also contained some ideas about the SEO impact of Google Buzz.

This time I’d like to focus on that: Google Buzz SEO or more accurately on the actual ways to use Google Buzz for SEO & SMO.

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Wicked by xlorddashx.

Black hat SEO is both a myth and a reality we have to face sooner or later as SEO practicioners. While I abide by probably one of the strictest SEO codes of ethics around and SEOptimise is a clean white hat SEO company company itself we still can’t deny that there is black hat SEO.

The sheer existence of black hat SEO techniques must be acknowledged for several reasons.

As Rishi Lakhani noted on his new SEO blog: You need it at least to know what to avoid or to know how competitors who perform worse than you still manage to outrank your site.
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Something we’ve come across recently is a search query to check for URL’s which are listed in Google’s main index. This appears to remove any webpage’s which may be listed in Google’s supplemental/secondary index.

The query to find this is: site:domain.com/*

At the moment I’m unsure how accurate this is, the only reference I can find is a comment from Halfdeck on Jim Boykin’s How to Find if a Page is in Google’s Secret Supplemental Results from two and a half years ago. And since then, despite pleas to bring it back – Google have removed the queries which have helped us to find supplemental pages.

But looking at the results, I think there is some truth to the results – even if these are not entirely accurate.

Example supplemental query – BBC.co.uk
For example, BBC.co.uk has 47.9 million indexed pages – but the supplemental query lists only 1.43 million results:

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Google changes faster than you can blink right now. Just some buzzwords that will bug you in 2010:

1. Google Caffeine
2. Google Real Time search
3. Google Personalized search results
4. Google Living Stories
5. Google Phone

I could go on like for a while. It’s not my intention to confuse you even more though. I want to shed some light on the near future of Google, search and SEO. It’s a daunting task as I’m overwhelmed as well.

Thus I picked 30 resources on Google, search & SEO changes in 2010 from around the search industry and some main stream sources. Continue Reading »

Some people, even at Google, still think that Google hates SEO. In some cases it really does. At the same time Google loves SEO as actions speak louder than words. Google provides not a few, not several but by now 10 free Google SEO tools everybody should use. I remember the times when we had none of them. Today we have an abundance of data Google allows us to mine.
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I very rarely write about individual website’s which are making mistakes online, but looking at the ASK restaurants website yesterday I was very surprised to see how a well-known UK brand has paid little or no attention to their search strategy.

Being a popular restaurant chain there are many opportunities to attract potential customers on the web and at the moment ASK do not appear to be taking advantage of these. Continue Reading »

Around 5 years ago I read the book Who Moved my Cheese. It’s a very simple, short story about the different methods of dealing with change. I’ve recently re-read this, (it only takes about an hour so I’d definitely recommend reading if you haven’t already) – but I realised that there’s a lot which can be applied to day-to-day life in search marketing.

Image Credit: Flickr

They say an internet year is the equalivent to 7 normal years, I’m sure a search engine marketing year may be more! So basically if you don’t like change – you’re probably in the wrong job! Continue Reading »

These days it’s hard to keep up with new gimmicks presented by Google. You could spend hours or days just coming to terms with them. Most of these new services and features are in some way connected to social media. Google’s social media strategy seems to be trial and error. Continue Reading »

I’m sure many of you have noticed Hasbro’s new, very popular, website Monopoly City Streets. Due to the fact that the online game is based on Google Maps and you have a worldwide choice of streets available to buy, this received a huge amount of attention very quickly. In fact, the demand for using the site was so popular that the site became unusable following its launch, since then they have fixed the server issues and relaunched.

Image credit: mtsofan (Flickr)

Anyway, what I found most interesting is the fact that a few brands seem to be using this for advertising themselves. Continue Reading »