SEO BLOG

Suspicious happenings at my domain name supplier – I registered four domain names on December 20th – two of which were very important, the two others were bought “just in case”. I received confirmation and an invoice, but when I went to upload a new site a few days later I found that the the two important ones were not in my control panel. A quick whois found them registered to another person the day after I registered them. I rang the company and they offered to refund my money… Funnily enough the two other names were correctly registered.

The real coincidence? The person who has my two names lives in Japan but had registered them through the same UK based company.

Watch this space.

Ha ha ha ha ha

Do it Rupert – go on, you know you want to…

Rupert Murdoch plans to charge for all news websites by next summer, according to an article in today’s Guardian.

To say I’m dissappointed is a bit of an understatement – but nevertheless it goes to show how a certain mentality never quite grasped the Internet.

I, for one, won’t be giving any dosh to Murdock – and I hope lots of others will do the same. Basically what we are seeing is an old dinosaur finally admitting defeat through lack of creative thinking.

Loser.

Just read in the San Francisco Chronicle that, after many false starts, Microsoft and Yahoo have finally struck a deal to pool their expertise on search.

Taking on Google was never going to be easy, but the combined power of the second and third largest forces on the search market might actually stand a chance.

I hope it works – the market needs a shake up.

This from the SFC website:

“Under the terms of the 10-year deal, which will require regulatory approval, Microsoft’s Bing search tool will become the exclusive platform on Yahoo’s sites, funneling an enormous volume of queries through the Redmond, Wash., software titan’s increasingly popular algorithm. Yahoo of Sunnyvale will sell the lucrative advertising tied to online search for both companies.

Microsoft will pay Yahoo for the traffic it generates, at a rate of 88 percent of search revenue for the first five years. Within two years of securing approval, Yahoo estimates the agreement will add $500 million to its operating income and save $200 million in capital expenditures.”

Click here to read more

In an article on the Guardian website, Mark Sweney tells how a case brought against Google by Metropolitan International Schools for defamation has been ruled in favour of Google.

In a judgment in the high court on Friday, Mr Justice Eady ruled that Google was  not the publisher of the content, merely a “facilitator”.

Good news for Google – if the case had gone the other way they would be up to their eyes in law suits.

Article here

When news that singer Michael Jackson had died hit the web, Google thought they were under attack with the number of related queries.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8120324.stm

Bigmouthmedia – traditionally the holders of the number one spot at Google for search engine optimisation,  seem to be on the missing list this morning – with TBPR0.

For years now Bigmouthmedia have held the competition at bay and have made their reputation as king of the heap in the field of search engine optimisation – and apart from a little spat with Google when their client BMW disappeared from Google one weekend a couple of years ago, have been pretty rock solid. 

I really don’t know what’s happening today, but it does make a refreshing change to see some sort of change at the top of the serps.

They say Bigmouth are worth many millions of pounds, and yet I am beating them this morning LOL! Offers for Search Engine Serious are now being taken…

From “The State of Retailing Online 2009″ the 12th annual Shop.org study conducted by Forrester Research Inc.

In a major survey by Forrester Research into online spending plans for 2009 we see a very positive response from small businesses on the web.

“…half of retailers surveyed (46%) have no plans to cut back original budgets and will spend as planned on their web business, while one in four retailers (24%) will spend more on their online business than originally planned. Companies planning to spend more will increase investments in several areas, including search (80% of respondents), email (65%), and social marketing (60%).”

So, once again, search leads the online marketing plans for businesses trading on the web – and far from cutting back as a result of the world-wide economic crisis and the resulting recession, many businesses are planning to increase marketing budgets – good news for the search engine optimisation companies.

Read about it here

UK based Wolfram Research are attempting the holy grail of search – the ability of an Internet search engine to understand questions in natural language and deliver relevant answers.

Most associated with Ask, this technology has long been the dream of the information retrieval scientist. Whether or not it can be done remains to be seen. I find it hard to believe that, even with just the English language to go on, it would be a huge undertaking, bearing in mind the varying speech patterns of English-speaking countries and the complexity of our language.

I would have thought that Google, with it’s many millions of dollars and it’s vast army of scientists, would had looked at this utopian ideal – and if it was a viable proposition, would have put a team or two on it.

Still, I wish them good luck – it will interesting to see how they get on.

The Telegraph website is currently a running a story about the British nuclear base at Faslane being clearly visible on Google Earth. Apparently a software update has caused the previously blurred image of this high-security facility in Scotland to once again become clearly visible.

The authorities are worried this would make it easier for terrorist to mount an attack.

Read the story here