SEO BLOG

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

Laz and I

I first met Laz on Search Engine Forums (Jim World) in 2001. Our obsession with Google and love of supercars quickly led to an enduring friendship. Many a night we’d be talking into the early hours, he talked about everything from his parents to the depth of the snow outside his window. Despite all the secrecy that surrounded SEO in those days we were soon showing each other sites we had made.

It was in the days when the discussion was branding verses keyword domain names and I had built two sites to cover both these bases and had them both in the top 10 at G. In one late night conversation with Laz I showed him one of my sites (number four at the time) and within five minutes he asked if I also owned the one at number six – LOL. There was me thinking I had covered my tracks oh so well, but he spotted my prints all over the other site too…

I soon became used to his incisive intelligence and endured many a good-natured put-down as he soared away with his knowledge – leaving me a poor second in the race.

He helped me many times over the following months as we traded SEO tips – but mostly he already knew what I had just “discovered”.

In 2002 he suggested we meet up at Pub Con in London – I had him in my mind’s eye as probably being in his late twenties and being a bit of a sharp dresser. Dunno what he thought of me, but when the 51 year old man met the 15 year old boy in jeans and tee shirt – it was a real laugh. Little did I know that someone took a photograph of that very first meeting.

The last time I saw him and spent some real time with, was at the SEO Roadshow in London back in 2004, I was sat at a large table with a bunch of WMW bods and someone started to massage my shoulders from behind – then an all too familiar voice said, “Yo Pete, you old rocker”. We chewed the fat for a while and then he was whisked away in a taxi to have dinner with a bunch of visiting yanks.

I saw him a few times after that at SES, PubCon etc – but he was always in a rush to get to another meeting. I was kept up to date for a while through mutual friends, but he was on a different journey then and I never saw him again

And now he’s gone – and the world is sadder place.

Welcome to the new Search Engine Serious blog. This is my fourth SES blog (I tire easily theses days)  and it was only hearing about the death of an old friend that caused me to start blogging again. When Martin died I felt unusually sad for quite some time. Although we had lost touch over the last few years, I was surprised how bad I felt, but apart from talking to some mutual friends I had no way of getting this feeling out of my system – so I decided to start a new blog to share the story.

Peter Maycock