A few of us UK SEOers are organising a meet in Manchester on September 14/15th.
Since there has been a serious lack of meets across the board this year, we would like to make this known to as many people as possible
Britannia Hotel Manchester city centre - plenty of rooms at the moment - Friday £69 for b&b single, Sat £89 for b&b single - Friday £70 for b&b double, Sat £105 for b&b double.
Like the original PubCon all attendees are responsible for paying there own way with drinks, meals etc, no sponsors, no presentations etc, etc - you know the score 
Who should attend?
Anyone wishing to share quality time with like-minded geeks to discuss search engine optimisation and marketing generally, Google Universal and all that entails, social networking, FaceBook, Stumbleupon, etc, etc…
Anyone who likes a drink in the company of those whose eyes don’t glaze over after two minutes
Anyone who wants a weekend away in one of the UK’s most vibrant cities
If you are interested please post so we can get a rough idea of numbers.
Go to SEO Circuit for the latest news and to sign up.
First reported in March of this year, and now once again in the public eye, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales states his intention to compete with Google.
Using a mix of human input and computer programming Wales is confident he can take on the world’s largest and most successful search engine.
Speaking at a software developer conference in Oregon, Wales said, “If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers.”
The new search engine is due to go live later this year.
Read more here
As a result of pressure from privacy campaigners and government regulators, search giant Google has changed its policy of setting cookies in people’s computers for 30 years and has introduced a policy whereby a cookie is deleted two years after the last time a surfer visits a Google page.
More here
My blog post last Friday seems to have opened up a whole can of worms - problems with NetBenefit hosting had led to duplicate content problems for many websites!
To bring new readers up to speed, a client of mine in the Security Identification industry asked us to promote them in the search engines for the keyword wristbands. During a casual check last Friday I typed the word into Google and saw that they were in the top 10 for the word. At first I was over the moon, (there are over three million competing pages in Google), until I noticed that the url being displayed was web4097.vs.netbenefit.co.uk/wristbands.html not myclient.com/wristbands.html.
To evaluate the effect this would have at Google, first I copied a random sentence from the page into Google as an exact phrase and to my dismay G returned one result, the NetBenefit virtual server address - it was not my client’s url.
Realising this was going to be a major problem - a virtual hosting set-up or DNS issue, I contacted a good friend who has great technical knowledge and experience in this field, Dave Naylor. I asked if this was going to be a big problem and his reply was “f*ck hell yes” It was as I expected and indeed said in my blog - a duplicate content issue - and not just for my client’s specific keyphrase, thousands of other NetBenefit sites had the same hosting problem.
Not being one to sit around on my arse when the you-know-what hits the fan, we arranged new hosting away from the NetBenefit servers and pointed the name at the new servers - at least the problem would not spread to other pages of my client’s site.
After much tooing and froing late that afternoon we had sorted the site’s new home and were just waiting for the new details to propagate across the web - I was tired and ready to wind down for the evening when the phone rang and a gentleman asked to speak to Peter, “That’s me” I replied and the fellow went on to explain that he was with NetBenefit and was anxious to contact David. Now Dave moved house recently and I didn’t know his new number, so I gave this chap the company number for Dave, just in case anyone was working late (they’re a dedicated bunch over there at Dave’s company) - I didn’t hear any more
I suspect this story will not go away anytime soon - and my client is not a happy bunny, seeing his prized top ten position attributed to a different url as a result of NetBenefit hosting problems.�
Scary times for an SES client when he discovered that he was top ten for a single keyword at Google against three and a half million competing pages - only to discover it was a copy of his site!
Fearing hi-jacking and all sorts of skullduggery he called the hosting company who admitted to some “problems with the server”. However the person on the phone had to liase with the tech guys and the client, so all questions are taking a while to be answered.
Downside of course is that Google now thinks there are two identical sites - dupe content anyone?
This is a learning situation for us all - get good hosting with good support or all your efforts could go belly-up if the server has problems and it can’t easily be fixed.
Well, Aaron said he was going to shut it down today, but has been curiously quiet all week - in fact he hasn’t posted since the announcement. Many are speculating that the web’s best SEO discussion group is finished.
Lots of people commenting in the thread, lots of appeals to reconsider, to sell, to put JasonD at the helm etc - but no word from Aaron.
Some say it’s just a link-bait kind of exercise - others say its the end of an era - guess all will be revealed later…
One of the few remaining SEO / SEM discussion sites is to close on Friday.
Owner Aaron Wall, he of SEO Book fame, has announced that he is closing the site, citing spamming as one of the reasons for this - from Aaron’s announcement, “What was awful though was when I invited a few friends to become editors here and they spammed the sh*t out of Threadwatch.”
I have followed Threadwatch from day one, in fact I think I was the first person, after NickW (the founder) to join - and I have to say that it had run its course. In truth, I feel it only had a limited lifespan anyway, Nick threw all his heart, soul and time into the project, but didn’t think the business model through, in fact I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.
Having said that, I thank Nick and Aaron for their efforts over the last few years, I would call in every time I went on the web - now, the question is, where will the gang gather next? Or is it the end of an era? As Aaron said, we’ve all got our own blogs to express our views now, and there are only so many hours in the day…
Dont want to spend a lot of time on this but.. heard about Mahalo? A new search engine thingy powered by people.
One would think, being involved with the search engine industry, that Jason Calacanis, the man behind Mahalo, would have learned a little from Google, you know the company, billionaire creating, top-performing web company that changed the face of information retrieval so completely its name has become a byword for search?
Google’s recipe - Automate it and make it scaleable
Mahalo’s recipe - Do it all by hand
Apparently Mahalo is Hawaiian for thank you - Mahalo is also myspeak for a right load of old tosh.
’nuff said.
The BBC News website has just run a piece on Google and its policy on privacy.
Apparently the Article 19 group, a data protection group that advises the European Union, has written to Google expressing concern “that it may be breaking European privacy laws by keeping people’s search information on its servers for up to two years.”
Google’s global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, said that Google “was committed to dialogue with the group.” Google will answer the EU’s concerns before the panel’s next meeting at the end of June.
The article goes on to explain the group’s worries and details the current European trends in the field of privacy and data retention - and with Google collecting a massive amount of information about searchers and their online habits it will be interesting to see where all this ends up. Essentially Google’s “mission” is diametrically opposed to most people’s concept of privacy.
Irresistible force meets an immovable object?
Read the BBC News article here
We advise a Scottish holiday website (dot com domain) on search engine optimisation and during the preparation of a monthly report for the client we found a big hole in Google’s results. For the bulk of the relevant search terms they were very highly placed with many number ones when one searched “the web” - but on a “pages from the UK” search, they were not anywhere for anything. Yet the site is quite clearly in the UK, so is Google going too far with its (clumsy) geo-targeting?
