I just wanted to get this out there and vent a little it’s a little rant fired up by what I keep seeing every single week on forums, blogs etc. It isn’t going to go away, I know that - but I’ll feel better for getting it off my chest.

To any SEO who thinks its cool to file a spam report then, unless it’s around something heinous or illegal then here is the news. You suck. No you really do. If you think that by reporting a site that ranks above your own, or venting somewhere in a forum is cool, then again, just in case you missed it the 1st time around here is the news. You suck.

Cool - This domain now has site links (not to be confused with subscribed links). A  search for the phrase ‘yack yack’ returned this

Who searches for yack yack? Answer - no one, but hey - for those who are interested there are lessons to be learnt.

I’d like to know how they arrived at those titles and why too,they snipped the word SEO from the first link there, from my post entitled “SEO a waste of money?”

Ok, off for alka seltzer

Google Subscriber links

There’s a little bit of buzz about today over Googles subscribed links feature. I thought it might be handy to share my robwatts view on it. The view being one that is informed from 3 perspectives. A google user a site owner and an SEO.

I’ll stick to three classifications, good, not so good and tell it like I see it reality good.

The Good

User

I was doing a little search this evening and found this amongst the results on the 1st page.

I thought it might be something related to me being signed in to a Google account so I signed out and tried again. Same result. So I opened up IE7 and same result.

I tried the same query on Google.com but it didn’t replicate.

Who is this mystery user=016597473608235241540 I wondered, no one it seems there’s a few more of them too. A little site:google.com/coop/preview query reveals just 152 results which in the grand scheme of things is just tiny . The question is however why? Why spider customer results and include them in a SERP however small the sample.

I attended SES London on Thursday, my first since way back in 2002 or was that 2003, Christ I can’t remember!

Customers Prospects and Drug users

The first session I went to way a presentation by Brian Eisenberg of Future now entitled Redefining the Customer loosely speaking, Brian hit on important aspects to consider when designing a site, usability issues, seeing site visitors as citizens rather than ‘users’ and how the small changes can really have huge impacts. One funny thing during this speech was the woman sat next to me who started to snore whilst waking intermittently agreeing and nodding with what he was saying! Bizarre person. Anyhow on the whole a good session if a little too ‘markety’ for my liking.

It’s good to rant

I’ve probably written other stuff like this in the past, but hey, I might say it a little differently this time, so i’ll say it again and see how it comes out this time. You can’t beat a good rant!

Writing paid posts

Do you blog? Do you sell paid posts or sponsored reviews? If the answer is yes and you want to get top line dollars for your blog posts then here is a little message for you.

STOP WRITING ABOUT EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. PLEASE LINK OUT TO OTHER STUFF WHEN YOU WRITE!

I looked at a few blogs last week that offered paid reviews. There was a disturbingly typical pattern that occured over and over and over.

Here’s an interesting little thing.

This button (fig. 1b) will move the result to the top of the page and add this orange marker (fig. 1a) next to it so you can easily recognize it. The result(s) you promote will appear at the top whenever you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.

Maybe it’s old, I haven’t seen it previously. Looks like one of those personalization of SERP features  that allows you to manipulate your own returned search results.

Don’t trust Google to tell you the source

There’s a certain irony in the whole trustrank and authority shaboogle.Googles algo it seems, puts so much trust in certain domains that it actually hoodwinks its surfers into believing that other domains are more relevant than the original source documents themselves.

Michael Gray at Graywolf draws attention to a factor that anyone who works in SEO these days is either painfully aware of or ecstatically pleased about. If you have ‘authority and trust’ in sufficient numbers then given a little effort, you can rank for just about anything.

SEO Porn - The content of this post are not in the least bit erotic, in fact  I kid you not when I aver that its contents are probably  about as elevating as a piece of dry toast in a butterless world devoid of strawberry jam!

Still, made you look made you stare made you change your underwear perhaps…? Well, no perhaps not. Anyhow the brief point of it all is do sebastian a lemon and throw a little link his way for his SEO Porn experiment.