I’m at the Online Marketing show at the business design centre in London Islington, doing.SEO Consultations.

I just so happened to attend a Universal search aka Blended search presentation by Neil McCarthy CMSO of Latitude Group.

Neil’s presentation was entertaining, Neil had a good take on what it is that is required to do well in search in 2008, that is, a knowledge and awareness of what it is that is making SERP front pages in 2008 - rich media, social media, news content etc.The message to the unconverted being that search engines today are trying very hard to give users diversity and choice within the search results. Knowledge and awareness of this is an obvious asset in any online marketing strategy.

Manufacturing consent. Nuff said.

Old School SEO Sucks and in isolation is a waste of money

I won’t be telling anyone anything new when I say that today in 2008 the web is a very different place from the web we knew in 1998. Back then Google was pretty fledgling, and spent a lot of time and energy building relationships with webmasters in the various webmaster hangouts. Back then, with a little programming nous and a lot of SEO knowledge you could easily make inroads to as many verticals as you had the time to manage or play in. It really was possible to wake up and say, “right, today I’m going to target x” and in as little as week you could be ranking for x related keywords and earning coin.

Hey Microsoft? What gives with all these dodgy false referrals? Do you think it’s a good thing to send zillions of false queries to website owners? Why are you doing this? Don’t you think it’s a little rude.

Back in December here Nathan Buggia said on the very issue of these cloaked referrals

Hopefully webmasters have also noticed these issues disappearing. If you are still experiencing any issues, please contact us before you block MSNBot, to see if we can address the issue.

Interesting, it seems like a ranking penalty has been applied to yackyack.co.uk, that or some funky Korean hijack has had the effect of kicking this domain out of the rankings

Go try a search for any of my unique title strings and see what comes up! I tried, .co.uk, .com, .ie, .in, .jp google domains and all returned the same.

Here is unique page from this site.

Here is the Google result for a search for the unique string, notice that yackyack.co.uk doesn’t appear anywhere on the first pages.

I’m kinda wondering what Bebo stands for. Bonk early Bonk Often perhaps?

But hey, at least it’s natural and organic!

I don’t get too much time on my hands these days as I’m too busy working. The cool things is I work with a group of people who are passionate and knowledgeable about Search and strive to deliver the best possible solutions for the clients they work with. They are a friendly happy bunch an…I’ve got a lot of time for everyone who works there.

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