SEO, Website Content Optimization
& Software Development

A piece of internet history will be consigned to the Recycle Bin in the sky today as Yahoo delete the GeoCities web hosting network. Although long-since defunct, GeoCities was outrageously popular in the late 90s and was synonymous with amateur websites, playing a significant part in the democratisation of the internet.

Established in 1995, GeoCities allowed users to set up free websites within its online communities or “neighborhoods”. (more…)

There is a lot of talk at the moment about a new music service Google will be launching soon, but little is actually known at this stage about the finer details of what they have been developing.

The original belief that Google would be serving and retailing music themselves has been forgotten, and the general idea now is that they will be providing an enhanced music search incorporating streamed recordings into the search results.

Google have reportedly teamed up with Lala and iLike who will be providing the streaming, and will also be retailing the songs. (more…)

Google PageRank (or at least the visible Toolbar representation we see in our browsers) has long been on borrowed time. Although Toolbar PageRank (PR) is still with us, a report by Search Engine Roundtable late last week confirmed that PageRank values have indeed been removed from Webmaster Tools.

Google has been threatening to take away the already crippled link-based importance indicator (Toolbar PR scores are purposefully outdated and often unavailable) since at least 2007, arguing that they are a distraction for webmasters and fuel the link buying industry.

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” explained Google’s Susan Moskwa, adding “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.” (more…)

If you haven’t already noticed for yourself, Google UK’s results have been pretty poor of late. Since June 2009, around the time of Vince update, the UK results have featured significant numbers of non-UK websites.

In amongst the regular co.uk and UK .com sites, those from other English-language websites like Australia, South Africa, Canada and (most frequently) the United States have been appearing. Even the odd Italian one has crept in.

Although websites from outside the UK can be relevant to local users, more often than not these sites are worse than useless. Not only are they usually completely irrelevant to UK users, their presence prevents the sites that are relevant from being found. (more…)

The BBC today reported positive news as Chinese official export figures for the previous month (Sep 2009) are said to indicate that the economies in the rest of the world are recovering. This appears to be good news for global economies, but there is also another trend which in the longer term could well have benefits for those in the West who get in a position to take advantage.

One of our senior managers from our China office is in the UK at the moment. One of her immediate observations to us, on this first visit in three years, is that things now seem comparatively “cheap” in comparison to how she remembers last time. The comment was made after a shopping trip to Asda. It’s likely indicative of how prices in China have increased as well as current exchange rates working in her favour.

As a company with a long established Chinese office branch, we have experienced wage inflation, certainly amongst the white collar educated staff which our business tends to employ. Recent valuations of the pound has also made purchasing in China seem more expensive for UK companies, as the Renminbi (pegged to the U.S. dollar) has risen in value. It is nevertheless a surprise to hear such a comment, especially as we have considered China a cheap place to do business for so long. (more…)

China is the single largest new Internet market we’re likely to see emerge in our lifetime, so why are so many companies so slow to gain an early advantage?  The answer seems to be the perennial, “…we’re aware that there are questions we should be asking, but we don’t know what they are….”  So, let’s start on just a few of the basics….

“Will the Chinese user feel comfortable using my site?”

Not only do you need to make a great job of translation, but are you adapting your Chinese website to fit the culture too?

Ensure that a Chinese person finding your site shouldn’t have to think about credibility, usability, language, and most important of all, trust – it needs to speak their language in every way. (more…)

This week has seen thousands of peoples email addresses and passwords being posted online as three of the biggest free email services Microsoft’s Hotmail, Yahoo’s Mail and Google’s Gmail were the victims of severe and crippling Phishing attacks.

What is Phishing?

Phishing (pronounced fishing) is quite simply the criminal process of stealing someone’s personal information online. This information tends to be credit card details, usernames and passwords.

So just how did three of the biggest names in technology fall foul of Cyber criminals? (more…)

On a post on the BBC Business section (7th Oct) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8291319.stm, a small business dealing in road and white line painting services asks the question as to which are the best advertising investments for their niche business.

The BBC’s expert, Ganesh Selvarajah, is an advisor at Business Link. He suggests that primarily after research on possible clients, the company should create a brochure, call up companies and mail the brochure out to them.

Developing the website is also a secondary suggestion - insofar as making sure their unique selling point is clear on the home page.

When reading this, it reminds us that, as an company steeped in the methods of internet marketing,  how many offline avenues to lead generation are still valid in today’s climate - networking, word of mouth,  as well as mailings suggested here. (more…)

Google have made us aware for many years that their ranking procedures are algorithm based. This gives some of us a feeling of some security no doubt - that the natural results we see are the result of a process which analyses all websites in a similar manner and comes up with the resulting rankings as a result of each website being subject to the same process.

We noticed with interest a post on Google’s help forum yesterday (7th Oct) asking “Why did Google fail me on such a straightforward search?”. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web%20Search/thread?tid=33778b5d5232c234&hl=en. The poster was asking why, when searching for text relating to President Obama’s statement on Information Literacy Awareness Month, this didn’t show up anywhere in the first 20 results.

A Google employee was straight on the case and within a day has posted that they made a “slight change” and now such a search appears at the top of the first page on Google. (more…)

Getting ranked on Google is great for business, right? Well, despite the obvious commercial benefits of the number 1 spot on Google, one website is having a good attempt at throwing it away - by blocking Googlebot.

A large UK chemical supplier, SciChem Ltd, currently holds top spot for the keyword phrase “chemical supplies” - no doubt pretty lucrative if that’s your line of business.  However, a search for the phrase currently brings up a rather unusual snippet:

The IP address that has been “logged and is now banned for improper use of this site” is none other than Googlebot.

Googlebot’s IP block was probably triggered automatically during the course of its regular crawl and (judging by the website’s continued high rankings) is likely to have happened fairly recently.

The danger is that unless the ban isn’t lifted in the near future, the website’s ranking could suffer badly. As far as Google is concerned, the website content is limited to the message it receives; they’ll probably let a failed crawl or two go - most sites are down through maintenance or problems at least once in a while - but any longer and Google starts to think the problem is permanent and won’t want to rank or send visitors to the site any more.