A UK SEO

Lunchtime find : Every so often you come across a site that hasn’t added nofollow to comment links. The independent comments allow you to add links in (check out the comments) BBC magazine websites are a free for all on the forums.

Checking over a few blog posts on the BBC surprisingly I’ve noticed that links don’t have nofollow on, which has led to anchor text links being placed into comments. Some of the BBC blogs add nofollow to links while others don’t.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/fivelivebr……ivin.html#P91629883

The link goes over to the Phones4U home page.

What’s great about the BBC blogs is you have a profile page which links to all the comments you have made. The comment above has been made by Vince (maybe related to the vince update?).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/profile/?userid=14285586

Vince has been busy recently targeting “iphone”, “mobile phones” and “phone” all to the Phones4U home page. It’s not clear if this is being done by an agency or Phones4u themselves but they are not the only one at it.

A further look finds this account http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/profile/?userid=14129205 in the name of David Cooper, which links over to www.very.co.uk, Phones4u.co.uk and k7computing.com (but that links broke!).

Others include…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/profile/?userid=14125842 – seospecialistbirmingham.co.uk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/profile/?userid=14235298 – seomomo.com
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/profile/?userid=14137534 – bluelightseo.co.uk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/profile/?userid=14130042 – clarebrace.co.uk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/profile/?userid=1773493 – openeyemarketing.co.uk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/profile/?userid=13952511 – david-whitehouse.org

I could go on…. Question is

a) Are these links any good considering they are located in the comments section rather than in the article content?
b) Is this a legitimate way of building links?

My view

a) Yes but they would be better in content.
b) Its a ok way to build links but in the long run not effective.

Anyone else have a view of this type of link building? If so add a comment

You may have seen this post from Dave Naylor about the spam on the Nexus One Google SERP, one of the sites listed is a malware site.

On the SERP for “we are the world 2010″ (song to help people in Haiti) 6 of the 10 results are malware sites. This has come around as the topic is trending.

It might get cleaned up soon, but don’t click any of the listings!

If your a fan of a sports team you may have seen Google displaying the last result and next fixture at the top of the SERP. They haven’t got is correct on all searches with some team names not triggering the feature e.g. “bolton wanderers”.

For my team, Blackpool they are showing the fixtures for Blackpool FC our namesake who play in the Malawi Superleague.

If you try the search sometimes Google is displaying the correct date which indicates it’s mixed across data centres.

Lets hope nobody goes to see Blackpool play the Barracks on the 31st!

When conducting key phrase research little tips, tricks and tools can save time. Being a wizz at Excel helps, being able to create scraping tools is also great but sometimes you just need to copy and paste from sites to generate key phrase lists.

I’ve come across a neat method of using the ImportXML function on Google Docs to extract lists from a web page into spreadsheet (from there you can paste into the Google Keyword Tool to get volumes). Credit goes to this post for the how to us http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/data-scraping-wikipedia-with-google-spreadsheets/.

First you need a page with data on, could be a list of products, table of locations, for example list of dog breads, list of football teams, or a list of settlements in the uk ordered by population.

In Google docs you then use the ImportHtml function specifying the URL, that you want to grab a table and which table e.g. the 1st, 2nd etc.

=ImportHtml(URL, “list” | “table”, index).

For example

=ImportHtml(“http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…..m_settlements_by_population”,”table”,1)

A full explanation can be found on the help files http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75507 which also show other uses and variations.

You hit enter and hey presto you have a nice table with all the figures separated out.

If you look into the “ouseful” blog, linked above, you can then publish from google docs into RSS, then to Yahoo pipes into RSS then use the RSS on your site as content.

You can also import from RSS and product feeds.

BT Phone Book – Why? Flat in East Didsbury 95% of residents aged 20-35 every flat with the internet and they continue to deliver they year after year, and year after year they stack up downstairs at my flat.

With Chrome coming out on the Mac I’ve moved away from FireFox at home and work, it’s just too slow and does have the odd crash. There is still no extension support on the Mac version but these all work with no problems on Windows XP SP3.

Photo Credit – iVinay

Chrome Flags by josorek – https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jhejngphiacapbgllhagbpdkkdieeaej

PageRank by kalehrishi – https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/pneoplpmnpjoioldpodoljacigkahohc

Firebug Lite by andrei.pervychine – https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bnbbfjbeaefgipfjpdabmpadaacmafkj – Or use the one built into chrome Ctrl + Shift + I

IE Tab Classic by josorek – https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/miedgcmlgpmdagojnnbemlkgidepfjfi

No Follow Checker by Dan – http://www.chromeextensions.org/webmaster-seo/nofollow-checker/

Anyone else with any good extensions for chrome?

I’ve seen in the past scraper sites cause problems for sites in Google and this blog is currently been scraped and outranked sometimes by brokencontrollers.com. A quick spam report to google and the offending site soon goes away. But it seems that the page to report spam to google has been removed recently and you can only report spam while signed into a Google account…

The page used to be located at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html known as the “unauthenticated” you could report spam anonymously, so no ties to your Google account which links to your site.

That page now 301 re-directs to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en which does load up the form but only when logged in to a Google Account with Webmaster Tools.

The landing URL from the natural ranking for “report spam” takes you just the dashboard of webmaster tools which is pretty useless, guessing they haven’t added the correct re-direct.

This seems a strange move by Google as this may decrease the number of spam reports.

1. Not everyone has a Google account.
2. Even if you have a Google account your might not have Webmaster Tools.
3. You might not want to report on an webmaster tools account that contains your site if you use any black hat methods. E.G. reporting your competitor may draw attention to your site.

Google’s best method of detecting spam and paid links are reports from webmasters, SEO’s and users. This move to to remove the unauthenticated / anonymously report method may have made their jobs a little harder?

Back in the office for the new year and I noticed a new name advertising on the term “SEO” – BT.

There’s been a few posts recently about how you get what you pay for with SEO services, so it doesn’t look great for BT’s new SEO service know as SearchSmart which starts at a chirpy £74.99 a month. There’s a £100 set up fee and also a minimum 3 month contract.

For £74.99 I’m guessing that the key phrases selected are long tail and local.

It sounds pretty much an automated service (bar the audit doc) with tight control on any phone conversations with a consultant. If you need extra consultancy time it’s £100 an hour, a little expensive for the UK.

It’s hard to judge the service, so far they have only got one testimonial Brand X PR who haven’t implemented the work and guessing haven’t had any link building as they have no links according to YSE. But a quick check on the BT site and they don’t rank for their own content.

So they have a duplicate domain “http://www.latitudeorganic.com” which is strangely owned by “Scott Sargeant” who works for the Latitude Group.

In conclusion is BT SearchSmart Any Good? Well it’s seems it’s just SEO by Latitude.. If your going to resell at least do a good job of separating ties from the company who are going to do

EDIT – Article from SEOCO about this too http://www.seoco.co.uk/blog/bt-now-offering-seo-ppc-services/

Another strange result from Google with the Wikipedia result for Sherlock Holmes (currently on at the cinema).

The listing has a address which expands to a map centering on Matt Barker Road in Kentucky USA. That should be centred on 221B Baker Street, London, UK.

Google grabs thats data from the Wikipedia page.

As long as Google continues to use user generated content they’ll continue to produce poor results.

and that concludes a test of Wordpress 2.9. As it didn’t work first time round…