A UK SEO

Slipping into TV and Print advertising in the last 6 months are requests to search online for … Asking the user to search online then means agencies can achieve almost direct conversions from TV ads. The first occurrence of such request was from mobile phone company Orange who asked people to search for “I am” so nothing too difficult for the SEO team to implement!

With no natural listings in sight they had to go with PPC paying for the traffic that followed instructions to search online for I am. The idea was good but the implementation was slated in the SEO community.

Similar to Orange computer animated film Monsters V Aliens asked people to search for MVA, with www.mvaconsultancy.com firmly holding down the number one organic spot PPC was used again to grab the traffic. I made a post with more details about MVA, the PPC campaign wasn’t well implemented and will have costed a small fortune. .

It seemed that most agencies were not getting the grasp of asking people to search online but then along come Tales of the Road from direct.gov, Think! and the Department of Transport.

The advert teaching kids about road safety asked the viewer to search online for “tales of the road”. Not to hard to remember and relatively easy to optimise for. The search result for “tales of the road” is is owned by the website with a PPC ad, number one ranking, site links, number two ranking and a video ranking.

Here a subdomain of direct.gov matches the search term. Using a sub domain then allows for site links (site links can appear for a inner page of a site but easier to gain on a sub domain) and a second listing for a inner page. Placing the video on YouTube a trusted domain then allows for the video to rank easily on the first page page.

One small point is that you can place a nofollowed html link in the description to a video on YouTube.

For any agencies implementing a “search for” campaigns then the Tales of the Road is an excellent blue print to use.

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It appears that Wolfman Alpha search results are appearing Google results. This search for “search for i am” returns a number 9 position for a Wolfman Alpha search result.

But the robots.txt is currently blocking search engines form the results page such as http://www46.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Where+am+I%3F
www46.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=pirates+vs+ninjas
www46.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+meaning+of+life%3F

User-agent: *
Disallow: /input/

So either Google is ignoring the robots rule or Wolfman Alpha have only just blocked their results as their are 71 results for a site command on http://www46.wolframalpha.com/input/.

Still not found a really good use for Wolfman Alpha… still better than tonight’s Britain’s Got Talent

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I’ve noticed this afternoon that Google is now pulling requirements information in the top of the search engnine results page similar to pulling the next fixtures for football teams or the population of france. For example a search for wordpress requirements shows this.

It says “No Special Requirements” as it pulls the information from http://www.brothersoft.com/wordpress-175754.html. but as people will know Wordpress requires;

* PHP 4.3 or greater
* MySQL 4.0 or greater
* The mod_rewrite Apache module for SEO friendly URL’s

Come on Google get it sorted, the brothersoft website can hardly bee seen as trusted site with loads of adverts it says that WordPress that is shareware costing $19.95.

I’m guessing this is happening on plenty of searches so far i’ve seen it on:

phpbb requirements

Add any other examples in the comments below!

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It looks like Google Webmaster Tools is having a few issues at the moment with listing a 404 error on /index.html from external links pointing at that URL, but when you look at the external links they all point to the root of your site e.g. http://www.domain.com. I’ve seen such an instance this morning on a client’s site.

This has been noticed by Fizzarotti who posted on YouMoz.

The fix implemented by Fizzarotti decided to 301 /index.html back to the root. This can be done by rule in the htaccess file if your an an apache server.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.domain.com/ [R=301,L]

This screenshot from Google Webmaster Tools shows the 404 error for /index.php with 100 links pointing to the page. (click to see larger image).

A second screenshot lists the pages where that link to /index.html. Check over them all point to the root of the site and not /index.html (click to see larger image).

In this example the rankings of the site haven’t been poor in recent weeks, Fizzarotti’s case on SEOmoz the site had dropped several rankings. I’m guessing there is another problem with Fizzarotti’s website and this ‘issue’ in Google Webmaster Tools is a reporting problem.

If you’ve seen the same problem add a comment below.

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Search Engine Rankings move, they move a lot and there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it but keep on the track of building content and links which should reduce the movement.

How much can they move? Well in the matter of 12 hours my Blackpool FC blog move from 3 to 9 on the first page for the key phrase “blackpool fc“.

So happy happy, joy joy with a number three ranking, the official club site takes up number 1 and 2 spot so no room for improvement. That was about 11 last night.

This morning at 11, whammy all the way down to 9 on the bottom of the first page. I’m signed out of my Google account which can skew the results.

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There seems to be a little page rank update going on this weekend. As we know Page Rank doesn’t directly relate to how much traffic a site receives, sales or success but many people are hung up on what the little Green Bar says.

The last update was on News Year Eve, if you’ve gone down in Page Rank this time you’ve either lost links, links have changed to nofollow, or the sites that link to you have lost links thus not passing on the page rank they once did.

Another reason for a drop in score is Google shifting the boundaries, Google will shift the page rank boundaries up to make sure we all don’t end up with page ranks of 10.

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Following the release of Google Street View in the UK I’ve been roaming around Manchester the City I live in. At the moment street view hasn’t been released in South Manchester where I live but the city center down to Fallowfield is mapped and here my top drinking venues in the mapped area.

1. Jabez Clegg

2. Sinclairs

3. Trof Fallowfield

4. tv21s

5. The Old Monkey

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YouTube have recently had to remove many music videos due to a issue regarding payments with Performing Rights Society. The result is that some videos have now been removed for UK viewers.

For example this video from Adele – Chasing Payment is now removed.

Interestingly this page is still hanging on in a Google Search for a search for “adele – chasing payments”

That page returns a 303 response, which is is similar to a 302 (more details here) in that the page as moved elsewhere but the difference its not permanent or a temporary change, it just does say.

This means the page will remain in the search engine rankings which is happening, the page was cached on the 16th.

This is a great move by YouTube as they are holding onto the positions in the search engine rankings and keeping levels of traffic until a deal with the Performing Rights Society is sorted out. Once the deal is sorted out the page will return a normal 200 ok like other YouTube video pages.

I’m not sure if the 303 response is the correct status to give to the search engine? Anyone know?

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I think the Google street view car may be following me, after the spotting the other day I passed the van today on the A34 coming into Manchester from Cheshire.

I can’t wait now for the pictures to be released, looking forward to looking all the old houses I’ve lived in. Football grounds, city centers and most importantly the prom at Blackpool where I’m from. I wonder if the Google car when through at night when the the illumination were on?

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I had the pleasure of seeing the Google Street View car today driving up to Manchester today through Poynton today. I was out getting lunch as the Opel car drove past I’m guessing taking pictures as it went along.

If you’ve not seen Street View from Google before then check some of the views out. The basic concept is that the Google car drives down the street, taking photos and then the photos are stitched together to create a panoramic image.

As the car went past on the corner of London Road and Queensway I started to wave an pull faces from my car, we’ll have to see if the moment was captured by the Google Car when the maps are released in the next few months

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