A UK SEO

There was a lot of press recently about the release of SEOmoz’s Linkscape tool in the last few months. That’s seem to have died down now an I’ve had the chance to use the tool at work and found it very useful.

It’s great for finding links that your competitor have that you should have as well. Of course you can use something like Yahoo Site Explorer but Linkscape enables you to grab the cream of the links quickly. The ones that are do follow and maybe based in the UK.

It’s help me to find a reason why a site has been penalised. It identified a site that had 10,000 links from only 52 domains, with around 8,000 using the same anchor text. It stood out as unusual and proved the theory about how the site had been penalised.

I’ve also used it to find duplicate sites from clients as all the site were from the same IP.

I do think that it will become essential piece for my day to day work. It is a tad expensive to sign up for if you are an individual so if you work for a company try to get your company to sign up for pro membership!

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Remember even the best have technical problems with websites as we can see from the BBC.

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I was looking over some paid links today from a company that you can buy links from. The company uses a combination of their own sites and contacting site owners offering them money for placing links on their sites.

Here’s the stupid bit, 5 different sites had placed the link in a div called “{companyname}-paid-links”. So why go to all the effort of setting up the links and then make them traceable to Google. They may as well stick a big arrow on the page saying “yup Google paid links over here”. Once they get the name of the div all Google’s spam team need to do is search sites for div’s called “{companyname}-paid-links”.

It’s same as using hidden text and calling the div “hiddencontent”.

The moral of the story if your going to do paid links, which might not be the option anyway then don’t make it easy for Google to pick up on them, place them in articles, if you have a network of site host them separately and use different names when registering the domains!

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Most SEO companies use search rankings to check the performance of campaigns. Most SEO companies will also agree that it’s really bad way to calculate the performance of a campaign but it’s what clients will generally want. Universal search, personalised results, results from different data centers and fluctuations in the results will give you random results at times making ranking reports a nightmare.

A mix of ranking reports and traffic reports should do the trick. This way you give the client want they want while getting the data over that you know is important. If you have a client with a brand new site and your going for difficult key phrases it means that you might see no results in the first 6 ish month.

Producing ranking report for 6 months when you know no results are going to come can really frustrate clients. There’s nothing worse then blank reports. So it might be a better approach to not have any rankings report sent out to the client.

Advise the client that this is normal procedure and that it take around 6 months for new sites to start ranking in the top 100 of Google listings, then when the results start to come through get the reports out the client.

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All the news at the moment is about tonights election in American but I’ve seen a much more exciting piece of news, WordPress 2.7 is on it’s way and with it they are making a massive change to the admin section!

The main visable change is the layout of the back end. Navigation now moves the left side bar and the top will become a breadcrumb navigation with a search box. On the writing pages the media uploader moves to the right side, as does the tags and categories. From the screenshot releases in the wireframe PDF it certainly looks good and far more organised.

There are other neat feature, like the ability to search, download and install plugins from the admin. Navigation expands / collapses in two directions, automatic upgrade of the blog, sticky post etc etc.

A release date was set for the 10th of Novemeber but this will be missed. Instead a Beta 1 version has been released and a final version will most likely come later in the month.

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If you need to 301 re-direct one page to another in WordPress Blog you can start playing around with the .htaccess file adding in re-directs or you could use Redirection a WordPress plugin.

A simple install as ever with WordPress plugins, the re-directs are all managed in the manage section of the WordPress back end. Just add in the old URL and the new URL and your done.

There are further options to re-direct to a 404 page, to a random post, import from csv etc. So head over to the WordPress plugin page to download Redirection.

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So they BBC has made a slight change to their external linking. Before the links opened in the same window and passed page rank. They have now changed to in the same window but via two 302 re-directs this means the page rank will not be passed on. E.g.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/relintlink/UKFS+News+v3/ext/-/http://www.aukseo.co.uk

Which uses this script

http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/redirect.shtml?http://www.aukseo.co.uk

So that’s not great news for the sites that have links from the BBC. A site that I work with are lucky enough to have a link from the BBC it will be interesting to see what effect this has on the search rankings.

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