A UK SEO

I’ve added a plugin today to reward commentators on the blog. After five comments the nofollow link is removed from the link back to their site. Many sites have adopted this policy as it also means you can select which commentators to keep the nofollow on their links in the admin section of wordpress, thus giving your editorial control over the use of nofollow.

The plug in i’ve used called Lucia‚Äôs Linky Love.

Loving Spotify still but no new doves album but the new Yeah Yeah Yeah’s album is on there. A great site has been launched in the past few months by Kieron Donoghue called www.sharemyplaylists.com.

The site works like many other of the Spotify playlists sites, you see a play list you like, click the link and hey preston the playlist is loaded up into Spotify. What makes this site slightly different, apart from the nice layout is the rating, comments and most importantly the quality of the playlists, plenty of decent indie and britpop stuff!

Head over to www.sharemyplaylists.com remember you’ll need to download spotify and have a good taste in music!

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

I’ve pointed out a few sites in the past that have working black hat technique another one cropped up the other day, I mentioned it on twitter.

Showforce.com are a company that provide staff for events, promotions etc, I’m sure they are a great company but it seems that the SEO company they are using are not too great (well they are ranking in Google…). In this case plenty of key phrases have been hidden in a h1 tag at the bottom of Showforce’s homepage.

So how is this text hidden? Well the text is placed in a H1 inside a div called “SEO”, the style is set to hidden.

<div id="SEO" style="OVERFLOW: hidden; WIDTH: 1px; POSITION: relative; TOP: 819px; HEIGHT: 1px"> <a href="http://www.showforce.com">
<h1><b>event planning checklist, corporate uk, co........</b></h1>
</a></div>

Does this work? Well yes, the text is hidden and the Showforce site ranks number one at for “event staff”.

Will it work for longer? We’ll have to see. It seems that Google need to fix up and look sharp on their spam detection.

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?

Recently I posted about using a Facebook application to help increase twitter followers. The application takes your tweets and sets then as Facebook updates.

Using Twitter Counter you can see that’s it’s had no impact.

So will linking your twitter account to Facebook increase twitter followers. No.

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?

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

In a series of blog posts I’m going to not only look at how to increase Twitter followers but also try to put the methods into practice in a bid to increase my pitiful 21 Twitter followers.

One method I’ve noticed some accounts using is to increase Twitter followers using Facebook, you can easily link your Facebook account to display your twitter posts as your Facebook status.

1. All you need is a) a Facebook account and b) a twitter account.
2. On Facebook go to the Twitter application page (search for twitter).

3. Sign up for the application by entering your Twitter username and password.

4. Click the button at the top of the Twitter application page to enable your tweets to update as your Facebook status.

Pretty simple to set up. You should also add a link to your twitter page on your Facebook info tab.

So will this increase Twitter followers? It really depends on the amount of friends you have on Facebook, I’ve only got 170 and most of them are not necessarily going to have Twitter accounts. We’ll see what effect this increased visibility has on followers over the next week

Online reputation is becoming more and more important for companies to manage. Already this year we’ve seen the problems that Ryan Air caused and other companies continue to make mistakes. But does online reputation match the reputations of companies offline?

For example it tonight on BBC watchdog Two Left Feet www.twoleftfeet.co.uk were the subject of a slating by Nicky Campbell and guest Richard Farleigh for taking orders via their website but not completing orders. Interviews with unhappy customers also revealed that refunds for a failure to deliver were never honored by Two Left Feet.

BBC watchdog clocked up around 500 complaints about Two Left Feet so it seems that the company have a few problems. Is that reflected online? Yes and no.

First of all checking the top 10 search engine results for “two left feet” you get two review sites and and no blog posts about the company. This seems to be due to them sharing their name with a couple of bands and a dancing company.

On www.reviewcentre.com they have knocked up no reviews so far which is surprising considering it’s one of the largest review websites in the UK. www.reviewcentre.com doesn’t show up on some UK serp’s as it’s not 100% geared to the UK marked.

So so far so good. But http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/online-shops/twoleftfeet-co-uk/ reviews of the site are really bad with only 9 out of 53 reviews being 3 star or above. Some of the comments are really negative.

A thread on http://community.babycentre.co.uk/talk/a959975/httpwww.twoleftfeet.co.uk also is negative.

The review on http://www.ciao.co.uk/twoleftfeet_co_uk__Review_5687570 is also negative.

The majority of the complaints seem to be payments taken but no products delivered and then no refunds given afterwards. To add fuel to the fire watchdog reported that two left feet pulled their customer service too.

So it seems in this case that off line activities of Two Left Feet have appeared online. Review websites like Ciao, dooyoo have given consumer the chance to voice their views and experiences of companies.