A UK SEO

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.

So you’ve signed up to twitter, your twittering away and now you want to track the number of followers on twitter. Well you can use twittercounter which tracks the number of followers over a period of time.

I’ve hit the grand total of 20 follower on my twitter account (@johnpcampbell), I’m looking at trying to increase that over the next few months. I’ve not actively tried to increase followers and before I do that it’s important to work out which methods of increasing visitors work.

twittercounter creates a page for your account (http://twittercounter.com/johnpcampbell) and then generates a graph so show follower levels over time.

So over the next few weeks I’m going to be trying different methods of increasing followers and twittercounter.com should act as the tracking to see which method is the most successful.

I’ve been using Spotify this week and have to saw I have to say that I’m really impress by the quality of the tracks on there, no load time for the streaming of the music too. It’s basically itunes but it streams music from the internet with 20 second adverts every 10 songs or so. It’s a great way to check out the back catalog of artists too. There are some tracks missing for one or two artists but on the whole you can listen to whole albums in full.

What I really like is the ability to download playlists via one click, there lots of Spotify playlist sites popping up www.spotifyfriends.com, www.spotifylists.com, and www.yourspotify.com are just a few. It’s a great way to discover new music. Head over to www.spotify.com download and start listening.

An increasing issue facing some webmasters in the UK seems to be Google not ranking sites in google.co.uk. The trend seems to be that sites that have a non country specific top level domain e.g. .com .net .org etc struggle to rank in google.co.uk for key phrases, yet the site will rank for the same key phrases Google.com when searching from a UK IP address (Which is different to Google.com searching from a US IP).

It can be rather frustrating for webmasters as they might have a perfectly working site with a good amount of inbound links but Google’s made the decision that the site isn’t 100% focused to a UK audience so Google will class the site as a US / international site thus excluding from the google.co.uk results.

So if you find your site in this predicament then you should take you site through this flowchart to make sure you’ve done everything possible to advise Google that your site is based in the UK.

Remember more help can be found over at the Google Webmasters Help.

The Manchester WordPress User Group (MWUG) pretty much does what it says on the tin, it’s a group for WordPress users based in Manchester. As a platform WordPress is pretty much everywhere so it makes sense that a group should be started. There’s already a WordPress UK North group but that does include members from Yorkshire.

The group has sprouted from the MDDA and (MWUG) have site over at http://mwug.info/ which is currently been worked on. There’s a Google Group too over at http://groups.google.com/group/manchester-wordpress-user-group and they are on twitter too @mwug. So if you like WordPress and your based in Manchester get signed up to the group and down to a meeting!