I’ve been having a play with a nice little tool from bad-neighborhood.com which goes through a page on your site and checks if your site is linking out to a bad neighborhood. When used as one of your qualifying metrics in a link building campaign you can quickly appraise a link source and determine if you’re going to receive a penalty.
For a freebie tool its pretty good, it shows you sites that are ‘blog spam’, has a 1-5 metric of severity and a tick and cross indicator showing if the sites clean or not.
Just got an email from Will at Distilled letting me know that they’re setting up a USA office due to SEOMoz quitting the SEO consulting game :O
It seems that as the search engines reduce their tool set, SEOMoz think that they’ll be able to make more money as an ASP (Application Service Provider) selling SAAS (Software As A Service)… and by speaking at conferences and expo’s.
As some one who got out of the client services game I can appreciate that not having to manage demanding and often irrational clients is a mighty big attraction, however, unless they can bull some big hitters out of their hats, the current SEOMoz pro tool set just isn’t good enough to justify the price tag (I bought my subscription in their sale for 1/2 price).
All I can say is good look Rand et all… fingers crossed this works out for you and as for Will, I’m sure SEOMoz will pass you some leads – it might also be time for you to think about improving your brand and starting your own community… it worked for Rand.
Heres the official announcement:
I wanted you to be one of the first to hear our big news – we are opening an office in Seattle. Our US online presence is going to grow at DistilledConsulting.com (Twitter: US, UK).
Our long-time associates, SEOmoz, are quitting SEO consulting to focus on their world-leading SEO tools and resources. Distilled LLC was therefore created to take over their consulting responsibilities and to service the demand for bespoke consulting generated by their tools and services.
Over the last couple of years, we have worked together to deliver impactful SEO campaigns for household names including Microsoft, Real Networks and fast-growth VC-backed companies including Scribd.com, Avvo.com and Etsy.com.
To celebrate, we are opening up free access to a conference call we are running on 24th February for all our contacts. You can sign up to get dial-in details here. Entitled "how to get the most from your SEO" it will cover:
• the best tasks to keep in-house vs. outsource
• combining SEO effectively with PPC, PR and marketing
• integrating SEO into other processes (e.g. development, business development)
• how to get the most from your agency
• how to be a great SEO client and get even more out of your agency
Sign up now.
You can read more about the US announcement in my blog post – the summary is:
• Distilled Limited now has a wholly-owned subsidiary, Distilled LLC registered in WA
• Rob Ousbey, one of the lead SEOs at Distilled here in London is heading West to brave the frontier and begin the process of establishing our US office
• We will continue writing for SEOmoz, answering Q&A and contributing to product decisions and testing (in exchange for which we will get loads of access to powerful tools, data and expertise)
• We will manage the SEO consulting page on the SEOmoz website and handle bespoke consulting needs for any of the SEOmoz community who would like to work with us
• We will all continue to refer to the recommended list where appropriate
• We are now hiring in the UK and the US for a talented SEO and a great marketing administrator
• Yes, we are also wondering if we did this just to make ourselves into a case study in international domain strategy.
So, we are now open for business on two continents. Please get in touch if there is anything we can do for you – US contact form, UK contact form – or email our Business Development Manager: Caitlin Krumdieck.
Sorry if you hear this news via more than one route – we’re pretty excited about it all so we would appreciate any extra publicity you can help us out with on this big day for Distilled.
Don’t hesitate to give me a shout if you have any questions or if there is anything we can do for you.
At last! A feature ive been waiting for for an eternity (and had originally built into a previous in-house analytics package) has arived for Google Analytics – Annotation.
This is a great little feature that takes the hassle out of monitoring events on the timeline.
With Annotations you can add notes to the timeline which makes it great for:
Tracking PR activities
Promotional Sales
The effect of any high value link (purchases?)
SERPS changes i.e. Caffeine
The only issue I can forsee is that the notes wont go far enough. I’d like the ability to have different, user defined note types as I can see my Annotations becoming the dominent factor of the visual display.
This feature was originally mentioned in the Google Analytics blog post of December 7th, but has taken until now to be implimented on the UK analytics.
Just got this nice email from the SEOMoz team ammouncing a nice little discount voucher code that gives you 40% off the monthly costs of an SEOMoz Pro account.
Simply enter the code:
ROLLBACK12817261
On the payment screen and have the monthly fee reduced from $79 to only $49.
Offer expires 19th Dec 2009 so get it while its hot!
Now getting stats quicker is great and all that and I’m sure that its work the hassle of changing your footer include but there is a greater benefit to anyone wanting to get an edge with Google’s imminent Caffeine update and that’s one thing… Speed.
I’m waiting for benchmarks but initial reports are that it shaves a nice chunk out of your page load time!
So stop reading this and get your analytics code updated… go, go now!
I’m kind of all over the place today as I’ve been given the day off for Xmas shopping by my great boss (it would never have happened in some of my past workplaces so big thanks to Steve) and as usual I’ve built up a nice set of tabs all containing things I really need to get around to reading, so instead of adding bookmarks onto bookmarks I will dump them here
Google Translated information on Eyetracking studies for the new Click 4 Beds design
The new Wolfram Alpha computational search engine has many great features like telling you whay happened on a certain date, what makes up chemicals and even breaks down your mortgage payments however one of my favourite uses is as a competative analysis tool.
Simply type your domain name or your competitors domain name to get some juicy information like host geography, hits and impressions. It’s not as indepth as Alexa.com or Compete.com but does give you the data in easier to understand formats!
Today sees a significant change to your Google listings with google announcing its support for rich snippets including vCard and vCalendar. This is important as it gives us an edge to make our listings stand out from the crown, however the down side (yes theres always one isnt there) is that it arms Google withgreater understanding our our content which can be used to marginalise sites and even worse reduce them to a local listing.
hCard
Heres my quick guide to creating a semantic hcard for your site to be used where ever you put your address:
If you read the original Google post above you’ll notice that theyre also displaying a review for this listing. They claim that this is a standard format widely used on the Interwebs so best keep your eyes peeled for something like the following which is used as a sample on microformats.org/wiki/hreview
1. <div class="hreview">
2. <span><span class="rating">5</span> out of 5 stars</span>
3. <h4 class="summary">Crepes on Cole is awesome</h4>
4. <span class="reviewer vcard">Reviewer: <span class="fn">Tantek</span> -
5. <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20050418T2300-0700">April 18, 2005</abbr></span>
6. <div class="description item vcard"><p>
7. <span class="fn org">Crepes on Cole</span> is one of the best little
8. creperies in <span class="adr"><span class="locality">San Francisco</span></span>.
9. Excellent food and service. Plenty of tables in a variety of sizes
10. for parties large and small. Window seating makes for excellent
11. people watching to/from the N-Judah which stops right outside.
12. I've had many fun social gatherings here, as well as gotten
13. plenty of work done thanks to neighborhood WiFi.
14. </p></div>
15. <p>Visit date: <span>April 2005</span></p>
16. <p>Food eaten: <span>Florentine crepe</span></p>
17. </div>
Based on the break down from the HCard this is pretty easy to understand.
XFN
XFN is already sidely used on blog engines like Wordpress where it encourages you to identify link relations to your site using the REL attribute.
I’ve been tasked with finishing one of my pet projects Chesterfield Sofas.com as the site in its unfinished state is ranking really highly, internationally for the term ‘chesterfield sofas’ despite not being complete and having little linkage as Steve wants to put this project to work in our quest to dominate Google’s page 1 for our main key terms.
Apart from deciding on the format of a product page (a pretty big decision) one of my biggest tasks is writing all of the copy for this site which has been constructed around Google’s on-topic and expanded keyword research results. Having just looked up from my keyboard I realised that I’m using MS Word to write the semantic HTML whilst using Words built in on-the-fly grammar and spell checking to minimise re-writes. This is a pretty good tip for all SEO copy writers as it just saves time! Just be wary of Words rewriting of hyphens, speech marks and apostrophies etc.
It seems that Microsoft have decided to finally take the IE8 browser out of beta and its now available to download in its complete form (despite the fact that its still not secure – yet more secure than apple’s safari!).
I'm happy to answer any and all SEO, web design, development and Internet Marketing questions you may have (and give you some free exposure for your projects). Just email your questions to markrush@gmail.com and I'll take a look through your site and post the answers here.
Mark Rushworth.com is a Do Follow Blog
All Comments are Do Follow and monitored so don't even bother using a keyword as your name or dropping links into the comments (unless appropriate).
– it might also be time for you to think about improving your brand and starting your own community… it worked for Rand.