Comments for Search Engine Musings

Comment on Who’s feeding the spammers with information? by bill

bill — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:38:39 +0000

Thanks for your comment David. You could be right and it may all be coincidence due to sheer volume, but when I see spam emails with names that are both unusual and very similar to people I know, or purporting to be from companies I’ve just done business with when I’ve never had such spams before and rarely since, then I smell a rat.
I’m not suggesting a large scale monitoring of phone calls but what about telecom workers being bribed to supply information, just as credit card workers have been in the past.

Sad to hear about PGP. It’s a reflection of how far down the road of reduced privacy we’ve come in recent years that the desire for privacy is equated to the suspicion of terrorism. I’m afraid that the politicians have repeatedly fallen into the trap the terrorists laid – if you change your society in response to their actions then they’ve succeeded in spreading fear and undermined the freedoms that we stood for.

Comment on Who’s feeding the spammers with information? by David Edwards

David Edwards — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:45:02 +0000

sorry, just too paranoid: many households have a Windoze computer and of course have problems so the chances are that a VOIP cold call will find a soft target quite quickly. Spammers use list compiled (sold to them) from many sources but I very seriously doubt monitoring phone calls. Think about it, how much would it cost to mount such a level of surveillance and more to the point, how many people would you need?

You may have received messages from carriers you’ve recently used but millions of e-mails were received by people who never used a carrier?

As for PGP, which is no longer available except a sanitised product approved by DoD for sale by Symantec. I suspect that any use of proper encryption would raise a flag at NSA or GCHQ marking you as a ‘person of interest’

Comment on Links – are there any genuine link builders out there? by bill

bill — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:27:30 +0000

Hi Jezza101, thanks for commenting. I’m very much in sympathy with your stance – natural links are far better and more useful all round. One of my worries is that much natural linking has largely ceased due to inaccurate advice and corporate mis-management. I yearn for the old days when you linked to things that were interesting and had the confidence to know that if your own site was good enough then people would come back to you.

I also dislike the vast majority of artificial linking methods for both quality reasons and because they grate against my hopes for the web from its early idealistic days. Sadly some of the artificial tactics do sometime work, at least for a while, and many SEO companies talk them up in a way that makes clients believe them. It’s hard to tell a client not to do something because you think it’s poor quality when everyone else is telling them it’s about quantity. They want to see action.

A good web-aware PR company is indeed well worth its fees, but many of them are still hopeless. I worked with one client whose PR company used the wrong address in their releases – linking to their main competitor! After a few failed attempts to steer them in the right direction I gave up.

Comment on Links – are there any genuine link builders out there? by jezza101

jezza101 — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:17:56 +0000

I would argue that any manually “built” links are by definition not naturally built and therefore potentially ignored by search engines. I’m talking about link building that involves someone trying to negotiate individual links here.

As someone who has relied entirely on natural link building (mostly because I think I enjoy spending my time building sites!) I would also say that manually built links simlpy can’t compete with natural ones. My readers build 1000s more than I could ever place.

But perhaps there are different types of “link building”. When I worked for a commercial site we didn’t pay for link builders. We had a PR team that got stories into the national press. Get a good story in the right place and you’d get 10,000 links coming in from all kinds of big sites and various syndications.

It’s hard to compete with the big guys!

Comment on Pressing the wrong international buttons by bill

bill — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 09:59:16 +0000

Hi Brett, yes I was surprised that there was snippet data in this case. Clearly this site should have been indexed and the robots.txt entry was a mistake, so in a way I almost agree with Google deciding to index, but it’s still worrying that they feel they can disregard an unambiguous message to stay out.

It really means that if you do have a genuine reason for not wanting a site indexed then you have to use stronger methods such as .htaccess.

Comment on Pressing the wrong international buttons by Brett Pringle

Brett Pringle — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 08:13:06 +0000

There are a few times that Robots.txt “fails” in some ways. Most of the time it’s the overriding link factor, links going to pages within sections that are disallowed in robots.txt. That said, if there is a result, it’s normally just the page URL, without any snippet data.

Interesting though that not many people know about using noindex within the robots.txt… since we know crawling and indexing are 2 different functions.

As you said, Google has the final call in most cases

Comment on The Problems of Privacy on Social Networking by John

John — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 12:21:17 +0000

Thanks for bringing up the topic.
This aspect of social media marketing has put a lot of question marks over how much a site is to be involved in SEM and SEO/SEM professionals along with webmasters are having tough time to decide how much to expose!

Comment on Personalised and real-time search – let me turn them off! by bill

bill — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 13:22:12 +0000

Glad to hear I’m not the only one John.

The extension I’ve been using is called CustomizeGoogle 0.76 but it appears that it’s no longer being developed and someone else has started a very similar one called OptimizeGoogle 0.77 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/52498?src=api
It has a lot of other options too like removing ads from Maps and making Gmail secure (not that I’ll ever use Gmail)

Comment on Personalised and real-time search – let me turn them off! by John Pickering

John Pickering — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 09:28:26 +0000

Bill, I totally and utterly agree.
I sell printer cartridges and most people will go to a search engine to buy them via mail order because of their small size and ease of posting.
Why would you want to see results for your local area, sites you have already looked at or worse still someone’s inane tweet about the subject.
I nearly fell off my chair two weeks ago when I saw my site at No.1 for a competitive term.
I had to cancel the expensive holiday, when I saw that the results had been customised from my earlier clicks!!
I’ve now switched off all these customisations, I didn’t know that there was a firefox addon that produced results less the adword adverts. I’m off to search for it now… I’m guessing that it won’t be provided by a company based within 5 miles of where google ‘thinks’ I’m based, which is something else they’ve got drastically wrong.

Comment on Mapping the marketers by bill

bill — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:53:47 +0000

Mike had to shift servers and never got round to reinstating that feature. Pity, it was a promising idea.