Search Engine Musings

Linkspam – Common forms of link building that have gone toxic

bill — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:18:19 +0000

As I’ve been predicting for a long time Google has finally upped the ante on poor quality link building and is starting to actively penalise those who participate in it. This has of course started an absolute firestorm of comment and general gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands amongst the “SEO community”. I put [...]

Linkspam – Common forms of link building that have gone toxic is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Technology ideas in the real world – the human factor

bill — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:03:52 +0000

I love gadgets, and I love new technology. You see something on Star Trek or one of the other sci-fi programmes and then a few years later you see it in the real world because the designers watch the same programs and you think ‘great, look forward to using that’. I’ve just been watching an [...]

Technology ideas in the real world – the human factor is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Social Networks and Search – will they just spoil each other?

bill — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:38:07 +0000

Social is all over the place these days – even the mainstream media mentions it often, particularly at the moment with Facebook having just announced major changes at F8 and with Google pushing Google+ as a major alternative. Following so many SEO-related blogs and Twitter feeds as I do it’s easy to get the feeling [...]

Social Networks and Search – will they just spoil each other? is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Links – are there any genuine link builders out there?

bill — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 09:52:52 +0000

In recent months I’ve been thinking a lot about links. I’ll say straight away that getting them has never been a particular strength of mine – I’m more of a structural, technical and content SEO – but analysing them is definitely something I know about. I used to think that I actually wasn’t very good [...]

Links – are there any genuine link builders out there? is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Pressing the wrong international buttons

bill — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 13:10:06 +0000

A Tale of Edinburgh University Press and search engines This weekend I was doing some research for additional content for my Scottish Books site and had occasion to do a Google search for Edinburgh University Press. To my surprise their site didn’t appear in the first page of results, or the second, or the third. [...]

Pressing the wrong international buttons is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Clouds, Trust and Security

bill — Sat, 14 May 2011 16:14:44 +0000

Recently we’ve had two major issues with online networks. One was the large number of services that depend on Amazon’s cloud facilities, which went down for a number of days. The second was the Sony PSP gaming network which was badly hacked and was down for even longer, and more importantly seems to have leaked [...]

Clouds, Trust and Security is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Should you follow the SEO rockstars?

bill — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 20:25:59 +0000

In the old days if you wanted to learn a subject you read a book on it. That doesn’t work with SEO because it’s a very fast-moving subject and by the time anyone writes a book about it and goes through the publication process the information is inevitably at least partly out of date. So [...]

Should you follow the SEO rockstars? is a post from: Search Engine Musings

IE9 – are we looking at the new IE6?

bill — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 21:14:16 +0000

This one’s webdev related rather than SEO, but then I’ve always been a web developer as well and I’ve always believed you can’t be a good SEO without being a good developer, and vice-versa. IE6 used to cost me a LOT of time chasing bugs. I’ve always said the only correct way to code a [...]

IE9 – are we looking at the new IE6? is a post from: Search Engine Musings

RIP AlltheWeb

bill — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 12:38:50 +0000

I was sad to see that Yahoo have announced that AlltheWeb will cease to exist from April 4th and queries will be redirected to Yahoo. Of course it was inevitable given the fact that Yahoo itself is now powered by Bing (not quite yet in the UK but it’s not far away), and hardly anyone [...]

RIP AlltheWeb is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Back in the saddle

bill — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 12:22:10 +0000

Hell, it’s been a long time since I’ve done any blogging. Major life events – bereavements in family and friends, divorce, house purchase, and a load of other stuff – have rather got in the way and my clients’ sites have had priority. Now safely settled in a new house and office and with Spring [...]

Back in the saddle is a post from: Search Engine Musings