let’s have a quick straw poll here, If you had decided that you are going to buy a sim free HTC diamond, and someone sends you two sites to buy from both are the same price, same offer really, but one site is covered in adsense and one isn’t.

are You like me, does Adsense turn you off to the purchase ?

Dave

This is pretty damn Awesome, I have only been playing on it for a little while now but Live Mesh “I’m lovin it”,

The syncing of Laptops, Work PC’s and Home Computers, is soooo easy, at present it’s just me and Dan that are playing with it in the office, but I can see me wanting more and more staff on this.

My Favourite part of this is the News : I can quickly see what’s happening in my Folders and Dan or myself can leave comments about what changed.

You can see that from the screen shot below that I Added a new folder and then renamed the folder Bnet1.

I did this from my computer in the office using a normal browser, all I needed was my Live login and I’m on My Live desktop.

I then connected to my Laptop at home, grabbed a CSV and synchronized it to the Mesh,

I then went back to my desk

,

Clicked the Bnet1 and Synchronised, Now if Dan was sharing Bnet1 he would have got that file too, now who ever edits that file the cloud will keep track, so if Dan deletes some sites from that csv dump, he can leave a quick note so I know what’s going on :)

at Present I only have a few devices connected but thats going to expand soon:

DaveN

DaveN and I were chatting yesterday about the fundamental aspects the should be incorporated with any website design. What prompted this discussion was the numerous web design companies out there that charge a premium for their design services and seem to purposefully overlook even basic Seo properties of the site with a view to adding an SEO package on later at yet another premium.

I would of thought with any webdesign the customer can at least expect decent page titles and headings which are relevant to their industry to be included with the webdesign.  It’s fair I think that the customer should see their web pages indexed correctly. I’m not talking about extensive SEO services here, just about the basics.

The philosopy of building a solid foundation rings true every time a website is built and through good communciation with the customer SEO services should never be an afterthought.

Dan Horton SEO

 
ok if I was Matt Cutts this is what I would do ..

ok first things first we know Matt Cutts does not like people buying links we also now that Matt Cutts said they use cookies and Ip addresses to help them catch spam..

So what I would do  is run a search query in Google Logs for anyone that went to text link ads then find your IP and Cookie, then look at all the sites you visit, remove common sites like the BBC, Twitter Facebook and CNN etc,

Then I would look at the sites you go to the most ( those will be your own or your clients, at a wild guess) then cross reference all the other sites you have visited, the chances are if you are buying links you will be checking them at least 1 a month to make sure everything is ok, you may even be telling google via the Toolbar that you are in tla and going to sitea, then back to tla then siteb etc etc

Then I would correlate the data, find out which sites are linking to the prime sites.

but I wouldn’t do anything just yet, you see if I find a site that’s buying links, the chances are the other links the link selling sites will have been purchased, via the same network so in a few months I can watch the trades happening and I just would collect all the data, then 1 day I would just devalue all the PR on the selling sites, if the buying sites didn’t have enough links holding them up I would ban them has well

Now you would think that if you did everything possible to stop me from finding you out, well think about all the others that are buying links, how many are buying links where you are what if they are stupid and get caught, in turn I would find you

DaveN

If you can remember back in January I blogged about the design side of Bronco, launching a Chesterfield Sofa site, in that post I mentioned one on how to help them sell a 15ft Lime Green Chesterfield Sofa .. (which I can handle OK ) more on that later, but if you need a 15ft chesterfield sofa it’s here

OK there was a side bet of a £100 between the partners which made the whole project more fun, you see no one in my opinion that went to the main site would buy that 15ft beast ;), so we built www.onebigchesterfieldsofa.co.uk and tried to give the beast a character and guess what it worked, somebody found Ches ( that’s the beast’s character ), loved the idea and bought him and ordered a few more, you see you can sell anything on the Internet

DaveN

update this is a YouTube bug pointed out by Barry at SEROUNDTABLE

Google removes informational Videos on Google Privacy

There used to be a Video on YouTube
href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLgJYBRzUXY”>here, it was on the official Google channel and it was Maile Ohye, explaining how Google uses your browser cookie..

But what’s worse is it looks like Google have removed all videos about Privacy ..

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=google+privacy

DaveN

Update: The videos are now coming back (11.57)

I have had a few emails about the what to do with the “Google Cookie” issues been used in logs, so here is a quick tip.

Use firefox clear you cache :

To clear your cache for Mozilla Firefox:

1. Open Firefox.
2. Clear your browser’s cache.
   • For Firefox version 2.0:
     1. Click Tools > Options > Advanced.
     2. Click the Network tab.
     3. Click Clear Now under the Cache heading.
   • For Firefox version 1.5 or earlier:
     1. Click Tools > Options > Privacy.
     2. Click Cache > Clear.
3. Click OK to exit.

Next step Clear you Cookies : also note this could also remove your saved settings for sites you’ve previously visited.

To clear your cookies for Mozilla Firefox:

1. Click Tools > Options > Privacy.
2. Delete your cookies.
   • For Firefox version 2.0, click Clear Now under the Private Data heading.
   • For Firefox version 1.5 or earlier, click Cookies > Clear.
3. Click OK to exit.

Now we need to make sure that we delete cookies when we Close the Browser 1

If you set tick all the the boxes like I have, you will delete the cookie when you close the browse, but if you really want to make sure, click on Exceptions and add something like :

But be Warned, Google really wants that cookie on you system.. so while you can browse Google and see Google ads !! if you want to use Gmail, Google analytics’s or Google Adwords you will see this screen

So I would advise take the Cookie but delete it when you close the browser

DaveN

I’M trying to workout why Google have come forward with this,

quote from Google :

Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight webspam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results “freshness,” and spam).

Whenever we create a new metric, it’s essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go “back in time” and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.

The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this–log data, IP addresses, and cookie information–makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.

So where are the pitfalls here, first off the big one that jumps out here is the amazing amounts of botnets and malware that’s out there in the wild that could be set to create fake traffic..

example: botnet users

search google for : keyword phrase you want to rank for,automate page click through keep on google don’t pass you brand, if brand found fake a click. If brand not found in first 2 -5 pages, random per user, search brand + keyword, brand.com + keyword

also

log spamming has been around for years, also if you thought you need protection before from Google, set up a caching proxy, take all your own data and look at you search patterns what sites you visit, a there are couple of things you will notice,

so you might want to do or at least think about.

a) Think about work search V personal searches
b) Install, foxy proxy or another firefox proxy plugin
c) Make sure you purge your cookie on closing your browse
d) Run a dictionary on google when your not searching
e) Pray that Sergy never wants to be the president of America

DaveN

well I’m a SEO, so I should know and this is how the internet was destroyed.

Quite a few years ago now before I became the SEO I am, I used to be like everyone else, I would go to a Search Engine, type in what I wanted clicked a few blue links and either bought something or was informed about what I was searching for, it used to take a few seconds and I was Happy, But today things are so different.

So now when I search, I still click a few blue links but do I buy or get informed NO.. I look at the links on the page I have just landed on, but I don’t see them as links, I see NoFollow and Followed links, if I landed on a page with five links and 1 is followed and the rest aren’t , I think that the followed link was a purchased link or just part of this webmasters network ( I would spend 10 - 20 minutes to prove that ) and the nofollow links are affiliate link or just wasted links. and if it was a high pagerank blog, omg I need check to see if the comments are followed or not ..

but it gets worse I have to find the H1 then copy it, and see if page ranks #1 in Google for that phrase then I start deleting words to see how it ranks for shorter tail version of it’s H1, so what’s that all about, I have even found myself shouting at my laptop, can’t you see that the Title and H1 are not SEO synchronised what is this webmaster doing….

But it doesn’t stop there I have an IP to country plugin to show me where the site is hosted, so that I can also check to see if the page I have just found also ranks just as well in the local Serps.. why I have found the page already, just Buy something or be informed I hear myself say, obviously if the site is ranking well for long and short tails queries, in both .com and localised search then have to check the back links out, I have to find the authority links. but by the time I have done all this seriously, I have forgot what I was looking for or why I was searching in the first place, but hell I know why that page was ranking so well..

Then I remember what it was I looking for, not to fall into the same trap I use a different keyword phrase, and sure enough I hear myself swearing under my breath #1 the WIKI the next 3 sites are MFA’s or comparison sites, so I get on my MSN messenger ping a friend and ask them !! and that’s why SEO destroys the internet

Ok for all of those that are thinking that this is just a referral to my popular “shaven pussy” post it can’t be further from the truth.

9 days ago me and Becky adopted a little black cat, from a friend of Rory (my hardware engineer). We already have a 13 – 14 year old cat (cork) so I don’t quite know what we were thinking bringing a little 1 year old cat into the house thinking all would be well. We did have plans to get a kitten when Cork has Karked it but we just happened upon this homeless little cat.

Our first thought last week when we first got Poppy (we renamed her from Salem) was that we’d just introduce the 2 cats to each other and all would be well. How wrong we were when the mother of all cat fights started! They say that cats fighting is the worst noise there is and it’s pretty horrific. Needless to say we decided that it was a bad option…. so what were we to do?

The answer is that when you introduce a new cat you have to do it slowly, and create an isolation room for the new cat (includes food, bed, litter tray), while the existing cat has the run of the house. Slowly you introduce the scent of the new cat to the old cat and vice versa. You can also put the existing cat in the isolation room while the new cat gets some freedom in the house. We had some hissing and spitting when the cats happened to see or smell each other but this has gradually subsided. The new cat was even out in the garden at the weekend and caught a bird … so was definitely settling in.

Anyway after a careful week of slowly introducing the 2 cats together it is amazing how adaptable they are. I was amazed how my old grumpy cat has just accepted the new cat, and amazed how the new cat has got used to us and got into a routine.