George Rosier's portfolio & blog site

There’s been speculation recently as to whether Google actually pay attention to dodgy link-building tactics. eConsultancy carried a fairly damning article that implied the Google spam team weren’t paying attention – and judging by the articles, it was true…

A bit of recent digging revealed that maybe the spam team have just been held up whilst sifting through the weird link-building campaign that Aviva have been embarking on. Admittedly, this could also be the ‘Caffeine’ update coming into effect, but the evidence is a bit…damning, frankly.

Last week, Aviva were ranked #2 in Google’s natural SERPs for ‘Life insurance’ – a coveted and popular search term, up there with ‘car insurance’ and the like – second only to Money Super Market (who, let’s face it, will probably be dominant for insurance-based search terms until hell freezes over).

As of today, though, Aviva are not even on the first page.

The reason? A quick check through Yahoo Site Explorer reveals inbound links from noted and respected life insurance authority sites such as:

• http://www.zen.org.au/reiki.html (an Australian Reiki site)
• http://www.goddess.com.au/Playshops/ (an essential oils site)
• http://www.carpetsofkashmir.com/silk-carpets.html (’nuff sed)
• http://www.sharkfreemarinas.com/LC/catch-release.shtml (my personal favourite: “Tags for sharks are as important as life cover for humans”)
• http://www.setox.eu/projects.html (the Slovak Toxicology Society)
• http://www.bujinkancornwall.co.uk/training/kihon-happo

Nice work! A quick squint through those pages reveals links dropped into the content that’s is (in my personal opinion) quite clearly there purely for search engine gaming. Perhaps there’s hope for spam detection yet…?

In the latter months of 2009 Alamy.com, a stock imagery site, ran a competition to redesign their homepage.

That in itself was all well and good: throwing it open to the public and offering cash to the winner is a great way of engaging with their users and – incidentally – getting shitloads of design options created for what is essentially a fraction of the price they’d have had to pay an agency (if you were to include all their associated fees etc).

Anyway, one of the flaws of the competition – in my personal opinion – was that it insisted one use the imagery from the Alamy collection. No real problem in that, but it meant that in order to enter a design which featured imagery, one had to buy the imagery from the site.

That annoyed me, since I was quite willing to create free designs for them – but I’m damned if I’m about to be forced to pay for the privilege. As such, I abandoned the competition with literally a few hours to go ’till the closing date.

Perhaps egotistically, I thought the designs I came up with were ok…so I’ve decided to put them up here to be scrutinised, criticised, and generally pulled apart by anyone who has an opinion – and that should mean you, whoever you are.

Want to see them? Reckon it’s about time I got critique’d myself after I’ve been reviewing all these websites? Fancy an insight into what kind of twisted logic my mind goes through? Read on!

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There’re various opinions around how Google and other search engines deal with duplicate content. Google’s comments on the matter give an indication of how they deal with it, and the main takehome points are:

• They can usually spot unintentional (i.e non-malicious) duplicate content
• In the above case, Google will simply index the content it feels most relevant to the query that’s been typed in (so analysis/decision is done on a per-query basis), and will give users the option to see similar-looking results from that site – see below:

• In the case of webmasters trying to game search results by keyword/content-stuffing, they’ll spot that too – and will penalise accordingly.

This is good news and everything, but it does rather raise the question: How can Google tell if you’re malicious or not? And what if Google misunderstands your content and accidentally tags you as a spammer?

If you’re new to web copy writing content/management, duplication perhaps doesn’t sound like an issue…but from a search perspective, it can be.  Why could you be penalised? How do you get round it? What are the options? Read on and find out…

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My car tax is due, and I received a letter to remind me. How nice. In doing so, it led me to the www.direct.gov.uk site, where I can renew it online.

This shitty task got me thinking: “Why don’t I review this site?”…so here you go! Read on to find out what I thought of the site as a whole. Or is that ‘hole’? I dunno.

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Merry Christmas! Hope you had a good one.

As a result of a faulty laptop purchase, I’ve been looking at the rather splendid, but horrifically-priced, Mac Book Air. It’s perfect for my commuting requirements (i.e it’s lightweight and has a good battery life), but I wanted to find out how much it’d be on finance. How did I get on? Read on and find out!

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