Seo Home blog

At last…

The hangover cure has come about as of yesterday for (some of) us web site owners / seo and webmasters (in general)

Yep.. The loss of xmas site traffic is on its way back…

Please note this is a hangover cure for the site(s) I monitor but w00t.. Its good to see the traffic and $$$$ coming back…

Sadly I haven’t got any stats on the proportion sites xmas related vs not…

Well…. My experiences so far with adding xmas sections to site especially UK targeted is that no one seems to be surfing in the subject area I cover, pre xmas oh yes but during nop.. I’ve read reports that on xmas day and boxing day that “some” sites have/had massive traffic manily with shopping bargins and kids stuff…

hmm..

Anyway… All the best for the new year and hope everyones traffic grows : )

 Interesting … Mircosoft are going to keep expanding the “maps” side of the business..

Quote from the bbc:

Huge opportunity’

Microsoft’s internet empire also includes services such as Virtual Earth, Live Search and Windows Live.

Earlier this year Microsoft bought a 1.6% stake in social networking site Facebook for $240m (£117m) and US online advertising firm aQuantive for $6bn

More here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7140920.stm

10 million users per month… Nice traffic.. Thats got to bump up the live UK search traffic hasn’t it? We wait and see.

So…

The amount of bandwidth yahoo is pulling is massive on one of my sites…

The site in question is a forum in the UK which ranks well on yahoo but as yahoo search is only used by 7.72% (hitwise April 2007) the traffic is pretty low…

I’ve posted in forums before asking if the bandwidth is worth the traffic.. Now that might sound crazy but having 50 bots on the site day and night is a little OTT imho ?

Anyway… I like yahoo and the results for the UK really arn’t bad so i’ve given the bot a good telling too..

Basically if you need a way to slow yahoo’s bot down on your site use the following in your robots.txt file.

For example, a robots.txt rule to set a crawl-delay of 5 for Yahoo! Slurp looks like:

User-agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 5 

A shorter delay value of 0.5 would look like:

User-agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 0.5

More info here:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/webcrawler/slurp-03.html

Yep.. Its that time again..

A load of seo’s in a pub…

Tomorrow night is londonseo’s pissup meeting in a great little swedish pub in central..

I going to be about from around 6pm so come and say hello! …

All the info is here: http://londonseo.org/blog/smx-london-2007-party-venue-confirmed.html

Today yahoo is now in the UK using a similar system to google regarding google’s “smart pricing” …

From today, 15th November, advertisers in the UK can benefit from discounted clicks for better quality traffic

Cool discounted clicks …

One big problem with this.. As yahoo hasn’t launched YPN in the uk then this is really only to be a tiny change.. Why?

Well… The “discount clicks” only apply to “partner distribution network” clicks.. So.. With no YPN in the uk then is a small number of site “driving” this traffic…

Don’t hold you breath for a massive increase in traffic due to this change…

 What is changing?
Previously you were charged the same amount for traffic from all websites within our partner distribution network. However, with pricing discounts, a discounting system will be introduced and you may be charged less for certain clicks than the price you would normally pay. This discount depends on the overall quality of the websites who are providing this traffic to you. As a result, your click charges may decrease

Maybe just maybe UK YPN is coming !!!

Full info here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/uk/yahoo/ysm/sps/start/overview_qbp.html

Today is the launch of yahoo search assist in the uk and Ireland..

Only available from Yahoo!, Search Assist goes beyond basic search “suggestions” and gives consumers real-time query suggestions as well as related topics and concepts, which is especially valuable when a person is searching on an unfamiliar topic.  

“when a person is searching for a unfamiliar topic” OR when a seo is looking for new keywords

Here is a screen shot..

Video’s and audio are also ment to be included..

Haven’t found any yet but i’m sure its working ?

In addition to the new Search Assist feature, Yahoo! Search has also introduced multimedia integration including video, audio and photos  directly into the search results, allowing consumers to get their answer – whether it’s a Web link, photo, video or music clip — without leaving the page. 

Good luck yahoo..

Looking for LOVE

Nop nor me.. hehehee..

Today on breakfast (a news show at no other than breakfast time in the uk) a great topic about online scams kicked off..

The main focus of the article was regarding dating websites… One guy was show on TV who had forked out £12,000 (about $24,000) for a “lady” from a dating site… Now this guy was as dumb as you get to hand over £1 but hey, loads of dumb people out and about (me included durrrrrr)…

An international initiative by SOCA targeting mass marketing scams says £8 million worth of fake cheques have been seized, mainly from operations out of Nigeria. They also uncovered scams connected to online dating sites.

Basicaly men would pretend to be women (still don’t know why men need to do this) and ask for money… The money would be need to fly said woman to said dumb man in the UK.. All info over emails etc…  hmmm..

Anyway said man will not be doing it again BUT in the interview he was all over the dating site(s) again..

If you want £12k his aka “I’ll give you £12k for free just email - 1969″

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/breakfast/7021705.stm

Over here in the UK we seen a loads of ads from ask.com with yea oldie jeeves to today sort of army,hacker style…

The new ads are being show almost non stop @ prime time in the UK….

According to hitwise ask has a 4.87% market share (April 2007) but with all the advertising its got to increase..

The newest ad which I saw for the first time yesterday show off a search for london… Ask includes the weather, related terms, blogs news… images, wiki and a maps..

The ad then shows the mouse clicking on the london eye…

Its then shows off the “preview” tool..

Right at the end its say its compairs the preview and other tools to a “plain” search like google results…

If the amount of advertising continues ask could soon over take yahoo for the uk search share!

OK.. This isn’t really going to work for many people but today I added a new way to combat SPAM submissions to one of my directories…

Almost all of my sites are for the UK only… Non UK traffic only really cost me $$ and makes me nothing… Anyway I have a UK directory for the uk.. Simple so no non UK sites are allowed…

Of course many so called SEO’s or spammer can’t F**king read the conditions for a submission…

So… I’ve added the following..

$time_array = localtime(time());
$currenthr=($time_array[2])-1;
if ($currenthr > 9 && $currenthr < 18){

//allow submission

}

else {

// tell them the office is shut  (along with a few other things) 

}

At present I have a 82% rejection rate… And because i’m off on my holidays soon I need to cut down this rate..

Posted a bit about it here:

http://www.seohome.co.uk/2007/09/07/matt-cutts-on-directories-way/

Just got a email from the nice guys at yahoo letting know about todays launch of yahoo suggest…

Quote from the email:

Search Suggest is not a new feature for the industry, but it’s new for Yahoo! UK, rolling out in Europe in the coming days

Due to the fact its already in the US the you can already read a load about it below:

The US version was blogged about here: http://searchengineland.com/070712-084921.php 12th of July..

More info here: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014286.html