I’ve been hearing lots of good things about Woopra lately. It looks nice - from the screenshots I’ve seen. Unfortunately I’ve been waiting an absolute age to get ahold of an invite - its like the wait that happened for Google Analytics before they got their act together.

If anyone has a spare Woopra invite they could send us we’d be really grateful. If you could drop us a comment below if you’re able to help and I’ll email you back as soon as I get it.

Checking your SEO rankings in multiple data centres can be a useful thing to have a look at. Showing you how your rankings are in variuos Google data centres (DC) at the same time. As Google does a rolling update of its data taking DC into and out of their active configuration to be updated. Sometime the DC you’re getting info on isn’t using the most recent set of data. This is espescially useful when google are carrying out an algorithm update or during technology changes - as you can see the changes rolling out across DC.

Google Data Center tools on the web

McDar has traditioanlly been the palce to go and check out results. It allows you to check by IP block for results. I like the way the results are outputted but you can only check about 6 DC on one screen.

Bill just sent me a link to a new DC checking tool - they need to do some work on the output of the results as they scroll down for about half a mile. But you get loads of differing DC checked at the on time.

If anyone knows of any other tools that do this job stick them in the comments below and I’ll have a squizz.

I was just chatting to Nick Duddy @ Equator and he was telling me about the ‘Gmail Grimace‘ thing going on over at the Email Standards Project. I’ve recently been getting more and more into Email Marketing as a way to generate sales and have been amazed at the difficulties that email marketers are having with different mail clients have with emails (think IE Vs Firefox web design problems on a far larger scale and your probably still not close to the problems they can have). Can you imagine having to do all your styles inline and design in tables - its so retro.
They even have a gmail Grimace Flickr Group - which is cool. At last something on Flickr which actually interested me!

The first rule of fight club is that you must not talk about fight club.

The second rule of fight club is that you must not talk about fight club.

The third rule of fight club is that you must not talk about fight club.

Are you a member of Fight Club?

So you want to make money online. Well it’s like being in Fight Club. You spend all day looking for things that are going to make you money. Niches here, niches there, you test, you refine and you start making money. The one thing is you dont tell anyone how you actually did it.

Every so often someone will break ranks and start telling everyone online how they used exactly the same tactics as you did to start making some money and everyone is doing it and all of a sudden that whole chapter of Fight Club needs to be closed down and replaced with a new, stronger Fight Club.

Remember the first rule of Internet Marketing fight club is that you must not talk about fight club.

Over the weekend I started to see a spike in traffic one of my sites was receiving from Google Image Search in Google analytics. Unfortunately when I start to dig deeper into it I find that Google Analytics won’t show me what the queries were that drove all the traffic to the site.

I love Google analytics: its free, simple to install and can be up and running in minutes and tracking almost instantly. However these kind of little glitches that I find that drive me up the wall. surely the piece of code that extracts the query is almost the same as that used for the noraml search queries.

While trying to develop a solution I thought the bestplace to have a look would be through the blogosphere and start hacking through some blogs to ‘borrow’ a solution that someone else has came up with for this. Some of the solutions for tracking image search traffic through Google analytics look complicated - probably as my JavaScript skills are minimal.

The best solution looks to be that advocated by Joost DeValk. I’m away to test this out and see how it works. If anyone knows of a better way to do this can you let me know. Thanks is advance.

I don’t need to go on about the importance of links in relation to your natural search positions. We all know that having great links leads to great positions.

One of the things that I’d heard could be affecting your natural search performance is whether these great links you’ve been out link baiting, link spamming or have been growing organically to your web sites is whether they created a link profile that was seen as ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’. I’ve seen unnatural link profiles referred to as ‘artifical’. I prefer unnatural as you could develop an unnatural link profile without doing anything on purpose - artifical indicates to me, at least, that you’ve been actively going out of your way to get links.

Having a natural link profile is what every website apparently needs to consistently rank well for all of its appropriate search terms. Unnatural link patterns are suppossed to damge your search engine positions, at least in the short term.

I’ve been thinking about this ideas for a while and it seems logical. Unnatural linking = Spamming = penalty in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Before I could go and test out this I had to define were natural and unnatural link profiles.

What is a ‘natural link’ profile?

A natural link profile is one that grows organically with no, or little, interference.

I believe that natural link prfoiles would have five defining components:

1. Links likely to grow at a consistent rate
2. The majority of links are on pages, within sites, on a related themes
3. These pages would be unlikely to have high PageRank
4. Links would often be within fresh content
5. Links would often be in non-duplicate content

I know these rules are subjective but I felt they could be used as a way to use a system of trigger level penalties: when your link profile displays an unnatural level of any of these the penalty starts to interact with your rankings.

• Links could grow dramatically to your domain - but these links could be natural if they were to a page about a hot topic. So there would be a trigger point inside the search engine algorithm to give leeway for this.
• It is likely that not all links would be on topic, nor should they ever be - human variation in language etc would determine that some links would be seen as ‘off topic’ by a search engine. Espescially when you have a brand name that means nothing in itsel: I was thinking about Diageo or something similar.
• Having exclusively links from high PageRank pages may indicate that you are operating within a hot topic again, or you could be spamming. The natural distribution curve for your website will be different from other websites but there may be points in time when your natural distribution changes drastically in terms of PageRank.

What is an ‘unnatural link’ profile?

If a natural link profile conforms to the rules above, but doesn’t need to obey all five at the same time. An unnatural link profile would be one where the rules of natural linking were broken often enough to trigger the filter(s).

This would be reasonably simple for a search engine to use as you could use threshhold trigger points within an algorithm to indicate when a website went from having a natural to an unnatural link proflile and vice versa, with various stages inbetween.

Testing Natural and Unnatural Link profiles

Base line test involved:

1. Five domains
2. All had been spidered for more than three months
3. No keywords in the domain names
4. All were .co.ukdomain extensions
5. All hosted on the same server

I’ll be putting the test results in our next post. If you have any thoughts in advance of our publishing the results please let us know.

I’ve been reading quite  a bit lately about peoples WordPress blogs being targetted by everything from Malware Redirects to BlogRoll Spam. I thought I’d stick in some bits and pieces to help you get your WordPress blog toughened up and make your blogging safe. If you have a bog hosted over at wordpress.com rather than your own install you’ll probably never have to worry about these things too much - you lucky people :p

1.  Keep checking in @ Blog Security: They’ve been doing some great work on keeping the community updated on security exploits with WordPress. Subscribe to their RSS feed - it’s well worth it. They even have stuff on WordPress Mu updates - which is fab.
2. Matt Cutts posted about toughening your WordPress blog: the bit about using empty index files can be hughely important as I’ve seen requests for this file going up quite a bit on some blogs lately from some strange IP addresses.
3.  There are also ten tips over at noupe.com. Some don’t always work (I have some Plesk and some CPanel servers which exhibit different behaviours when trying some of these out.)

Hope that helps all you WordPress addicts get a WordPress installation thats a better, and safer, than ever before.

If you know any other tips/tricks/etc that I could be using drop em a comment.

This is a plea to anyone who can help us here. We’re looking at building a Facebook widget - purely for vanity. We’ve had a look through the web and found various video tutorials about developing these but so far I’ve not been able to find one which has a step by steo guide for techy folk on how to build these. Its going to involve parsing an RSS feed at some point.

Some of the applications I’ve seen online seem to build them for you - but they dont really offer us the flexibility we’re looking for.

If anyone knows of any good Facebook tutorials, guides or walkthroughs drop us a comment below.

For a while I’ve been thinking more and more that Matt Cutts, aka Google Guy,  blog is becoming less relevant to me. It’s became a mecca for lots of non-seo noise that is starting to block out the good stuff that he used to post about Google and SEO.

In the past he posted some really cool stuff, that was useful to everyone from web developers to Internet marketers. Some great posts included:

• Backing up Aaron Wall of SEO Book
• 301 redirects
• BMW getting kicked out of Google

Increasingly I find that posts to be of less relevance. due to his I’ve started to use the official Google Blog more and more as a source of info about what’s going on at the search engine and referring less and less to Matts site.

Does anyone still think that Matt Cutts blog has the same level of information as it used to?

Having a well organised work station is great: in tray, out tray, worklist etc all help manage my work flow (kinda). But I often find that my file system gets out of control.

So recently I started using Folder Marker - which allows you to change the colour of folders within windows. So now I have nicely colour coded structure which I am (trying) to use all the time:

• Green folders for Admin
• Orange Folders for General Clients
• Red Folders for Clients I am working on
• Blue folders for old/expired clients
• Purple Folders for My own personal website stuff.

Its strange but this has actually made my work more efficent. (I’ve just noticed this post reads as if it’s some affiliate promotion or something).
If you fancy giving it a try download Folder Marker

As a quick note I found folder marker over at Geeks are Sexy