Getting your pages cached by Google can be a nightmare at times. You’ve updated a web page and then you sit back and wait, wait some more and after more waiting GoogleBot decides index and cache your updated web page. It’s a problem that Dunkin’ Donuts had recently. They had a free iced coffee day in their branches put it on their website - but it was invisible in their search rankings as the page was not cached - GrokDotCom have posted on this recently.

Traditionally Google would index, and cache, your website based upon the number of links and the resulting PageRank of your webpages. Pages with more links and/or PageRank would be reindexed and cahced more frequently than pages with less links and/or PageRank.

It is possible to make changes to your website to help Google cache your website more often.

(more…)

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.

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.

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.

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

Oddbins is a great retailer. They’re staff have always been great at helping me out whenever I want wine, whisky or rum and have often directed me to new and exciting drinks that I’ve come to love - and my drink cabinet is rarely without.

However on there website they’ve made a bit of a mistake - no ‘£’ on the website they charge by the ‘?’. I have no idea where has the official currency of the ‘?’ but I really need to find the exchange rate so I can work out how much something costs from Oddbins online.

I’ve just had a look and its my copy of firefox that’s doing all this as it’s across lots of sites - anyone know why firefox aint handling ‘£’ properly?

One of the things we’ve been working on at IMJUK is to devise some added value extras: we’ve messed around with google maps and have given away a spreadsheet to help monitor the progress of internet marketing campaigns - we’re now looking at providing some free templates for Pligg, Wordpress etc.
(more…)

I’ve posted before about how great FeedBurner is for getting your feed subscriber stats. However I do feel that it has a major failing - it doesn’t give you your link love back. And as someone who loves the free links that you can get from using your RSS feed appropriately having a feed in feedburner becomes a non option.
(more…)

I just saw today that Microsft have launched their equivalent of Google Webmaster Tools at http://webmaster.live.com/. I was really interested to have a look at this.

(more…)