I have a great respect for the tried and tested SEO techniques that everyone uses to make sites rank more effectively. We’ll always use them as they’re are useful at achieving relevance. However rankings aren’t the be all and end all of SEO. Natural search is a marketing channel – it is not for just generating traffic its about making sales. Duly all SEO needs to be put in this context. I’ve had a quick look at some systems that sites use to achieve rankings which are just plain ‘old hat’ they get rankings but don’t always do much more to help the website.

I was reading through the terms and conditions of some affiliate programs the other night. During this I noticed that if you’re an affiliate on the H Samuel or Ernest Jones programs you’re not supposed to be targeting misspellings of the brands . Why strong highstreet brands such as H Samuel and Ernest Jones should really have to worry about aspect of their brand online is beyond me. If you’re an affiliate you shouldn’t be attempting to rank for phrases such as:

• H Smauel
• H Samuels
• H Samul
• H Samel
• Ernst Jones
• Ernet Jonew
• Enrest Jonew

After having already disrupted the Web Position gold ability to scrape results Google has now thrown another spanner in the works. Results are now server within H3 rather than H2 tags. Not a big change I grant you – but as everyones scraper is set up to look for these when analysing the pages they’ll all stop working. Can just see loads of wee coders having to try and remember which part of code they’ll have to fix to get it all working again.

God knows how much hand checking will be going on today until they get it fixed. No doubt SEO offices throughout the world will be getting the evil screen at Google telling them that they can no longer access Google as they have some spyware or a virus installed…

For the last two months I’ve not been posting here at all, work and other commitments . Anyway I’ll be back up and running again next week. I’ve just moved servers and need to get some backendy stuff and plugins working again.
This may mean that some of the stuff aint working yet. If you find anything stick it in the comments below. You may have noticed the themes gone and that my blogrolls gone – just hacking it out of Google cache.

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.

From what I’ve been reading over the last week or two it would appear that following  the puchase of IndexTools by Yahoo! IndexTools is going to be made free! Soon you should be able to get an enterprise analytics package for your website and for at the best price you’ll get online – absolutely nothing :p

Is IndexTools better than Google Analytics?

You bet. I’m a strong believer in Omniture (it’s fab & when you plugin in some modules it rocks your online marketing world – if you havent seen Test& Target you’re in for a treat). Over at Search Engine Watch they described the free IndexTools like getting 80% of Omniture but free. To me is this is true the difference we could all be seeing from our free analytics package could be vast.

When can you sign up for your Free IndexTools?

Ah the difficult question – and the truth is I have no idea. All the ‘buzz‘ seems to be about it happening. At present I can find no information on timescales.

If you know any more about release dates for the free IndexTools or have some comments to make let us know in the comments below. I am sure we’ll be talking more the free analytics war that’s building in the nesr future.

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.