Thursday 27 March 2008

Blatent Plug

The digital point forums are full of crazy people who can't read specs, the webmaster world ones full of crazy people with huge egos. However! There's a rather good SEO Forum starting up - http://forums.seohelp.org - run by experts who have maintained a free help service in their spare time over the past four years. Drop in!

Wednesday 26 March 2008

AMEX advice for idiots

AMEX have been blasting out some fairly self-contradictory advice recently, according to WebProNews. They suggest that small businesses avoid employing SEO guys:

don’t waste money on so-called Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) specialists. Search engines are very quick to penalize sites that try to trick their filtering techniques, and once your site has been put on Google’s blacklist, it will take forever to get off.


Obviously the SEO people have been up in arms over this rather broad tarring. While of course there are many terrible SEO firms out there, and even more that over-charge, it's fairly easy for anyone to spot a dodgy outfit thanks to Google's published SEO guidelines.

Anyway, the bit where this gets "interesting" is about here, where AMEX then proceed to dish out SEO advice themselves!

using clean U.R.L.’s like yourdomain.com/store/widgets instead of yourdomain.com/store.php?id=42&categoryID= widgets will increase your chances of getting indexed in a search engine.


Sound advice indeed. Shame about the utterly conflicting points of view presented here, though. Tell you what, AMEX: how about you stick to raping me on chargeback costs, and I'll stick to what I do best, too.

Monday 17 March 2008

Google forgets everyone's News settings

Google news is great. You can view a bunch of categories of news, add and remove these categories for various regions (e.g. take out US entertainment, add Global politics, that kinda thing), as well as control how many stories show for each section. Plus, you can show stories relevant to a specific keyword (say, "SEO", or "free chocolate"). There's even this great thing where you can drag and drop different news sections to create a custom layout.

Yeah.. got a big downside though. Every once in a while, Google deletes all your settings. Last weekend was just one such occasion!


From: David Allen
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:41:27 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Tues, Mar 11 2008 4:41 pm
Subject: My customized News page is gone
I had an elaborately edited personal Google News page, including a key
custom section. It is all gone! I get just the plain vanilla 'stock'
News page. Help!



He's not the only one:

Hi,

I logged in to my Google news today, and all my personalisations have
disappeared! I had a heavily customised layout, and now I just have a
default one with "Recommended for you" added. This is terrible - I put
months of tuning into my layout, which I haven't touched since mid
2007. Is it recoverable?



Way to go Google! I'm sure you won't do anything like that with my 6GB of GMail. Get backing up, sheeple..


 
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