If you missed it, it on BBC Iplayer here
I love the get the Old team together, and how they worked in the early days.

then Today :

Ther’s a great bit with Sir Alan Sugar.. classic..
Dave

HTC Diamond or Samsung F480 Tocco
With the onslaught of mobile phones flooding the market nowadays, it’s becoming more difficult to choose the phone that is right for you or in my case for my wife. I have narrowed it down to three possibilities so far, these are - The HTC Touch Diamond, Samsung U900 Soul […]

Google announced AdPlanner, a tool to help ad agencies find where desired demographic audiences are active online. The WSJ highlighted how the new Google tool can help make the ad marketplace more efficient:

The Web-audience data could be combined with the ad-serving system, so that advertisers would be able to find out whether they would reach the right audience before they committed to placing an ad.

In addition to AdPlanner, Google will launch another tool that compares consumer response to ads against a control group of users who did not see the ad:

Separately, Google this week is expected to roll out a new tool aimed at showing how Web surfers respond to online ads. It will compare groups of people who are exposed to an ad with others who haven’t seen it, taking into account such factors as search activity and site visitation.

Update: Search Engine Land Reviewed AdPlanner.

Disruptive Technology
Disruptive technology is a term which I first heard at a Microsoft event,which in turn made me dig a little deeper, basically it describes a new technology that unexpectedly knocks out an established technology.
The more I thought about it a few things hit home. Take VCR’s when I was a kid these were the […]

Tomorrow will be 13 weeks since Yahoo acquired Indextools, and another week goes by where I have to tell a client that Google Analytic’s is the best fit for them, until Yahoo pulls it’s thumb from it’s arse.. and starts offering the ability of people to trial it again for free..
DaveN

What are the Top Seo Blogs in the UK.,, According to Google Trends thats is..
I have been playing a little today, at the Moment It’s Davidnaylor.co.uk and Blogstorm.co.uk are the front runners.. andybeard.eu is third at the moment

I have tried redflymarketing.com, cornwallseo.com, timnash.co.uk, distilled.co.uk
so any ideas make a list of who I should check
DaveN

I got an email from Gleb at seoquake asking me if I wanted a Demo (30 day free account of AdsSpy.com), seeming how I love free stuff I said yes and started to play..
DoshDosh has189 domains wow ok ..
Jimkarter.com 37 domains ok..
calacanis.com and Mahalo.com .. nodata .. pfffftt
Then I got thinking, about how we […]

Google launched a new version of Google Trends which includes website traffic estimates, and highlights….

• visitor locations
• top keywords
• related sites

You need to be logged into a Google account to get a numerical scale on the traffic graph, but you can still get the general trend graphs and other data without logging in. Google also allows you to compare up to 5 sites at any given time

Search Engine Land reported that Google Trends…

This tool bases its data off Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.

Those who wondered why using Google Analytics is a bad idea just got a taste of why it is a bad idea! Sure the data is only aggregated anonymously, but with Google owning 70% of the search market and having access to your analytics data you never know how deep they could decide to go through the data for competitive purposes. Is your site a keyword source for AdWords? How much of your data will appear on Google Trends?

You can’t export the data yet and it only shows data for high traffic sites, but it is a great free tool for marketers.

• If sites do not show any data then they are probably either low traffic sites or penalized.
• The related sites feature lets you know how related your audience is to other sites, which is useful for determining how familiar their audience is or if you are reaching a new audience when buying ads.
• The top keywords shows you what competing sites are getting traffic from, and if those terms tend to be more brand oriented or more generic in nature…which is useful when thinking about the stability of a website you may want to purchase.

Fred Wilson did a review of Google Trends, comparing Google Analytics to Compete.com and comScore across 3 high traffic websites.

Since we are investors in these three companies and know what their internal numbers are saying, I can safely say that ComScore and Compete are lower but directionally correct. Google is like Alexa in that they don’t report absolute numbers but even if they did, they are not directionally correct on this particular set of companies.

The fact that Google is even compared to the analytics firms with years of experience and algorithmic tuning shows how easily they could take a leading position in this market if they wanted it. Google will improve their accuracy, and at any point in time they could chose to expand the top 10 keywords to the top 100 or top 1,000.

The AP threatened to sue a blogger for quoting small passages, and at the same time the mainstream media is trying to redefine copyright for their own benefit. Eventually much of the mainstream media will start looking like eHow and Mahalo. Your content compiled and slightly rewritten by a third party. Your keyword list is their money list. Thousands of people are competing against you while you read this sentence. As your data leaks it is going to be tough to stay competitive unless you are often the topic of conversation. Public Relations is the only PR that matters.

I am probably a bit less pessimistic than Michael is at the moment, but firms are using G.P.S. data to create “reality mining” for offline analytics, predicting everything from traffic patterns, where to buy an ad, and where to place another store. A recent NYT article highlighted some such services:

Tony Jebara, also 34, the chief scientist and another co-founder of Sense, said, “We can predict tourism, we can tell you how confident consumers are, we can tell retailers about, say, their competitors, who’s coming in from particular neighborhoods.”

The idea of staying competitive through obscurity is obsolete. So you may as well be a loud mouth, encourage users to be loud mouths, and build a big brand that helps protect your plot from competitive market forces.

As a field get saturated one of the easiest ways to stand out is to take generalized tips from one field and apply them to another niche. Recently Rebecca mentioned this Recruitment SEO guide, and a friend of mine named Dave spotted this real estate marketing guide.

Some resources are niche specific while others are applicable to many industries. Ping Pong Pie (nice domain name) compiled a list of top social networking sites by category. The Zip Code Guy blog offers a 27 MB database of US cities, counties, and states which works great for local keyword generation for AdWords when used in combination with tools like Speed PPC.

When Google switched to a single universal icon a few weeks back they created problems, the icons on my bookmarks toolbar are now … (wait for it) … IDENTICAL. The last two on the right are Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Central, so I have no idea which is which. Compare that to the Google […]

Today Google released an new feature that gives away traffic stats and keywords for most websites on the internet. However what everyone failed to notice is that Google laid everyone else bare, naked and exposed but kept their own stats locked up and private.
Here you can see the stats and keywords for my website, while […]

OK which Firefox plugins have you found that don’t work with the new Firefox ? Personally, I think the new version looks pretty good, but already people are talking about its flaws regarding plug-ins. What about page speed is it faster / slower ?
I’ve experienced some issues on secure connection failure with Firefox 3 but […]

A website’s size can often be overwhelming especially when there are so many aspects to consider SEO wise. That’s why it’s important to have a clear focus as to what the client really wants from you even if your main role is to lead with knowledgeable direction to site architecture and indeed SEO strategy.
Here we […]

Really I wasn’t going to post this but since Matt Cutt’s asked people to snitch on paid links again I thought I’d bring up another case of Google’s double standard and two tiered justice.
CASE A
A public relations person starts working for a Bed & Breakfast in New England. The person comes up with the idea […]

Depending on what what side of the fence you sit on, this is awesome or really really bad … LOL
People keep on getting the NOFOLLOW tags in a mess, using it to SILO page rank etc, well what about the NOSEE approach, It’s dead simple server side script that if you are a search engine, […]

If you build a clean trusted brand many people will emulate your brand and leech off it. Everything from wrapping spam in the Google brand right on through to registering a domain name that sounds just like your name and doing mass email spam with it. You can’t stop all of it (or even most of it) but you can defend yourself from a lot of it by:

1. Registering a couple of the more common alternative domain extensions (like .net and .org). This also has the benefit of locking out some competition if you own a keyword domain.
2. Adding the word the to your domain name and buying it
3. Adding an s to your names and buying the .com versions (the person who bought seobooks.com wanted $25,000 for it…I should have spent $8 instead)
4. If you own a 2 or 3 word domain name consider buying the version with a hyphen between the words
5. If you have an affiliate program you either need to actively monitor the search results or prevent affiliates from registering your brand in the URLs
6. If your brand domain is not generically descriptive then buy not only your brand name, but also buy the name with your brand name + your field of trade in it. Just recently one well known SEO firm was the victim of brand dilution due to someone registering theirnameseo.com and doing a massive email spamming campaign.
7. Given that the April 2007 version of Google’s remote quality rater guidelines defined social sites as vital results if they rank then it is best to register your brands on the major social sites before others do. (Someone else is already seobook on twitter and I don’t think it would be cheap or easy for me to change that at this point.)
8. For each major product launch or linkbait launch you may also try to get at least the matching .com name (advice I wish I would have gave myself in the past).

Some companies may also go so far as to check for other domain names containing their keywords, monitor recently registered names containing their trademarks, or pay a third party to do so. You probably do not need to go that far in most cases, but if you are going to put a lot of time and effort into building a brand then carrying an extra couple hundred dollars a year in registration costs is a negligible fee to help protect your offering from brand dilution from unsavory market competition.

not sure how long is been happening, but I noticed canon camera ads on flickr tonight

could be old, but I just can’t remember seeing them in the UK
DaveN

No it’s not the add links at the bottom, this is better evil but better..
get your designer to create a wordpress template as standard :

style.css - index.php - comments.php - comments-popup.php - single.php
page.php - category.php - author.php - date.php - archive.php - search.php

but before the you package it up and ship it out : edit […]

How many time have you found a website started up a conversation with the owner and convinced him that his users reading about his “1967 VW campervan restoration” would fit perfect with your Client that sells “classic car insurance” , 2 months later you have 5 other people listed on there and you look like […]

I got an email a few days back about a flaw in the Yahoo £50 deal… this one I’m actually running
Start with £50 credit in your new Yahoo! Search Marketing account for a limited period only.

It turns out they have flawed logic, and that you didn’t have to deposit any money ! I also read […]