Ok, this isn’t really a useful post to anybody at all… more a request for all these Bots to stop spamming me (if any of their users actually read this)
I’ve had 44 spam comments in the past 2 hours, really taking the utter piss now!
They are not even decent spam comments! All but 4 are total giberish!
Thank you, come again! (or don’t if it’s you spamming me!!)
I wanted to try and get a lot more posts on my blog this year – was considering trying to set myself a target of at least two a month and seeing if I could get myself into a regular pattern!
Unfortunately after finally getting done with the Christmas rush we have now had some changes at the company which has resulted in our Head of SEO leaving the company. I’ve got no doubt at all that Phill will land on his feet with all of this and get himself the next role that he wants – whether that role is self employed or looking for a head position elsewhere.
As for those of us that are left at Summit Media we now have more work to pick up between us, obviously just one of those things you cope with and get on with so not complaining about that.
To be honest… I’m not really sure this post has a point at all, but I felt like I needed to make up a “genuine” excuse for myself on why I’ve ALREADY broken my target for this site for the year, and we are not even out of January.
Oh well, there is always 2011!!
A few months ago there was a tweet (and I believe a blog post) by Dave Naylor on the exploitation or URL shorteners in general, specifically bit.ly (as that was the example he used).
On seeing this I decided to sit down and see what I could find out about further ways to ‘influence’ these URL shortners to send me more traffic and to possibly impact on crawl times and as such rankings.
On 24th September 2009 I decided on how I should do this and implemented it straight away.
I’m not going to give exact details out there of what I did because there are probably URL shorteners out there that are allowing this, it would be silly for me to give away this note without trying to test it a bit further 
(In fact I know there are URL shortners out there that still allow this because I just found one, but that’s a story for another day).
The graph below shows the instant clicks that I received from testing this (without mentioning this test anyway, not even verbally):
Unfortunately, as can be seen on the 23rd December 2009 all this traffic instantaneously stopped!
Not ideal as at this point I wasn’t checking it as much as I should have done and had no idea that this had happened and as such wasn’t able to do an instant check of my logs and traffic to see if any impact was made (hence why I’m not in the best of moods today because I have just ruined a lot of the benefits of the test)..
In case you think that this test was more of a “blackhat SEO exploitation” rather than an actual test – it wasn’t – what more is there to say about it. It was purely a test to see if increased traffic and crawlability would affect my rankings in one way or another.
From a quick (very unscientific) look at my statistics, etc. I would have to say that this has worked in the way it was supposed to, but, without a more in detail look, which I’ll be doing at some point this week, it’s hard to come up with any hard evidence.
I don’t normally want to share methods I’ve used to try and test things like this with the public because, as everybody knows, anything you find and then share reduces your competitive advantage… in this case though, I’m not really giving away any details that people can’t work out for themselves – I just wanted to post something up that gave an example of some of the tests that I am running in the background.
**EDIT**
I decided to go back and search for the exact posts on Dave Naylors blog so that I could add in the links that he deserves
So recently I’ve been doing a lot of work with link location networks at Summit Media, and from this I’ve been having a look at information I can get quickly and what effects it has on rankings – obviously we already have a scoring factor that we use for tasks like this but I’ve decided to start looking at this in a lot more detail.
I’ve come up with a list of around 50 factors that I think I can get information for relatively quickly and easily which I will be starting my study with.
I’ve started small and picked a high volume search term and are basing my initial analysis on just the top 20 results for this one term.
Clearly there are a lot of issues with this but I think as an initial study to get some sort of basic information before I take things a step further this should work quite well.
Not really got anything to share majorly at the minute, just thought I’d put up an introduction of the new project I’ve set myself…
Here are a couple of example graphs that show some of the very top level analysis that I’m starting with
Graph of relationship between Page Title Length and Google Rank
Graph of relationship between Meta Description Length and Google Rank
Clearly both of these have pretty poor relationships, not necessarily a bad thing – all information is good
I’ve decided I’ve being feeling a bit left out with my Avatar on all sites just being an old logo I designed for my holding pages that actually made no real impact, etc. and almost all other ones that I remember are because they are either the face of somebody I recognise or a graphic that is funny/stupid therefore memorable for me.
My logo that I always normally use for my avatars is this:
Although I do like that logo (I obviously have got a lot bigger versions but that is the one most to hand) it doesn’t really feel right anymore for some reason.
I decided to upload my Skype one to my Twitter for now since it makes me smile and although a lot of people won’t understand why it does make sense to my friends (which ultimately is what matters in my eyes since I don’t monetise anything I do)
I don’t think that is ultimately the logo I want to use so I think I’ll put this new avatar creation at the top of my “Things to do when bored” todo list (everybody should have one of these that they can just pick something up at random in my opinion) and then see what I can come up