Rob Hughes
UK Based SEO,  Genius  and Developer

Well today I thought I’d finally have a proper look at the Search Game from SharkSEO.

I completed the first 16 questions in about 30min (admittedly I’d say a couple of them were more luck than skill) but question 17… my gosh that was annoying as hell!!

I even contacted Dave himself:

That just annoyed me even more and I sat there for about an hour then I helped my friend Darryl Leaning (without giving things away too much) get to the same stage as me at which point we both got really confused about it…

I then decided I was getting really annoyed and was going to tweet something disapprovingly to Dave on Twitter

…

…

Then I saw it – I’m not going to say what it is because that would give it away for others but trust me, you’ll kick yourself!

Anyway, here we go

Finally completed it and, although I’ve got no recognition because I forgot to save the image that said “I was a winner”, I still feel happy I accomplished it

I’ve now decided I’m fed up of using multiple RSS readers and trying to remember to check them all everyday in case I’ve missed anything important!!!

So, to actually do what was recommended to me by, well, everybody a long time ago I’ve now transferred all my feeds to Google Reader.

If you can think of anything funny / interesting / feeds I should be following please feel free to share them with me, my reader profile is http://www.google.com/profiles/inverseSEO

Not really a lot of point in writing a long post here, just thought I’d let people know that I’ve just written a post about using Link Networks in Semantics (Link Removed because the post has been deleted due to issues out of my control ).

Probably the first ‘proper’ post I’ve written that explains anything and it isn’t even on my website!

Oh well, I’ll put something useful on here at some point!

Ok, well this post has now been removed due to issues out of my control so that kind of kills one of the most useful things I’ve written on the web, with regards to SEO / Online / Anything not to do with cars generally… oh well

The agreement was originally scheduled to be announced in late October 2009. Surprise surprise this hasn’t happened!

Obviously it is a very complicated agreement that the two companies have to make and as such it is taking a lot longer than the original suggestion (as these things always do).

Both companies are apparently “optimistic” about a deal being completed early in 2010 although they haven’t yet specified a date (we’ll see, I think their idea of “early in 2010″ is going to be very different from other peoples)

Yahoo! and Microsoft are hoping that once they have come to an agreement and things get implemented they are going to be able to challenge Google’s dominance of the search field (well, pretty much everything as it seems to be heading) … Personally I think that they will make very little impact at all, even with their combined technologies Google must have a lot of projects in the background that they haven’t mentioned anywhere yet – as with most recent releases they always have something to compete!

A release, linked to by Hitwise UK Press Centre, by Livescience says:

According to Experian Hitwise, Google accounted for 71 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 3, 2009. Yahoo! Search grabbed 16 percent and Bing 9 percent of searches, while the remaining 53 search engines accounted for just under 4 percent.

This gives Yahoo! and Bing a combined share of 25% compared to Google’s 71% share (admittedly US only)

This is compared to last years search shares which state that in December 2008 Google has a 72% share compared to the Yahoo! and MSN combined of 23%

Basically Yahoo! and Bing/MSN/Microsoft are going to have to pull out something pretty heroic in my eyes to make a major dint in the Google monopoly!

So, I’m posting this to mainly talk about the URL shortener bit.ly.

I was wondering what peoples opinion is on how accurate this is mainly because the figures are a LOT different to Google Analytics that I’ve currently got running on the blog.

I’m getting very little traffic at the moment, mainly because I’ve never really set myself a schedule to post anything and really need to start writing up some tutorials when I do stuff because (in my opinion at least) some of it could be pretty useful!!

Strangely enough, since I started writing this post there has been a massive jump to try and syncronise up my Google Analytics data and my bit.ly data… still nowhere near each other (i.e. bit.ly is showing about 4x the hits that my Google Analytics is)

I have briefly spoken to some other bloggers about whether they think the bit.ly data is accurate and strangely enough they seem to be getting exactly the same information…

I’m not sure what to think about it at the moment but here are some screen shots of the other days information and I’ll keep an eye on it to see if it changes much in the coming months and try and update this

InveseSEO Bit.ly Statistics for 27th October 2009

InveseSEO Google Analytics Statistics for 27th October 2009