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

Well, here at Inverse SEO I decided that after my recent move to Posterous that I actually preffered having more flexibility over everything, mainly the benefits of properly working analytics!

So… with that in mind I contacted Paul Madden to ask him if he would mind me basing my new site design on his current design (from September 2009 according to the CSS).

Obviously as you can see from the current layout of the site he was nice enough to let me do this, even asking to see the design once it was done which surprised me because I wasn’t expecting an invitation for future communication (even if it just be in this particular case).

The design isn’t ‘complete’ at the time of posting this, unfortunately I’ve not yet enabled the ability to post or view comments, etc. (so I apologise if you want to comment on this before I have fixed it)

Hopefully I’ll be able to keep with this design once, and it should encourage me to blog more!

I’m hoping to get some detailed tutorials or basic experiments I’ve recently completed

***EDIT***

Thought I’d post up this link here since people can’t see my comments or trackbacks at the minute!

Great when people ask…Post by Paul Madden – SEOidiot

Proves that it’s definitely worth that extra bit of effort to fire a quick email away rather than just doing your own thing!

***EDIT 2***

I’ve now enabled comments and trackbacks on the site properly… users with over 3 comments (I think I’ve set it at 3 comments) get dofollow links, as long as I think it’s a trustworthy link

Obviously from the URL I work in SEO – at Summit Media, working with Head of SEO Phill Midwinter.

Recently I’ve been heading a lot more towards development at work rather than general link building – although obviously I do still link build, create strategies, deal with ad-hoc requests, etc.

Anyway, back on track – the point that I was writing this for was just an update on what I’m now starting to learn, get more involved with and starting to like more and more

I’ve always been interested in coding and anything really mathmatical based, even from  a very early stage in life before I started thinking about work; then when I started work I initially went into Engineering, very mathmatically based!

I think this has what has made me like coding so much, with the research that is required, the logical steps that need to be taken and the problem solving (not to mention the sense of accomplishment when a project is completed).

The languages I knew previously, before really starting development, was just HTML and CSS with a small amount of PHP that I was starting to get the hang of.

I first jumped into Python, on request of @PhillMidwinter, and he worked with me to help me start developing tools to automate current tasks we are doing and speed things up a lot (I think we ended up saving about 2hours per job, for a 3 day project)

I then jumped into ASP.Net and C# for a client/twitter based project that I can’t really go into much detail to at the moment, but I really enjoyed this, especially since it has actually involved in creating backend user interfaces as well as all the coding and then the frontend of the website itself, it has made it a really fun project and been able to see it from start to completion (well almost completion anyway)!!

I’ve been speaking to my mangers at work in one of my reviews and I have basically been told that I might be given the chance to specialise in development of tools/etc. for the SEO team at Summit Media soooooooooo… my next plan of action is to try and do some research and learn some more about development and specialisations within development, then make a list of what other languages I want to learn (JavaScript really being on the top of this list because I think I should already know that)

We’ll see how things go from there but I’m liking the new direction my job ‘might’ take – not that I’m not happy with how it is at the moment, I love my job and the varying tasks and clients I get to work with, but I think this new direction will suit me and the way my mind works

Ranking for Rob Hughes

One thing that quite annoys me really about having websites and ‘sometimes’ updating them is the fact none of them seem to rank highly for my name, Rob Hughes.

Although this does annoy me I strangely don’t actually ever do anything about it – considering I work in SEO, and similarly to pretty much every Search Engine Optimiser out there, I spend my time reading about it and testing things, etc.

Even though I spend all this time doing this I never actually seem to bother writing any decent blog posts or spend any time optimising or link building for my personal website (probably mainly because I’ve got a habit of changing URLs every few months even though I really shouldn’t).

I’ve read quite a few posts recently by people like Will Critchlow at Distilled who keep mentioning brand management, which although it isn’t the same thing makes me think of exactly this topic.

Additionaly, it doesn’t help that my boss, Phill Midwinter – Head of SEO at Summit Media constantly decided he is going to announce how well he ranks for this or that (strangely the terms always seem to include the words ‘semantics’ or ‘Google’ in them).

Well I know this post isn’t going to go anywhere near repairing the damage I’ve probably already caused my situation by not even considering what I post about or posting with a totally irregular pattern, etc. and there is also a lot of competition within search for Rob Hughes so that does make it additionally difficult!

To make a start today (that I’ll probably have forgotten about tomorrow and won’t even bother trying to continue this task I’ve set myself) I’ve decided to start creating some more social media profiles with URLs that I can try and optimise, so here they are:

• Facebook profile for Rob Hughes
• Rob Hughes on Twitter
• Newly created Linkedin profile for Rob Hughes
• My Personal blog: Rob Hughes at Inverse SEO

I think that’s all of the ones at the moment – that’s all the ones I can think of anyway so I shall leave it at this and see what happens