FiddyP

It always amazes me how much time and effort that people will put in to SEO tricks and tactics, how they swear that they know Google will ‘see’ this or ‘know’ that based on some rumour of a overheard bit of gossip written by a black hat SEO guru. Lol, what is a SEO guru anyway?

It’s an emperors new clothes designer that’s what! If someone tells you that they know what the Google algorithm wants then they are feeding you a line of BS because no one knows and if they did, Google would change it so it would be old news very quickly.

Is all SEO hopeless or even real?

Of course not! there are things that you can do that are known as ‘best practices’ or more commonly known as, ‘common sense’ and you can find out about them from Google itself from their webmaster pages and blog.

A good friend of mine who has successfully got his clients to the number one position on Google for their chosen terms recently wrote an interesting article on SEO and is it real?. He spends his life on and around Google search and even he says that you can try too hard.

The human factor

I recently had emails go to and fro with a colleague and she was quoting another SEO guy who said to bold this term and only do it once and how that is how the Google algorithm ‘knows’ what the article is about.

That makes me lol! Google algorithm ‘knows’ nothing! it can’t ‘see’ anything either, it can only trawl text and html source. It doesn’t look at images, it only stores what they’re name is and whether or not it has a caption and what that caption is.

Here’s a little experiment I want to try to prove that last paragraph..

So, I was like

later that night

A good friend said..

3 minutes later… (at 4:49am my time)

about a femto second later..

All while I was asleep in bed…

I’m not crying (much) but I would have loved to get an invite, I watched the looong google wave video last week recorded at IO and was totally impressed by the ability to collaborate with others without having to say, “hey, lets collaborate on something” . I’d love to get an account just to connect with other plugin authors, imagine the awesomes that we could produce for WordPress if we put our heads together?

If you have an invite and want me to bear your children to better the world by giving one to me, I’d love it andrewgbailey (at) gmail.com

I’ve been using the Google translate button on my google toolbar for quite some time, it’s got a whole list of languages that it can attempt a translation from.

Look at how it translates this Norwegian language blog when I click on “translate to English”:

The original page

After translation

Ok, so it’s not perfect but I’m sure you’ll agree that it is a lot easier to figure out what’s being said!

It means I can respond to a post if I have something to add and it always seems to surprise the blog owner that I could understand their article!

I’ve used this a lot more recently due to CommentLuv being picked up by a lot of foreign language blogs like CommentLuv users Andymse in Indonesia and My Lovely Blue Sky in Colorado but written in Malay Chinese

There are German, French, Spanish, Japanese and other language blogs that can be translated by the Google toolbar.

You can even add an option to show a translation from English to a language of your choice when you hover over words, I choose a new language to translate to now and then so when I do my normal web work, I absorb a language via osmosis…. it’s true!, I had it set on German for a few weeks and when i was on a German site I instinctively knew which was the about page link and which button meant “Support”

Installation

Easy peasy, just download the Google toolbar for your browser.
Visit the settings/options

And choose the language you want to learn by Osmosis!

Hot on the heels of me bigging up Chrome in a previous post I got a bit of a shock when I tried to visit Google adsense from Google Analytics

yes, I know it’s because of the ‘s’

I used a friends computer the other day and they were really surprised when I used the google search box on Firefox to do a quick sum.

he was like, “woah that’s amazing”

I was like, “dude, wtf?”

• He’s the type of guy that minimizes all the open windows one by one only to open a browser from it’s desktop icon,
• he always goes to google and types in the url to the search box and then goes and clicks the top adsense ad to get there,
• he thinks those annoying mid page ads that look like a warning dialogue box are real (every time he sees them)
• he thinks that when I went into his BIOS that I hacked into his computer via a back door, he still tells his friends about it
• he thinks he can clear up some space in his pc by deleting 150kb .dll files
• he takes literally 100 seconds to type “yes” on MSN
• he’s still trying to capture something good on camera so he can make “millions” on YouTube (he swears he read a story that YouTube pays for each play no matter what I say or show him)

it’d be funny if it wasn’t true.

Looks like Google did some PR’ing recently because I’ve just been surprised by the amount of PR increase I have received on quite a few pages and sites, the main page here has gone back up to 5 and the commentluv page has gone up to 6!

The site I set up for free goes on the lottery has gone up to 5 for my id and 4 for everyone elses.

Even my crap napkin cartoon post has got itself a 5.

And my shop page category has gone up to 5 with only 1 product on it but at least they continue to trickle out. I really must get some more products on there and take advantage of the increased rank…

omg I am knackered, this post probably makes no sense but a whole week without a post or chance to visit my blogroll is hard to take so tired or not… I’m just gonna type

It looks like Google did a page rank update recently and it’s not as vicious as the last one where many blogs were stamped with a multi-point decrease. Fiddyp got a single point dropped on the main page, down from 5 to 4. The CommentLuv plugin page has still retained it’s PR5 at least.

My elottery site actually went up to a 4 from 2 (it used to be 5 though!) and a couple of my other sites had a small increase. Even an old blog that has had a “site moved” on it for months went up a couple of points.

How did you fair?

I’ve made an update to the CommentLuv plugin so it behaves better, the speed should be better too after rearranging the different parsing routines and I’ve added a bit of code submitted by Edward De Leau of http://edward.de.leau.net/ to handle web-log.nl blogs. Thanks Edward!

The second part of the AJAX series is coming soon, I’ve been literally worked off my feet this week so I’ll have to squeeze some typing in during the evenings this week to get it finished.

I’ve added some adsense code here and there to see if it has any potential, I’ll see how they perform before deciding if I want to keep them. Lots of impressions so far but no clicks and I’ve also added a couple Tradedoubler ads. One at the top for PC World and one to the right on the main page for special offers. A few clicks but no sales yet but it’s still very early to decided if they will be worth it or not.

I’m also trialling the Google search box instead of the WordPress one, it can search the web and this site and display the results within the FiddyP template which is pretty cool. I’ll test it for a few weeks to see how that goes too.

AntiBarbie has prepared a holiday themed short story for here and it’s great! Look out for it on the 1st of December, she’s a dark writer that one. You’ll see why when you read it.

My blog is 2 months old today and I woke up this morning to see a Google pagerank of 5 applying to this site!

This is the first site I have built that didn’t have the whole PR thing predominant in it’s construction, I just wanted to have some fun for a change and along with my wordpress plugins and prolific commenting, I get a PR of 5 and an Alexa rank up to 223,600.

In that time, my online counter says over 16000 unique visitors came here, my page hits on my other stats says an awful lot more but 16000 is a good enough number to say!

The busiest day always seems to be Tuesday and a peak of traffic comes in at around 4 o’clock in the afternoon (UK time), Stumbleupon has been the biggest traffic source with the weblog tools collection site and the official WordPress plugins page for CommentLuv coming in second and third.

Google itself has only accounted for about 1000 of the entire hits, it’ll be interesting to see if those go up now it’s a PR 5 here.

I haven’t even got any monetization going on here, apart from a small link in the sidebar to a pre-release affiliate program, I may go the monetization route later in the year. First, I want a professional redesign of this place. More 2.0 colour scheme and a rounded corner look and a little bit of tidying up on the sidebar and then I’ll start thinking about some flyby advertising to see if can get my PR down a little

Sooo, who’s up for a free paid review? lol