http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/flashTrackingIntro.html

Really exciting for Flash site developers as it shows Google are taking more of an interest in them and could lead to more Flash development.

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The widget is on the right —–>

Click here for the widget code to put it on your site.

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The other day i reported on sitenumberone breaking into the top 10 for a couple of weeks and yesterday i noticed quicksilhouette.whsites.net in the top 20.

This one is doing a really crappy spam technique but one that has worked for a short period of time and even a day in the top 20 of car insurance can be big money.

The site seems to be down today, (possibly because it is hosted on a free hosting network and they have exceeded their bandwidth for being in the top 20!).

Here is what they have done:

They are doing a very simple form of cloaking - showing the search engines something different to the users. The have created some content that is displayed to the user:

and some content visible in the source of the page that contained links to other sites. The visibility was hidden in the CSS file. The content was then broken into small pieces of text through <span> tags and making it look continuous through <nobr> tags. I think they may have done this bit to make it look like the text is a hidden navigation structure and not a large block of hidden text.

This is a old technique to hiding content so why has it worked?
Well, it looks like it may have been a couple of small factors:

1) It’s not the hidden content on the above car insurance site that is helping them but the hidden content on the link network pointing to it. The network pointing to it have no authoritive links but it is doing the same cloaking technique as quick silhouette resulting in hidden links pointing to quick silhouette. Now the content may not offer much benefit but the links could still be followed by the search engine passing on link equity to the quick silhouette site.

2) The second factor is a bit more interesting and offers more insight into what Google is currently looking at. Quick silhouette is hosted on a web hosting network - whsites.net. This results in the domain having a huge amount of links and many of authoritive ones.

The second point and the sitenumberone factors offer the same outcome, that Google is looking more at the domain authority from link juice being passed to the overall domain and holding weight in Google’s trust of the site.

Both sites have now dropped out of the results but there is a link between these two sites and both the internal linking structure and overall domain authority, factors that you should consider when optimising your website.

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The feature reads your comment back to you before you post it. YouTube are trying to stop people from posting so much unreadable crap on the comments and their approach to solving this is to include a option to read the mindless dribble that people have written back to them.

It is pretty useless but can be a good laugh in the office!

My advice is to turn up  your speakers and get it to say something like:

Although it gives you a maximum character count it only reads back about half this amount, but it’s still good fun.

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www.sitenumberone.org.uk/car_insurance.html is the page ranking.

After a bit of analysis into this to find out what is making it rank so high, I’ve noticed they have over 100,000 links pointing to the domain and about 758 pointing to this page.

Looking at these links they seem to be from sites like:

www.efcva.org
www.vtccm.org
www.crfpd.org

There are loads of sites like this.

Looking at these domains they all expired recently and have been registered in the last month or two. The spammy pages like the ones above have then been created and point to the site number one website.

The domains that expired all seem to have a number of authoritive links (www.crfpd.org has 32 .gov links).

So it looks like the company doing this has used a tool to find expiring domains, found the ones with authoritive links and then bought them. They have then created the spam page to help site number one to rank.

In theory Google says this won’t work as the site will have a new registrant so will go back into the sandbox but this may only be the case if the site is redirected to another domain. The fact this site has created a page and not redirected the site may have got around this with Google.

Hopefully Google will pick up on this and kick it out pretty soon

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Here is the conversation:

Hi,

Are you interested in getting a template/ banner/ header/ logo/ business cards/ mascot designs for no money for your site, in return we require text links from your site. Please get back to me if you are interested.

Warm Regards

XXX XX, Webmaster

ABC.com – Website Design Services

XYZ.com - Custom Logo and Marketing Materials

My reply:

Hi XXX,
I don’t generally include advertising on my site, particularly text links as i thought i read something about issue with search engines if i did this, is that not the case?

He continued:

Hi
Thanks for the mail. Yes, there are certain rules followed by search engines to rank a site, it follows an algorithm, according to that the text links you are placing must be under the heading “blog roll, featured sites, my favorites sites, etc.” you should not use the heading with the word “link” then the search engine deeply scan the data and make some action. So there is no harm if you put text links of others, but you should not use the heading as “link/ links” thats it, and the links you are placing should be relevant to your site thats all a search engine wants. You no need to worry I will give relevant links to your site, so let me know which product you are interested in template, banner, header or logo. Reply me ASAP.
Regards,
XXX

Interesting response! Completely untrue but at least he’s creative!

I continued:

Hi XXX,

I’ve looked at Google’s webmaster guidelines and it doesn’t mention anything about what you have said, it does say that i should use a ‘nofollow’ tag though -
In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, we urge webmasters use nofollow on such links.
Do you advise the nofollow tags go on your links to prevent causing any issues with Google?

Sorry about the questions, i just want to make sure i am not harming my site by including links to other sites.

Thanks

He continues with more bullshit:

Hi
What you said is one of the criteria, there are many criteria regarding links, if the links are related to your sites, there is no harm, no search engine will take any action. No follow links you can be used for the links which are irrelevant to you. Having related links search engine will enhance your rankings. I think we are more out of topic, so kindly get back to me regarding product. Await for your good answer.
Regards,

I like the way he has said it will help my rankings by doing this and then has said ‘we are more out of topic’

I replied:

Hi XXX
What site would i be linking too?

He responded:

These are my link details, send me the product details, I will go through it tomorrow, moving now, bye
1) Link Text - SEO Services
Link Url - abc.com
2) Link Text - Marketing Strategies
Link Url - xyz.com
3) Link Text - Web Developer
Link Url - 123.com
Regards,
xxx

So he has lied to me about the guidelines and then asked me to link to SEO services!

I got bored at this point and told him the truth:

Hi XXX,
Looking at the three sites below they are all registered by XYZ.com and all three offer SEO services. Based on this i would expect you and them to know Google search engine guidelines. How you can actually say ‘there is no harm, no search engine will take any action’ and ‘Having related links search engine will enhance your rankings’ is absolutely disgraceful. You are lying to people who may not know any better, luckily i do!
I work for a world leading, ETHICAL search engine optimisation agency and if you actually took the time to read the sort of things included on my site you may have thought that this person actually knows about SEO and i shouldn’t try to trick him into damaging his own site through such blatant lies!

I now have the 3 sites and the parent site that is blatantly breaking Google’s guidelines and, as such this email and it’s history will now be sent to Google’s spam department and hopefully all 4 sites will be removed for the listed very shortly.

I don’t care that they are buying links but a hint to the ones who try it out there - if someone starts to question, it don’t lie. It just makes things worse and you will look like a moron, especially when it gets sent to Google!

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The first is a site called Knicker Picker. An amazing visual site that offer the USP of models actually trying on the underwear/swimwear before redirecting the user to the relevant retailer to buy.

This year Knicker Picker is second only to Victoria’s Secret in global lingerie visitor numbers and has over 30,000 sites and blogs linking to them, not bad in a site officially launched in May 2008!

With no SEO work the site now ranks 1st for knickers, on page 1 for lingerie, ladies swimwear, nightwear and thongs.

Another great viral video i’ve seen has been created by Rebel Virals for caterer.com.

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We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.

This is obviously a benefit for the Flash websites out there but the amount of information spiderable to the search engines is still pretty minimal and a Flash website will never be able to compete with an HTML website. So a word of warning, don’t let the creative agencies out there use this as an excuse for creating a funky site that still won’t rank for anything!

Full article can be seen here

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The presentation demonstrates how holographic conferencing can work but, to me it opens a whole new doorway of customer interaction.

Here’s what I was thinking:

A customer goes onto a business website and, instead of navigating through the site everything is voice recognition; a hologram of a personal shopper appears in front of the user and answers any questions they have with auto generated responses, offering an amazing user experience.

There could also be an actual person on the other end to answer questions, such as a doctor or customer service manager.

These ideas may be a bit ‘out there’ but if a creative marketing person can’t be out there with their ideas then who can!

The marketing avenues this could potential open up to businesses is endless and really exciting.

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