The mediadonis memoribilia ebay auction has ended, and it has been won by the Munich iPhone developer Hans Schneider. Hans has donated €50 to the charity in return for the two items, and we will match the bid to bring it up to a nice €100 for the charity. Thanks to marcus tandler for indirectly supplying the items, and to Julian Dziki for being a good partner in crime 
I hope Hans enjoys his prize !
In aid of the Muenchner Tafel , I have gathered a few interesting things that I found over the course of the day at Munich SMX. Auction ends in 7 days on April 30th, and I will ship it to anywhere in the world . Technically the items fell in my possession, and I have no clear guideline as to how it actually happened. But I am sure it was a good story.
Auction ends in 1 week, April 30th. 
So fi you want to win some great memoribilia then please chewck out the ebay auction.
Paul
The traffic data in this example has been removed on purpose, but general information used with permission from client.
One of the easiest ways to see if you are penalised by Google is to see how your traffic is doing. Here in this example that show things quite nicely. Here we are looking between February and April 2009.
example of a Google penalty
The client in question received a number of new links via some media attention, which was in turn picked up by some blogs. Initially the traffic grew to about 300% it’s base level, and then suddenly dropped off to about 5% of the traffic in the previous month. The remaining traffic was coming from other search engines, 3rd party site who linked to the client and direct type in traffic. Looking at the previous traffic , from the start of the year:
Jan 1st to Mar 10
We see that the traffic to the site was increasing steadily, it had some peaks and dips, in this case due to weekend traffic fluctuations, and then around February 26th there were two big jumps over 2 days. And then suddenly zero. So what happened ? Our guess is that because of the quick increase of the number of links to the site, that Google decided to over night cut off the traffic to it. This was also confirmed by seeing that the clients SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) were also removed. The site: operator on Google was saying that the domain not in the index. For all of the other queries, where traffic was previously coming from, the client was no longer listed.
The client contacted us and gave us access to their Google analytics account, where we discovered that there was some strange things going on. When realising that they were no longer showing up within the first 5 pages for queries they normally ranked for and having no results from the site operator. We requested a reconsideration request on Google webmaster tools (click talk to Google on the right hand side, and then request reconsideration. Here we outlined what we thought had happened, and within about 2 weeks the traffic started to come back. We also took it as an opportunity to get some authoritative links from some business partners of the client, in order to add more trust to the domain. To enable faster spidering we also added a XML sitemap. This also helped to see if there were any problems indexing the content again. Note: When you send a reconsideration request you won’t hear back from Google, the only way you can find out if it was granted is if you start to see your site appearing in the index again.
Here is a quick video tutorial from Google on the topic of “Requesting reconsideration”
Here are two good posts about the google penalties from SEOmoz.ORG and SearchEngineLand.com and are well worth a read.
For my clients I tend to check on a monthly basis, who we link to, and what links those websites in turn link to. It’s not enough to make sure that the websites are live, rather one would need to check visually what is being display on these websites and where the links go to. Also it is important to monitor if sites are being dropped (i.e. failed to be renewed, and subsequently registered by someone else) or if they have recently changed hands. Being anyway associated with dubious domains has the potential to damage your SERPs (the so called “bad neighbourhood” effect). Often when these sites are bought or picked from the dropped list, the old version of the website will remain (or re-appear, scraped from somewhere like google cache or archive.org) and then over a period of time these dubious links will creep in. This all sounds like a bit of work, but in the end it can avoid damage to your online reputuation. It’s not enough just to have a google alert, which emails you whenever someone mentions your website/brand, online reputation management should start at home, on your website. Have a look at your older out going links to make sure that they still work and they still link to the website you intended to.
Just today there was a high profile case of the British Home Office linking to a Japanese porn site on BBC News.
Richard Hearne from RedCardinal is offering some free consultation again. A while back he offered some tips to the short list of the Irish Blog awards , and now he is offering to help some Irish online businesses, to analyse and optimise at their conversion performance. He’s also offering the help of two great Irish developers, namely James Larkin and Jason Roe, for the programming and graphic parts of the tests. All he asks for in return is that he can use your data in case study. Overall the package is worth €3,000, and has the potential to make your business more profitable in the long run.
If you have an online shop, or sell items online and you want to increase your sales rates, then this will probably be right up your street. Right now Richard is only offering this to 5 Irish companies, so be quick.
Over the last few days I’ve seen that google is starting to decrease the space where they display sitelinks. Previously sitelinks were displayed for some search phrases, for the first SERP result. They could have up to 4 extra lines, and 8 inner links to other pages on the top result. As you can imagine that having sitelinks for a top keyword would really increase your relative CTR, because of having more options to inner pages and the fact that you have more real esate on google.
Here is an example of the older view, for the keyword “Recruit Ireland”
But now on certain phrases (perhaps more general queries) these site links are compressed on one line.
In this climate the keyword “jobs” is highly sought after, but it’s also possible that it is just too general of a keyword to merit expanded sitelinks.
upon searching for “jobs.ie” you will get the full expanded version of their sitelinks.
And here is a further example for a highlight competitive keywords “cars”, on google.ie.
It will be interesting to see how traffic is effected by this recent change by google. It could mean that there will be a higher CTR through to your homepage, as sitelinks are not always shown up so prevalent. For those of you in positions other than first, I would expect that by making sure your keyword description that little bit more appealing you will be able to benefit from this change.
Did you know that you can control your website’s sitelinks on the google webmaster console ? Here you can remove links that you don’t want to appear in your sitelinks.
