This morning I was looking for a T-shirt printer in Munich, and I typed in the following search query [tshirt druck] on google.de , and after position 3, I see the google places map.

Casually checking out C & D, I didn’t notice that they had the same phone number. But both results brought me to the same same website. On closer inspection we see that munich-t-shirt.com 301 redirects to stadtkopierer.de, but none the less google places lists them both.

btw. stadtkopierer I am also surprised you have 20 reviews, when your competitors have 0, but maybe that’s a topic for another day.

Steps to create a multiple listing

Things that will probably need to be unique :

• website URL
• email address
• business title

Things that probably don’t need to be unique :

• phone number
• location

I did notice that the two websites have different WHOIS & DNS settings, but I’m guessing that this also isn’t so necessary.

Adding your business on Google Places

To add your business to google places, simply log in to your google account and visit http://www.google.com/local/add/, here you will be guided through the process. My only tip here would be to include as much information as possible.

I’m not going to go too in-depth as to why being listed on Google places is absolutely important. But if you are selling a product and have a physical presence in a town or city, then having a listing will deliver you a great leads of customers who want your product in a specific area. (examples : wedding planner {city name}, dentist near {postcode} , gardner {town} , etc, etc.) You know that people searching for these types of things are more prepared to buy, than someone looking for general information. Test it yourself, google [tv shop] & [tv shop dublin], and see how Google treats the different visitors.

Now I’m off to do a little further testing

Some quick points noted about Google Caffeine :

• Image results seem to have lower priority.
• Search results appears to be about 50% faster.
• Larger index size.
• A different sensitivity to keywords in domain names.

Caffeine Comparison Tool

As always we like comparisons to be easy, like the Google / Bing Comparison, so I chopped the tool around to do a comparison between Google and the new Google Caffeine version and it’s located at www.comparecaffeine.com .Give the tool a run and see for yourself the differences.

Right now we have a US .com and Irish .IE targeted versions, more can be added upon request. Just say the word !

Updates

Given the amount of feedback I’ve gotten, I decided to implement some changes:

• Added .CO.UK version , the tool is now available in .COM / .CO.UK / .DE & .IE versions
• Ability to see more than 10 results, now has the option to show 10/20/50/100 SERPs
• Personalised search is turned off. Result changes on the current version of Google SERPs won’t be effected by what you have clicked / searched previously.

Bing From Microsoft

Today Microsoft has relaunched Windows Live search and it is now called Bing (www.bing.com). Right now Bing looks very promising, at least for the US market, their image search and some localisation seems to be better compared with google.com. For some searches like [thai restaurant 33308] the results are very similar indeed. Bing’s image search has a nice slight zoom in featyre , and “similar images to this” option which is rather nice. They present the results rather clearer than google, and have an easier navigation system on the left hand side to drill down on queries.

For Bing.IE the results we looked at seem on a par with google.ie, i.e. as good or even better, when it comes to general queries of facts ([horse racing] for example). But when we start to ask more localised and to ask for [doctors in Cork] or [cooking courses], bing starts to show it’s weakness. I would generally expect more local search results to be returned, even without specifying “only pages from Ireland”. I’m sure that this will be improved over time, and Bing.IE’s deficiencies are not always a bad thing. Right now there are very little ads on bing.ie, so you can be sure that the results you are getting are not confusing you with paid ads. This alone would move me to check bing before google.

Compare Google & Bings Search Results

For SEOs we have thrown together a quick tool that basically compares the two search engines side by side in one frame. Check out our Google compared with Bing Tool . Here you have the option to compare the .com or the .ie version of the search engines . The query will check and display the results for both search engines so you can see the difference in their ordering of the SERPs.

Google vs. Bing

Search Results compared

Submit your site to Bing

Hat tip to Michele for the link toBing’s URL submission. If you were previously in MSN Live Search results, then your site should also be listed in Bing, but if not you should take the time to add your URL.

Is Bing the Google Killer ?

Right now I think it is too early to say whether Bing is a real Google killer, but it does look like it will give Google a run for their money. I’ve read that Microsoft are planning an ad campaign in around the $100m mark, so after that I’m sure everyone will know what it is ‘to bing‘ just like they know what it is ‘to google‘.

Business Listing

So if you were a Doctor in Cork, you could possibly easily get your business listed in the A-J business listing. Just think of the extra number of enquiries/leads that a bussiness could get by having their business appear in such listings. Of course some areas of business areas are already using this to full effect, take the hotels in dublin for example.

Hotels in Dublin

List your business on Google Local Business Listing

Here is a quick run down on how to  get your business listed on the google local business listings:

1. Go to the Local Business Center
2. Login with your google account
3. Select Add New Listing
4. Enter your business details and link to your website
5. Select your business categories  and add opening hours
6. Verify by phone/SMS/post

When adding your business we would recommend to add as much information as you can. Also think about optimising your company’s name listing to insure that it includes the type of business you operate.

For the US listings, Google has used some 3rd party websites like the Yellow Pages & Trip Advisor to seed the index. And it appears that some of the Irish listings have come through 3rd party sites also. If your company is listed via one of these sites, you can still take ownership by clicking on the link and viewing the full listing and then select “Add or edit your business”.

The Bad of Google Business Listing

Where there is any oppertunity to game google there will be people who will take advantage of it. Right now there does appear to be some SPAM in the listing for some queries like [car hire cork]

Spam in the Business Listings

Right now there doesn’t seem to be a way to report a listing, but maybe Google will add that soon.

Edit : Thanks to JohnMuller from Google I found out how to report SPAM on google maps.

The site in question is HarleyMedical.ie has a really nice design and decent navigation, site structure.

above the fold view

But let’s have a look at the full page view:

full page view (click to view)

There seems to be some large port of text at the bottom of the main page. The big worry is that they have have over 280 links on their home page. And on the sub-pages it averages closer to 160 links per page.

These links are clearly targeting keywords and it doesn’t appear that they are using them as a navigational aid. We all know links are important. Of course you should link to your some of your more important internal content from the home page, but basically having a keyword stuff sitemap at the bottom of the page really won’t help you rankings. In fact it could possibly have negative effects.

Here is a zoom in on those famous links:
 

200+ links in the footer

Currently it doesn’t seem like they have a penalty from google, they are ranking well for [cosmetic surgery] on google.ie and some other terms. Also they have around 150 pages in the index. We would see this SEO tactic as “high risk SEO” which would have the potential to have a domain banned from google.

A further SEO look

As for off page SEO , HarleyMedical doesn’t have many links, but they have gone the route of submitting some “basic press releases“. These types of links can be helpful for new websites, but what you really need is some good, relevant, trustable links.

There is also a potential issue with having similar content on their .co.uk domain, and it does appear that at least one other domain has taken a copy of their content as well.

And one final tip, fix the canonical URL issue

 Here is a quick quide on how to list your blogroll links on your homepage. It involves editing one of your templates (Admin Menu > Appearance > Editor) and editing some wordpress code around where the Blogroll links are called. On the default Wordpress Theme (and probably your theme also) it can be found in the sidebar.php file. 

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); ?>

Before you start to try and edit the template you need to make sure that you have uploaded the file so it can be edited. 

Replace the code above with the following code:
<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); } ?>

The is_home() function is an inbuilt wordpress function that checks if the page you are on is the home page, and if so it will display the subsequent code. 

Note if you are using “widgets” (Admin Menu > Appearance > Widgets) to populate  your sidebar, then this method might not work.

Some more advanced examples of listing blogroll links

<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks(); } else { wp_list_bookmarks('category=4'); } ?>

This example will show all bookmarks on the home page, and on all other pages it will show just links that are in the 4th category. You can find out the link category number by going to (Admin Menu > Links > Link Categories), then click on the category you want to be displayed. You will now see a URL in your browser that ends in &cat_ID=XX, where XX is the category number. In our example we will display category 4 on all other pages.

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.

Our actions against the penalty

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.

Google on Reconsidering Request

Here is a quick video tutorial from Google on the topic of “Requesting reconsideration”

Further reading

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.

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.

Site Links Jobs

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.

Site Link Cars

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.

Sitelink Tip

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.

So generally when I look at the website the first thing I do is I check out the source to see what engine it runs on. And I am happy to see that Dine To Read has the latest version of wordpress (2.7.1). Looking further into the website there is an easy to use navigation bar at the top, and links throughout the website have a nice structure (using the permalinks feature on wordpress), and they offer all the relevant information, such as a privacy policy, contact form, etc. One change I would make to the contact form is to also have a physical address available on that page also.  It’s also good to see that they are hosted in Ireland (with Blacknight).

There error page returs the right HTTP status code (namely a 404). But I would offer more infomation than:

The page you have requested does not exist. You might be able to find what you’re looking for from our home page.

Rather I would suggest they include a search bar (wordpress has an easy search function) and include links to some of their more popular parts of the website.

Getting back to the topic of search, this is something that is missing on their pages. Having a method where people can search through your site (especially if it is a dynamic site that changes often) is very important. This can be both good for existing users who remember a certain helpful page, say on the forum, but can’t find it anymore, as well as for new visitors so they can find what they want fast. 

The titles of the pages should be improved. Title text helps users aswell as search engines. By tweaking your title text to make it more attractive.  The main page for example “Dine to Read – A book club with a difference” really doesn’t use the title tag to it’s full effect. One thing with wordpress is that it lists the name of the website before the title of the page. This means that every single title will have Dine to Read at the start. Generally you will try  to have the keywords you want indexed at the start of title. An example of what would be better wouuld be ::

• Irish book club with a difference – Dine to Read
• Book club that discusses books over dinner – Dine to Read – A book club with a difference
• etc

There is a great plugin call All in One SEO pack  which will help you change titles of the pages, and it will also allow you to specify META keywords and META description tags on a per post/page basis. The META description is something that is used when displaying your search result, and when optimised (along with title tags) it can greatly increase you click through ratio in the SERPs. This would help pages in the News section to rank higher.

This will also help avoid content showing up multiple times. Wordpress is particularly bad at having more than one place where you can see the content of blog post.  For example you can see the post about World Book Day : here, here, here and here, and if you had categories you would be able to see it in more places ! These should have the noindex attribute to them, and this plugin will make sure of that for you. This would be another reason why the news section pages are not really being indexed by google right now.

So wrapping up my 45 minute analysis , I would say that over all dinetoread.ie , is a solild site, but it there are still a few tweaks that can make it more sound. 

Other things that are missing that could be added easily:

• a robots.txt file, currently this displays the main page and could cause problems. It doesn’t even give a 404 code, it says what is displayed on your robots.txt is an actual page. 
• a sitemap.xml file to tell the search engines what pages on your website are more important than others, and should effect the order of such queries. Currently the forums are figuring higher than the main page for example. 

*note : as this is a new site, there are not many inlinks, and therefore not easy to analyse this part of the website.

• a previously  registered .COM domain
• has google analytics code on the page
• has google adsense on the page
• only one page, this page in the google  index.
• plain HTML site
• no previous versions of the site listed on www.archive.org
• registered in January 2009
• sitemap not submitted to google

Details on Domain B

• a new .IE domain
• doesn’t have  google analytics installed
• doesn’t have google adsense installed.
• multiple pages, 3 in the google index
• wordpress based site
• registered in January 2009
• sitemap not submitted to google

Because domain A is a dropped domain, it is likely that thare are some  links to this site. These could be from websites that list dropping domain names, or links to the domain before it dropped. In the past I have seen that google has discounted these, and often won’t list them completely.  Google is very good at cleaning the slate for domains when they drop.  

In the past getting a dropped domain to be indexed, was harder than getting a new domain to be indexed.  Buying old domains, and recycling links was something Blackhat SEOs did in the past, and as expected Google has gotten a smarter over time.  So I was suprised when I saw that the site:domainA.com operator on google was showing this domain

And for domain B with zero links, and hasn’t been submitted to search engines, it is indeed baffling why it would start to be listed in the SERPS.

Yahoo & Google Listing Differences

When I compare what yahoo and google lists for these domains, there is also a big difference. Yahoo doesn’t have any listings for either domain, and for all intensive purposes, it doesn’t exist in their eyes, and on the other hand Google is fully aware of these sites, and is listing Domain B for certain keywords. This would lead me to the conclusion that it is something on google’s side, and the only obvious advantage for Google  is that I have browsed both sites with Google’s internet browser Google Chrome . After a bit of searching I wasn’t able to find any mention that Gogole Chrome can get your domain listed, but I do know that from their privacy terms it is possible that what you type into the browser is sent back to them. Google Chrome Privacy Info

“When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for.”

So this might be yet another way to make sure that your domain gets indexed by google.

• if you met the person you are linking to
• it’s a link to a friend or family member
• if you happen to have a crush the person
• or it’s another website you own

While these are nice, they don’t normally serve much purpose for me. The XFN relationships that are of interest me are ::

• rel=”nofollow” : for limiting the flow of pagerank
• rel=”external”  : XHTML compliant version of target=”_blank”

So here is a quick tutorial as to how you can add these attributes to your current version of WordPress (done for version 2.7).  
 

How to add nofollow to Wordpress Blog links

Warning:As with all editing of files, you should keep a backup of them before you start to change them. Believe me, it will save some headaches along the way. 

Adding the nofollow and external attributes is quick, easy and painless, here are the 3 steps.

1. open file /wp-admin/edit-link-form.php
2. Go to line line 193 / 194 and find
   <tr>
<th scope="row"> <?php _e('identity') ?> </th> 
3. Above  that add
   <tr>
<th scope="row"> <?php _e('seo') ?> </th>
<td><fieldset><legend class="hidden"> <?php _e('seo') ?> </legend>
<label for="external">
<input class="valinp" type="checkbox" name="seo" value="external" id="external" <?php xfn_check('seo', 'external'); ?> />
<?php _e('external') ?></label>
<label for="nofollow">
<input class="valinp" type="checkbox" name="seo" value="nofollow" id="nofollow" <?php xfn_check('seo', 'nofollow'); ?> />
<?php _e('nofollow') ?></label>
</fieldset></td>
</tr> 

Once you have this,  go to Links on the side bar, and now you can change existing links or add new links with these attributes.  There will now be an extra line in the Link Relationship section of your Links page.

Why use rel=”nofollow”

This is used when you don’t particularly want to endorse a link you are linking too.  Normally a link to another page from your website, is seen as a vote for that page. And each page only has a certain ammount of voting power. If you use the rel=”nofollow” no virtual vote will be passed to the link tartget. For more info have a check for “PageRank”.

Example of controlling votes via rel=”nofollow”. If in your blog roll you have 10 links, but 2 of them are to well know services, you can choose to disable your vote to them, and to increase the effectiveness of a link to those other pages.

Why use rel=”external”

In XHTML Strict the link attribute target is not supported.  Previoulys target was used as a link attribute to open new pages, break out of frames, by using target=”_blank” , target=”_parent” etc.  Now in XHTML you need to use rel=”external”  to inform the browser that this should be a new  

Next time at BlackDog

Next week I will be discussing on how to edit your wordpress template, to just have your blog roll on your main page of your blog.

• rank highest for the term [geansai gorm] on google.ie
• domain name had to be new
• .IE domains were not allowed
• no keywords allowed in the domain name

And here are the results:

Hats off to the other guys who but in some great efforts. I counted around 15 entries, all though I am not sure if some of them were created by the same person.

A longer post will be following in a few days hopefully. Where I will be outlining some approaches I took to things (obviously some things I won’t be discussing). As I am a great fan of stats, here are some:

• Overall I had unique visitors 788 to the website.
• The resulted in almost 6, 000 page views.
• The busiest day (besides December 1st) was November 16th where 73 visitors came and looked at my entry.
• 531 people visited via the keyword “geansai gorm”
• strangest keywords were “photosesion dublin” and “gigs in kerry”
• google delivered 601 visitors
• windows live gave 40 visitors
• yahoo sent 20 visitors
• 2 people came via MSN search
• 17 blog posts were created
• google indexed 36 individual pages.
• 232MB of bandwidth was used by visitors
• 7MB of bandwidth was used by googlebot

Daily search positions of the entries can be seen here.
Stay tuned or subscribe to my RSS feed for updates.

Here I will show you some tips on learning about search trends, changes in search patterns and popularity of websites, with a few nice examples. These should be a great way to start to look at your competition.

Search Frequency

The tool of choice is,Google Trends . It allows users to compare trends in search which is very useful to see how search frequency is changing. Here is an example of the difference in the search frequency between blackberry’s two new products (bold and storm) over the last month.

The values presented are relative (and possibly on a logarithmic scale) as opposed to absolute so it is a little  difficult to exactly quantify the difference in the searches frequency. But you do see which one is a clear winner. Also Google has the possibility to show the related news frequency, so you can see how hot the topic is, and find out  the reason for a specific increase in the number of searches about the topic.

Knowing the search frequency can help when you are running seasonal campaigns. Have a look at the comparison between Christmas and Valentines search traffic. Here you can have a great idea when you should start your PPC campaigns for example.

Website Popularity

The send part of Google Trends is what they called Website Trends. This is really a website popularity tool, which shows an estimate of the traffic going to websites of your choice. As usual it’s always a little bit easier with an example. Here is the comparison between myspace.com and facebook.com .

As you can see there was a cross over in popularity at the end of last year. Facebook is still gaining numbers of visitors, while myspace is starting to decay slightly.

Google trends really comes into it’s own where we can now look at the regions, again looking at myspace and facebook, but this time the data is based on Irish information.

We see that the crossover in terms of traffic happened more around the middle of September 2007.  With advertising programs on both Facebook and MySpace, I know which one I would be targeting more and more as a business.

Comparison between Irish Newspaper websites

The whole reason for this study was that I wanted to see what was the most popular online newspaper in Ireland, and to see there has been any changes in the last year. Here is the data for some Irish newspaper websites, and interestingly enough we can see some important events.

First off we can see the rise in the use of the domain irishtimes.com from July 2008, this was due to the Irish Times separating the news from the ireland.com domain. It remains that the Irish Times and the Independent are the top 2 most read Irish newspaper websites, and there seems to be little movement for the others in the field. Also we can see that over all the number of people visiting these websites is increasing.

Give Google Trendsa whirl and let me know if you come up with some interesting trends.

How many times a day they blog

Number of blog posts over the last 30 days

At what time of the day are the posts published

So here we see that google has metrics on usage of blogs. They are building up patterns of usage for the users. I’m guessing that they not only use this data to show us something nice, but that these factors could be fed back into the Google Machine and taken into account some way.
When you think about it, especially for blogs, having a usage profile it quiet interesting. It could be considered that these blogs that say, have a higher reader frequency, have a consistent blogging frequency  would be more important/trusted. These profiles could also be used for identifying splogs (spam blogs) or could even be a factor in ranking parts of a website. Google has access to a whole load of information from services like Google Reader, Google Analytics and FeedBurner. Now I am wondering if there is a feedback loop that effects your rankings in some little way. Sure why not ?
So if you don’t have a blog already, maybe you should think of getting one !

There are a few rules (so don’t forget to read them), and it will be interesting to see how closely they are adhered to, I can already (in the space of a few hours) see that one person is breaking rule #3.

I’ve decided to take part, and will be hoping that mybluejumper.com will come to the fore and will win. Either way it’ll be a bit of fun. I’ll be twittering my ideas under the name gorm_geansai, so feel free to follow me. I’m not sure how much time I can devote to this, but I will give it a go.

And while I am on the topic of twitter, I finally got around to using my account, feel free to follow that also. It’s at twitter.com/savagepaul.

Ranking on Regional Domains

The regional domains give preference to websites that are related to that region. Things that can influence your standing here include:

• Business address listing in Google and on your webpages.
• Domain name from that specific TLD. i.e. for google.de , using a .DE domain.
• Domain targeting on your Google Webmaster panel.
• Frequency of other locally related links.
• Server location, based on IP address targeting.

Also it is possible that language of a website and keywords in the domain have some lesser effects too.

While most people are aware of Google.com, there are also significant numbers of people using their local version of search. In fact Google will often redirect users to their local version of the search, as they know that the results which appear on regional search is typically more suited to searchers.

The net effect of having regional rankings, is that there can be different results in the SERPS for each version. Logically this makes sense, when someone searches google.ie for mortgages, it’s clear they are only looking for companies related to the Irish market, and the same is true on google.co.uk, etc. And the sensitivity tothe Irish market can be cranked up even more by selecting the “pages from Ireland” option.

For users this is great, but for a SEOs it can mean that we need to check multiple versions of google, to see the regional differences. But of course the positive side is that the competition to rank locally is a lot less

Listing of Regional Domains

As the format that google provides is rather awkward to use, I decided to put together an excel list, maybe this will be easier for people to use. In all there are 162 regional google domains, which took about 15 minutes to organise into a nice formula. The list can be downloaded from google docs and I will updated it if google adds some more regional sites.

It is also notable that google doesn’t show versions on all it’s domains, i.e. google.us redirects to google.com. And there are even some domains that they don’t own , namely Google.by and Google.cm.

EDIT : Seeing as someone emailed me and pointed out that the google docs version isn’t that easy to use, here is a CSV version of the regional google domains. I hope this works for people a bit better.

Looking at the google search results for Paul Savage, I see that a relevant result only appears on page 2. This could be due to many factors, such as:

• The name I have is really really popular – which it isn’t, well not along the lines of say “John Smith” anyway. Take “Yaro Starak“, google his first name and you’ll see that his sites come up first.
• The fact that there is some other high profile Paul Savage out there – more or less true as there is a Professor of Chemistry in Utah with the same name.
• Or just down to the sheer lack of links with the anchor text pointing to here – BINGO.

One hard part of link building is making sure that the links you get have a relevantly useful link text. This is easier said than done for links that you don’t have control over. Sometimes a simple note via emailing requesting a tweak could do the trick, but more often than not webmasters don’t have the time to go back and update all these various links.

So one short goal I have for the next few months is to start to register somewhere in the SERPS on the front page for my name. It’s always nice for people  to find easily you when they are searching for you. Actually this is the reason why I link to the blogs I read via their real name, if you are not on the list, do let me know ! And before I go, any link love, with my name as an anchor text  will be accepted with open arms .

My first reaction was  that of surprise and intrigue that this could happen to an IT services company.  So being  being the good  Samaritan, I decided to have a look at the site (disabling javascript first) to inform them  of the potential problem. Just remember that if Google flags your site like this, you won’t get any direct traffic.  Google will tell you to copy and past the URL at your own risk.   Visiting their site  I see that there is a n embedded javacript file inserted “optimised” META keywords tag from the domain adwnetw.com.

Now having an idea what the problem was, I was tried to use their contact form, but alas it was completely unusable, it appeared more to be for a sign-up form for an email list, rather than a contact form. Even if this was the form I needed, I couldn’t use it because there wasn’t a submit button anywhere to be seen !

Next I checked their lovely About Us page.

Besides the  fact that  there seems to be  major bugs in their HTML code, and resulting in a poor  rendering of their web page , I was able to find the contact number.  Then I gave the  Dublin  number a call (from Munich where I current am),  hoping to tell someone  that their website  has been compromised . Sadly all I got was the lovely screech of a  FAX machine.

Not wanting to try any other methods to contact this uncontactable souls, I gave up, and decided to pen another blog post instead.

Today I was doing a search for skiing ireland on google, when I noticed that one of the websites listed was flagged by google. The reason for the flagging ? The message from google was:

Suggestions:

* Return to the previous page and pick another result.
* Try another search to find what you’re looking for.

Or you can continue to http://www.knockairport.com/news.asp?dbtype=news&id=51 at your own risk. For detailed information about the problems we found, visit Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostic page for this site.

For more information about how to protect yourself from harmful software online, you can visit StopBadware.org.

If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google’s Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.