The BBC has reported from Silicon Valley the next stage in online communities is exclusivity. Following on from a report by HP researcher, Bernardo Huberman, they both talk about the amount of information and groups which is freely accessible to everyone on the internet.

“Everybody has access to the same kind of information and the same array of products,” he said. “Those who manage to convince you to part with a lot of money in exchange for being exclusive, feeling different, and feeling part of an elite group are the ones that are going to make it.”

I think this is a valid point. As consumers expect a level of free stuff from the internet, they are finding out most of it is garbage, which will condition them into thinking they will have to pay for quality.

Read the full article here

Worried about the Hadron Collider?

Those mischievous chaps over at SEO Black Hat have written about Google’s black hole. A very real phenomena that happens frequently. It’s not what you think either, not about being page 1 one day and no-where to be found the next, although that too happens a lot. No, this is about the power of authority sites and how they dominate 70% of the top rankings.

Read the article here http://seoblackhat.com/2008/09/08/black-hole-seo/

Myer, David Jones and Target have been beaten to the world of online shopping by an overseas department store. JCPenney, the US department store, has setup shop in Australia - not physically but online.

It’s an odd move, considering they don’t have a bricks and mortar shop here, and even more odd is all their sizing is in inches. What the? Having obviously spent a considerable sum of money on an Australian online store they couldn’t scrape together another $10 to convert the sizing to centimeters?

Anyway, I’m going shopping now … www.jcpenney.com.au

p.s. Actually not, the shoes I want are $18, the freight charge is $29 and the handling charge is $10. Mmm…how do all those people on eBay do it?

Google have added a new Beta tool called Google Insights for Search. It’s sensational. With a quick search you can see the regional differences between keywords. For instance, in the last 30 days more people in Victoria are searching for SEO than those in Sydney. And according to this tool, no one is searching for “search engine optimisation” anymore, interestingly it seems “search engine marketing” is no longer popular either (which kind of goes against my other data).

It’s a quick tool with an easy to understand graph that should really be used for more less serious searches or in this case political searches, so here goes. Over the last 90 days more people in Northern Territory, Tasmania and SA have been searching for “Olympics” than those in the Eastern Seaboard.

But when it comes to “Tibet”, the Eastern Seaboard leads the way, with no searches from NT or Tasmania.

I’ll let you make your own assumptions…

Google continues to be the dominant player in the Australian search engine landscape, with Hitwise reporting another hike in its popularity.

Last month, 87.81% of all Australian search engine queries were through Google. They’ve taken back some of Yahoo’s share, but have mostly reduced MSN’s search traffic since June 07 to half.

In the last year Google have gained 12% of a very competitive stake. Will they be able to grab the remaining 12% of the Australian search market? I doubt it, but the way these trends are pointing, it looks like it might just be possible.

View the stats over at Hitwise.

Udi Maber, VP of engineering at Google, is going to be a bit more transparent in how the search giant’s ranking algorithms work. On the GoogleBlog, he says “this blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past.”

Sounds promising, but as Google worry about giving away too much information for fear of their competition, I don’t think we’re going to read about anything too revealing. Anyway, it’s certainly a blog post to watch, read more here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/introduction-to-google-search-quality.html 

Google algorithms appear to change daily and whilst competing for popular phrases I notice who moves around and am always interested to figure out how a website got to the front page. I’ve been focusing on the term SEO Services for a while now - just researching, I’m yet to implement any optimisation until I launch my new site.

Anyhow I notice today there is a new player when you Google SEO Services. Number one is a company called Web Dynamic. They have a really good looking professional site, but scratch the surface a little and it’s no so professional.

If you click the first link you’re taken to a page titled SEO Services, still looks good, you’re in the Search Engine Marketing group, you click the tab and you’re taken to an equally as nice page talking about search, you can’t see a link back to the page you just came from, but that doesn’t really matter does it? Well, yes.

This is a well designed site, it doesn’t look like the kind of site that forget about a link. So a bit of investigating discovers there are more than 13 orphan pages all dedicated to the same subject:

1. SEO
2. SEO Australia
3. SEO Services
4. SEO Services Company
5. Search Engine Optimisation Provider
6. Search Engine Optimistion Consultant
7. Search Engine Optimisation Strategy
8. Search Engine Optimisation Company
9. Search Engine Optimization
10. Search Engine Optimization Services
11. Search Engine Optimisation Australia
12. Search Engine Optimization Australia
13. Search Engine Optimization Specialist

See them all live on Google and on their page, www.business-directory-online.com.au, where the SEO person obviously just got bored and just posted everything. They all contain pretty much the same content, just re-written in different ways and prominent use of the keyword.

I hear what you’re saying - it’s not spam and it’s not against Google webmaster policy to write the same page more than 13 different ways (I got bored of counting all of them). But, wait - there’s more!

These pages all have inbound links. From crappy domains. The spammy domains:

http://search-engine-optimisation.org.au/

http://web-designer.org.au/

http://online-marketing.org.au/

http://website-optimisation.org.au/ etc - there’s rather an impressive collection of .org.au’s.

All of these domains are registered to the same guy who has registered the webdynamic.com.au domain.

Whilst they may not have breached any guidelines what they are doing is filling the web with spam, actually no, they have breached, just looking at the Google Quality Guidelines - basic principles:

“Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

Mmm…I think not.

p.s. I’m not being a bitch - it’s all part of learning what makes a quality page one result. This ain’t it.

I’ve just taken an SEO quiz from SEOmoz and it turns out I am a dark lord - which is good thing…
SEO Dark Lord - 95%

Are you an SEO Expert?

I was following up with our friends of Google to see if Rob’s Google maps business listing has returned to normal (read here). No, it’s got worse, the mother ******* Nestsoft people have hijacked my mother ****** listing as well.

If you do a search for businesses on http://maps.google.com.au/ and type in SEO as the service and Sydney as the location, you’ll see our friends of Nestsoft appearing in the number four spot : Nestsoft Web Development, Designing, Seo Services…mother ****** (Gordon Ramsey can fill in the *******)…

Now I’ve just noticed I can claim this listing - it has a sparkly “NEW” link next to it. Even though it’s already in my Business Centre, anyway I’ve gone through the whole claiming and filling in details again - thinking it will all be sorted when I get the phone clarification straight away - only to find I can’t do phone clarification - it’s disabled. Mother ******! I’ll have to wait weeks for the mother ******* postcard.

The race is on.

Who will be quicker:

• Snail mail or
• Google Maps or
• Google AdWords (yes, I also wrote to them as they disapproved one of my local business ads based on mismatching business name)

Sadly my bets are on snail mail.

Even sadder: it’s Friday at 7.55pm and I’m still at my computer…

Jill Whalen has finished another piece of her excellent “how to” series of articles at Talent Zoo. This one covers writing a killer title tag. I agree with all she says, and would add that after I’ve written my title tags I’ll do a quick search on Google for each of the keywords I’m targeting to compare my tag with those that appear on the first page. I want to make sure that whatever I can control to appear in the search results is more clickable than anyone else’s title tag and description.

Read Jill’s article here: http://www.talentzoo.com/website/columns/ColumnContent.aspx?Id=2140