2008 February

UKSBD Special Pages

I set up my 3rd demonstration page on uksbd.com tonight, this time for VikingKids an online supplier of childrens clothes from Scandinavia 

It is in the same format as the previous demonstrations, 3 pages; an information page, a latest news page, and a testimonials page. VikingKids provided me with some nice images to use and the text for the content. I set it out in a similar style as my first demo, but this time positioned the images alternately.

I’m still waiting for the content from 2 other businesses, will also add a couple of my own sites to it, and will then start thinking about marketing it better.

Getting used to a new website look

12 months or so ago I used to spend a lot of time on the affiliate forum affiliates4u.co.uk. They then changed the design of it, and since then I have probably only been there half a dozen thimes.

I’ve never known the change in design/look of a website effect me as much as the change to a4u has, and after spending 20 minutes there tonight wonder if I will ever go back there again.

Testing Google to the limits

I made a post in a business forum the other day about one of my test sites that had been filtered by Google and had just returned back to the serps after a long period.

One of the people who replied said “Never had a site filtered or penalized in my life” to which my reply was “You don’t do enough testing then”

I constantly have different tests running, and sometimes use specific sites just for testing new ideas, theories and for monitoring changes in the google algorithms.

Obviously some of these tests stray over to the dark side, and I sometimes use test sites to see just how far you can push the boundaries, which on occasions has led to me overstepping the mark, hence sites getting filtered or penalised.

The guy in the forum seems to think this is a bad idea, but I personally have always believed one of the most important things in search engine optimisation is testing, testing, testing.

Google cached snapshot of page not working properly

I’ve always been a great user of the google Cached Snapshot of Page feature, but are noticing that it is becoming less and less accurate.

Quite often I do a search, see a description in the SERPS, but when checking the cached snapshot it has no relation to the page or the description displayed in the serps.

Another thing I have noticed recently is that using a cached snapshot of a page on large pages only reveals up to a certain size.

An example of this can be seen on my Website Designers Directory it is a large page (over 860k) and displays the details of over 1600 UK website designers who are listed in my Business Directory

A look at the cached snapshot of the page makes one think that Google has only crawled so much of it, and that this is what they will have indexed. On closer inspection though, and by doing a search for a unique phrase near the bottom of the page, we can see that Google has in fact crawled the whole page, and the whole page is indexed.

To sum up: It looks very much like the google cached snapshot of page feature is either lagging, restricting how much it shows, or is simply not working how it should be.

Sim64

It’s been a week now and sim64 is still appearing in the serps for the obvious phrases, I will give it another week to see what happens, and then if it still hasn’t been dropped will start adding more content.

This time I will keep everything strictly White Hat and use it for unique content which I am not using anywhere else.

Still not sure what the content will be, or even what the site will eventually be about, but as my new years resolution was to use more sites, the timing of it coming back couldn’t be better.