West Midlands Business Directory
Every now and then I get what I call a google jammed page
A google jammed page is basically a page on a website that no matter what you do , it just doesn’t get picked up by google.
My West Midlands Business Directory page is a perfect example of this, despite changing the content, setting new links to it, and tweaking it about, it still shows a cache from way back in July and appears nowhere in the SERPs.
Tonight I set up a little experiment to test a system I used when I was selling World Cup football shirts back in 2006, will it work? I will only know if my West Midlands Business Directory gets crawled soon.
DoubleClick ignoring Google Adwords TOS
Now that DoubleClick is a google owned company does it mean they no longer have to comply with the Google Adwords TOS (terms of service)?
I had some adwords ads showing on one of my sites this morning which I didn’t like, so checked the display URL and added it to my competitive filter. A few hours later the ads were still showing so I decided to investigate further. I right clicked the ad, copied the source and pasted it in to Notepad to discover that the ad URL was completely different to the displayed URL, and was in fact going via clickserve.uk.dartsearch.net part of the DoubleClick network.
Now according to the Adwords TOS, the display url must be the same as the ad URL which enables us to know who to add to our competitive filters. If Doubleclick are allowed to do what they are doing it means we can know longer block individual ads without having to put dartsearch.net in our competitive filters, which could in turn block legitimate ads.
If DoubleClick are allowed to get away with things like this it akes a complete mockery of the AdSense competitive ad filter.
Google cache updated and tidied up at last
It looks like google have finally gotten around to updating the google cached snapshot of page feature. It looks a lot neater now and doesn’t appear to be effected by the CSS of the page being cached anymore.
Google confirm outgoing links help for SEO
Google has confirmed what many of us have believed for years
“Outgoing links are also important and should comply with our guidelines.”
Source: Inside AdSense
Google Problems 2008
It is being reported in numerous places that Google has been having problems today.
Unconfirmed reports say that an unexplained script has triggered PC’s that have the google toolbar installed and that this is causing strange re-directs to totally unrelated websites.
July 2008
Create a seed keyword list
Red Evolution have devised a fantastic new keyword tool which lets you create your own scenario for a search query. After creating the scenario, a unique URL is created which you can then email to friends, post on forums, send to people to test for you, etc. These people then enter the search phrase they would use for each scenario and the system generates a seed keywords list.
An example scenario can be found here, I’m looking for somewhere where I can advertise my services and products. and you can use the same page to create your own scenarios.