Social Media blog

The web evolves and changes very rapidly. A change in which people have been resistant to is the change from www to non-www domain names such as http://www.example.com to http://example.com. In both situations you have a redirection from the one to other to guarantee seamless use.

However cutting off the www element you save time and money. You don’t have to SAY www anymore. You can just say that ‘my site is example.com’. Saves time, and no, I am not going to say time is money. Not yet anyway.

Cutting off the www also means it is faster to type (in Firefox, the retro IE still does not support this) but most importantly easier to memorise and remember. Hence more money.

If there is any reason you think you should keep www, I would very much like to hear it.

It is a little comical that MSN adCenter fails to rank in position number 1 for the term MSN adCenter.
Maybe it goes to show… Read more

It seems that BA has acquired some strange SEO habits. Such one is that they hide the text displayed within Flash files on the site.
One could argue that the text is contained in the visual file and therefore this is not classed as SPAM.

However, when the user lands on the page, they are not presented with the text, which only starts displaying in the Flash movie if the user decides to play it. Certainly a major dilemma here. Is this SPAM?

News that search giant Google is going to introduce social media elements, such as voting search results for specific queries and approving or disapproving them in order to modify their own search results.

The big question is:
I am continuously logged in to my Google account. If I disapprove of one site in a specific query and that site refreshes it’s content and provides something useful a few months later…will I then lose it forever? Read more

One of the most common misconception of internet users is that organic (or natural) search engine rankings, (the rank of a website when making a search), are influenced by the number of visitors to that website. This is not true… Read more

There is a lot of buzz in forums recently after Google announced their intention to remove PageRank from the Google toolbar. Many argue that this is a tool used only by webmasters to SPAM the web. Is Google trying to find an easy way out by blocking access to information about it’s algorithm that could potentially help people to manipulate the index? Is this strategy a little short-sighted in many respects?

Firstly Google users are not all the same. There is a great gap between the average user and the advanced user. The latter are the trend-setters, the people that teach everyone else what PageRank is. An indication of page/website importance. In many ways sharing this information is the most engaging social aspect of the Google search engine. It signifies preference from people with websites that link to a particular page they find meaningful and useful. Of course importance is also demonstrated in rankings. Google ranks important pages higher. How are you to determine importance however if you are being referred from another website or a social network? Read more

Many business people and especially SME’s are very surprised when consultants suggest the setting up of a blog. Retailers seem to be more shocked by this new-found craze, as they call it. They cannot understand why people would read them and are completely lost as to what to write. Which is understandable as we are not all born writers.

The main problem however is the lack of understanding of the core dynamics of the web. Read more

Finding a good domain to register and kick-start your business with was never easy. Things have however become much worse recently. There are many reasons for this.

If we are going to start naming and shaming we have to start with ICANN. These are the people that control the rules around domain registration and them being an American company they seem heavily preoccupied in protecting the rich and the wicked. The rules around domain registration and ownership are not just difficult to understand but also extremely vague and impossible to reinforce. In this way a company that goes after a domain registered by one of ICANN’s approved resellers has no chance in winning in court. This is simply because they can easily prove that the parked domain was registered in ‘good faith’ and it is being withheld until the company decides to spend too much money (A link of their mambo jumbo can be found here).

Second culprit is Google offering AdSense ads. Read more