Not sure how Historically accurate this is. Sure they stopped, but not necessarily for the reason stated.

Still. It’s the right sentiment!

Scotland V Italy. The big one.

Can you be sure what you ever see again?

Look at it on your monitor, and then step back……

Phillippe  G.Schyns and Aude Oliva of the University of  Glasgow made this (citation needed).

Hmmm - I’ve not seen this before today, and not sure if this is actually part of the plug-in terms and conditions ie they are allowed to do this sort of thing or frankly if it’s a hack or something….

When I signed up to this gizmo (the Snap Shots Wordpress Plugin) I quite liked it purely from a”fun” perspective and expected it to operate only on links embedded within the page that I had made myself.

Reading over a post today and I saw this:

(more…)

2007 is the year Google dumps Google PageRank.

Toolbar PageRank that is. It’s a dinosaur that’s received a bullet in the head and it’s wandering about looking for a place to die. It is more and more irrelevant in Google organic search today and the only people cashing in on it are sites that sell it. Bad press for Google? Not at all, Google is giving us what many cried out for after the last Toolbar update 6 months ago. The End of Google ToolBar Page Rank! (more…)

originally uploaded by Shaun.

Hopefully this test blog post from Flickr will be what I’m looking for. Me (as Darth Maul and my pal Jamesy as a Zombie). (more…)

Originally uploaded by Shaun

This is actually a test blog using Flickr, but I thought I’d post a pic of the recent Halloween party at Mick & Zoza’s. (more…)

Some people are just fucking simple. A guy leaves a perfectly valid comment on the hobo-web.co.uk site concerning the recent PageRank shuffle. His site went to 3 after he checked, and commented that in my article I said the hobo-web.co.uk had a PR of 7 when in actual fact we had a 5. (more…)

Well as usual Scotland have it all to do against the Italians on November 17th and leave us all thinking which team will turn up to play at Hampden - world champion beaters or duffers.

After a disappointing display losing by two goals against Group B Georgia boys, and not getting a penalty that surely redefines the term “stone-wall”, one of my pals watching the game with me had only one positive to take from the nights game of football;

“England 1 Russia 2″

(more…)

I’ve just read a couple of blogs / websites that purportedly claim to sell expert seo services. One or two of them warble on about fucking ‘programming’ this and “training” this and “LSI” that to achieve to positions in search engines. Stone me what a black art I seem to be involved in. Hell, I can’t even understand what they’re on about. For me, simple seo is where it’s at…. (more…)

The time has come. After reading a blog or two I’ve decided to start chasing the pounds on my blog. Not on every page, at the moment, as I think those homepage ads suck (you know, the kind of ads you see everywhere). (more…)

I must admit I’ve always hated phones, and am basically waiting for the Iphone to surface here in the UK. But the company recently got me a Nokia N95 on account, and I am loving it. (more…)

I knew I would buy a Plasma TV. The LG 50PC55 fitted most of my requirements, and when I confirmed it would play nice with my Apple MacBook Pro I decided to stomp up the £700 (look around - at the time I couldn’t get it for under £600 as i had hoped) and £100 delivery charge to get one. (more…)

One thing I hate about one seo blog after another is the constant drivel many put out there as “advice” on their websites. In an industry where most agree it’s impossible to know how Google works, there are sure a lot of arse-holes out there who seem to think they actually do know how Google works.

Constant regurgitation of basic advice and passing this advice of as their own is pointless shite, but I’m sure it fools the odd customer who stumbles onto their blog after typing in something so fucking obscure as to unfortunately land on that site.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s exactly how I started. (more…)

I see Paul at North South Media is opening up sponsorship on the Top Ten SEO League for Scotland, The UK and International.

Good luck.

We won’t be sponsoring this time around, only as we are on there already, but no tinkering with those results! 
And you’ll understand I might have to sit the next round out completely. Needs must! I’ve got a few things up my sleeve for next time though…
Good luck again.

Remember and Nofollow that link!

It’s great, Google have really got it together getting my (and yours) content into the main index super-fast. I already see a post I wrote on my blog hours ago, already feature in Google, in some way.

Yesterday I saw an article feature in Google as soon as Google Blog Search picked it up minutes  after I wrote it.

Magic!

I work for Hobo, a seo company in Scotland.

OK so I finally talked to my very expensive libel solicitors and although I am not letting on what exactly I’m doing at this stage, I’m happy with the way we seem to be going forward with this. As you may know, I am being threatened with legal action (a libel / defamation) suit over commentary i made about a seo company and it’s practices. I said rightly, wrongly or stupidly that the seo strategy / practices they were selling were, in my opinion, and I’m paraphrasing here, bollocks. (more…)

Oops it appears I am being sued (threatened with a law suit / court case) for Defamation and Libel. Apparently some company thinks an article I wrote slamming a crap seo company was about them. (more…)

Well, just returned from my holiday with the boys in Tenerife, happy, not exactly rested but refreshed at least, with a new fire in the belly. Not for SEO though. It’s time that took a back seat, at least for the Hobo SEO corporate site. PS, I’m not linking to my company site still from this blog. That’s one of my ongoing experiments.

Anyway by end I mean it’s really time to get stuck into customer sites again. For a while there it was fun competing in the seo competitions for “best in Scotland” (top 3 out of four months aint bad) and before I left for my holiday I threw a couple of wee changes at the site / to the site to try and get back on top, before I make a big change to the Hobo site design, so I expect to be at least somewhere near the top for the time being.

Anyway, I think it’s always good to take a break from seo for a week or two to regenerate the batteries and explore new opportunities.

But it’s time to get the sleeves rolled up again and start deploying all the new stuff I’ve learned to client sites and get involved in some of the more interesting projects we’ve been lucky enough to land recently. Even the proposed Hobo website redesign will have to wait. It’s ready, but it all needs a once over again to ensure I keep the rankings that are making me money.

And now that I’ve sobered up after Scotland humped the mighty Les Bleus (twice!) …. anyone tell me what’s the big news in SEO Land in the last 10 days?

God if my MD knew I was spending time on this blog he’d have my gonads. But that’s the point of the post. It’s been hectic at my seo company recently and frankly if I’m spending time on this shit I’m not getting clients leads. Hence the cessation in blogging. Frankly it’s fucking pissing me off and everybody in the office knows it.

Not got time to blog. Not got time to experiment. Not got time to get better at Linkbait. Not got time to get really involved at Sphinn although 50% of my posts have went hot (3 out of 6). Not got time to beat of the competition in the local Top Ten SEO Scotland competition which we’ve been leading the last 3 or 4 months. Not got time to read Andy (thanks for the 6,000 hits from Stumbleupon at the weekend on the Hobo Web site!). Not got time to read Jim. Not got time for thinking about Google. Not got time to spam the dofollow community (oh, I forgot, gave that up!).

Fuck, I’ve not got time for sleep at the moment (averaging about 4 hours a night). Why the fuck did I start a company a year and a half ago where I can’t even get a lie in? I’m sitting on about 10 website projects of my own an only the main one (the company site) is getting any development love at all and that’s minimal - a few posts about Page Rank & Title tags and the like was all I managed recently).

On the other hand, things are getting better. (more…)

Ok so i have started reading SEO Book (by Aaron Wall) so I know what every body else knows about seo
I’ve printed it out, pulled myself away from Sphinn and SEOmoz, and decided to take a chapter in every night or so. If I can be arsed I’ll update my blog regularily with my views and any tidbits of interest (to me!). (more…)

I had to laugh the other day. I normally check up on who’s ranking for the top terms in Google for keywords I’m interested in and you see plenty of companies doing the following:

• search engine optimisation glasgow - Page 1
• search engine optimization glasgow - Page 2
• search engine optimisation scotland - Page 1
• search engine optimization scotland - Page 2
• seo company glasgow - Page 1
• seo company scotland - Page3

Yes! Just listing these keywords, as above, so Google picks them up (it’s an old seo trick) and so the site now ranks for these terms (if the domain / page is strong enough).

Yeah I know, I’ve just joined them, but it’s lazy seo, probably not “the best way” of doing things, but it sure works at the moment! (more…)

My site is only a toddler. It’s only a month old, that’s why I’ve not got any Google Page Rank. Many people look at a potential link opportunities on blogs and only consider the Google Green, totally forgetting about Neighbourhood and Page Strength generated by other sites linking to it.

Don’t these people know that Google Page Rank is months behind REAL page rank? Sometimes a link from a PR 0 site can see your serps improve. (more…)

If 5 + 6 make eleven, the optimal keyword density is 6.3%. If two tomatoes and one cucumber make 56, the optimal keyword density is 42. What am I on about?

Fuck knows but it reminds me of Keyword Density. What is the optimal keyword density for your web page? Exactly what is the % of keywords to normal text allowed on a page to get to Number 1 in Google? (more…)

I was recently approached to offer advice on improving someone’s online “reputation” in search engines (called quite simply “search engine reputation management“. A SEO company in Scotland said it couldn’t be done. Pah! I’d done it with my own name a few years back using quite ethical means (yes I am a megalomaniac - at one time, when you typed in Shaun Anderson, I had control over every listing on page 1 of Google & MSN (Yahoo never played ball) - I’m over that now, thankfully). And online reputation management seems to be all of a sudden a big thing, these days, so i bet that incompetent seo company is aware of it now! You see, the company in question had some bad / unfair / critical / unsavoury (delete as necessary) competition for their brand name, and this featured right below their own website listing in Google. In fact looking at the top ten, they had quite a few articles they didn’t want the brand associated with.

The business itself was in no way unethical, just in a controversial area that drew even my Granda’s opinion on the subject, so i offered some advice. Naturally when someone is investigating your business using nothing but Google, they might only check a few of the top ten listings. This means there is a chance you can control this.

What can you do? You can’t delete the offending article, you need to beat it down in the serps! even better, why not try and “own” that whole google serp? (more…)

This article is a bit all over the place. It’s thoughts I have, nothing more, based on my limited experience.

Google Page Rank is just one of 100s of signals / calculations that Google uses to evaluate your site. A high PR does not guarantee high levels of traffic, nor does it lead to good search engine positions.

Example - I have a PR 6 site that gets 20 visitors a day! I have PR 4 sites that get 70 - 100 visitors a day (from Google). The reason? The PR 6 site was a test, without any really decent content, and I haven’t earned any real “trust” in Google’s eyes with this site. One day I will add good content to it, when I have the time, and it is aged a bit (another good signal to Google), but at the moment, the site doesn’t have enough good content to it to make it really “trusted”. (more…)