In 2009 there are loads of strategies that we expected to stop working in 2006, then again in 2007 and certainly in 2008. The problem is that most of them still seem to be working.

Of all the things Google could fix I would have expected this to be the first. What happens is that SEO companies use link spam and networks of sites to get top rankings for keywords that send them customers.

Customers assume the company must be good at SEO and hire them to work on their sites. The SEO company uses spam to promote their clients and links back to their site from all their clients and gets even higher rankings.

If Google was to just start banning dodgy SEO companies then clients wouldn’t find them and the whole industry would clean up in months. Few clients are going to hire an SEO company that’s been banned from Google.

My question is, why don’t Google ban these sites? Of all the search results that should be manually edited I think SEO related ones are top of the list.

Firstly, hello everyone – I’m the newest member of Branded3’s SEO team! Whether you already know me or not, you’ll probably be seeing quite a lot of me from now on

I’m not sure what to tell you about myself, so here are some facts in no particular order:

I’m 23. I write a blog called Piggynap which talks about SEO and whatever else is on my mind (normally something weird). You might find it interesting or you might just wonder why I keep posting things about cats. I like Adwords which is great, because that’s one of my new responsibilities at Branded3. I live in Harrogate with my web designer boyfriend (that explains the Twitter background) and like a typical girl I really like shoes…and chocolate.

We’ve been snowed out of work today so I’m writing this from home, but I’m really looking forward to working with Patrick and everyone else

I’ll be attending Think Visibility so if you’re going, see you there!

We are hiring a business development manager, if you are interested or know somebody that might be please drop us a line.

• Company Name : Branded3
• Location : Aberford, Leeds
• Salary : £28-£35k per year

Contact Information

• First Name : Vin
• Last Name : Chinnaraja
• Email Address : vin@branded3.com
• Website : http://www.branded3.com
• Phone Number : 0113 2814100
• How to Apply : Email CV

Job Description
Branded3 is an innovative digital agency with offices in Leeds and Malaysia. We have delivered work for a number of leading organisations such as Interflora, Heinz, and Airbus. We are a team of digital enthusiasts with the drive and passion to deliver outstanding work for our clients.

Having a ‘can do’ work ethic, you’ll discover the core culture of our agency:
‘We like to challenge and be challenged.’

We are now in a good stage of our growth and are looking for a dynamic, talented and committed marketer who can help take our agency forward. Working directly with the MD of Branded3 your role as Marketing Manager will be to develop, define and execute marketing strategies and generate new business leads to contribute to our ambitious growth plans over the next few years.

If you like the sound of us, we can offer you a role that will stretch you, challenge you and reward you fairly.

Responsibilities

• Develop cut-through long-term marketing strategies for Branded3
• Generate leads
• Execute all agency marketing campaigns
• Manage agency PR
• Manage creation and updating of agency literature (website, email, credentials)
• Manage pitches and presentations
• Agency brand custodian
• Event management and networking
• Outbound communications (email, DM)
• Contact and prospect database management

Skills
The successful candidate will have significant B2B marketing experience preferably for an agency. You will be comfortable dealing at different levels (from Chief Executive to managers). You are ballsy but grounded, witty but humble, friendly and focussed. We are looking for someone who has a good contacts book and is driven to succeed.
Any experience working for a new media/digital agency would be preferred but is not essential.

Relevant Work Experience
2+ to 5 Years

Salary
28,000.00 – 35,000.00 GBP per year
expenses, car allowance and uncapped commission

The popularity of the SEO Toolbar is on the rise with recent offerings from SEOmoz and today a new SEO Toolbar from Aaron Wall at SEO Book.

The SEOBook Toolbar seems to work best on FireFox 3 and includes as much data as you could ever need to evaluate a page quickly. Best of all it has an in-built RSS reader with the Blogstorm feed included meaning I get lots more RSS subscribers which is why I decided to help Aaron promote it.

Last year I switched to Google Chrome and don’t use Firefox much at all. Chrome is faster and allows me to get more done in a day. The disadvantage is the lack of toolbars although Dave Naylor has an overlay bookmarklet that does enough for me.

Do you use SEO toolbars? Which is your favourite?

While I was away it seems a few plugins have sprung up to integrate Twitter mentions of blog posts in the style of trackbacks and normal blog comments.

The options available seem to be TweetBacks from Joost and TweetSuite from Dan and I’ve tried both of them today finally settling on Dans implementation after struggling to get Joosts working with Thesis.

Check it out below.

Has anybody managed to do a really good implementation of one of these plugins using Thesis and WP 2.7?

Link re-working is something that keeps popping up on my radar and few recent events have prompted me to blog about it.

Basically link re-working is the process of contacting people who already link to your website and asking them to change the link to make it more valuable from an SEO perspective. For example if somebody linked to my blog with the anchor text “Blogstorm” I could ask them to change it to “Blogstorm SEO blog” or even just “SEO blog”. Read more >>

How many times have you seen a website being used on TV and thought that it was either an amazing example of product placement or that you couldn’t understand why such an obscure site was being featured?

Quite often I take a look at sites featured in popular programmes to see if they really exist and more often than not the sites are live but are just fake websites developed by film production companies.

One of the most famous fake websites is Erinsmail, the email service often seen being used on Neighbours. The website doesn’t exist on the real internet but Erinsmail is used by almost all the residents of Ramsay Street.

Image credit

A website often seen in the UK on Eastenders is the fake search engine search-wise.net, Google is giving a malware warning for this domain so visit at your own risk. Checking the about page of the site reveals the following:

This is NOT a real search website!

Owned and operated by Compuhire (Eccentric Trading Company Ltd), this website has been set up for clearance purposes so that it can be used in film and TV productions when scripts require that a search engine is shown in vision.

Doctor Who has used dozens of fake websites including www.unit.org.uk in the past as part of some clever viral marketing campaigns. One campaign encouraged users to search for “doctor blue box” on Google to find the site but this campaign has now been ended and the site altered so that it no longer ranks for this term.

Do you know any other fake websites?

Matt Cutts gave Digg & Wikipedia a nice piece of news last week at Wordcamp 2007. During the conference Matt was offering tips on search engine marketing to Wordpress bloggers and explained that Google is starting to treat underscores in URLs the same as hyphens. In the past hyphens were treated as word separators while underscores weren’t.

CNet has a good summary of the news:

One key development that Matt shared with the audience was that underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon to be) treated as word separators by Google. That’s great news, because it historically hasn’t been that way. Back in 2005, Matt stated that Google did not view underscores in URLs as word separators. That meant that in a URL like http://www.mysite.com/iphone_review.html Googlebot couldn’t “see” the words iphone or review. Instead it read iphone_review as one word. I wouldn’t recommend targeting “iphone_review” as a keyword, as I doubt anyone will be including an underscore in their Google query.

Digg and Wikipedia are probably the largest sites that uses underscores and will see a huge increase in traffic. I’m not saying the increase in rankings for each page will be huge, far from it. However if each of Digg’s 2 million pages and Wikipedia’s 12 million pages ranks 1 place higher in the search results thats going to equate to a load of traffic.

The last thing we need is Wikipedia getting more search engine traffic.