Dougal Crowder

What is all this about Google and Penguins?

dougal — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:12:23 +0000

Chances is are that if you are a small business owner you will have a website (if you don’t, you and me need to talk). There is also a very high probability that you have talked to various colleagues about your ranking in Google and maybe even Bing. This invariably leads to us having a good old winge about all the big companies (who don’t pay any tax like…ahem… Amazon) being ranked at the top of the search engines. The simple truth here is that a lot of these big organisations can afford to pay lots of people to spend lots of time getting there website to the top of searches using search engine optimisation techniques.

Well, the good news is that Google’s new algorithm, code named “Penguin” is designed to penalise over optimised websites and try to reward websites that have high quality content.

Here is what Mr Matt Cutts of Google said on the subject.

We try to make our relevance more adaptive so that people don’t do SEO, we handle that and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they put too many keywords on the page or whether they exchange way too many links or whatever they’re doing to sort of go beyond what a person would expect in a particular area and so that is something where we continue to pay attention and continue to work on it and it is an active area where we’ve got several engineers on my team working on that right now.

So, Dont:

Hide text or links in your web pages.
Cloak or stick in redirects to try to trick people to your pages.
Send automated queries to Google.
Load lots of useless pages with irrelevant keywords.
Do the scatter gun approach by building multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with all the same content.

And please do:

Fire that ‘Internet Marketeer / SEO specialist’ who is promising you something out of nothing whilst talking to you in his flash car on his bluetooth headset.
Hire some creative people to put amazing stuff on your website, so, people like going on it.

So what is wrong with over optimised sites and why is google all upset with them?

Well the problem with them is when you search for something you actually want to find, you get a load of “highly optimised” but, irrelevant pages, which is wasting your time, electricity and bandwidth. Or the same sites with the same versions keep coming up and you get a narrow picture. Google knows the customer is usually right and if they stop showing us what we are looking for we will find someone who will show us and companies will pay them loads of money for advertising instead.

New LG IPS235V monitor

dougal — Mon, 14 May 2012 08:36:46 +0000

Finally, my old Samsung Syncmaster 24 inch monitor bust its capacitors and died on me, just a faint flicker when the power came on and and then the picture would disappear. There are various tutorials floating around the web on how to replace the capacitors, however, I decided that the screen wasn’t up to much anyway and wasn’t worth the bother.

The search began for a new one. Now my setup is my 27 inch iMac as the main monitor for designing and previewing and the Samsung was used as a second monitor for my email client (sparrow) and Coda (for coding etc), so, mainly text use.

I was tempted to go and get myself I great big Thunderbold display or a 27 inch Dell Ultrasharp, but since I am gonna be moving office soon and don’t know whether I am going to need to get a Laptop as my next computer (in which case I would definitely want a Thunderbolt Display) I decided value for money would be fine for now, and I could always turn what ever I buy into a TV later on.

I looked at a few 24 inch Dell Ultrasharps, but ended up gunning for the LG IPS235V which was being sold for only £128. It has received good reviews and for that price, it was worth a punt and unlike the Dell it actually had an HDMI slot. In Terms of picture quality LG make the screen panels for Dell and Apple.

I think the Dell Ultrasharp U2412M is a better size (16/10) for actually doing work (the LG is 16/9). But was about £100 more wherever I looked.

The LG has arrived now and after trying to get a similar colour setup to my iMac for way too long I was about to send it back and get the Dell, as everything was looking very magenta….. I then changed the Gamma from 2.2 to 2 and suddenly the magenta tones went and I had a screen I could live with.

Verdict

If the Dell had an HDMI cable I think I would have gone for it. But for the money the LG is a very very good monitor and will be fine later as a bedroom TV etc.

elete™ – The Electrolyte Concentrate

dougal — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:01:19 +0000

elete electrolytes are simply fantastic. This was a rebuild of a very tired old site to add a better online shop experience and new strong web presence.

Outdoor Cook

dougal — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 12:40:50 +0000

Outdoor Cook is an ecommerce store selling meat and fish smokers. It is really the beginnings of much more to come. It uses media queries to serve huge screens down to smartphones.

Outdoor Cook Logo

dougal — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:38:37 +0000

Part of the initial branding for Outdoor Cook. This logo was inspired by the stamps you get on quality meat to prove its provenance.

Ecowoodworks by Rob Sim

dougal — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:41:51 +0000

A pure and simple site to showcase the work of Rob Sim. It uses WordPress with some nifty custom fields and re-sizes all the way down to iPhone portrait screen size.

Don’t let them sell you SEO, it is generally a rip off

dougal — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:27:26 +0000

Search Engine Optimisation by definition should be the process of “Optimising a website for search engines.” Something seems to have got lost somewhere, for example I have had someone call me up and say “Hey Dougal, my cousins husband who is a bit of a geek told me all about “SEO’s” so, can you put some on my company website? Yeah it’s a site that a friend of mine built for me a couple of years ago!” This is the moment where I type in the url and am greeted by a horror of horrors. Then I have to tactfully suggest that it is probably best they hold off on too many “SEO’s” for now and concentrate on figuring out what it is they want people to do once they are actually on the site, apart from deciding never to use that company in the future.

I digress. But, the point I am trying to make is that I think it is all a bit misunderstood. Search Engine Optimisation is not Marketing and it cannot replace it, of course an optimised website will help your marketing program, it may even save you a few quid.

A few everyday examples

The cold calling “SEO Specialists” promising the worldIf you are a SME owner, the chances are you will quite often get cold called by some person offering you the unique opportunity to be on the top of the first page of Google for your choice of 10 keyword searches, all for £100 per month for example. Yes apparently there is enough room for all the companies they are calling to be on the top page of google.The latest trend is a Facebook advertising campaign that they manage for you, even though the developers at Facebook have spent a lot of time making it very easy for you to manage all by yourself.I have never yet met any company that has had a good experience with these sorts of deals, or even managed to get close to a return on their investment.Don’t get me wrong, I think well managed Facebook and Google adwords campaigns can work, if they are done well. However, it seems that cold calling companies generally don’t do it that well. Just to warn you, some people have also lost a ridiculous amount of money getting it wrong themselves, so, always make sure you have limits on what you let the campaigns spend.

Backlinking and the “link Farms”Link farms sound quite nice to me, maybe it is a place where links go round holding hands, getting drunk and cow tipping. As far as i’m aware though it is a place where lots of people usually in third world countries sit very close to each other on old pcs and create links all over the intertubes that point back to your site. It is a hideous practice and American retailer JC Penney recently received a nice pair of concrete search engine shoes for it’s association with the dark art

The process of climbing the natural search rankings by trickery rather than merit is referred to as a “black Hat” technique.I think people still get away with it, In fact I have studied the incoming links of a highly ranked competitors site for a client. In 2 minutes of looking I found many links from very hardcore porn sites which might not be so bad if they were selling adult toys for example, but, what they sell is for kids……ouch!

Gonna tweak the SeoThere are also companies out there who will “tweak your SEO.” Now, I have had a few of these elusive types do some tweaking on some sites I have built and have only really seen a small gain in performance.I am guessing that they are spending a little extra time getting some relevant keywords in there and making sure the rest of the meta information is in tip top shape.In fact I have a little update on one of these “elusives.” A site I had been working pretty hard on that was starting to generate sales quite well, suddenly disappeared from all the searches. I am 80% sure that this is a result of the guy spamming keywords…or “keyword stuffing” as it is often referred to!

So what is the best way to get a busy site?

What search engines like is money (just take a look at Google). Luckily they also like good content. Yes it is that word “content.”
A lot of people tend to forget this, but it is the only reason people have to come visit you online. Why on earth would they visit your website otherwise…..

Stop trying to impress Robots

If your website is compelling and rich, people will bookmark it and recommend it, they may even come back. so BE POSITIVE! Why spend your hard earned denarii paying somebody to fiddle about with a few keywords and sentences that may work for 3 months then become a negative impact on your ranking. A far better idea is to pay someone to CREATE SOMETHING like a beautifully written article, that humans might actually want to read, not just nonsense for robots. The article can remain as a positive feature for years.

Is your site ready for visitors?

There is this bloke who is trying to get me to sell some software to my clients for a referral fee. He asked me the other day if I did SEO. I said “No, not really. Why?” He then explained that he has a client who has a website, but, because it looks bad and is out of date, he has suggested she gets some SEO work done……. I kindly explained that that is missing the point completely.

My suggestion here would be to possibly get the site in order before paying to get people on it. Sounds to me like they would be in the very mortal words of Fat Mike “Flossing a dead horse.” Joking aside, it is the most important thing to get your website

Windkat Chimney Cowls

dougal — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:13:03 +0000

Windkat Cowls UK required and online shop, CMS and brand identity for a brilliant and unique anti-downdraft chimney cowl. The site has fantastic SEO and gives them an excellent return on investment.

Ecowoodworks Logo

dougal — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:52:08 +0000

A clean badge style logo that could work like a stamp or brand on the Ecowoodworks wooden products.

Stop disabled Magento products appearing in Google Content

dougal — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:17:39 +0000

Since I can remember there have been problems with Magento’s built in Google Merchant Center product submission called google base in your Magento Admin.

Now to align themselves with google’s new api they have released the Google Content API for Shopping extension which seems to work well enough. But like the previous versions it still has the ridiculous quirk of showing your disabled products in when you click “view Available Products.” This is plain daft as to me disabled should be considered unavailable in this context.

A simple fix requires you edit some core code, so if you plan on doing this make sure you have backups etc etc. It is tested in Magento version 1.5.0.1 with the above extension installed. If you have older versions of Magento have a look at this post on the forums

In your favoured ftp/code editor head to your html folder/app/code/core/Mage/GoogleShopping/Block/adminhtml/items/product.php

find line 141 hit return there to make a little space and add the code below

        $this->addColumn('status',
            array(
                'header'=> Mage::helper('catalog')->__('Status'),
                'width' => '70px',
                'index' => 'status',
                'type'  => 'options',
                'options' => Mage::getSingleton('catalog/product_status')->getOptionArray(),
        ));

This will ad a column on the end called status like below

if you then select enabled and hit return you can then “select visible” products and send them to the google merchant center (which you will have to of previously set up of course)

Cheers