Archive by Author
Lost your reviews? It’s probably best keep that to yourself.
Posted on 05. Sep, 2012 by Richard Falconer.
Fake reviews, also known as deceptive opinion spam, is a growing problem. There’s a huge temptation for businesses of all sizes and types to use sock puppet profiles to publish fake reviews for their products and services as well as those of their competitors. Recently, there has been considerable unrest over Google’s removal of customer reviews from certain [...]
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Understanding Google Webmaster Tools 404 Errors
Posted on 09. May, 2012 by Richard Falconer.
Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource for site owners but its error reports can be quite scary to site owners or SEOs who don’t understand them. This lack of understanding can lead to additional work for little or no benefit. One of the main areas where this happens is in the “Not found” section. [...]
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How Google is destroying trust in its own results
Posted on 12. Apr, 2012 by Richard Falconer.
Google is showing more sites with Rich Snippets review data in its results. It allows sites to use structured markup to code customer review statistics on their pages. This is all well and good except that site owners have started to take liberties. What Google appears to think users say on seeing rich snippets such [...]
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4 Free Places to Get Quality SEO Data
Posted on 08. Feb, 2012 by Richard Falconer.
There are a ton of expensive SEO tools available. Many of them do a great job but you shouldn’t forget the great data and insight that can be gleaned from free tools. These tools are often overlooked. Blekko Blekko provides a ton of amazing ranking data to SEOs but I rarely [...]
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Google sticks the knife in Bing
Posted on 15. Dec, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
Google recently launched markup which allows the language and country targets of similar pages to be specified. For example, a product page in different languages, potentially consolidating the inbound links and social signals of those pages whilst showing the correct version in results. The markup also allows the identification of a canonical version of the [...]
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5 Tips for killer user generated content
Posted on 20. Oct, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
At A4UExpo yesterday I spoke about user generated content, its benefits and how it can be used effectively on a site. here are the slides from that presentation and some more information on the 5 tips I provided: View more presentations from richardfalconer 1. You don’t need to be sexy and fun to be engaging [...]
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A Rich (Snippets) History
Posted on 26. Sep, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
Google appears to be releasing new types of Rich Snippets at an increasing rate. Rich snippets were officially launched in May 2009 and after that initial launch it was a full eight months before any new types were released (events). In the last 5 months Google has launched 4 new types of snippets based on structured [...]
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Google Launches Product Snippets in UK
Posted on 31. Aug, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
Google appear to have launched product Rich Snippets in the UK. They have previously only been available in the United States. In the case below for Boots’ fantastically named Smoothies Soul Soother shower gel the “in stock” information appears to be generated from information in Boots’ Google Shopping feed. The page does use structured product [...]
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Can Computers Make Better Social Media Judgements Than Humans?
Posted on 19. Aug, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
There has been a lot of discussion about services such as Klout.com and PeerIndex.net recently. I’ve read strong opinions that online influence, authority etc. can only be accurately determined by an experienced social media expert and not algorithmically. There is evidence to suggest that this assumption is not a fact and indeed the opposite is [...]
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Actually Useful SEO Tools
Posted on 12. Jul, 2011 by Richard Falconer.
There are a million and one useless SEO tools, a quick search will tend to turn up any number of Firefox plugins which will happily ruin your browser with keyword densities, PageRank and Alexa scores. Often these “tools” will slow down your browser and collect your private information, providing little actual SEO value to you. [...]
