Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ category

Around 2004 when I was still finding my feet in SEO and was confused by the SEO noise that was out there I played about with buying keyword rich TLD’s and tried to get traffic to them to see how well they ranked.  I never really witnessed the true potential, and whilst me and a mate made a little bit of money from slapping some AdSense on them once they hit 2nd page, I can easily say that I never ranked in the giddy heights where traffic enabled me to just sit back and watch the pounds roll in.

That was a long time ago, and whilst the tactic for keyword rich TLD’s still exists, I have never truly witnessed their natural ranking potentials from scratch at the time as I didn’t understand SEO fully enough to employ all of the tactics needed.  Thankfully I have been given the opportunity recently with a few TLD’s that I have been dabbling with and I can say that it is pathetically easy to get a 1st page ranking for a phrase you want to target if you have the .com/.net/.org » Read more: How I easily got 1st page for an Alcohol Addiction Keyphrase

**Disclaimer:  This post as all with goosh.co.uk, contains my own views and no-one else’s – not my employers, my mothers, my friends or my pet dog – simply mine**

This is a rant; A bloody great big rant.

When I left school in 1996 I was a fresh-faced, naive and inexperienced boy entering the real world.  I was given advice about a variety of things when I left and one of them was “Swot up on the company you are going to for an interview”.  This advice also extended to researching the role I was applying for – it would appear that some people don’t adhere to this advice anymore.

Having partaking in several interviews in the last week and a half I am continually astounded by the audacity and bare-faced lies that people put across during an interview.  The job spec we were interviewing for was a junior SEO role and required basic knowledge of:

• link building
• on-page optimisation / copywriting

Experience was preferred whilst online searching experience was necessary.

As explained in my previous post There’s a Difference Between Reading Something and Doing Something you can’t know everything – nobody can, but you certainly know something a bit more when you actually do it – the proof is in the pudding with that one.  But to sit and watch some people tell lies with words they don’t understand is not only soul destroying but also infuriating!  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of bending the truth, but simply waffling around something when you don’t know it makes you look a much bigger idiot than you actually are. » Read more: Attention Prospective SEO’s: Please Know What You Are Applying For!

As you may have seen on the blog lately, I have been mildly amused at the spam I have been receiving.  However, there is one spammer that is really starting to piss me off – and that is the make-money-quick Affiliate Millionaire.

In the past two days I have seen a variety of automated blog comments for the “Affiliate Millionaire” – I’ll be honest I briefly looked at the site and it’s the same old “do it faster, harder, stronger, longer & get rich quick with no actual effort” types.  The same types that piss other SEO’s off with their Instant SEO Bullshit.

I hate automated blog comment spam – hell, even a human who is shit at it can piss me off with their unimaginative and less-than-thoughtful messages.  So imagine how narked I was when I saw this:

Affiliate Millionaire - The Automated Blog Spammer

The message is exactly the same, but they have tried to dupe me by changing their name – it nearly had me, it really did! (idiots).

Anyway, Affiliate Millionaire has already got a black mark from me, so anyone who is thiking about partaking in their service (whatever it is) might as well not bother.

When it comes to Wordpress blogs & indexation I’ve always gave out the advice that “You know you’re indexed when your blog starts getting spammed“.  I relaunched my blog on the 15th Januaray 2010 following a 2 year 301 redirect to my employers site.  Within days 2 weeks I had automated spam from a lazy spam bot.

The spam has continued in abundance which is a good sign that the blog is being indexed more and more (in a round about false-positive way), and this little one caught my eye…

Are spammers getting more creative? Looks geniune doesn't it!

I had to actually check that this wasn’t spam but the URL gave it away.  Are spammers getting more creative or was this just a one off?

Throughout my working life I have always referred to myself as a “Jack of all trades – Master of none”.  The reason being is that I like diversity in my job, I like to get my hands dirty and have every single one of my fingers in the proverbial pie and I have never concentrated on one field of expertise – until I decided I wanted to be an SEO fulltime.

Even then SEO is such a wide topic that it is always easy to get caught up and distracted.  This became so apparent recently when we were interviewing for Junior SEO’s at Mediaworks and it reminded me of my own experiences trying to learn the elusive skill of SEO.  As a result of the wide circle that encompasses SEO it is simply not something that can be learnt from a book – you actually have to do it to learn from your mistakes.

» Read more: There’s a Difference Between Reading Something and Doing Something!