People are often asking what is the point of Twitter. Well ASOS, the clothing retailer, is using Twitter to communicate with customers, primarily to handle customer complaints and comments, with 55 staff from all departments registered on Twitter and communicating with customers.
Great way to be responsive to customers and to react to complaints as quickly as possible and to start a dialog with customers - they'll like you all the more for doing so, even if the communication started off with a complaint.
This is not something we'd recommend doing for any site with decent search rankings, but somtimes business events dictate that URL's need to be changed.
Google have just made it easier for website owners to notify Google of a URL change, via its change of address tool in Webmaster Central.
For security reasons and to ensure your site is being hacked, both URLs need to be verified with Google but after that the process is easy & ensures that Google indexes your new URL quicker than it would have otherwise.
If your site isn't appearing in Google's search results, or its rankings have dropped without violation of Google webmaster guidelines, you can request that Google reconsiders the site.
Until now, Google has worked on these requests, but has never provided any acknowledgement that it has done so. Now, Google will confirm that is has looked at any requests via Webmaster Tools. However, it still won't tell you what it thinks of your site! It simply advises you to check your site's rankings after receiving the confirmation message. If it's performance has improved, then Google reviewed your site and believes it adheres to their guidelines. If performance hasn't improved, it's likely that your site breaks some of the guidelines and needs to be reviewed.
If you think your site has fallen foul of Google, then call SearchPath - we may be able to help!
We have just launched our latest new site: Dr-Search.
The site enables visitors to search for health professionals across the UK - from consultants to GPs, dentists, opticians and pharmacists. Visitors can search by postcode and gender and then view specific details of their chosen health professional.
There are also helpful resources on the site, that will be expanded upon in time, that explain what type of consultant visitors should see for their particular health concern. Visitors can also use the site to register with a GP, or to request an appointment with a consultant.
There has been lots of comment recently in the SEO Community about some PageRank changes announced by Matt Cutts, that have actually been in effect for the past year.
The basic story is that a while back Google recommended using nofollow tags to 'sculpt' PageRank on websites, to ensure the best pages got the most PageRank. Each page on a site has a certain amount of PageRank - each outbound link from a page passes on some of that page rank. The idea with PageRank Sculpting was to stop PageRank being passed to less important pages on a site or to external links, enabling you to give more PageRank to a smaller number of important pages to give them more of a boost.
It seems that this has now all changed! Even with nofollow tags, PageRank will be passed to a link. Furthermore, rather than passing an equal amount of PageRank to each link on a page, Google itself makes many determinations of exactly what level of PageRank is passed to each page.
So what does this all mean? Well, it all seemed quite logical - do you really want to pass on PageRank to your Legal Info page or your Privacy Policy? Its not as if you needed these to be found in the Google search results. This is partly the reason everyone's got flustered - sculpting PageRank was a good idea! In reality, if you have been sculpting PageRank with nofollows, there's little reason to rush in & change everything. In the future though, it's likely that people will link less - both internally and to 3rd party sites if they want to protect PageRank. We'll also likely to see comments switched off on blogs and the use of iframes for links.
There are some great posts by Danny Sullivan that explains this in far more detail and also here's a link to Matt Cutts' blog post and his recent video post.
We've just come across is a great new 'Greasemonkey' plug-in for Google Analytics which pulls in all the social media metrics directly in Content page reports on Google Analytics. It also shows the number of Yahoo backlinks to that page.
They've now also made the icons interactive, so if you can see your page hasn't been submitted to Digg, you can submit directly from within Google Analytics - great stuff! Download here.
