Rorschach’s SEO Journal

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Steve 4 Comments

Given that I work in SEO and that Watchmen is one of my favourite films of all time, I’ve had this idea on the back burner for a while.

I have just one request of you though, dear reader/fellow SEO/fellow Watchmen fan. Please don’t take any of it seriously. Read, laugh and enjoy! :-)

Full credit for the original text goes to its writer, Alan Moore, who’d probably weep if he knew I’d desecrated his excellent work. Or bludgeon me. Or both. Simultaneously.

OCTOBER 12, 2015:

Rorschach image 1Panda dancing in the algo this morning, version 155. This search engine is afraid of me. I have seen its true SERPs. The results are extended sewers and the sewers are full of spam and when the drains finally scab over, all the black hats will lose rankings. The accumulated filth of all their link wheels and keyword stuffing will foam up about their backlink profiles and all the directory submitters and article spinners will login and type “Save us!”…

…and I’ll look at Google’s search bar on my screen, and type in “no results found.”

Click to read more!

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SEOno News & GB Posts: Part 5

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Steve 2 Comments

News

A fair bit’s happened recently:

  • I’ve joined Cardiff Blogs‘ admin team. Even though I’ve had little involvement with the organsation of the March event (due to illness), I will be involved with future events. If you blog and you’re based in South Wales yet you’ve never been before then what’s stopping you?! :-) Sign up here.
  • I was also supposed to give a talk at Ignite Cardiff‘s February event (IC10), but unfortunately had to pull out at the last minute (also due to illness). I’m hoping to have my talk pushed to their next event – IC11 – in May.
  • Even though I’d previously reported that I’m on my way to obtaining ‘chartered’ marketer status, it turns out… I’m not. My tutor found out from the CIM that the CAM Diploma doesn’t count towards it. However this is bearing in mind that I’ve received multiple letters and certificates of progress from the CIM saying that I’m on my way to becoming chartered. Pretty bad really… it’s certainly soured my opinion of the CIM. Update: The CIM have cleared this up via Twitter here and here.
  • It’s not yet been fully announced, but I’m going to be doing a talk at Cardiff Internet in April. My first ever professional talk! I’ll be talking about rel=”author”. Update: Unfortunately the event has been postponed, so… just ignore this bullet-point, heh!
  • I’ve been featured on Lancaster University’s Alumni section. Read my profile writeup here.

Posts on other sites

And here’s a couple of posts I’ve written for my work blog and as guest blogs since last time:

SEOno News

#SMsceptic: Etiquette Tips For Gentler (Yet More Effective) Twitter Outreach

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Steve 2 Comments

Megaphone graffiti imageIt’s been a little while since I wrote an #SMsceptic post (i.e. moans about social media), but following a recent first-hand experience and various conversations with colleagues/industry peers/fellow tech enthusiasts, I wanted to discuss Twitter @mentions some more, especially in the context of conducting outreach.

For the record, in my opinion, outreach via Twitter is awesome. I prefer it to email (which is I guess the more standard approach in an online capacity) for a fair few reasons:

  • It’s quicker and easier. “Hey, I wrote about you – check it out: [shortened URL].” Boom! Done.
  • It’s less pestering to an extent (…at least I think so, as I see email as a somewhat more formal means of communication and therefore Twitter as less formal – with that in mind, an ill-timed or unwanted @mention may be viewed with less dislike than an email of the same intent).
  • It holds more weight from an authoritative point of view – if someone’s thinking “who is this guy/girl?!” then they can check out your profile. If you have stuff in common or they realise that you have mutual acquaintances then it might help with the process. They might not be able to assess all of that by email alone, e.g. if you don’t have any info in your email signature.
  • It’s visible to those who have an interest in both of you – i.e. if someone is following both the sender and receiver of the tweet, they’d be able to see it in their feed and – as they know both of you – they might be inclined to check it out as well.

Also, @mentions are generally more effective than DMs (Direct Messages) as the latter requires that both people follow each other, which may not be the case all the time, especially if you’re conducting outreach with people who may not know you (yet).

Anyway, I digress. Apologies… I tend to do that.

The main point of this post is help you to avoid a few common pitfalls, take a softer approach and generally piss as few people off as possible (which can sometimes be the nature of the beast with this type of thing).

Click to read more!

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How To Remove Slanderous Google Reviews – A Case Study

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Steve 7 Comments

Evil Computer photoEarlier this week, I had to deal with a slanderous review left on my parents’ company’s Google Places (a.k.a. Google+ Local) page. When researching how best to get it deleted, I came across a mishmash of info on a mix of blog posts and forums, which wasn’t very helpful, so I wanted to write about my experiences in getting it sorted.

Surprisingly, Google doesn’t exactly make the process easy. Well, they do, but it’s one of those ‘once you know, you know’ scenarios. And after reading about some horror stories, I wanted to outline how I managed it. So if you’re in a similar boat then I hope this helps you out.

The review’s discovery

Computer Recruiter logoMy parents run an IT recruitment agency called Computer Recruiter. I’d been working from home on the day that we discovered the review, as I was still recovering from an on-going, on-again-off-again illness (more about that in an upcoming blog post by the way), but as my folks are based nearby, they invited me over for lunch. We were talking about recent rankings (as I’ve done a bit of work for them in the past) and we got onto the subject of their Places page. I wanted to show them something on the page, but then we spotted it…

A review, left 3 weeks ago, with a rating of “Poor to Fair.”

Then we actually read the review…

Click to read more!

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The rel="author" SERP Challenge

Posted on March 3, 2013 by Steve 7 Comments

Update: Someone’s found a SERP with 10 in it. Scroll down to learn more!

The other day I was doing a vanity rankings check to see if my recent rel=”author” case study post was ranking for anything. I found out that it was ranking 1st for “rel author case study” (which is nice, but apparently doesn’t get searched on much) and also found out that I’m on page 1 for “rel author implementation” (which does get a bit of search volume).

But something else caught my attention about the SERP…

rel="author" SERP screenshot

Do you see it? EIGHT faces, i.e. 8 instances of rel=”author” implementation. Given the keyword in question, I can’t say I’m surprised.

And then it got me thinking… Is there an instance of a SERP with 9 or even 10 Google+ avatars in it?

Click to read more!

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