I’ve not posted for a while, so I thought I’d better just explain why I’ve been such a lazy-arsed blogger recently. Outside of the usual 9-5 stresses, the main reasons are:

• The World Cup
• Trying to work more on various web projects
• Continuing to renovate our house

The house is taking a lot of time at the moment. We moved in January to our new house in Cheshire (I’d lived in Manchester city centre for about 5 years previously). At the time it seemed a good idea to buy something we could add value to. So far we’ve had the whole house rewired, then all re-plastered and then complete replacement of the central heating. Now I’m spending my days painting and laying floors which is more knackering than I realised! On the plus side, I have been able to formulate some good DIY to SEO analogies in my head, so maybe they’ll get turned into blog posts at some point

As for my own projects, I run a few sites which are doing pretty well, but I need to really knuckle down and put some more effort into them. In addition, I’m sat on a load of good keyword domains that I’ve been picking up periodically so I need to  develop these too. When I’m flat out on big projects in my full-time job, I do sometimes find it difficult to get the motivation to work on my own stuff when I’m back at home. When the world cup is on at the same time, it’s just a non-starter!

I was going to do a post on this nonsensical Developers-hate-SEOs-hate-Developers stuff that seems to be cropping up all over the place at the moment, but sadly, not enough time. Maybe I will do later on.

So yeah, that’s it . I’ll be back at some point in the not too distant future I’m sure. In the mean time, if you want some lulz, why not try this theme on your new WordPress 3.0 installation? Wow, that really reads like a spammy paid link doesn’t it. It’s not, I promise :)

And good luck to England this afternoon of course!

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Google introduced a couple of neat features today in preparation for the 2010 World Cup (whoopie – can’t wait). The first was changing the pagination numbers at the bottom of the page to read “Gooooal” instead of “Goooogle”:

Everyone loved this; Mashable featured it on their post (1100 Tweets at the time of writing this; I mean honestly) and Matt Cutts even tweeted about it during SMX. OK, so it’s nice that Google is showing some support for the World Cup, but it’s not really much use now is it?

However, Google also added something considerably more interesting to the search result pages in the form of a nifty World Cup Calendar. I noticed this in the morning when searching for World Cup. It also shows for other related searches such as World Cup 2010, WC 2010 or World Cup Calendar (as Malcolm Coles tweeted later that afternoon). It’s not a total broad match though; there’s no World Cup Calendar displayed for the search World Cup Venues for example.

Now, this is where it gets a bit confusing. During the afternoon the calendar looked like this (click to make bigger):

Very nifty like I said; I particularly liked that it lists the UK times and even shows me which TV channel the games will be shown on. A little later in the evening, I had a thought about if Google would have listed Sky as the TV channel if they’d been the broadcaster (you know, given how Rupert Murdoch and Google don’t get along). There’s a hilarious tweet in there I’m sure.

Anyway, I searched again and this time I was presented with the following World Cup Calendar:

Note how now the times are South African rather than UK and in addition the TV channels are no longer listed. I tried refreshing, disabling search history, trying a different browser and this alternative version just wouldn’t budge. Then after a short time, the UK time version reappeared…then reverted back…then reappeared again!

I guess the question is why are Google alternating between different versions of the calendar? There’s nothing to click so I’m not really sure what they’re hoping to achieve with this one. Hey, it’s still a neat feature though; hopefully they can keep it updated (with UK times and channels please) for the duration of the tournament

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Having read and digested the title, I’m going to take a stab in the dark and presume you’re thinking one of three things:

• Of course skimming still goes on, you moron
• Skimming doesn’t happen anymore, it’s too risky for merchants
• What on earth is skimming? Seriously, what the hell are you talking about?

In the interests of providing a good user experience for you my beloved reader, I’m going to try and address all these possibilities as best I can.

What is Affiliate Skimming?

If you search on Google for skimming, you’ll find a whole myriad of definitions for the word. What I’m talking about has nothing to do with credit card fraud, reading, plastering or throwing rocks in a lake. In relation to affiliates, skimming is simply where the merchant company in question purposely doesn’t pay commission revenue to affiliates for a proportion of orders generated.

Skimming literally refers to taking some commission payments off the top of the pile, like skimming cream from a vat of milk. However in most cases it’s much less hassle for merchants to just not credit a proportion of legitimate affiliate commissions in the first place, rather than try and hide them later.

For example, a particular merchant might decide that for 10% of orders through affiliate links, they’ll block the tracking of affiliate commissions (whether that be through their own affiliate system or through a 3rd party affiliate network) and thus save themselves healthy wads of commission payments.

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t frown upon this kind of behaviour. Due to the nature of affiliate tracking in general, it’s very difficult to spot skimming on a modest scale which puts affiliates in a vastly inferior position when trying to hunt down and deal with any offending merchants. I remember Dave Naylor speaking about his hatred of affiliate skimming with some passion at SES London 2009 and my feelings are pretty much the same. It’s just plain wrong and I say that from both an affiliate and merchant perspective.

Surprisingly perhaps, there isn’t a great deal online on the subject of affiliate skimming. Most of the posts I saw were from 2007 or earlier; perhaps it’s just not an issue anymore?

Click here to continue reading Is Affiliate Skimming Still An Issue In 2010?…

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In the last couple of months, various studies and blog posts have cropped up regarding the SEO performance of large (super) brands. These posts and studies all show pretty much the same thing; lots of super brands don’t rank for diddly squat in the organic search engine results.

US brands

In an article over at Advertising Age, they summarised a study of America’s top brands by Covario. The study noted how these brands don’t rank organically for some (loosely) related generic search terms. Yeah, I know, what a shocker.

This article was met with a swift (and slightly brutal) response over on the Outspoken Media blog by Rae Hoffman, where she explained why these sites don’t rank and how just tweaking a few title tags wouldn’t really help. This is all true, but what interests me more is why these big brands don’t invest more in SEO. It’s absolutely right what Rae says about generic term ranking often being more about vanity and less about ROI, but I wanted to delve deeper into the nitty gritty with my post (more on that later).

Finally, I read about a survey in the US by Conductor about big brand SEO rankings over on Search Engine Watch. The data is nicely summarised by one of my favourite speakers, Mr. Greg Jarboe.

UK brands

So, focusing now on our side of the pond, a similar study was carried out by SEM agency Epiphany Solutions. They profiled 50 super brands in the UK and noted ranking performance for generic related search terms.

The study was then blogged about by Econsultancy; the general synopsis being that a survey from an SEO agency shows that big brands need to invest more in SEO. I mean honestly, I wouldn’t have seen that coming, would you?

Click here to continue reading Why Super Brands Don’t Care About SEO…

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So, this isn’t my main post for this week (I’ll post something serious later this week), but I recently became aware of some horrible-ness on Youtube that warranted further investigation. I don’t profess to be an expert on viral marketing, but if I was going to create a viral video campaign, it would be NOTHING like this monstrosity from Nokia.

Exhibit A

This video was supposedly leaked from “security company” Blackwell Briggs in May 2010. Nokia even set up a fake Twitter account. In fairness to Nokia, a few commenters on Youtube seemed to think it was real, but they could just be plants. Or maybe they’re just idiots, I don’t know.

Click here to continue reading The Nokia – Blackwell Briggs – Conspiracy For Good – Crap Viral Campaign…

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