Matt Cutts has posted a new video answering some more complex questions when it comes to robots.txt and your site. The questions this video covers include:
After I’ve blocked URL’s in my robots.txt file why are they still showing in search engine results pages.
I’ve been using Chrome over the last few weeks at work on my PC and at home in Beta version on my Mac. In the past I used Firefox only due to the fantastic use of plug-ins and extensions. I find Chrome fantastic to use, its amazingly quick compared to Internet Explorer and Firefox and I massively prefer the rendering of web pages.
Good news then that the first stable release is due “Within Months”. After watching someone messing around with Google Wave the other day I’m looking forward to moving everything into the Google cloud.
Noticed a great post on Jonathan MacDonalds website about advertising and marketing so I thought I’d share it. The examples are fantastic and give a great real life example of marketing methods in action.
1. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and say: “I am very rich.
“Marry me!” – That’s Direct Marketing…”
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2. You’re at a party with a bunch of friends and see a
gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and
pointing at you says: “He’s very rich.
“Marry him.” -That’s Advertising…”
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3. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and get her telephone number. The next day, you
call and say: “Hi, I’m very rich.
“Marry me – That’s Telemarketing…”
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4. You’re at a party and see gorgeous girl. You get up
and straighten your tie, you walk up to her and pour
her a drink, you open the door (of the car)”Marry Me?”
- That’s Public Relations…”
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5. You’re at a party and see gorgeous girl. She walks
up to you and says:”You are very rich!
“Can you marry ! me?” – That’s Brand Recognition…”
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6. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and say: “I am very rich. Marry me!” She gives you
a nice hard slap on your face. – “That’s Customer Feedback…”
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7. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and say: “I am very rich. Marry me!” And she
introduces you to her husband. – “That’s demand and supply gap…”
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8. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and before you say anything, another person come
and tell her: “I’m rich. Will you marry me?” and she
goes with him – “That’s competition eating into your market share…”
Lesson 10 in the 30 day to build a better blog guide brings us onto monitoring whats being written on the Internet and how you can find out about it quickly and for free. You may ask yourself why its important to monitor what other people talk about but if you think about it from a strategic point of view setting up alerts can massively help you. Darren in his lesson covers the main reasons on why you should update setup blog alerts below.
I wouldn’t normally post videos here from one of the car websites I run but this one is a little bit special. Just make sure you have the volume turned up and pay special attention to those downshift noises.
Yesterday I installed the Snow Leopard upgrade on my iMac. Nothing really new in terms of front end upgrades apart from a few small tweaks. Most of the features of Snow Leopard are backend related, removing bloat and helping streamline processes. The update has improved performance across most of my applications, iTunes for example loads roughly 50% quicker than before.
As mentioned above there are a couple of front end changes but they are pretty hard to spot unless you are a power user. Matt Fisher has put together a nice four minute video demonstrating the changes, watch it below for your quick guide.
Well I’m slowly getting there with the 30 day guide that I’m completing on blog promotion. Yes there haven’t been many updates as of late but I’ve been away in Cuba for the last couple of weeks and work has obviously been mental since I’ve returned.
Day 9 of the guide concentrates of the powerful potential that forums and communities have in terms of helping you grow your sites traffic. Now you’ve picked a niche to focus your site on you need to ensure you find where your potential long term users are spending their online time and start getting involved.
Darren in his post quite rightly points out three key reasons why you should focus on forums as a way to grow your blog and I agree with them entirely.
I want to draw your attention to a very interesting site I stumbled upon the other day during my lunch break. tweaktoday.com takes the now common ‘Status update’ on sites like Facebook and Twitter and adds a nice twist.
Users are challenged to perform a mission which is decided by the community, today’s is “Show us something that you no longer use for its original purpose.” Users then respond to that task either by uploading images, videos, drawings etc in an attempt to answer it. There is already a good following of loyal users with lots of effort going into producing content by the community. Because of the real-time response to tasks, there is always something worth visiting the site for so I can see how easy it is to get hooked. The level of detail people have gone to when answering some of the historical missions is quite astounding, for example the task asking people to write a letter on their hands generated some serious effort.
Its a great little site with lots of potential as I’m sure the user base will continue to grow. You can find me on the site here.
Been a while since I’d done one of these posts but here is a quick round-up of articles/sites I’ve found over the last couple of days.
Download Concentrate for Mac. This is a great little program that can block you opening websites or applications for a set amount of time so you can get on with work. Very good idea!
Not sure what the Google supplemental index is? Find out here
Good article by Dave Chaffey here explaining the importance of Google’s SEO changes over the first half of 2009
Download Page Speed by Google to ensure you site is performing in the way it should.
Linking between pages on your website or blog is one of the easiest thing you can do in terms of building your search engine ranking and generating more page impressions from your users. Task 8 of the “Build a better blog challenge” covers the reasons why you should link between pages and the resulting benefits. I’m going to add a few suggestions and comments to Darren’s views.
There are three main reasons why you should ensure you link pages within your website. Carry on reading to find out.
This is the personal blog of Nick Flood. I am the Product Manager of whatcar.com
at Haymarket Consumer Media. This blog covers my experiences, learnings and views on all things related to digital publishing.
The views expressed and information presented on this blog are entirely my own and not associated with my employer in anyway.