Thanks to the post that our writer Shaun did about interestingly shaped communities on Google maps there have been many thousands of visitors on this blog in the last week, it went really viral. Altogether the post has had over 67,000 unique visitors and many of them clicked onto the view larger map links to go and see a bigger map on Google.
I ran a report using my premium MyBlogLog account to see how many readers clicked onto the Google.com domain from this blog in the last week and then I ran one to see how many readers came from the Google.com and Google.co.uk domains, here are the results:
- This blog sent Google – 2097 visitors
- Google sent this blog – 1794 visitors
So in a bizarre case of role reversal this week I have sent Google about 15% more traffic then it sent me.
The vast majority of the Google traffic came from Google reader not from search, I wish this blog got that much search traffic.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 19th, 2009
The introduction of mapping applications such as Google Maps (undoubtedly the most popular example of all) and their subsequent widespread use around the world has resulted in an enormous amount of people taking up an interest in an interactive view of the world which previously was very difficult to obtain. There are millions of incredibly interesting sights to experience which, when living at ground level as we do, are rarely seen in the flesh.
As an example, here are some intriguingly shaped communities which take on a new appearance when viewed from the air, along with those same areas pinpointed in embedded maps. Take a look around.
Trails West, Arizona
Image Credit: © 2009 Alex S. MacLean / Landslides www.alexmaclean.com
View Larger Map
(Above) To begin, here’s a small mobile home community called Trails West just outside Tuscon, Arizona. The interesting thing about it is the shape as there aren’t many towns or communities with such a distinctly triangular boundary.
Sun City, Arizona
Image Credit: FESPM.es
View Larger Map
(Above) Sun City is a planned retirement community in Arizona which, due to its design and hundreds of identical houses, offers an incredible view on Google Maps. Dozens of tightly knit roads snake around the area and a even form a couple of huge circular neighbourhoods.
Ixtapaluca, Mexico
Image Credit: Aerial Photographs of Mexico City
View Larger Map
(Above) The town of Ixtapaluca in Mexico is full of low-income housing identical to the examples you see in the photo above, resulting in rows and rows of cookie-cutter homes which resemble a cartoon-based community. From above, the area is just as uniform and equally as fascinating.
Bourtange, Netherlands
Image Credit: Vesting Bourtange
View Larger Map
(Above) The beautiful star-shaped village of Bourtange was originally built as a fort in the 1500s, the shape chosen due to its highly effective defensive qualities. Today it houses a village and museum and looks incredibly unique, especially when viewed from the air. There are a few other similarly shaped villages around the world but none as defined as this one.
Harborwalk, Texas
Image Credit: © 2009 Alex S. MacLean / Landslides www.alexmaclean.com
View Larger Map
(Above) Developers in Galveston decided to build a planned community on the wetlands in Galveston and came up with a strange design where houses sit on rings of land which, from above, resemble concentric ripples on the water. At the moment the town is still under development, hence the numerous gaps where homes should stand.
Palm Islands, Dubai
Image Credit: Dubai Invest
View Larger Map
(Above) The award for Most Eccentrically Shaped Community has to go to Palm Islands in Dubai, an incredibly ambitious project which will, if ever completed following the financial crisis, consist of 3 separate palm tree shaped islands off the coast. Work on the first island began in 2001 and can be seen on Google Maps. The size and scale of the project is astounding.
June 12th, 2009
So I have been working on this air conditioning website and as you can imagine good air conditioner scoops are few and far between, so when Jeff the owner called me up with a bit of a story I knew I had to do something.
He found the story on a website called KRGV.com, you can read it here. It’s about some women in Texas who found an image that she believes is the Virgin Mary on her air conditioner.
There weren’t very many details really so I just re-worded it pretty much, blew up the tiny photo to a decent size and published it, you can see my post here.
I really didn’t expect it to go anywhere, I mean look at the image, it does in fact look more like death then the Virgin Mary, but to my amazement it did. The bait was just about crap enough to actually work. I got people talking about this image all over the web. Check out the discussions at Reddit, Propeller, Mixx and Plime.
I went to bed last night thinking oh well it’s not going to get any good links but at least it sparked a bit of discussion and sent Airconco a bit of traffic. When I woke up this morning and checked the stats, everything looked pretty normal, 1,500 from Reddit, 90 from Mixx etc. but then I saw Twitter.com 500 clicks. Now I don’t know a lot about Twitter, but that looked like a lot of traffic, my previous actual decent baits had gotten 50-100 clicks from Twitter at the most.
About an hour later I refreshed the stats. again and now Twitter had sent over 1,000 clicks. I decided to do a bit of investigating and found the URL that was sending the Twitter traffic: http://bit.ly/NVE6h, I searched Google for the URL and found Ashton Kutcher’s twitter profile aplusk.
Ashton Kutcher is a big time movie star, he was in that movie Dude, Where’s My Car and he is married to Demi Moore. He is one of the most popular Twitter users with over 2 million followers. Getting some of my work linked to by him is awesome.
The Airconco website has had 5,172 visits from Twitter.com so far and he only linked to the story about 9 hours ago – Link
Update: The traffic has started to calm down now and the post has had just under 10,000 unique visitors from Twitter.com, about 4,500 uniques that are unaccounted for and a couple more thousand uniques from other social networks. Altogether the story has had over 16,500 visitors and there are 60 comments on the post.
Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 9th, 2009
I recently started working on a new design agency site called Kosh Creative, it’s ran by a guy called Ben Smith, he is doing some design work for me in exchange for help with SEO.
I’ve been doing the usual link building stuff, getting it listed in directories, giving it a bookmark here and there and because it is a nice looking site getting it featured in CSS galleries.
When I was searching for CSS galleries to submit to I came accross this site called The CSS Gallery List offering me a deal where for $20 they will submit you to 87 CSS directories. Now I never buy directory submission services from anywhere, I always do them myself by hand, mainly because they always submit you to crappy linkfarms, but this site was offering me submissions to quality well designed sites with good PageRank and unique features so I gave it a shot.
I have got to say that I am absolutely amazed at the results, less then 24 hours after I purchased the service CSS gallery listings were showing up on Google, many of them with labelled dofollow image links going directly to the Kosh Creative website. Plus because I submitted the website title as as Kosh Creative Design Agency instead of Kosh Creative many of the links had good anchor text.
The best part about this though is the traffic, before I bought the pack the Kosh site was only getting a few visitors, about 10-25 a day. I bought the package on Tuesday the 26th of May and immediately it started getting more visits, here are the site’s visitor traffic levels for the last 7 days according to Google analytics:
25/05 – 22
26/05 – 53
27/05 – 59
28/05 – 58
29/05 – 597
30/05 – 401
31/05 – 292
As you can see on Friday the traffic just exploded, this is because it got featured on CSS Mania and a couple of other biggish ones. Here are the 10 CSS galleries that have sent the most traffic to Kosh so far:
So let me break this down for you for $20 I got the Kosh Creative website about 30-40 links on separate high PageRank sites, most of the links pass juice, many of them even have good anchor text and to top it off the links have sent a shit load of targeted traffic (because the site is in the design industry), the traffic has already gained the site about 6-7 delicious bookmarks over the weekend and I am sure it will lead to Ben getting work.
I know some of you might say well linkbaiting can be even cheaper and it can, but most of the time it is hard god dam work, this isn’t, it took me like 30 seconds to fill in that form and look what I got out of it.
It probably won’t be anywhere near as successful if you have a plain looking site like this one because it won’t get accepted in most of them, but if you have a good looking site that you are trying to promote it is a great way to spend $20 on link building.
Get yourself over to The CSS Gallery List and give it a whirl, you will not be sorry.
Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 1st, 2009
About a month ago I got a link exchange request from a guy called Suny:
“Dear Webmaster,
First of all let me introduce myself – I am Suny, Link Manager
handle online marketing for my client http://www.sunyseocompany.com
To increase the link popularity of my client’s site , we are now looking for triangular Link swapping with some good quality sites. You are already aware that Triangular Link swapping is much more popular and beneficial than Reciprocal Link exchange . This way both the sites gets the benefited . I would request you to place my client’s link at your site. ( please add my site at least page rank(1) page.)
Here are details of my site :
Url : http://www.sunyseocompany.com
Title : Professional SEO Company
Des: SEO Company ‘SEO Visions’ is home to suny and eajaz, experts in Search Engine Optimization, Traffic Building and Internet Marketing. Increase your return on investment online with us today.Email:-suny@sunyseocompany.com
Or you can simply use the following Linking code:
a href = http://www.sunyseocompany.com > Professional SEO Company SEO Company ‘SEO Visions’ is home to suny and eajaz, experts in Search Engine Optimization, Traffic Building and Internet Marketing. Increase your return on investment online with us today.Email:-suny@sunyseocompany.com
I will add your link at my site on Page Rank. choose any one site ;-
http://submitexpress.we.bs :- page rank -4
Please forward me your linking details along with confirmation where my link have been added by you.
Hoping an early and positive response from your side.
Have a nice day ahead 
Best Regards”
All sounds pretty good right? Wrong, the site Suny is offering me a link on is an exact rip off the Submit Express UK website and he had used the old blackhat PageRank 10 trick to fake the PageRank, when he 1st sent me the email his website http://submitexpress.we.bs was showing a PageRank 4/10.
I knew he had faked it because at the time if I looked at the Google cache of http://submitexpress.we.bs it went straight to the cache of http://www.submitexpress.co.uk.
If I had of gone for his deal I would have got no real link as the site he was offering me a link on was not even included in the Google index.
What this guy was doing was wrong on so many different levels so I emailed Submit Express and told them what he had done.
Today I got I new email from Sunny that was pretty much the same as the last one only this time he was offering me a link on a new URL:
“I will add your link at my site on Page Rank.
http://www.seocompanys.we.bs/ page rank -5″
If you check right now that site that he is offering me a link from: http://www.seocompanys.we.bs is an exact clone of SEOCompany.ca and if you click on the link below:
Google cache of: http://www.seocompanys.we.bs
You will see that the cache of seocompanys.we.bs just goes straight to the cache of seocompany.ca. This is because Suny has used the old redirect trick.
This guy has really gone the extra mile with the link exchange scam, I bet a few people have been taken in by the prospect of a nice link from a PR4 or PR5 site.
I feel sorry for the people who are getting ripped off by this guy so I have outed him. I am surprised that the fake PageRank trick still works.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
May 12th, 2009
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