recommendations? Want initial sample/test lists and then good sized ones for what works well.

looking for SME sized named contacts in construction/home decor/interior design.

ok - so small device to read tweets meeting certain croiteria (hashtag, tweeted from specified account, or whatever) aloud?

Karotz used to do it - that little bunny thing with the moving ears - but that seems to be discontinued and all I can find is Sense Mother which is home automation - seems well within its capabilities in theory but it doesn't seem to 'speak' just create alerts.

There must be something - anyone know of a gadget to do this offhand? Or I guess a smartphone with a text to voice app would do it - anyone know of an existing app which works with twitter?

for various reasons we report against WT data for impressions/average ranking etc.

In september impression data for a lot of clients shot up (for some clients by about x4) - clearly a difference in how data is being measured - average rankings and CTR are stil broadly where you'd expect and no we're not using a new tool etc.

the strange thing is I can't find anyone else talking/asking about it - has anyone seen chatter? I'd like to be able to tell clients why their graphs are ridiculously positive! (many theories, none fit perfectlly)

google logo change >> click through to puff piece >> first line says Googles been around 17 years.

which means I have known (or known of) most of you guys for 18 years. Brad, I think you were the first person to say hello to me on an SEO forum - I blame this all on you

Aaahh, alta vista...

so this from their paid page

QuoteTrademark registrations ensure that you rank at the top of search engine results when your trademark is searched by your customers. Additionally, you will be able to prevent any competitors from bidding on keywords for the same brand name.

I'm not sure I even want to look at what they're saying about organic... how can Sugar not have pulled the plug on this level of incompetance? How can the junior they had spellcheck the content not have picked up on that? Gah...

(just in case some poor potential client is reading this - Google adwords policies - https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en-GB )

This will be of interest to most here one way or another

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/22/google_co_and_trustworthy_accountability_group/

QuoteThe Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) pilot program will nix bot traffic using a blacklist which could cut a significant portion of web traffic; Google's DoubleClick blacklist alone blocked some 8.9 per cent of traffic.

I want a database, preferably cloud based, which allows me and invited colleagues (this is public data but as a collection I'd like to keep it invite only) to upload, store and access large files (mainly pdf white papers from various sources) and to tag/flag them as being in multiple categories.

I would like to be able to either auto-flag for attention or easily find all files which were upliaded more than xx days ago and at the same interval afterwards (as these will probably go out of date). Worst case I could try and do this with tagging

It should be easily searchable by tag and hopefully by content.

Ideally I'd like to see who uploaded and who/when has logged into the system and what they've used - but that's not essential.

And it would be great if it was free.

Effectively I want a manageable knowledge base to dump all the useful data one person finds and and then files somewhere never to see again. while another person is looking for that exact info. Its hard to do it on the network as things need to be in multiple 'folders' but I don't want loads of copies of these things,, and our intranet doesn't really work for it either.

Suggestions? I'm sure its out there!

This may just turn into a thread where I ask Woz advice a lot, but since at least a couple of other people are vaguely interested in bees, I thought might be a nice one to rumble along!

so I now have two hives, I got the first two years ago and was luck enough to get a (late) swarm given t me which survived the winter. My first bees were so gentle that I could work on the hive with no tools and no smoke and wearing flipflops, and I only got stung twice all year. The second year that hive swarmed and the new queen started to produce incredibly defensive little workers who reacted badly to everything from lawnmowers to touching the hive.  Yesterday the hive swarmed again, so new queen time - lets hope this one is a bit calmer and we're back to being able to enjoy working with that hive.

Swarrms are amazing. when bee's swarm they're actually at their most gentle and calm and you can stand in the middle of it as they fly around you with pretty much no risk of being stung. I think when my first hive swarmed that first time was when I massively got the bug (as it were) because I immediately got a second hive last year, which also survived its first winter. So far so good.

But it is a hell of a steep learning curve. There are 70,000 bees in a summer hive and thats quite a lot of little lives to be responsible for, although they don't need a lot of worrying about thankfully!

did you find a BBKA Jason?  How're you getting on?

I'm looking for a broken link checker which will allow me to upload a list of domains and will run through the queue providing a standard broken links check for each - xenu or screamingfrog but without having to check everything one at a time.

Anyone seen one? Happy to pay fo a one off or a subscription service if absolutely necessary

So, you can sign into ahrefs using your google account.

It may just be me, but that's strange.

a client has asked for the top 10 results for 150 serps

I had a bit of a play with Kimono and its generally working but sometimes returning less than 10 results per query - whcih is a bit of a pain because I need to format the output to add the keywords back in, and I'd rather not do it manually.  I've added &num=10 to the url's and individually it seems to pick up 10 results, but running a batch I still get fewer rows than I should

Anyone else had this? Its not terrible if I need to do a bit of manual maipulation but I'd rather ake it work properly if I can!

This update came in at a shitty time for me with most clients about to go into sale, which means looking at local search volumes to try and work out exactly how they've been impacted by Pigeon is really awkward, I can't compare before and after, I'm comparing just after and a bit longer after.

Also the clients tend to have different models - so some have verified physical stores, some have no stores but case study or other localised pages, some have franchise models etc.

So where I am now is seeing changes but narrowing down the exact changes for each client is proving tough. You think you have a pattern and then discover that for some reason a place they have no store is sending three times the traffic you'd expect. And the PR companies aren't much help at identifying if it could be from local coverage rather than SERPs results.

soooo - anyone else have any insight? We're approaching six weeks and normaly I would have told clients at least a borad approach to making the most of the update by now - although my reasons for not being sure are sound, its also frustrating!

Does anyone kmow a decent study on the % of entirely natural links which are nofollows?

This isn't for linkbuilding as I look at it by industry for that, but for a pure 'if we achieve 1000 totally natural links how many of these will be nofollows?' theoretical question.

I've been looking in majestic at sites where I judge the link profiles to be natural and its surprisingly small - obviously its hard to find commercial examples where you can be sure of a natural profile unless you know the owner but I'm tending to find slightly less than 10% nofollow at the moment, which really doesn't play at all into what I would expect based on the number of sites out there which nofollow as standard.

I've looked at alltime links and recent, in case old ones were skewing, and also tried removing deleted....

I think I might be seeing skewed results because what I'm looking at is either very trusted or very niche and thus they get a bit of a free pass, but would be good to compare with some other results from somewhere...

has anyone seen, ether personally or on your trawls through other forums. mention of old meta descriptions being used?

One of my clients emailed me yesterday asking why a meta we changed 6 months ago was bing picked up by Google.  Its only on certain searches and it makes sense in that the keywords it appears for are better represented in that meta - but it is the old meta, not words from elsewhere on the page, or commented out, or anything... the G cache shows the new meta and it has been ages....

Was just wondering if its to do with Pigeon, or something else if afoot - at the very least it incicates Google stores old meta data for a hell of a long time!

I haven't played much with G+ brand pages but have to now for a client - however if you search their brand in Gooogle+ their page doesn't come up

when I have this on pinterest etc I just kick in a couple of hundred followers and it springs into life - is it the same on G+ ?

I have a fairly painless way which doesn't involve spam or paying for followers to achieve a reasonable minimum number, I think,  but it'll take some time to get it explained to all the right people and get things signed off, so no point doing it if that isn't the answer!

The page isn't expected to be a major social channel, just a brand guardian, so I don't especially need to achieve any KPI's aside from 'being there, in answer to the obvious question!

TIA

Anyone got advice on how best to tackle this

Aside from a variety of other complications which I have solved I now have this for a client;

The site offers a variety of products under their brand name
The site also co-brands its pages when a user clicks through from certain websites. A cookie is set. Users with this cookie will see the co-branding on repeat visits

BUT some of the products are not available under the co-branded deal

the client requested that a visitor with this cookie set who clicks from a SERPs will either receive a 404 or be redirected to the (co-branded) homepage.


in my view the 404 is a bad idea
the redirect feels like cloaking, technically, and while of the mildest form this comes after a whole raft of major changes (all very genuine but big impact stuff) to the site and I feel this might push us over the edge.


do I have any options which will stop people with this cookie seeing these pages without causing potential issues?  I know there are other/bigger solutions, but I want to be sure I can't resolve it within these constraints before I force one of them.

has anyone successfully done this?  I'm not sure how workable it is - the proposal is to block everything unless specifically whitelisted (and there's an acknowledgement that some bots will ignore it, of course)

thoughts?

anyone else seen the change here?

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2375474?hl=en-GB

Quote
Where the ratings come from

Seller ratings are based on an aggregate of reviews and information from the following sources:

    Customer reviews collected by Google Shopping: Google Shopping aggregates reviews from a broad base of sources across the Internet. Google Certified Shops reviews are also included, where available.
    StellaService: StellaService is an independent company that rates the customer service performance of online businesses.
    Google Certified Shops: Google Certified Shops is a free certification programme that can improve your conversion rate and average order size by reassuring potential customers that you offer a great shopping experience.

I don't know when it happened, and as far as I can see, having read the StellaService gumph, that basically means if you're outside the US, then you need to be running on Google shopping (which is now paid) or, er, well no, because certified shops is currently US only?

At present other review providers are still being pulled in in the UK, but I don't know for how long, apparently some Review Centre clients got an email saying their reviews would no longer count...

not online marketing I guess, but much more social and driving so much online traffic I think its ok to mention the TV ads?!

For you 'Mercans - the Christmas ads are, I guess, our equivalent of the Superbowl ads  - always instantly identifiable before you see the logo and massive spends.

There's a rundown of this weekends main releases here http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/article/1220211/john-lewis-m-s-boots-tesco-watch-weeks-christmas-ads - what do you all reckon? - the joined up thinking behind the JL one is really impressive  http://www.johnlewis.com/inspiration-and-advice/az-of-christmas/bear-and-hare

sorry, don't want to turn this into moz, but I could do with a sanity check on Hummingbird...

What is your take on what it means in terms of what would now be required to get more search traffic?. Because I have made my decisions based on what happened to traffic in late august/early sept, where I saw specific patterns on clients sites in the month before hummingbird was announced, couldn't work out why and then saw the HB announcement at which point (I thought it) all clicked into place.

But, er, my thoughts are actually really different from what a load of other people are suggesting.  I'd like to hear what some people I respect (and some of the rest of you  ) reckon because I'm 95% sure I should stick to my guns but if I'm wrong, then I will have a long term issue... and keywords dissapearing makes it hard to sense check from analytics in the short term!