Google Search Engine

A lot has been written about the Google Sandbox effect, but much of it is based on early reports of what webmasters thought was a downgrading of a site that was just beginning to do well.

Many webmasters concluded from this drop that Google was giving their new sites some good rankings so other webmasters could find their content to link to it and then after a short period of good rankings for being a new site the rankings drop.

The theory was if the content was great that short period of good rankings would be enough to generate enough backlinks to give it a start on the journey to long term rankings in Google.

Interesting title don’t you think

No I’ve not lost the plot, all will become clear as you read.

The World of Warcraft

Recently I’ve become a little addicted to the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) The World of Warcraft (WOW).

My eldest son (15 years old) is to blame, he wanted to try the game out to make some money, so I bought the game and paid for a 6 month subscription, but after I played it I was hooked (it’s so addictive)!!

Now we have two World of Warcraft accounts!

Originally he planned to sell WOW gold (apparently a big industry, but against the terms of playing WOW), but changed his mind and settled on creating the site Warcraft World which is primarily a list of World of Warcraft Quest Guides.

Can a blackhat SEO consultant ever go too far?

I think that was answered earlier today when the Google employee Matt Cutts SEO blog was hacked by the owner of a blackhat SEO blog.

Whitehat SEO Turns to the Dark side!

In a moment of madness the whitehat of Matt Cutts was temporarily tossed aside as he recipricated in kind and hacked the blackhat’s SEO blog

Obviously that’s not what really happened. A hackers had some fun with two site owners.

I’m sure Matt and Dark SEO Team will fix their sites quite quickly, so I took screenshots for prosperity

Text on the page:

This site have been hacked by
Dark SEO Team.
nous sommes le proprietaire de toi

There’s quite a bit of confusion over 301 redirects and how they effect SEO and a sites rankings. We’ve extensively used permanent 301 redirects on both our own and client sites and in this article I’ll explain how to use them and what you should expect SEO wise.

First some basic information for those new to permanent redirects.

What is a permanent 301 Redirect

A 301 or permanent redirect basically tells a browser (or search engine spider) that the site or page it is accessing has moved permanently. It then immediately redirects that page to the new one.

Search engines like Google will attempt to pass SEO benefit (PR and anchor text benefits) from the old page to the new page.

It’s that time of year again when Google invites college and university students to work on open source projects, see Now Accepting Student Applications for Google Summer of Code 2007 for how to apply etc…

WordPress (the CMS used for this site) is participating in Google’s Summer of Code and until the 24th March are open to ideas from users etc… for project ideas.

Will be interesting to see what they come up with.

What I’d like to see is-

1. The image/link bug fixed. When you post an image as a link WordPress forgets to add the closing link tag (/a). At least not fixed in WordPress 2.0.4 (can’t use latest version, need to update the server to run it).