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I've been using Google maps quite a bit in the last few months to get me from point A to point B in cities that I don't know too well.

Most of the time the maps are accurate and the directions are good.

So what about this one?



Granted, there could be some very good reasons why Google wants to route me by this rather circuitous route (and yes I did specify "walking", so it's not a "one way system" issue) but it still strikes me as odd ..

So much for the shortest distance between two points being a straight line ...

I don't like Google or anyone else telling me what sites I should or shouldn't look at, so when their "nanny filter" broke today I had to giggle.

Doing a search for anything - no matter how "innocent" it might be will get you a page of results that are flagged as "harmful" for your computer.

See what I got when I did a search for "the pope":

The online chatter today is buzzing around the announcement by Google that they are cutting back on several or their services - including Jaiku.

I've always preferred Jaiku's web interface to that of Twitter, as Jaiku supports threading - ie. you can actually follow a "conversation" without losing your mind!

Seemingly Jaiku isn't being fully shutdown, but it won't be developed any more and is going open source

Maybe this is a good thing?

If you're going to spend money on PPC advertising you really need to make sure that your website is working for you:




The site I decided to check obviously won't deliver anything for me:




What a waste of advertising spend!

And of course this isn't an isolated incident - if you spend enough time looking for products and services online you will find hundreds of these scenarios!

I posted about this yesterday on the company blog, but forgot to mention it over here ....

We've managed to secure a deal for our clients that can give them up to 75 euro of free advertising credit with Google Adwords.

More details on the blog and offer page

I recently acquired a webmaster discussion forum that had been semi-dormant for a period of time ie. it was like a wild garden where the weeds had been left unattended.

Looking back over the archives you can see that it once was quite a vibrant community, but that after the founder left to move onto other projects, or possibly a more demanding dayjob, the quality of the site declined.

Rebuilding a community on a site like that is not an easy job and I don't expect to see tangible results for quite some time.

Over the last year or so the forum had been attacked by a lot of spammers who were posting content that drove away potentially valuable members of the community.

After moving the site and its contents to a server I controlled the first job was upgrading the forum software to the most recent version. While Vbulletin has a pretty good security track record I wouldn't like to leave an old version "in the wild" for too long, as there are plenty of nasty little hacks that people can try.

The next thing was to install VBSeo, which is a very nice plugin for vbulletin. It helps with making "pretty" URLs and rejigs a lot of the other parts of a site's display to make it that bit more attractive to search engine spiders.

Over the next few weeks I expect there will be quite a bit of work to be done in trying to attract new members and retain them, but it can be worth the effort. (At least I hope so!)

Another thing that will be addressed, of course, is the site's look and feel.

Personally I can't stand graphic heavy forums with loads of flashing icons etc., I'm much happier with a clean and simple look and feel. James from ForbairtMedia has been working on tweaking the site's layout and design and given it a nice new logo - nothing crazy, but something quite simple and elegant.

The next big job is to see about regaining the search engines' trust of the site. The amount of spammy junk that was there would have led to the site being heavily penalised and judging by the lack of longtail referrals my suspicions are that the site wasn't being taken seriously by the likes of Google et al.

If anyone has any experience of rebuilding a community and would like to lend a hand please let me know :)

The launch of Cuil, which was a self-proclaimed "Google killer", got a lot of PR. Of course not all of the PR was as positive as the company's spin doctors would have liked.

I was planning on posting about Cuil around the time of the launch, but between one thing and another it got put on the back burner. That was until I saw a post today over on TechCrunch where several webmasters were complaining about Cuil's spider / bot. In common with most search engines, Cuil uses a bit of software to index pages.

Unfortunately, if the Techcrunch post is anything to go by, Cuil's bot isn't the sharpest tool in the shed and has been misbehaving. What that translates to in real terms is that it seems to be downloading the same content over and over and over again, which can affect website performance and bandwidth costs.

Of course this isn't the first time a search engine's software has had a negative impact on website owners. Microsoft's own search engine bot used to behave in an equally annoying and damaging way when it was in its infancy.

However the key difference for website owners is that Cuil simply fails to deliver.

While they may be able to rectify some of their early mistakes the audacity of Cuil's founders' claims is bound to leave a bad taste in many people's mouths. If you make big promises you need to deliver.

One of the things that I can see Cuil having serious issues with is its use of images.
When you do a search on Cuil you will see images displayed beside search results.
The company's FAQ claims that:

We know from our research that people can make better and quicker decisions about relevance and quality when they can see an image from the website. We do our best to take images from Web pages that accurately reflect the content of the website. Many websites are full of images, so we use advanced algorithms to determine the best image to show the user.

That sounds fine, and if anyone remembers the entire adsense + image placement debacle a couple of years ago, it probably rings true. But, and here's the kicker, which images are they actually displaying?

Doing a few vanity search queries for my own name I can't really complain, as it's showing photos of me for several, but things change quite dramatically when I try to search for keyphrases related to my business.

A search for "irish hosting" is currently displaying a UK ISPA badge beside a link to our company site. We're not members of the UK ISPA, so I don't think they'd really appreciate anyone inferring  a relationship.

It gets worse!

A search for "register irish domains" shows one of our competitor's logos linked to our site!

See below:
I know for a fact that Irish Domains have trademarked both their name and logo, so this kind of usage could lead to issues for all parties concerned.

When I conducted similar search queries a few weeks ago I was seeing our logo displayed as a link to a competitor's site!

And what about the search results that Cuil produces?

To say that they are completely random is to be diplomatic.

A search for "Carlow" turns up a university in the US as the 1st result (I guess you could use Cuil to find random websites that you might never have discovered?)

Darren Rowse should be happy. A search for blogs returns a photo of him, though it doesn't link to his site!

And if you want to check out porn stars Cuil is NOT the place to try. Choosing a few well known adult stars' names at random led to very little (cue jokes about all IT people being obsessed with porn - I know!)

Maybe it will get better over time. Maybe it won't. I don't think anyone is going to notice for quite some time.

Getting your site listed in Google is one thing, getting traffic to your site is another.

What's the difference?

Well basically Google pretty much lists every single webpage on the planet, so getting listed or included isn't really that big a deal.

What you really want is people to go to your site and buy your product or service (or take whatever action you want / need).

Now this is where it gets interesting and complicated.

If someone does a search in Google for my name they'll probably end up here pretty quickly. This has very little to do with SEO. It's basically because I have an odd first name and a rather uncommon surname, so most of the results in Google will refer to me.

With me so far?

Ok, so that shows that searching for something very specific is probably going to take you to it. It might not, but it's more likely.

But what if you are running an online business?

Are people going to look for your business by name?

While that might happen eventually it's highly unlikely that it's going to happen when your site first goes live, or even after that.
What's a lot more likely to happen is that people are going to look for a solution to a problem.

For example, if I want to read a review of the Babylon AD (a film released this week) I have a couple of options.
I could go to a site such as entertainment.ie, filmreviews.ie or movies.ie to see if they've got any reviews OR I could simply do a search on Google for "babylon ad". Since I'm interested in a review of the film I might append that to my search query, so it becomes "babylon ad review".

This isn't rocket science.

However if you deal with small business owners on a regular basis you soon realise one thing. A lot of them don't really understand how to use search engines.
They don't understand the difference between their browser's navigation bar and Google.

What this means in practical terms is that people can get duped by promises of "rapid inclusion" or "top ranking" etc., etc.

If someone promises you "free traffic" how are you meant to understand that?

Will you know that the only traffic you can possibly get from Google from a new site is going to be a spider ie. a bit of computer software that isn't going to buy anything

The devil is in the details, though anyone dealing with small business should be very clear about what exactly they are offering.

Damien wrote up a nice piece covering some of this based on what was being discussed on the Enterprise Ireland Ebusiness mailing list. It's worth reading the comments by the way!

James took the entire fluffy link / Google rapid submission tool idea and threw a quick site together

It all gets quite inane yet amusing, doesn't it?

After an extended period of downtime, while it was moved onto the Google infrastructure, Jaiku is back online.

Ciaran was following the migration's progress over on Jaiku Invites.

They seem to have opened up the invitations, presumably because they're on a much bigger platform than before and can manage the load, but whether the service will "take off" or not is hard to say.

Twitter, even if it has a horrible UI, is still a lot more popular.

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