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I use Firefox both in work and at home, so I'm used to using it on both OSX and Linux (Ubuntu). Since so much of what I do is either centred around email or web based systems, my usage of my browser and a few other tools, is quite important to me. Things that make my life that little bit easier are always welcome.

So which addons do I currently have installed:

• Google toolbar - shows a site's pagerank and gives you access to a few other handy little tools
• Zemanta - a handy tool for bloggers which allows you to easily access images and links based on your post's content. You can also use it to easily link to products on Amazon
• Mozbar - direct access to the Seomoz tools
• Delicious - probably the addon I use most. I spend a lot of my time bookmarking sites, so doing it via a web service like Delicious makes sense
• Alexa sparky - gives you access to Alexa data on any site you're viewing
• Ebay toolbar - if you use ebay as much as I do then this makes it a lot easier to track your current bids (I was trying the AIR desktop, but it was annoying)
• Blacknight domain search - allows you to search for available domains directly from within Firefox

Which Firefox tools / addons are you using?

SEOmoz are doing a special $1 pro membership deal, but it looks like it will be ending soon.

Go here to signup and use the coupon code: SUCCESS09

I signed up a few days ago and have been playing around with some of their SEO tools - definitely worth more than a dollar!

The internet is a weird and wonderful place.

This evening let's look at the "weird" and possibly even "bizarre".

As regulars readers probably know, I run several websites apart from my day job (I really should put "day" in inverted commas, as it's never really been 9 to 5), including IWF, which is a discussion forum for Irish internet professionals.

Users of the forum discuss topics that they're interested in and, naturally, link to websites they've come across.

(Last time I checked there weren't any laws against linking to websites, but maybe I was mistaken... I'm just not so sure anymore.)

Maybe I don't know anything about how the internet works, or anything about internet marketing or SEO, but I heard this rumour, now it was just a rumour, that links to websites were quite important. Maybe I just misheard it.

In any case I received an email earlier this evening from the owner of a website that someone had linked to demanding that the link be removed as it was against their linking policy and breached their copyright terms (I'm not linking to them directly, as that would be against their rules)

Am I alone in thinking that this is decidedly odd for a company that sells online marketing and SEO services?

UPDATE: The link I provided earlier was redirected to another person's website, so I have removed it.

Trying to get sites to display identically across multiple browsers and multiple operating systems is awkward. This site probably doesn't display particularly well on all browsers, but I'm not a professional web designer / developer, so you'll have to excuse me. It's also not a corporate / business website trying to sell products or services to the public.

Screenclick, however, is a business website.

Earlier this evening I decided to visit it on my Mac using Firefox. Apart from the really annoying splash page, which doesn't do anything useful, the main page does not load correctly in Firefox 3 on the Mac:


Now if you open the same page in Safari you seem something totally different:
Why?

Seemingly somebody decided to use Microsoft's Silverlight, but didn't bother to do a simple plugin check that would either prompt the user to install the plugin or gracefully degrade.

I won't be able to view their site on my Linux desktop either, as Silverlight isn't available for Linux (there is a port, but last time I checked there wasn't a native Debian / Ubuntu version available)

UPDATE: I've now moved to my Ubuntu Linux desktop and this is what I get:

The wonderfully helpful splash page (do they honestly expect me to continue browsing after seeing that?)



and the inner page (for some odd reason it's actually telling me that I need Silverlight now, whereas it wasn't on my Mac!)

The "geansai gorm" (blue jumper in Irish) SEO competition has been flooding Irish sites over the last few days.

Some of the entries are amusing, while others are a bit silly. However James has been doing a nice job of making it visual.

He's got a headless girl posing with a geansai gorm for example, which begs the question - who is she?

He even went to the trouble of getting his cat kitted out in a geansai gorm as well!

Of course I haven't even got round to entering! (I misread the rules and registered domains that broke them!)

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?

It really irks me to see organisations like the IIA (the Irish Internet Association) knowingly setting all links in comments on its blog to be "nofollow.

The "nofollow" attribute sucks. Sure, there are *some* circumstances where it can be useful eg. linking to a competitor for example, but if you moderate comments on a blog then nofollow is just inane and dumb.

This blog quite happily "follows" people who take the time to share their opinion via a comment. In fact all the blogs I run or post to use the normal link attributes.

So what the hell is up with the IIA?

They're supposed to be promoting the internet sector in Ireland etc., etc.,