I will obviously update this post once the results are in :)

I don't need to go over this in too many details as you can read about it on Dave Naylor's Blog, where he performed a number of tests. The tests though, seem flawed. Dave managed to submit the removal request for BingoPlayUk.com, a site he does not have access to under GWT, but to date, it still hasn't been removed:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Abingoplayuk.com

Nor do I think it will be removed. The issue is, unless you have blocked access to the URL or site via robots.txt or a robots meta tag, or have removed the site or page thus serving a 404, Google won't actually remove the URL. As Dave notes in his post, it warns you of this when you submit the removal request:

I'll keep an eye on the SERP for BingoPlayUK, but doubt it is going to change without a physical change to the site.

As for James and his results... linkbait-a-licious given his site is brand new? I'm not one to judge but until someone else can verify his results, I'm on the fence.

The not so simple problem, is that with the number of stakeholders within any sizeable organisation who share responsibility for the website, marketing and acquisition channels, development and technical assistance, SEO - and some of the responsibilities that fall under an SEO consultant/employee's remit - can unfortunately be overlooked.

In my line of work, and I would hazard a guess in many SEO consultants' working weeks, there are a number of situations that have a habit of catching you surprise, when one of said company stakeholders has "done something" without consulting you first. Here are my top 4 (either personally experienced or through stories from other SEOs):

What's analytics?

Too many times to count
Scenario: Person A has put a page up regarding a new promotion, and wants to know how many hits the page has had, how many registrations or sales said promotion has brought in and how much profit they have made the company after all costs (including that huge billboard they put up, as well as a ton of PPC traffic purchased).

Issue: Person A got the dev team to put the page up urgently as the billboard was about to be unveiled, and they didn't tell the person who heads up analytics (usually tied in closely with SEO) about the page, which simply linked to the registration form, or product category.

Result: SEO/Analytics person gets it in the ear for not tracking the page and resulting traffic (it's his/her responsibility to know about every page, after all!), thus nobody's able to work out if said promotion was a success or another massive failure.

Why are people finding our page!?

This one actually happened quite recently
Scenario: Person B has put a page up regarding a new promotion through a media buyer. The promotion is only open to visitors arriving from said channel and nobody else.

Issue: Person B got the dev team to put the page up urgently as the offer was about to go live, and they didn't tell the SEO about the page. The resulting popularity of the page pushed it up the SERPs organically until it ranked 2nd or 3rd for the brand name, with nice juicy "Sign up now for a big promotion!" title tag, matching description, etc... it really was an offer you couldn't pass up.

Result: SEO person gets it in the ear for not blocking the page and resulting organic traffic (it's his/her responsibility to know about every page, after all!), thus they had to give the offer to some people who had not arrived through the correct acquisition channel until the SEO could get the page removed from the index (fortunately, they did it quite quickly!).

Why isn't our site appearing for brand searches?

My favourite story from a friend at a big SEO agency about a very well known brand
Scenario: Person C hires a big design (not SEO) agency to build them a brand new, shiny, sparkling website. It's all singing, all dancing, you name it, it's got it! The proverbial mutt's!

Issue: Person C requested that the design agency to put the site up urgently as they wanted to launch the website before a specific event, and they didn't consult anyone in regards to SEO, but expected the site to rank quite quickly (it was backed by a big UK brand, after all). The site was up in plenty of time, press releases went out, lots of nice, top media websites picked up the story, linked back to the site, no love from the big G. The design agency just don't understand what's going on. It's been weeks since the site launched, why is it not appearing for any searches regarding the product/service?

Result: SEO consultant gets called in by the brand, makes one change to robots.txt (apparently it hadn't been amended since the site was in test, when they didn't want any search engines finding it) and all is well (it's his/her job to know these sorts of things, after all.)

Why don't we rank for our own story instead of these press release syndication sites?

You can lead a horse to water...
Scenario: Person D distributes many press releases on behalf of their client, replicates the press release on their own website, but never seems to rank for stories about their client, even though the PR was on their site first. The PR distributor and numerous sites who syndicate content always outrank them.

Issue: Person D always includes a few links in the press release, but as we all know, the PR distribution company always includes a link back to the version of the PR on their site... Person D, unfortunately, does not!

Result: SEO gets bugged, repeatedly, whenever this happens, even though they have given Person D instructions on how to optimise their press release distribution method.

Conclusion

Everything and anything can have an effect - positive or negative - on your website. Submitting a story to a bookmarking site brought this very site down back in November last year, because I hadn't expected such a high volume of traffic, enough to bring my host down! On and offline marketing/PR efforts, promotions, etc... they all have an effect on your SEO.

The time has come for SEO to be seen as a complimentary channel to all other marketing channels, be they for acquisition, retention, reactivation... even - as I've recently spoke to an online casino about - reputations can be managed through search and SEO.

Conferences

The conference season is well upon us. I went to one three weeks ago, missed one two weeks ago and am currently missing one, and that's just within the iGaming industry (my industry of choice). Let's not forget the recent Manchester Mini SEO Conf, SEOktoberfest, G2E that's about to happen in Vegas, BlueGlassFL which is currently running; the list goes on and on and on.

"Portable Wifi Hotspot"

My new phone (an HTC Desire running Android 2.2 Froyo, which, incidentally, is a lovely little phone) comes with something called "Portable WiFi Hotspot". This allows you to share your 3G, HSDPA or other mobile internet connection with, say, your laptop, by transforming the phone into a wireless access point. You can also do this by tethering the laptop through your phone using the USB cable, that's not what we're concentrating on here. You can limit access to the hotspot, secure it, restrict MAC addresses, but again, we don't want to do that!

Firesheep

Firesheep hit the tech headlines in the last fortnight after being announced at Toorcon12 (a hacker conference). Firesheep is a plugin for FireFox which sniffs out traffic on open wireless networks (and WEP secured networks for that matter) and allows the "attacker" to take control of other WiFi users' accounts on a number of popular websites. It was produced by a software developer named Eric Butler who was becoming increasingly frustrated by the number of mainstream, popular websites showing a distinct lack of "responsibility to protect the people who depend on their services." Butler continues, "they've [websites such as Facebook] been ignoring this responsibility for too long, and it's time for everyone to demand a more secure web. My hope is that Firesheep will help the users win."

Butler was instantly flamed due to the fact he had opened up the gateway for people to abuse security flaws - which, I might add, anyone with some reasonable tech-savvy-ness could have done before FireSheep - in a far more readily fashion. A few clicks of a button whilst connected to an open wireless network (in Starbucks for example) and the "attacker" could take control of anyone elses Facebook profile (again, for example) who is currently connected to that same network.

Some Blackhat SEO

To bring this post to a conclusion then, having spoken about 3 reasonably random things. There are other security credentials that Firesheep picks up by default, including the ever popular WordPress (hello, someone elses affiliate site). Did I mention it will also log access to Google accounts (hello, Gmail), Yahoo! accounts and MSN/Windows Live accounts (hello, YMail and Hotmail)?

So my question is thus: Would you continue to jump onto any freely available wireless hotspot whilst attending a conference to quickly check your Facebook profile if you knew it could be my HTC which is acting as the  "CONFWIFI - ATTENDEES ONLY" hotspot? Would you even be thinking about the consequences when you just checked you analytics stats for a second? Are your affiliate site login or FTP details saved as a Google Doc or Gmail draft? And would it already be too late for you to notice that I or anyone else had changed some of your affiliate links to my own, or have 301'd your site to mine?

Like I said, this is all hypothetical, but certainly something people should be aware of. Be careful on public wifi networks or even publicly available computers (I recently used the ones at BAC, but did everything through a secure LogMeIn connection to my computer at home), use secured connections where possible and be sure to call your own wireless network something amusing:

Starting at Google.com, I began typing in the address of my blog into the search bar. Note, this is without hitting return/enter:

The same happens when searching for a term, and note, the search results autoupdate as you type:

In light of the "naughty" filter (as it's being referred to), 2600 (the hacker group) have begun compiling a list of words that have been blacklisted by Google Instant, fairly or not. At the end of said blacklist, is a list of words which are not blacklisted, even though they would do well to be, given the guidelines Google seems to be following at the moment. You can, for example, search unhindered for the phrase "how to commit suicide" without the big G sticking its beak in.

Hungry to know more, I quickly thought of a word, to see which list it would fit in... out of curiosity. Imagine my surprise, when searching for "clung" - as in: "the climber clung to the cliff-face for dear life after his safety line snapped leaving him dangling above a great big gorge" - I was given the following suggestion from Google, as well as a full Instant result:

Note the lightly shaded letter "e" urging me to complete the search.

I also found the third result for the full, dirty, uncensored search reasonably amusing!

But you can't search for "teen"!

Alas, Google Maps had failed me, as a quick look at the postcode of said hotel, and indeed the image which showed no nearby buildings, quickly alerted my suspicions. The Trelawney Hotel is actually in Torquay:

Google Maps, well and truly, failed!

Tracking sub-domains with Google Analytics also works, with the minimal of configuration, by simply amending your GA code (this is the most up to date version, just by the way):

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

To read:

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.yourdomain.com']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

Simple enough? Well, here is a a nice tidbit of information, if you have two pages on your primary and sub-domains, that share the same page name (i.e. index.html), then Google Analytics will combine the statistics for these two pages artificially inflating the statistics for index.html on the primary domain. As my good friend Rob put it: "I wonder who decided that this was a sensible default?" Sensible default indeed!

More endless searching led me to information on setting up a filter, which will supposedly split your data and track traffic on both sub-domains and the primary domain:

Unfortunately, this didn't work out too well either in my tests:

So, calling on the Twitterverse, David Whitehouse from Bronco volunteered to help out and see if we could get this fixed, and came across the following filter configuration from Brian Clifton's book:

This has now been set up, and I'm running a few more tests on some new pages and will report on results as soon as they're in...

Update

So it's the morning after the afternoon before, and I can't say the results are overly brilliant, especially when I spot the following duplication in my analytics overview:

Furthermore, the subdomain I have been testing is being treated like a subdirectory in the reporting:

So when you hover over the "Visit this page" link in GA, you get the following in your status bar:

Not what I would call perfect, by any means.

Robots, crawlers, spiders or agents are programs which are used to traverse the wobbly world wide web automatically, taking note on which content is where. Search engines use these programs to index content for their indices, spammers use them to scrape content for their own sites, or even to crawl the web for email addresses to spam you even more. Understanding of how search robots work is an intrinsic part of SEO!

What is robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a file which, when placed in the root of a publicly available webserver, tells search engine robots and agents which content they can and cannot/should and shouldn't access. It can be used to block access to members' only directories for example, or pages which nobody should really be finding through search engines, or, as I was trying to do earlier today, block search engines from indexing pages which are a part of your affiliate system or associated with an affiliate ID.

What is an affiliate system?

Many e-businesses run affiliate systems, which can be described as an semi-automated process by which the e-business takes referrals from partner websites, and remunerates them for any transactions that result from the referral. Having worked in the online gaming industry for over 10 years now, I'm quite familiar with many of them, as they an intricate part of just about every online gambling business model.

Most affiliate systems use standard html links which contain affiliate ID parameters in order to track referrals from their partner or affiliated sites. Anyone who clicks the link which contains the affiliate parameters will be associated with that affiliate's account. If they go on to purchase something from the site, the affiliate will take their share of that revenue.

Search engine optimisation and brand protection

This is leading somewhere, I promise!

Many companies, when taking on an SEO consultant, agency or in-house employee, go straight for the proverbial jugular. They want to target the big, juicy keywords which will drive mountains of good, converting, valuable traffic. Because of this, they usually overlook the basics, ensuring you're dominating the search results for your brand names. Imagine, if you will, the panic in the office this morning, when after no more than a few hours, I spot a discrepancy in our brand term search results: an affiliate tracked URL is ranking in second spot, taking a nice bounty per referral as well as a share of any future revenue from any clients that came through that link!

SEO, brand protection and affiliate URLs

Whoever was in here before me, had not taken the time to ensure that search engines, and especially Google (ye olde search dominator) were not allowed to index URLs tagged with affiliate IDs. Due to the high volume of traffic this affiliate was sending through his affiliate ID, that URL got indexed for our brand name, and is still ranking in second place. I immediately submitted a removal request, and asked for a change to the robots.txt to ensure that affiliate parameters were blocked from this point forward... the reply: "what robots.txt?"

Robots.txt to block affiliate IDs

Given the fact the content/web developer people here hadn't implemented one, and the urgency required to get this resolved, I quickly typed up a robots.txt file for them to upload... ran it through the nicely-provided-by-Google testing utility:

Allowed by line 5: Disallow:

But what about line 6 you stupid test tool? The one that says:

Disallow: /?affid=*

No amount of fiddling would get it to work! I tried and tried and tried. And then I tested a second URL, one I typed up myself, and not copied and pasted:

Blocked by line 6: Disallow: /?affid=*

And that is when it struck me... affid and affId are two completely, and utterly different things according to robots.txt... why? Because ROBOTS.TXT IS BLOODY CASE SENSITIVE!

• Based in Canary Wharf
• The world's leading digital and direct media agency, with more than 650 professionals in 39 offices across 32 countries.
• Part of the second largest communications group in the world
• Fast growing, even in the current economic climate

A bit about the job, you should be proficient in:

• On and offsite optimisation techniques
• Coding in web languages
• Analytical analysis and reporting
• Development of proposals and presentation of such

The ideal candidate should also be proactive (I had to put that in, be thankful I didn't include: "be a team player" or some other clichéd rubbish) and a team player (hahaha, I crack me up).

No, but seriously now, if you think you fit the bill, please leave a comment with your details and I'll be in touch! There are plenty of perks in working here:

• We have a bar on the 9th floor, that serves booze, no joke, every day from 5pm. And it's subsidised. Not free, but cheap, a lot cheaper than anywhere else within the square mile!
• The bar also serves proper coffee, all day, which is also cheap. Think at least half the price of a Costa or Starbucks, and it's decent, non-instant stuff too (we all know SEO's run on caffeine and alcohol)
• The rest of the guys here are all awesome, search minded people, just like you and me, and it's nothing short of BRILLIANT sharing an office with them
• The Bolivian SEO guy buys you coffee and beer when he's late for work, and that's quite regular!
• Did I mention the bar?
• With the cheap beer?
• And the free jukebox?
• Which you can plug your ipod into?
• And the free pool table?
• AND THE BEER?

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?