Microsoft drop bid for Yahoo

4 May, 2008 (10:46) | Uncategorized | No comments

Microsoft has dropped it’s bid to buy Yahoo as the two companies cannot agree on a price for the internet firm.

Microsoft claim to have increased their offer by $5bn to $47.5bn whereas Yahoo were after a minimum price of $53bn which was more than Microsoft were prepared to offer.

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer said ‘After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Mircrosoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal’.  Ballmer has told his employees that Microsoft will continue towards the same goals without Yahoo, just at a slower pace.

Google to start crawling HTML Forms

14 April, 2008 (09:09) | Google | No comments

One of the accepted truths of SEO today fell as Google announced that Googlebot (the software they use to crawl and index the web) now has the capability to fill in and submit HTML forms on webpages.

The basic way it will work is to take prominent keywords from the website the form is on and use these to fill in the form parameters (or in the case of dropdown lists, radio buttons and tick boxes it will presumably pick an option) and then submit the form. If it gets what it thinks are sensible results returned it will index the page and carry on it’s crawl.

This announcement only applies to GET forms, and if you don’t wish your forms to be submitted then simply use robots.txt to exclude them.

Full details can be found at: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/crawling-through-html-forms.html

Google trying to spoil the Yahoo/Microsoft Party?

10 April, 2008 (08:18) | Uncategorized | No comments

Google have signed a deal with Yahoo to place Google Adwords ads in Yahoo’s search results for a two week trial period. During the trial period up to 3% of the ads served on Yahoo will be from Google.

It’s thought that the move is designed to frustrate Microsofts attempts to purchase Yahoo, or to try and raise the asking price.

In a related move Microsoft were reported to be discussing a joint move for Yahoo with News Corp, who had previously ruled out working with Yahoo to block Microsoft’s offer.

Using a competition as linkbait?

30 March, 2008 (15:18) | Uncategorized | No comments

We’ve seen many ideas used to gain backlinks to a website. Travel website sunshine.co.uk are using a competition to gain backlinks, they are offering anyone who links to them in March the opportunity to win a Mac Book Air.

So in doing this the sneaky buggers have gained a backlink from us, both as an example of a good link bait, and as an excuse to enter the competition!

How to destroy your rankings in one simple step

18 March, 2008 (12:01) | Uncategorized | No comments

So your site has been up and running for a couple of years and you are ranking well in Google for your desired keywords and you are getting a good deal of traffic, you are taking plenty of orders and life is good! You (or your boss) decide that you should invest some of the money from this new found success into a brand new site design to take you to the next level.

You hire some designers in to give you that fresh new look and some web developers to implement the new designs, it all looks good so far. You launch the site live and for a few days it looks good, you are still getting traffic and it’s still converting… then it starts to go downhill..

  •  You start to notice that you are receiving less traffic
  • You notice that you aren’t ranking as highly in Google for your search terms
  • Your sales start to drop

You’ve made the classic SEO mistake, you’ve effectively removed all the pages from your site that had built up a level of trust and ranking with Google, all the backlinks from other sites that were contributing to your rankings are now pointing at non-existent pages. Your new design is seen as a bunch of new pages with no backlinks, no history and no trust, no wonder your rankings have dropped!

What’s the solution to this problem? Well the trusty 301 permanent redirect of course! A 301 permenant redirect is what you use to tell the search engines that you old page has moved to a new location with a new page and that you want to transfer all the backlinks, history and trust of the old page to the new page. Properly used 301 redirects can enable you to safely launch your new site AND keep all the search engine love that you have built up over the years.

For more on 301 redirects see this.