Only just noticed that yahoo site explorer will show you backlinks for images. Guess i missed this one when reading seo for dummies.
Was looking to see what i would have to do to make this image of DougS 
rank for doug scott (better file name would help) and noticed yahoo was showing which pages referenced the image.
Anyway i guess this has a few amusing and practical uses, tracking pixels ;).
Take a look at who uses Googles logo
Doug told me he wanted a new domain for his blog to keep his crazy rants separate from ASAP.
After he rejected my first suggestions by telling me to fuck off, i decided to ask everyone else at Dougs for their suggestions.
After removing the abusive suggestions we ended up with the following…
You can help pick the winning domain by voting here on the right
Over the years I’ve had few search engines of choice.
Before 1999 it was infoseek, but I used to hop from infoseek to several other engines if something was hard to find.
Hotobot
Altavista
Excite
Lycos
2001/2002 when google was overrun with spam I would occasionally switch to alltheweb or yahoo.
Apart from a few rare occasions I’ve had google search as my home page for 5 plus years now. Thinking it’s about time I gave another engine a trial. So for the next week I’m having live.com as my home page - going to try not to do a single search on google - going to need a lot of willpower! 
Last week Google Trends started allowing you to compare websites and not just keywords
compare: bebo.com, facebook.com, myspace.com
Yikes!
More intresting to me is compareing some sites in our sector of car hire holidayautos.co.uk, avis.co.uk, nationalcar.co.uk, carrentals.co.uk, hertz.co.uk
How useful it this? Well by looking at several competitors i can see their top traffic terms, and work out which other sites send them traffic. Ok we know the majority of these keywords already, but now we can see how much traffic these words are sending the competition and where to focus our efforts.
Interesting to see how much traffic carrentals.co.uk must send some of these big brands checkout the also visited and you’ll see carrentals, looks like we account for a lot of some sites traffic(they dont send us any ;)). From our own stats we can see the exact number we send someone, then compare that to how much other sites send.
GrayWolf noticed that google has immited all thier own sites Guess Google are worried how it would effect share price? I dont see this as evil, there is some nice info thier, but wont make much difference to people already going full pelt to gobble up all thier realted traffic Besides if like us you have the cash you can get much more deatiled info from companies like HitWise.
Anyway, trends is still fun
The SEO Roadshow is back! The Roadshow is an informal, invite only, no nonsense, pub meeting held over a weekend where a 100 or so SEO’s get together and network.
Destination Limerick Ireland - picked for no other reason than 4eyes needing a new banjo.
Date: October 11th 2008
Venue:The Absolute Hotel, Limerick
Why go? to network, get drunk, and escape the office for a weekend.
Who’s it for? anyone with a passion for search and knows someone who can get them an invite
See you there!
Read the SEO Roadshow site for more deatils and to see whos going
Another big brands dont get it post - why working for a corporate sucks!
Earlier today a friend who doesn’t know SEO asked me a question about duplicate titles. She was fairly certain duplicate titles were not good, but this is what an SEO firm working for them had done. So i told her they should be avoided, and pointed to a few online sources which explained why.
So being the diligent employ she is, she passed on this information to the man at the top who is able to do something about it (pass info on to the right people and make sure its actioned). His response, “I disagree” - and they wonder why i left! So the guy who has done as much SEO as our office cleaner and who is supposed to be overseeing online strategy for a company who’s domain alone is worth millions thinks he knows more about on page optimisation than the seo industry, google, and me - and that duplicate titles are fine - knob!. Remember when this guy talked to me about SEO and thinking oh my god, was like he had just read the digitial point services forum and now thought he was an expert.
So good news for all those affiliates operating in this industry, bad news for all those share holders/owners.
Was going to post a bunch of resources to optimising titles and why duplciate titles are bad - but seems every seo guide out there has them covered.
Just when you thought Google only cared about generating revenue, snapping up companies, and updates to hordes of other non search products,we get a flurry of blog posts and guideline updates reminding us that someone at the plex still focuses on search.
First we have Spam fighting super hero Matt Cutts
“Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines”
Used to be fun to watch people argue over that old text, With some saying any changes that took search engines into account were breaking Googles guidelines and that made you a spammer 
Robots.txt documentation - Have to admit i havent looked at how i use robots.txt in years
Nofollow documentation - As much as possible i’ve avoided using nofollow for sculpting link juice, to me nofollow has always suggested you have untrusted links - but now Google confirm it’ ok. But i would still only use nofollow as a last resort.
Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow “register here” or “sign in” links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.
Cloaking or IP Delivery - You know if you are cloaking or not, but guess this helps clarify those situations where you are concerned about doing IP delivery on a site you cant afford to get banned. Cleared things up? some evil seo’s disagree
Reporting paid links helps - Well quick check of all the websites above ours shows buying links still works, but hey dont do it!
Want Google to improve your ROI? - Ok not quite search but be interesting to see if google can do a better job than us.
- bored now so back to work
