According to the Sunday Mirror

Computer experts believe supermodel Kate Moss is one of dozens of celebrities who have paid thousands to play down references to their troubled pasts on the world wide web.

Now when you Google her name, the first page of results has no mention at all of her druggie past - only positive accounts of her career.

The process can cost anything from £12,000 to £300,000 and takes as long as six months to show results. But it ensures bad publicity never pops up on the first page. It means a Google search for “Kate Moss” brings up no initial reference to her 2005 cocaine scandal, exposed by our sister paper the Daily Mirror.

Instead, users find glowing profiles of Kate and links to her Topshop range. The first mention of her involvement with drugs comes on the second page. In contrast, rival search Yahoo and Ask.com both turn up a string of druggie references.

Google is targeted rather than rivals because it accounts for 80 per cent of all internet searches.

To clean up a client, web experts use specialist techniques to boost the rating of “positive” sites. The higher these appear in the results, the further “negative” sites are pushed down. Other celebs suspected of doing the same include ex-PM Tony Blair, whose first Google page has NO reference to the Iraq war. Instead, it cites links to a Downing Street website and his own official site. Lycos and Ask.com both mention the war.

Stars who might benefit include Chelsea footballer Ashley Cole - his first Google page includes four references to cheating on Girls Aloud wife Cheryl. And a search on Heather Mills brings up two links to her divorce from Paul McCartney, one to her bizarre rant on GMTV, and one to her past as a porn model.

Well according to the ramblings of one blogger I have just stumbled across

Google PageRank To Be Reset

During a recent meeting with a Google engineer it was revealed to me that during November Google plan to make changes to four elements of their search engine and AdSense program in an attempt to thwart the increase of blackhat SEO, PR fraud and invalid AdSense clicks.

PageRank to be reset to zero and replaced
The infamous PageRank (PR) is going to be no more. All toolbar PR data will be reset to zero and PR will never be coming back (this is why we have been waiting so long for the update). This is very bad news for anyone who sells text links in order to make money.

This will be done in time for a mid November release of the Google Toolbar version 4.2 which will be used to roll out “VR� (visitor rating). Google VR™ will use a digg like system with a voting button on the toolbar to collect visitor ratings of the page and the VR will be displayed via a blue bar similar to the PR bar. The VR value will be based on a number of factors like the ratio between visitors and votes and where your visitors come from (i.e referred from a site or a search engine), It will also take in to account how many people return to your site over time. I was assured that measures will be in place to stop competition rigging your VR by giving you too many negative votes.

Two clicks for AdSense
With the increase of click fraud and invalid, unintentional clicks, Google are bringing in a system designed to prevent someone clicking on an advert unless they actually want to. The system they are implementing will mean when someone clicks on your AdSense ads a box will appear telling them that the link they just clicked is a PPC advert and it will ask them if they want to visit the sponsored link. if they click “yes� you get paid, If they click “No� you don’t get paid. It is speculated that this will reduce all AdSense earnings by 75% across the board but will increase the CPC.

No more link: data on the operator search
The link operator on Google search has long been an inaccurate way of seeing how many backlinks you have (another important factor when selling text links), But we don’t have to worry about that anymore because Google are removing all backlink data from the search engine and from Google webmaster tools and analytics.

rel=�nofollow� replaced by rel=�dofollow�
Not to long ago Google came out with the great idea of using a rel=�nofollow� attribute for links. What this done was tell the Google bot what links you didn’t want it to follow from your site. This was a great way of stopping comment spam on blogs. Unfortunately not many people used the rel=�nofollow� attribute and it kind of died out. So in november Google are replacing it with a rel=�dofollow� attribute which will tell the Google bot what links you DO want it to follow. It will simply ignore all links with no attribute or the rel=�nofollow� attribute, it will only crawl rel=�dofollow� links. All links you have earned up to this point are now worthless.

I have no idea if there is any truth in the above, but it makes good reading anyway…

Read the original here 

I read a cracking article from The Daily Moolah this morning about a really quick way to create backlinks, they actually reckoned that it would take you 15 minutes, they lied. It took me about an hour and a half. But thats only because I signed up to all the Online bookmarking sites that they are linked with.

Its a lot easier to do this if you actually sign up with the following Social bookmark sharing type sites first, and then sign up sign up with Onlywire

Now you have done the laborious task of signing up for all those social bookmarking sites (hopefully with the same username and password) you can go over to Onlywire and signb up with them and then they do all the donkeywork of posting your links to all these sites

Onlywire is an automated social bookmarking tool which has18 sites built in its content network. Setup is fairly easy and involves adding  a bookmarklet to your toolbar in Internet Explorer or Firefox. Click on the bookmarklet after visiting the site you wish to promote, and it will take you to Onlywire.

Onlywire takes the URL and the title information from the page. Feel free to modify the title, as that will be the anchor text linking to your site.  You then choose tags that describe the page you are bookmarking.  Onlywire has you separate tags by a space, so you need to cover all your bases when it comes to phrases.  I normally create one word with no spaces (affiliatemarketing) and separate with a hyphen (affiliate-marketing) to ensure proper coverage ( Each tag has its own page ). 

That page will contain a link back to your site!  I recommend using 10 – 20 tags per bookmark to optimize your backlinks.  You also need to include a description of the link in the comments box.  Your description should include any valid keywords relating to the site you are promoting, but don’t be a keyword stuffer. Click on the submit button and you just created over a free 100 backlinks!

Original article is here 

One of our clients, Plantain,  is a seller of Natural essential oils. You know the stuff thats used in aromatherapy, and massage oils and all things like that. We were pretty chuffed to find that our search engine optimisation services have come up tops again.

You will now find Plantain, in the top 4 of Google for their main search term

Natural essential oils 

And if you select the small checkbox saying uk only, you will find Plantain Number 2.

We’re chuffed to bits with the results.

I think Matt deserves a pint, for his hard work on this project.

 Vanessa Fox has posted some new features to Google webmaster tools over at the official blog

Requesting removal of content from our index

Posted by Vanessa Fox

4/17/2007 04:04:00 PM

As a site owner, you control what content of your site is indexed in search engines. The easiest way to let search engines know what content you don’t want indexed is to use a robots.txt file or robots meta tag. But sometimes, you want to remove content that’s already been indexed. What’s the best way to do that?

As always, the answer begins: it depends on the type of content that you want to remove. Our webmaster help center provides detailed information about each situation. Once we recrawl that page, we’ll remove the content from our index automatically. But if you’d like to expedite the removal rather than wait for the next crawl, the way to do that has just gotten easier.

For sites that you’ve verified ownership for in your webmaster tools account, you’ll now see a new option under the Diagnostic tab called URL Removals. To get started, simply click the URL Removals link, then New Removal Request. Choose the option that matches the type of removal you’d like.

Individual URLs
Choose this option if you’d like to remove a URL or image. In order for the URL to be eligible for removal, one of the following must be true:

• The URL most return a status code of either 404 or 410.
• The URL must be blocked by the site’s robots.txt file.
• The URL must be blocked by a robots meta tag.

Once the URL is ready for removal, enter the URL and indicate whether it appears in our web search results or image search results. Then click Add. You can add up to 100 URLs in a single request. Once you’ve added all the URLs you would like removed, click Submit Removal Request.

A directory
Choose this option if you’d like to remove all files and folders within a directory on your site. For instance, if you request removal of the following:

http://www.example.com/myfolder

this will remove all URLs that begin with that path, such as:

http://www.example.com/myfolder
http://www.example.com/myfolder/page1.html
http://www.example.com/myfolder/images/image.jpg

In order for a directory to be eligible for removal , you must block it using a robots.txt file. For instance, for the example above, http://www.example.com/robots.txt could include the following:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /myfolder

Your entire site
Choose this option only if you want to remove your entire site from the Google index. This option will remove all subdirectories and files. Do not use this option to remove the non-preferred version of your site’s URLs from being indexed. For instance, if you want all of your URLs indexed using the www version, don’t use this tool to request removal of the non-www version. Instead, specify the version you want indexed using the Preferred domain tool (and do a 301 redirect to the preferred version, if possible). To use this option, you must block the site using a robots.txt file.

Cached copies

Choose this option to remove cached copies of pages in our index. You have two options for making pages eligible for cache removal.

Using a meta noarchive tag and requesting expedited removal
If you don’t want the page cached at all, you can add a meta noarchive tag to the page and then request expedited cache removal using this tool. By requesting removal using this tool, we’ll remove the cached copy right away, and by adding the meta noarchive tag, we will never include the cached version. (If you change your mind later, you can remove the meta noarchive tag. )

Changing the page content
If you want to remove the cached version of a page because it contained content that you’ve removed and don’t want indexed, you can request the cache removal here. We’ll check to see that the content on the live page is different from the cached version and if so, we’ll remove the cached version. We’ll automatically make the latest cached version of the page available again after six months (and at that point, we likely will have recrawled the page and the cached version will reflect the latest content) or, if you see that we’ve recrawled the page sooner than that, you can request that we reinclude the cached version sooner using this tool.

Checking the status of removal requests
Removal requests show as pending until they have been processed, at which point, the status changes to either Denied or Removed. Generally, a request is denied if it doesn’t meet the eligibility criteria for removal.

To reinclude content
If a request is successful, it appears in the Removed Content tab and you can reinclude it any time simply by removing the robots.txt or robots meta tag block and clicking Reinclude. Otherwise, we’ll exclude the content for six months. After that six month period, if the content is still blocked or returns at 404 or 410 status message and we’ve recrawled the page, it won’t be reincluded in our index. However, if the page is available to our crawlers after this six month period, we’ll once again include it in our index.

Requesting removal of content you don’t own

But what if you want to request removal of content that’s located on a site that you don’t own? It’s just gotten easier to do that as well. Our new Webpage removal request tool steps through the process for each type of removal request.

Since Google indexes the web and doesn’t control the content on web pages, we generally can’t remove results from our index unless the webmaster has blocked or modified the content or removed the page. If you would like content removed, you can work with the site owner to do so, and then use this tool to expedite the removal from our search results.

If you have found search results that contain specific types of personal information, you can request removal even if you’ve been unable to work with the site owner. For this type of removal, provide your email address so we can work with you directly.

If you have found search results that shouldn’t be returned with SafeSearch enabled, you can let us know using this tool as well.

You can check on the status of pending requests, and as with the version available in webmaster tools, the status will change to Removed or Denied once it’s been processed. Generally, the request is denied if it doesn’t meet the eligibility criteria. For requests that involve personal information, you won’t see the status available here, but will instead receive an email with more information about next steps.

What about the existing URL removal tool?
If you’ve made previous requests with this tool, you can still log in to check on the status of those requests. However, make any new requests with this new and improved version of the tool.

LONDON (Reuters) - Spending on advertisements using the Web will overtake radio in 2008, a year earlier than forecast, according to new data released on Monday.

ZenithOptimedia, a media planning and buying firm, said it expects the Internet to account for 8 percent of the world’s total advertising spending in 2008, compared with 7.9 percent for radio.

Norway, Sweden and the UK are three markets were the Web already accounts for more than 10 percent of advertising expenditure and this is expected to grow to 11 countries in two years.

The Internet has its highest ad market share in the UK, where it is expected to attract 16.6 percent of advertising spending this year and 22.6 percent in 2009, ZenithOptimedia said.

Fastest-growing ad markets in the next two years are expected to be the Middle East and central and eastern Europe, with high oil prices providing a boost to several countries.

Qatar and Egypt are expected to see their ad markets grow by 304 percent and 221 percent respectively between 2005-2009.

Global advertising spending is forecast to rise 5.2 percent this year, on a par with its long-term trend, but this figure masks different growth rates in various media such as outdoor advertising, newspapers, magazines, cinema and television.

In 2008, the global ad market is expected to enjoy a short-term boost from the summer Olympics, presidential elections in the U.S. and European soccer championship — events that traditionally stimulate advertising spending.

Ad spending on the Web is expected to grow six times faster than traditional media between 2006 and 2009. ZenithOptimedia said apart from the Internet, only cinema and outdoor advertising are expected to grow faster than the market to 2009.

The company has downgraded its forecasts for newspapers and magazines as publishers spend more on online products and less in print, adding that newspaper spending is essentially stagnant.

 From Reuters

One of our clients is a screen printer, well they do lots of things over at Harveyboard, including Health and safety signs, T-shirts, lables and Mugs. They came to creativesuit before my time here. At the end of 2006.We redesigned their website from something that that didn’t look very professional Into the new website here, which I’m sure you’ll agree looks miles better.I did my initial checks on the recently relaunched Harveyboard site back on the 22nd Feb, I changed a few things. Added the site to google webmaster tools, dropped a few links here and there, changed the titles, descriptions and the site structure and left it alone for a month, and came back too check the rankings today. (as a creativesuit client, you receive monthly web rankings reports)We were extremely pleased with what we found:

Thats nowhere, to quite a lot of page one’s in a month.  We spoke to Kevin and he confirmed that he had already noticed a dramatic increase in incoming calls and emails. With business coming from all over the country, despite us optimising the site for the Greater Manchester area.We’ll keep you informed with any more developments in the world of Harveyboard.

If there’s one request that I always cringe at, it’s to disable a site because a customer decides that it is in his best financial interest to “close shop.� Later, if we own the domain name and get notifications about its upcoming expiration date, the customer may already be long gone and is not reachable with any contact information we may have for them.

I can’t say this has happened a lot, but it isn’t unrealistic either. If there’s one thing you should keep when you decide to shut down your business, it’s your domain name (and let’s hope you grabbed your website files too). But why? Believe it or not, it’s an important element for ranking in search engine optimization.

Consider the idea that you are creating a brand new website. The domain name is unheard of and therefore is unranked. You search for your domain name in Google and find nothing. Weeks later, your brand new site is still nowhere to be found. Time passes, and your site may start appearing in the search results, but the progression is going very slowly. Google is crawling your site with caution. They don’t know you well and are determining if you can be trusted.

An element of trust is important for ranking well on search engines. Trust can be conveyed through linking strategies, like when your site is linked to from a site that Google already considers to be an authority, but age, too, plays an important role.

Why should it matter? Simple. Considering recent studies showing the spammy nature of brand new websites, how is Google supposed to know that your site is more legitimate than the other spam site (including on their own domain)? It doesn’t. Google is not human. Trust comes with time. Spam sites don’t last for a long time and certainly won’t be linked to from authority sites.

The problem is that if you lose your domain name, it’s likely gone forever. If it expires, it goes into a pool and it will get snagged pretty quickly if the domain name looks like a worthwhile investment on the part of people who actually make it their business to buy domain names that could make them rich. If you’ve made a name for yourself and have to shut down without keeping the domain name under your ownership, but later, you realize that you’ve made a regrettable decision, you might have a hard time getting your “brand� name back (especially if there are no associated trademarks). You’ll end up likely having to build a brand new name — and you’ll have to concern yourself with regaining that trust once again. If you don’t own the old domain anymore, you can’t set up 301 redirects to retain any rankings you might have. You’re back to the beginning.

Depending on the TLD (top level domain) you choose, your domain renewal shouldn’t be more than $15 per year in the worst case scenario. Even if you’re not sure you’ll ever use the domain name again, it’s a small price to pay for the time and money that you will have to reinvest in building your credibility in the search engines again.

Article from http://www.10e20.com 

Our friends over at “your office manager” will hopefully be seeing a dramatic increase in traffic to their website after we designed, coded and of course optimised their website for the search engines. We have seen a nice couple of results come in from our friends over at MSN. If you search for their main keyphrase Secretarial services Manchester You will find them lurking on the first page at the lofty heights of Number 4. And if you search for a more niche phrase Typing assistance Manchester you can see that we have them right at the top of the tree.

Numero Uno.

Don’t forget to get in touch with us here at creativesuit, if your website needs a bit of a headstart, and if you need any Typing Support. Give Louise a shout over at Your office manager

New owners of Youtube, Google have indicated that the bandwidth hungry video sharing site will be implementing copyright protection filters very soon. Google head honcho and extremely rich bloke Eric Shcmidt said.
“We are definitely committed to (offering copyright protection technologies),” “It is one of the company’s highest priorities,” he said.

“We just reviewed that (issue) about an hour ago,” Schmidt told news agency Reuters when asked what Google was doing to make anti-piracy technologies widely available to video owners. “It is going to roll out very soon … It is not far away.”

How will this effect Youtube? well is going to stop me going on there for one. If the site becomes exclusively the home of content created by its users its going to be a pretty boring affair. Who wants to watch opinions from some 12 year old emo on the state of her favorite depressing band.
So that means. NO music videos, NO episodes of tv shows, no Interviews from TV programmes, and NO sports highlights such as these absolute gems from last night.