hackbash

Noun: pseudo news; Fact x Importance / SEO

Tags: definition, psews, SEO

I don’t know. Seems I’m still feeling pissy about the polluting effect of SEO on content. While Google News seems to have temporarily extinguished Autobulbs Direct, a host of similar sites are cropping up in its results, blabbering on about how the weather could delay prestige car hire customers (people) or how British commercial vehicle hire users (lorry drivers) are safer than their foreign counterparts.

I’m fascinated by this stuff, because it’s shit, but also because if Google News is going to allow it it drives home a depressing realisation: from day one, Charlie and I could have put all our ‘journalist’ crap aside and just rewritten optimised press releases as news – don’t think nobody wanted us to. We’d have hated ourselves and gained even fewer readers, but clearly they’re not the point.

So I’ve been thinking more about exactly why companies want psews on their websites. Make no mistake that it’s all about the optimised links, but a quick chat with @randipdhesi helped me better understand what’s going on. They’re not getting link equity from Google News, of course, but they are getting a degree of traffic, and there’s always the chance that people linking to the news story will – like I did – forget to add a no follow.

Linking 101

By omitting this, and thus conferring its (limited) authority to another site through a link, Hackbash is suggesting to Google that it rank that site more highly for search terms similar to the anchor text used. By way of an example, I know of a jolly good B&B. At the time of writing, search results for that exact term all relate to a pub in Hampshire. Within a day or two, now I’ve written that, the B&B closer to my heart should rank alongside it.

So that’s part of it, although of course you can’t control the text with which people link to your site*. But third-party sites that link to yours confer a more general sort of authority on it, and by careful management of links within the receiving site this ‘Googlejuice’ can be distributed in a controlled fashion.

By ensuring that any part of the site that attracts inbound links contains only optimised links that point to the site’s own product landing pages, a company can channel some of its incoming link love to its products. This helps them rank more highly when people search in Google for product-related terms. Like prestige car hire, commercial vehicle hire or fucking car lights.

Randip makes the point that a newsfeed is particularly attractive, because there’s no shortage of third-party sites who’ll syndicate, or simply rip off its content. In some cases the links stay intact, resulting in an optimised link to a product page from a third-party: the best of all worlds.

Tamsin’s written on the iCrossing blog about how Google’s useless in a crisis. To an extent that’s unsurprising; something as fast moving and serious as the Chilean earthquake is always going to generate a challenging amount of information and, as Tamsin says, much of this came via sources created specifically for the job. Google’s search algorithm wasn’t designed to reach an instant value judgement, and yet increasingly it needs to.

But news aggregation relates to established and ongoing sources, and as such it’s an area where a search engine has the time to fettle and refine its service. By now, Google News should be shit-hot. It’s tempting to say it’s half-way there.

* Search agencies, including iCrossing, do ask, and some webmasters are happy to oblige.

Tags: Google News, hyperlinks, newsfeeds, optimisation, optimised, psews, search engine optimisation, SEO

Tags: Chris Brennan, Chris Phin, funny, twitter

It used to be that only virus writers and spammers went in for social engineering, but it seems it’s OK for Facebook advertisers.

I’ve seen this advert on the site a couple of times now. It’s easy enough to ignore but… Wait, hey. I’ve got two messages? Well I’d better click.

The site you get if you do is another hawker of individual voluntary arrangements as a financial cure-all. What, no messages?

Phooey.

UK Debtors note: there are many companies purporting to be a ‘National Debt Helpline’ or similar – a google search will show you the ones who’ve spent the most on optimising their sites.

I’m only aware of one charitable example: the National Debtline, run by the Money Advice Trust. Call them.

Tags: debt, Facebook, social engineering

From this month, I’ve switched to a four-day week at iCrossing. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while: I’ve struggled to stop freelance taking over my weekends and, frankly, have started to get a bit shit at meeting deadlines.

The other part of it is that I enjoy freelance and I don’t like feeling that I’m doing it badly. The extra time should allow me to catch up with existing commitments before seeking out a few new ones.

The prospect seems to have given me a boost, even extending to some renewed enthusiasm for blogging. And today, my first day ‘off’, was good. I learned:

-I can see stereograms, but the ones with dots are shit.
-Pigeons actually bob their head so they can create motion parallax, and thus judge the distance of objects.
-A dog’s head with a man’s hands is inherently funny.

Tags: bob, dog, parallax, part-time, pigeon, polarisation

An earlier gush on Twitter (I refuse to pander by calling it a twush or anything equally facile) provoked a couple of replies, revealing that I’m not alone in my admiration for Google’s Chrome browser.

I came to it late – about two weeks ago, truth be told. I’d been struggling with IE, and have never liked FireFox enough to settle on it, resulting in an unhappy, slow and memory-hungry mix of both, depending what I was doing.

The billionth intrusive, annoying and slow FireFox update made me give Chrome a proper look. Within a day it was the default on the three computers I regularly use, chiefly because it:

-doesn’t crash
-starts quickly
-opens new tabs quickly
-has tear off tabs
-actually fucking remembers passwords if you ask it to
-doesn’t have an intrusive update every time you open it

But even once you accept that it’s just going to work properly and be useful, the details keep giving:

-if a site isn’t in your favourites, the star icon on the favourites button is unfilled. If it already is, the star is full.
-Chrome remembers the last favourites folder you saved a site to (Internet Explorer 8; why did you make this such a monumental pain in the cock?)
-the status/preview bar at the base of the screen is only as big as it needs to be, and it only appears when it has anything to tell you. It’s repositioned to avoid your mouse cursor
-the default new tab screen (detail above) is actually useful; containing thumbnail views linking to your eight most visited sites
-whether you type an address or search in the address bar, the appropriate result appears straight away
-Chrome can sync your favourites between multiple computers

It’s ironic, really, that I’ve discovered how good Google’s browser is at a time when I’m increasingly disappointed with the quality of its search results, but there you go.

Tags: browser, Chrome, Firefox, Google, IE, Internet Explorer, twitter

When shopping, heavier items end up in my manbag.

On a typical day my manbag might already contain a notebook, a phone and a snappy camera.

Putting heavy items on top of these is normally fine. Putting heavy items on top of a two-pint bottle of milk on top of these is not fine, apparently.

On future typical days, my manbag might contain a milk-stained notebook and a phone.

But never again a bottle of milk. Or indeed that particular snappy camera.

Tags: accident, camera, leakage, manbag, milk, mobile phone, MP3 player

Just noticed this box on the BBC site as it prepares to cover the Oscars. It’s the first time I’ve seen them directly embed tweets into a story.

Looking at the actual feed page it seems like there’s a problem – an 11 hour-time lag between a tweet and its appearance on the BBC page.

That and it looks fugly.

Tags: bbc, Oscars, twitter

Tags: email, Hotmail, inbox, unread

At work, we’re writing a couple of motoring news feeds for an insurance client. It’s not journalism red in tooth and claw, but they’re nice people and we quite enjoy trying to give them a couple of properly researched, written and edited news stories every day. To their credit, that’s what they want.

We use Google News among our sources. I’ve written before of my concerns regarding its apparent lack of judgement, but I still find it useful – particularly its new(ish) custom section feature.

Recently its results have begun to include the peculiarly car-headlight-bulb-focused Autobulbs Direct News, providing such fetishistic takes on motoring news as:

Bentley launches new vehicle, with gloss black finished car light casings

and

Car lights of Spyker supercars to be fitted in Coventry (where, in fact, the whole cars are to be assembled).

We’ve seen this kind of deal before: take a press release, rewrite it, crowbar in the term you’re trying to optimise for, publish and submit to Google News. Even so, a recent story went too far, mis-attributing a focus on headlights to a Virgin Money spokesman:

[Grant Bather] suggested that this could include cracked car lights or other damage caused in a traffic accident or claims that result from breakdowns or theft.

This is just naughty. There’s no mention of headlights in Bather’s quotes, or indeed anywhere else in the Virgin release.

Taken in isolation, tucked away in a news feed that’s written for Google, perhaps this kind of search-term loading hardly matters, but it depresses me all the same. I expected Google to become more wise than it was in 2007 to the quality of the news it aggregates.

Back then, in a few months of optimism, it was tempting for Charlie and I to believe that we were part of a potential new direction for journalism. Like us, we assumed, other journalists would want to maintain decent standards when writing news for the websites of corporate clients, and that Google would help by favouring those who bothered.

For me, our two motoring news feeds are all that remains of that belief.

Tags: attribution, quoting, SEO