We work as outsource link building partners for quite a few big companies who have a good level of SEO knowledge in house but don’t have the resources to do high level link building.

Normally we just charge by the day (£750) but recently we’ve launched a new offer for in-house teams whereby we don’t charge anything for our time, we just charge for the links we get…

It’s not often that a premium .co.uk domain with mass market appeal gets auctioned but mobilephones.co.uk is currently being auctioned on Sedo, the current bid is £25k and the reserve has been met with only one bid so far.

Apparently phones.co.uk was sold for £175k a couple of years ago so it will be interesting to see if this reaches the £1m mark. What do you guys think, how much will this domain get sold for? Could you use the exact match domain to rank for “mobile phones” as a keyword or is the brand algorithm too strong in this sector?

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisationMobile Phones …

For those of you into paid links and blog/guestbook spamming this is probably going to be bad news – Google has apparently got a new linkspam algorithm and they are actively seeking reports to test it with.

Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we’d like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you’d like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e…

Branded3 is enjoying a bit of a boom this year with a new SEO client pretty much every week since mid-January. Because of this we’re on a recruitment drive to build the best team of on-site and off-site SEO specialists in the UK.

If you have experience in the industry and want to work with some of the UK’s biggest online brands then please get in touch with us and we can arrange an interview…

This is great news for agencies – Google Webmaster Tools now has an easy way for clients to give access to their data without having to upload a meta tag or an html file.

All you need to do is enter the email address you want to give access to and as long as they have a Google account they can get access straight away.

Small changes that make our life a lot easier…

For the last couple of years we have been badgering Google to start emailing webmasters to tell them that their site has been hacked and now the feature is finally live – no more having to use Google Alerts!

The system reports on hacking and abused user generated content as well as comment spam amongst other things. The only drawback is that you have to set up the email forwarding feature otherwise you won’t get a notification – why can’t Google just use your registered email address?

More from the Google announcement:

Starting this month, we will notify more webmasters of more potential issues we’ve detected on their websites, including:

• Spammy or abused user-generated content
• Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
• Suspected hacking

These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google’s search results…

Most news sites are reporting on the Google anti-trust allegations today after the European Commission launched an anti-trust investigation against Google after three online companies alleged that the internet giant’s search functions were penalising their businesses.

This case has a lot of background (you can read about Foundem here and here – they recently got a 10,000% search traffic increase overnight after Google apparently lifted some kind of penalty) but the interesting thing for me is that at least one of the sites wanting to take action against Google is one of the webs largest link buyers…

The worst page on a website is the last page that a visitor looks at before they leave and unless that’s the final page in your checkout process you need to be looking at ways to improve it.

An easy method to identify pages that are causing your visitors to leave is to order your Google Analytics content report by “% Exit” but this doesn’t really help because you get loads of pages with 2 visitors and one left straight away giving a 50% Exit Rate…

Analytics programs are never going to be 100% accurate but you might not expect them to be over-reading by 2-4 times on your unique visitor numbers.

According to research this is exactly what’s going on. Scout Analytics has developed algorithms for tracking users across different devices using dozens of unique attributes and utilize patent-pending algorithms to derive a unique signature for the device, network, even the individual user (biometric)…

With the huge amounts of long tail traffic websites get these days it’s very hard to analyse where sudden traffic increases and decreases come from. If you get 100,000 visitors one month and 80,000 the next month somebody is going to need a report detailing where that traffic went.

Google Analytics offers a fairly comparison of one months data over another and is also not too bad for comparing how traffic has risen (or fallen) for your top keywords…

We use WordPress a lot whenever we are building non-ecommerce sites for clients. It’s a perfect CMS for anybody who wants a mixture of pages and news and the latest versions are really user friendly.

One of our web design clients does online backup for large companies, financial institutions and the UK government and they have just released an Online Backup for WordPress plugin which backs up all your blog data to their secure servers (mirrored across two datacentres in the UK)…

Despite what you might think, not everybody uses Google and even though only 10% of the UK choosing to search on Yahoo and Bing it’s important that we consider who those people are and what they want to do.

A recent study into the demographic and psychographic profiles of search engine users has found that people who use Bing are early adopters and innovators whereas people who use Google are more middle of the road types…

Until early 2009 the tactics required to compete in most marketplaces were quite similar. Certainly you needed to use some special techniques to rank highly in industries such as online gaming and real estate (until the famous Google penalty of 2007) but in most other industries the usual SEO techniques worked perfectly well with the right execution.

In 2009 Google started using a few different algorithms such as the famous “brand” algorithm which is linked to satisfaction rates (apparently) and more recently the one not many people seem to talk about which is the “not optimised” algorithm…

Last week I started looking into a few rank tracking solutions to see what was new on the market and Yoast pointed out SEO Rank Monitor. We’ve looked quite a lot in the past at SEO analytics tools and I think this market is wide open for somebody to build a fantastic suite of tools but so far there is no clear leader.

The big issue for rank tracking tools is accuracy, most of the tools we try are inaccurate every time we use them and inaccurate data is worse than no data at all…

Until the invention of the Local Business Listings Google had two sets of results, AdWords and natural. Placing some ads around the natural listings was a perfectly acceptable thing to do but Google is limited by the number of ads they can show due to the size of the page. Adding 4 or 5 ads at the top simply wasn’t going to help the user experience.

Fast forward a few years and Google invented the Local Business Listings and suddenly started displaying them for one in every 13 searches (and virtually all the time for geographical searches)…

We’ve had a really good year so far at Branded3 and are looking for at least one/two experienced SEO consultants to join our Leeds office. I don’t want to make this post sound too much like a job advert because I’m sure most of you know the skills and qualities that an SEO consultant needs to have.

You will be working with some of the leading brands in the UK (our client list is missing some of the best accounts we have due to NDA’s) and get to work in one of the fastest growing natural search agencies in the UK…

When you download the Google Toolbar and select the “enhanced features” option you are giving consent for Google to monitor and log all the web pages you visit. That’s always been fairly clear but apparently Google is being a bit more sneaky – the toolbar will continue to track your visitors even after you disable it.

Pretty clever way for Google to get data.

Another story this morning shows graphically how Google is reducing the share of money they give to AdSense publishers…

This isn’t a post predicting what’s going on for the rest of the year, more a post talking about what’s been a bit of a whirlwind year already and we’re only 22 days into it.

I don’t normally talk too much on Blogstorm about the stuff going on at Branded3 because I hate self promotional blogs but today I wanted to make an exception just to explain why there are so few posts going up on Blogstorm at the moment, even though it has a shiny new design…

Google Local Business Listings are either a fantastic opportunity or a really annoying barrier stopping a site in 4th place from getting any traffic.

For example when Google displays a map for the query mobile phones it’s annoying for the poor site in 4th place because they get a massive drop in traffic but it’s also not an opportunity really because most people are not looking for a local phone shop they want a national online retailer…

Google is one of the most trusted services in the world and when it tells me that my spellings are wrong I normally blindly accept the correction like most of the UK population. The problem is that Google is a US company and they have a different way of spelling lots of words.

Try searching for marginalisation or search engine optimisation and you can see that Google isn’t just offering a correction they are displaying search results for the Americanised search term rather than the English one…

Depending on whether you believe Google or the fake click detection companies click fraud is big business. Detecting it is impossible for small advertisiers and it’s now being made even harder for even larger companies thanks to a new scam involving spyware.

Traditionally fake clicks were very costly to the merchant because the traffic wasn’t real and therefore didn’t convert…

Google is clearly going for some kind of record with product launches this quarter. Today we see them extending support for the rel=canonical tag across two different domains as well as adding sentiment analysis to reviews in Google Local.

I don’t see any situations where a cross domain rel=canonical tag would be the right thing to use but here is what Google has to say:

Q: Do the pages have to be identical?
A: No, but they should be similar…

The SEO industry has always been hard to follow but the last few months/years have seen unprecedented changes to the results being displayed. Ever since universal search catapulted videos and local business listings in front of searchers there has been too many different mediums for most people to understand.

During the last 70 days Google has launched no less than 38 new search products from social search to real time search and each one has a different algorithm and requires different optimisation techniques…

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6 months after we first started work the new Branded3 site finally went live yesterday evening. It was a long process primarily because we scrapped everything from the existing site and started from scratch on the design and the content.

As most of you know the task of sitting down and trying to convey all your thoughts about the different areas of a business on paper is a really hard task and takes a lot of time…

Recently we discovered Tynt which allows web publishers to add links to content that is cut & pasted from their websites.

Today I’ve removed Tynt and added a better script that allows me to add a link to the story page and a link to my homepage with the anchor text of my choice. The script is called Link Building Pro and you can download it for free here.

If you want to test it just try copy & pasting some content from this page into your WordPress editor or a Word document…

With site speed apparently set to be a factor in the 2010 Google algorithm webmasters are looking for easy ways to speed up their sites and Google wants to help.

The latest Google Analytics code loads asynchronously allowing your page to load faster – download it here.

Think of the asynchronous tracking code snippet as a script that uses a “separate lane” to handle part of the processing of your webpage…

Internet marketing firm Conductor has carried out some research (using Spyfu) to see what proportion of traffic to the top 10 big-box US retailers is coming from paid search compared to natural search.

In summary, they are spending a lot on paid search and natural search is still performing better in a number of cases. Of course the natural search traffic will include a lot of brand search (more than PPC) but it’s still interesting to see…

With Google Local results taking up more and more space in the search results local search is becoming (at least for Branded3) one of the key things we focus on for clients with multiple locations.

The Google Local algorithm isn’t the same as the main search algorithm but it does have similarities such as citations & reviews which work on the same principle as PageRank & links…

Over the last few months Google has been really pushing local search in the UK (with plans to push it even more) and we are finding Local Business Results increasingly creeping into generic keywords such as mobile phones.

Today I thought it would be interesting to take the “mobile phones” search results and see what percentage of the page each element takes up. The results are below and you can click on the screenshot to see a full size version of the whole page…