I honestly believe, that by sharing their knowledge, most SEOs stand to gain more than they stand to lose. Until recently I was also more than a little jealous of the buzzing social scene across the London agencies.

That’s why a few of us got together in May and created the Manchester SEO Meetup, and its supporting Manchester SEO Linkedin Group.

So what is Manchester SEO Meet-up?

David Towers put it quite nicely back at the first curry and beer meetup in June:

It will all be informal, no presentations, no pitches – just a chance to meet up and talk SEO!

There were about 8 of us back then, and it’s since grown to over 25 – Turns out there are a lot more SEOs in Manchester than I thought – we had a bar full of onpagers, copywriters, linkbuilders, techs, account managers, blackhats, heads of departments and more.

Manchester SEO Meetup has no hard and fast agenda – people meet to share SEO tests and methods, find people to collaborate on projects, look for job opportunities, and just chill with like-minded agency and in-house SEOs.

Last night I had some great conversations about everything from Google Base, drop-shipping, SEO ‘celebrities’, golf, Google Wave, American bands, and both extreme demographics of the travel sector. I also drank lots of continental beer from a glass with a stem, which confused my northern mind no end.

Find out more about SEO Manchester Meetup

So if you’re an SEO in Manchester, or just interested in search in general, sign up to the Manchester SEO Linkedin Group and look out for the #mancseo hashtag on twitter to keep posted on when the next meetup will be.

Oh yeah, regrettably recruitment agencies are not welcome – there’s plenty of other events guys, but please respect that this one is just for us SEOs to chill without hearing about your latest commission-driven “fantastic opportunity in a leading North-West agency”.

Recently @louisventer and @Rishil found themselves banned from Twitter with no explaination, and after some pretty awesome hashtag protesting @Rishil was reinstated.

Turns out both got banned for tweeting a URL – http:// cash – with – google .info

Not exactly breaking news, I hear you say. Hear me out…

It’s not just because this URL is on some spam list over at Twitter HQ. In fact it has been identified as contained Malware (which roughly translates to “bad/unhealthy stuff”).

So Twitter is now using Malware detection to

a) identify potential spammers
b) stop these tweets going public

Here’s your proof…

So why is this so interesting? Well it gives us an insight into the working of a spam detection system, a glimpse into the world of categorisation and sorting. Basically, it’s an element of an algorithm of an extremely popular social media platform.

If you still don’t think that’s interesting, then you’re probably on the wrong blog.

More reading…

SEOptimise

Rishi Lakhani at The Telegraph

Having just come back from the Think Visibility conference last night I feel recharged with motivation to finish my half-baked projects.

One of the consistent themes of the event was how easy it is to get distracted with planning, writing lists, drawing wireframes etc. without actually seeing an idea through to the end.

So a massive thanks to Dom Hodgson without an ‘e’ for the hard graft, along with all the other people who chipped in to make Think Visibility such a blast. Here’s just a few…

Joost De Valk – Some great tips on how to squeeze every inch (watt? horsepower?) of performance out of your Wordpress blog with regards to load speeds, optimising images, caching etc.

Interesting fact: the guy has over 50 active plugins on his wordpress blogs!

Julian Sambles – Head of Audience Development or something similar at The Telegraph speaking about the process of bringing SEO into a huge business and challenging established industry traditions. He didn’t mention anything about their off-page SEO of course!

Interesting fact: The unique traffic growth graph this guy showed us was staggering. Watch out The Guardian!

Judith Lewis – For a start she gave out chocolate to everyone. She could have talked about optimum keyword density and I would still have nodded contently. Great session about universal search and optimising rich media.

Interesting fact: I made everyone wait whilst I dug for a Cadbury’s Truffle.

Some other sessions I managed to get to and thoroughly enjoyed were Fiona Thompson from SimpleUsability on eyetracking and debunking the F pattern, and Karyn Fleeting of Tinderbox Media on corporate blogging.

Maybe next time I’ll try my hand at speaking? Or maybe I should buckle down and finish my myriad of unfinished projects first!

Links to other Think Visibility Writeups

Here’s all the writeups I can find – many of them in much more detail than mine. So if you want a link, drop me  a comment!

Photos

Photos from @sk8geek

Photos from James Inman

Session Slides

Tom Smith’s Session Slides

Writeups

Joost again on Julian’s Telegraph.co.uk session

Carla Marshall of Sorbet Digital

Simon over at Zath.co.uk

Rahoul Baruah (awesome name!) at 3HV

Kieron Hughes aka Web Toastie

Branded3’s Zoe Piper via Piggynap

Michael Heap gives the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

Someone no-one’s really heard of

Pfft’s Chris Clarkson

Lynne Foster of PoLR

SEOidiot and the happy light. Plus check out the Yoast cufflinks!

Malcolm Slade of Epiphany

Last year the fine folk at SEOmoz dropped at bomb that I wasn’t aware of. They claimed that only the anchor text from the first link to a target URL passed relevance. In practical terms, this meant if you linked to a page multiple times from the same page, then you’d better make sure you got your money keyword in the first link text.

Objective

So, do internal links pass relevance from the second occurrence of a link to the same target URL?

Michael Martinez strongly refuted this claim with his own set of tests, but I only got around to reading this after my own tests were complete. The link is there for background reading if you feel like wading through industry politics.

Passing authority is something totally different and is not within the remit of this test – we want to test relevance… essentially, will a target page rank in the SERPs for a keyword if we send a link to it containing this keyword?

The Test

The test consisted of a two pages – a previously indexed parent page (/index.htm) and a brand new target page (/page2.htm)

Two simple links were placed on the parent page. Both were linked to /page2.htm with different anchor text – thromppluserism and prekemplisation.

<html>
<head></head>
<body>

<!--
Test started 10:37 19 March 2009
-->

<!--
This is url: /index.html
-->

<a href="/page2.htm">thromppluserism</a>
<a href="/page2.htm">prekemplisation</a>

</body>
</html>

I used these unique, gobbledygook keywords to remove any competing results in the SERPs. These words are completely new to Google so I feel confident there are few contaminating factors.

<html>
<head></head>
<body>

<!--
This is url: /page2.html
-->

<p>
content
</p>

</body>
</html>

So, after a decent wait for indexation, I searched for each of these two keywords on Google to see if /page2.htm came up in the results. If Rand was correct, the target page would not appear for a search for prekemplisation.

Results

thromppluserism
Two results in the SERPs – one for /index.htm as expected, and one for /page2.htm.

prekemplisation
One result in the SERPs – for /index.htm

Conclusion

It seems Rand is right on this one. The second internal link on a page does not pass any keyword relevance to the target page. The test is lightweight enough to replicate easily so I’ll probably do so before drawing any concrete conclusions.

It’s since been suggested to me that Google is smart enough to apply different rules to links in various page segments (e.g. header, main content, footer etc.) It’s far fetched in my opinion but theoretically possible – if anyone has an insight into this do give me a shout!

Practical Takeaways

Make sure the first link to a given target URL contains your yummy keywords. Having a sitewide link to HOME is probably the biggest culprit here.

Don’t try to fix navigation link anchors by adding contextual links further down the page or crafting the footer links.

This has a direct impact on ranking and therefore visits, and ultimately conversions, so forcefully argue the point with your clients by appealing to their commercial logic regardless of how much their design team wants to define navigation link text.

Many SEOs felt there were some volatile changes to the Google UK algorithms in June. They weren’t wrong either – June’s SERPs for competitive industries saw some pretty significant tweaks. Call it Vince if you like.

This anonomised data shows the amount of keywords on the first 3 pages of Google UK for 4 competing websites within a competitive market, each with their own SEO strategies run by different people (yes mine is the green one of course!).

Note how the dips affect all four whilst Google UK shakes things up.

If you’re not tracking your competitors then months like June could encourage unnecessary knee-jerk reactions as you watch your rankings plummet without any knowledge of the market.

Still not conviced? Here’s three other examples of entirely seperate industries and keywords that prove my point.

Note: Anyone who wants to check Google UK every day for a few competing websites for a selection of keywords can get this data. It’s industry specific data, not client specific. There is nothing within the data that can identify a website.

Canonical tags
Do they really consolidate inbound links? How can this be measured?

Link anchor text
Do links pass relevance from the second occurrence of a link to the same target URL?
n.b. My first test results on this are almost ready to publish!

Page title
Despite the aesthetic value of limiting a page title to 70-75 characters for the SERPs or browser, at how many characters past this point will a keyword still pass relevance? 76? 150?

Meta description
Will keywords in the meta description have absolutely any affect on how relevant Google considers a page to be?

PageRank
Can you sculpt it? If so, how can you measure changes?

Bad Neighbourhoods
Can I really burn a website by getting links from bad website neighbourhoods?

Semantics
Can I get a web page to rank for a keyword just by using synonyms onpage and offpage?

URL
Can I get a website to rank purely on the virtue of having the keyword in the URL?

Subdomains
Does Google regard them as distinctly separate websites? Will links to a subdomain benefit the parent domain?

Indexation
Can I get a web page indexed by publishing the URL in plain text, with no direct link?

Bots, scrapers, harvesters etc. It seems they adapt to every new platform from Facebook and Digg through to Q&A sites and IM – and of course microblogging services like Twitter.

Following on from Archibold Teriyaki’s Twitter email spam test, I figured he had a few more uses before becoming too cross-contaminated for me to consider the tests objective.

Objective

If I send an @reply to a new Twitter account from an existing account, will the auto-follow bots be clever enough to follow the new account?

• Set up a new Twitter account - @ArchiboldT
• Do not tweet anything with this new account
• Tweet a message to the public timeline from my own Twitter account @lindop containing ArchiboldT’s username
• Monitor anyone that chooses to follow ArchiboldT

The Test

Tweeted 19:23 10th July 2009 from @Lindop

@ArchiboldT – this is a test

Results

12:35 1st August 2009

ArchiboldT’s Twitter account shows no followers, bots or otherwise. ArchiboldT’s Twitter alerts via email says otherwise!

• qdouble_tree (double_tre427) – 12th July
  0 followers, 1 update, following 245 people
• Karla Marrufo (KarlaVenez460) – 14th July
  44 followers, 2 updates, following 1986 people
• Georgia Martelino (georgiasdf4256) – 15th July
  1 follower, 2 updates, following 759 people

All three accounts have been suspended by Twitter “due to strange activity”. This would explain why Archibold Teriyaki’s Twitter account shows no followers.

Conclusion

Yep. Bots can and will use replies from other people to discover new accounts to follow. So it makes sense that the more people send tweets to you via @username, the more auto-follow bots will find you. That’ll teach you to be so popular!

What can we take away from all this? Well, it looks like the team at Twitter are doing a fairly good job of identifying and cleaning things up. The very nature of Twitter means your usernames will always be visible to any basic script, and having fake profiles following you isn’t going to hurt you so just sit back and accept it as inevitable.

Inspired by Fantomaster’s… “Do NOT tweet your e-mail address openly if you don’t want to get spammed to hell and back!”

Objective

a) If I tweet a new email address onto the public timeline, will it get picked up as per Fantomaster’s warning?

• Set up a new Gmail – archibold.teriyaki@googlemail.com
• Tweet that email address once from an established account
• Log into Gmail a while later and check if I’ve got any spam email

Simples, eh?

The Test

Tweeted 19:22 10th July 2009 from @Lindop

this is a test: archibold.teriyaki@googlemail.com

Results

1st August 2009

I’m quite surprised. Just one spam email, basically a $15 get-rich-quick Twitter ebook.

From:  Sheldon Washington
To:  aquintano@gmail.com (note ArchiboldT has been BCC’d)
Date:  17 July 2009 17:29
Subject: Fw: connect with twitter

Hi,

Jamie is here,

Are you struggling to build a decent targeted list of subscribers while others do it quickly with ease?
Apply instantly here:
http://bloat.me/7mtM

Conclusion

Fantomaster is right, tweeting your email address will get you some spam.

However, it’s worth considering the method that bots use to harvest email address… do they have to be following you, or can they just scrape the indexed public timeline? I’m inclined to go with the second one for two reasons.

a) I used my own Twitter account to tweet the email address, and with just 165 followers I don’t think it’s a scalable approach for these scrapers to follow accounts first.

b) The email was sent on 17th July – 5 days after I tweeted. A time-lag doesn’t make sense. Most automated systems that rely on following people will pick up new email addresses immediately and fire out a spam email within the hour.

What can we take away from all this?

Well I guess take Fantomaster’s advice and don’t tweet your email address unless you’ve got a good spam filter. It’s just like putting a mailto: link on your website, an open invitation to send you spam emails.