ICANN has just delayed the launch of their new Top Level Domain (TLD) extension program, which lets businesses apply for custom extensions such as .shoes, .flowers and .texas. They have cited technical, economic, legal, and policy issues that still need to be resolved. There’s one issue ICANN are unlikely to consider though; how these domains [...]

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My first thought when hearing that Google are making site speed a ranking factor, was how this would affect International SEO. Hosting infrastructure in the US is large-scale, reliable and often cheaper than local providers in developing countries. The Planet states that 42% of their customers are located in international markets. On the other hand [...]

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Google seems to be including in-page navigation links within their SERPs, most likely as part of their strategy to show the user as much info as possible about the destination page before they click through. We’ve seen this strategy in action with the site search box that is added below the SERP entry. John Andrew’s [...]

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It’s easy to avoid disasters with hindsight and hopefully 10yrs as a domain registrar, web producer and marketer has given me some. In my opinion, here are 12 defensive steps which you should take right now. 1. Ensure Your Domains Have Accurate WHOIS records Sounds simple but you wouldn’t believe how many domain registrations have [...]

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When Dave Naylor first reported some issues with his blog, I fired up SERPGuard.com to check out his URL. Our tool interacts with Google’s API to find compromised sites which are listed on their malware or phishing blacklists. Dave’s pages were being dropped from Google’s SERPs, which raised my suspicions he had been blacklisted but [...]

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Earlier this month, Google gave their users access to a free library of document templates. I found time last night to dig around and discovered some useful ones for search marketers. To save you some time, here are direct links to the ones I downloaded. 1. Non Disclosure Contract (NDA) An NDA is an essential [...]

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Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, has finally waded in on the issue of fake linkbait. Jonathan Crossfield (aka Kimota) provides some background information on the controversy. In summary, Lyndon Antcliff posted a satirical story on a client’s site, which ended up being quoted on several mainstream news channels. Critics have claimed that Lyndon [...]

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I have several sites in our Google Analytics account, as most people do I suspect. However I noticed this morning that Google seems to be mixing up the data in a couple of them. Here’s a screenshot of the content report (pageviews/traffic by content) when logged in as RussianMarketer.com: As you can see, there are [...]

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