I love SEO Conferences, but there’s a good possibility I’ll never attend another one. Why? Well, for one thing, after I tick off all the conference hosts today with this post, the SEO bouncers might block me from entering. But in reality, I may never go to another conference because the prices are just too freaking high. (please bear with me on this long rant, because really, you’ve GOT to read it all…seriously)

Yeah, yeah, I’m cheap, I know that. And I agree that conferences have a hidden value, especially in the networking, and that even one tiny nugget of information gleaned from a conference can make up for the price. And yep, I understand that it costs a lot of money to host one of those puppies because you have to pay an arm and a leg for the fancy conference hall digs, and give the keynote speakers a few bazillion dollars plus a promise of everyone’s third-born child. I get all that, really I do. And no doubt, there’s lots of big companies out there that don’t have any problem whatsoever paying all that money to send a couple employees to a conference.

And I agree that the first conference I went to was great. The second…pretty darn good too. But I just honestly can no longer justify the ginormous costs of these events any longer.

What got me started on this rant was the fact that PubCon’s prices have risen pretty dramatically since the last time I went. And while it’s finally in line with the rest of the conferences, it still didn’t make me happy. And it got me to thinking…how can all these people afford to go to conference after conference after conference?

Here, look, let me throw a few numbers at you. I picked just 3 conferences although there’s lots more every year. But I figured 3 was a good solid number, and I’m pretty sure quite a few people hit at least 3 each year. So I chose SES San Jose, SMX East, and PubCon Vegas as good examples of popular conferences that lots of people will attend. I then looked at the prices of the conferences, the hotel prices, the typical airfares, and included expenses for food and drinks (although I went really, really cheap on that part). Each conference has several “tiers”, including early bird pricing, and various options of what is included (full conference, expo only, etc). I used mid-range pricing for full conferences (meaning I used pricing that was early-bird, but not the deepest discounts), and figured out what it would cost to attend all 3 conferences…give or take a few hundred dollars.

The grand total was $11,225.* That’s right, the average conference is going to set you back nearly $4,000, and if you hit all three, you’re likely going to spend over $11K.

Guess what? There ain’t no way in hell I’d ever get that much ROI out of those conferences. So I decided to play around a little with that $11K and see if I could come up with any ideas to make that money work better for me. See if you don’t agree.

First, let’s take a look at what a typical conference looks like, with my head photoshopped over some other woman’s head. (Sorry for cropping you out of the picture, lady, but it’s really important for me to be able to stick my photoshopped head on other people’s bodies in this rant post, k? And I really wanted to see how short hair and bangs would look on me. Not so good.).

Woo. Doesn’t that look like fun. Yeah, k. Now, multiply that fun by 3 and that nets you 3 conferences for 11K.

Ok, moving on.

I could take that same $11K, grab a partner in crime, and spend 2 glorious weeks in Aruba at an ALL-INCLUSIVE resort instead.

(See, that’s my head below, at an Aruba pool, and yeah, that hair style looks better on me, don’t you think? So, ok, we’ll stick with this one from here on out).

But wait, let’s expand on this thought. What if we ALL spent that 11K by meeting up at this same all-inclusive resort in Aruba for two glorious weeks. and just hung out with each other all that time…imagine how much we’d get out of THAT!

Don’t like Aruba for some reason? Ok, let’s all spend that 11K by going to Disneyworld for 2 weeks instead? We can stay at the Polynesian resort shown below (with my head shown there, with above-chosen “do”) and choose one of their nearly-all-inclusive package deals.

Again…two weeks, with a loved one, just hanging out with all our buds. How much ROI do you think we can get out of that, huh? Now I don’t know about you, but I’d rather spend that money in either Aruba or Disney than in three of those “lovely” conference rooms shown above. What about you?

Ok, so now that you get my point, let me get serious. Ever heard of WordCamp? Guess what? They hold that sucker for the lofty price of FREE. Yeah, free. I think we need more of those kinds of conferences in our industry. Who’s with me on that, huh? C’mon, raise your hands!

Either way…Free, Cheap, or Aruba/Disney…I’d take any of those choices over the expensive conference circuit right now. But hey, that’s just me. I’m cheap that way.

Wait, don’t leave… there’s more. There are, of course, even more options. You could actually use all that money to pay for - oh I don’t know - lots of good quality content? a decent link building/baiting package? creation of a kickass web app? outsource your entire seo campaign to Bob Massa’s new company for just $1000/month? Just ’sayin… I mean, that doesn’t get you a photoshopp’d pic of my head on someone else’s body, but it sure as heck would likely generate some nice ROI.

* Here are more numbers (which could be significantly higher for you overseas peeps) in case y’all feel the need to do some number-crunching yourselves:

SES San Jose
conference: $1795-$1995 (+ $745 or $1345 for half day or full day training (optional))

hotels:
san jose marriott $215/night
hilton sj $179/night

flight: $460

food/drinks: $250

***

SMX East New York City

conference: $995-$1595

hotel: westin ny at times square
smx east special rate is $359/night + tax

flight: $296

food/drinks: $400

***

PubCon Las Vegas

$899 -$1499 (+ $150 for pubcon on last day (optional))

no official hotel listed, but wynn is closest
$299/night

sahara (kinda run down, but close and cheap)
$48-$113/night

flight: $458

food/drinks/entertainment: $500

(Now I’ll need to get plastic surgery so the SEO conference goons don’t recognize me).

Whilst entering a search for “hitbacks” into Google, one of our link developers encountered the following helpful message (and if anyone wants to call me out as being pretentious for using the term “whilst” like one of you ponces did with Jane, then let me tell you that I wrote this on my way back from London where I had tea with the Queen so I think it’s ok in this case):

“Did you mean: wetbacks”

Normally this is where I’d issue an offensive exclamation. Wetbacks?? Did we mean WETBACKS? Holy fucking shit. This is obviously done by Google’s spell checker, and, if you look closely, you can see that, indeed, hitbacks and wetbacks are quite similar in their spelling. I only say that because I’m becoming more and more wary of the intelligence of the majority of people after the Lyndon linkbait fiasco. Just wanted to draw attention to the bleeding obvious..

The question I have is what exactly triggers the spell check to give you an alternative suggestion? There are results found for the term hitbacks, after all, 2320 to be exact (at the moment.) There are, however, sadly, 150,000 results for the term wetbacks.

According to Google, “Google’s spell checking software automatically looks at your query and checks to see if you are using the most common version of a word’s spelling. If it calculates that you’re likely to generate more relevant search results with an alternative spelling, it will ask “Did you mean: (more common spelling)?”"

How on earth does this calculation work? Oh god, it’s another one of Google’s famous relevancy algorithms! Haven’t we seen how well those tend to work with links (um, and search results)?

Does anyone remember the infamous Google Jew Watch fiasco from a few years ago? Searches for the term “Jew” were bringing up an anti-Semitic website as the top result. As you can imagine, no one but my usual flight attendant (I’ll call her Cheryl since I once hated a Cheryl) liked this (Cheryl is always very nasty to anyone ordering a kosher meal, especially when he’s sitting with a shiksa wife, and she asks questions like “did Jew want more water?”) and Google was called out for being racist. There was definitely a relevancy factor there though, and it had nothing to do with racism or anti-Semitism or the hatred that some people show towards small Yorkshire terriers. Relevancy is not something that a machine can accurately determine. At the risk of almost defending Google (gag), I do think that they are simply fighting a losing battle by attempting to determine relevancy. As I wrote awhile back, when I had inspiration and more free time and it wasn’t so freaking hot where I live and my bloodhound wasn’t 100 pounds of drooling and destructive magnificence, you can make anything seem relevant if you’re slightly clever.

Obviously my main interest here is in finding relevant links, or at least finding decent links (and sometimes shit ones) and making them seem relevant, but this affects our work on many different levels…if you’re the tiniest bit bright, you can word content in such a way that it works, for example. So IF relevancy can be so easily manipulated and faked, why does it continue to be such a big thing with the engines? If you search for “google relevancy” in Google, you’ll see over 10 million results, so people are quite concerned with this, yet I can’t imagine how accurately the relevancy of anything can be determined. Searching for a phrase such as “American watch”, for example, could give you results ranging from watches sold in the States to a site devoted to keeping the public informed about all the stupid things this country does. If that’s the exact phrase that you enter, how can Google make an accurate determination on which results are the most relevant? There are a ton of examples like this, with words typically used as verbs being used as adjectives in YOUR mind, but being interpreted as verbs if that’s their typical meaning.

Google says this about how they determine results for a query:
“We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.”

Lots of room for error there…and you can also imagine all of the wasted money due to Google Adwords being shown and clicked on by some clueless spaz like, maybe, my mom. If you have an ad set to exact match for “stiff little fingers” because you’re selling joint cream or a carpal tunnel syndrome brace, some person with quality musical taste and a high level of impatience might excitedly click on your ad thinking she’s getting a new punk album. Those Irish boys were such jokesters anyway, so it’s an easy thing to confuse, or so I think. Humans will never be exempt from determining relevancy, no matter how hard the machines try to do it for us. You just have to figure out how to make everything fit the algorithms’ idea of relevancy.

I have a terrible habit. Every morning, I get on the scales to check to see if I’ve lost weight or fat. In fact, the habit is so bad that sometimes I’ll get on two or three times a morning and even through the day. Measurement is fine and good but sometimes daily measurement of small or difficult to measure changes can be frustrating and inaccurate (unless it says I lost weight – then it’s accurate).

The other day I noticed that by simply allowing 30 minutes to lapse without doing anything, my body fat percentage dropped by four percent and I lost 100g (apparently). Well, I thought, forgo food and activity and by lunch I should be at a decent percentage body fat and a pound lighter! Obviously my instrument of measurement was not reliable.

I had an experience with a web analytics tool which seemed to be under reporting for a site I was working on. I was making changes, seeing the effect in other ways (sign-ups) but analytics refused to budge. Analysis of the code showed some variations but apparently it was all OK. There was something wrong though in my opinion and an audit of our raw log file stats illustrated in tangible terms what I had been struggling with for weeks – the measurement was indeed flawed.

Relying on web analytics has become something of an addiction among some businesses. With constant feeds of web traffic, the minute-by-minute tracking of where traffic is going to on their site and pages ranked by popularity real-time, web analytics are as essential as their other addictions – coffee, toast and antacid tablets. The problem with this is that most web analytics are wrong and are misreporting statistics. Add to the mix a misunderstanding of some of the analysis of the data and it’s a recipe for stress.

There was a comparison of the various statistics packages which showed the variation among the packages available in 2007 and how differently they reported on the exact same website. In the report Stone Temple assert that “as Jim Sterne is fond of saying, if your yardstick measures 39 inches instead of 36 inches, it’s still great to have a measurement tool”. I would argue that some statistic packages are not continuously measuring 36 inches as 39 inches due to cookie reliance, poor implementation and other factors and thus are not a proper measurement tool in those conditions.

How can web business operate in an environment where reliance on web analytics has to be tempered with something else? Using more than one measurement tool can help. With the former Urchin product, now Google analytics, now available for free it is easier than before to run two statistics packages. I would argue that someone in your organization should make web analytics their project. If possible, train up someone to dedicate at least an hour a day to web analytics. The more this web analytics person understands, the more appropriate use your company can make of sometimes flawed analytics.

Web Analytics are not the be all and end all of measurement online. I’d argue that a holistic approach needs to be taken and that online is the same as offline – it’s simply not conducted face to face. Footfalls are not the only measurement of a shop’s success and nor is unique users. Sales are not the only measure of a company’s success and nor are sales online. Websites are more than just online brochures, they are a way for people to engage with your brand.

I’ll still get on the scales every morning, but Sunday is the day I use now to benchmark my weekly weight loss. Diet, exercise and health levels all cause variance in my scales ability to correctly measure me. Your website’s health, code implementation and use of first or third party cookies (the code kind, websites don’t eat cookies) will determine the accuracy of your web analytics. Don’t rely on analytics alone, find an internal champion and make sure your website code is correct for a happy, healthy web analytics experience

I read an interesting article the other day which discussed the importance of targeting and bounce rates and it got me to thinking about the clients that I have had, past and present and the buckets of money I have seen thrown away. So, I decided to put a list together of 10 ways you or your client may be wasting money they could be paying you:

1. Stop sending paid traffic to your home!
   1. Your homepage is rarely the page your potential customers are looking for. If I am searching for “buy sony flatscreen 1080p” PLEASE send me to a page with sony flat screen tv’s on it!
   2. Check your homepage’s bounce rate. It is 60% than you should only be sending people searching for “sitename.com” to that page otherwise, you are throwing at least 60% of your money away. Why do I say at least? Because if you are sending all your paid traffic to your homepage than you probably haven’t optimized your paid search ads and are just looking for a high click through rate.
2. Stop duplicating terms in your paid search accounts
   1. It never ceases to amaze me when clients are using the same keyword in multiple ad groups with the same geo-targeting and timing. Don’t do this
3. Have goals for your website
   1. Set goals for your website. “I want to make money.” Isn’t a sufficient goal. Come up with trackable metrics to get you there so you can optimize your website to eventually make you some more money.
   2. Publishing sites - # of page views, repeat visitors, high CPM.
   3. Ecommerce – lifetime value
   4. Lead-gen sites are a monster in and of themselves. If you generate leads so that they become sales then focusing on the lead only is going to inhibit you from making money. Remember, unless you are selling leads, they don’ t make you any money until they become a sale.
4. Don’t cut the long-tail
   1. If you aren’t tracking performance over-time, you are probably missing all of your long-tail terms. Don’t cut terms that are attracting people in the educational phase of the sales-cycle. If you market to them differently you can increase your conversion rate over time. Don’t cut them just because these phrases take a little longer to convert - MARKET TO THEM DIFFERENTLY. These are long sales cycle leads
5. Use negative keywords in your paid search campaigns
   1. This may sound basic, but if you aren’t using negative keywords than you are paying for traffic that will NEVER make you a dollar, pound or euro. If you have paid-search clients or use paid search and using mostly broad match than you really need to spend some time investigating exactly what terms are being clicked on.
6. Learn what terms lead to conversion and optimize your site accordingly
   1. Welcome to the beauty of the internet and web analytics. You can actually tell how people get to your site, what they do there and if they are making you money. It’s brilliant. So why are you optimizing your site based on what you think will work well?
7. Stop making creative decisions based on what your boss thinks is a good idea.
   1. See point 6. We have the ability to test and optimize, which means we can run multiple ad creatives (banner and search) and see what drives the greatest revenue rather than based on the CxO’s affinity to the color blue. Back your decisions with data
8. Test, test, test and SPLIT TEST!
   1. See point 7. Products like Google website optimizer and Omniture’s Test and Target (formerly Offermatica) can optimize your landing pages based on conversions. There is no excuse for not testing your landing pages and assuming that your designers first try is always correct. In all likelihood it is not optimal and assuming it is will make an ass out you but not me because I’m split testing
9. Track how changes to your website affect your bottom line
   1. If designers, programmers, your kids or whomever are making website changes that affect your business– especially your homepage – you should be recording that this is being done and how this is affecting organic placement and conversions. If there is no tracking there is no accountability.
10. Know what your users are clicking on
    1. Heatmaps and click analysis tools, like Crazy Egg are great at letting you know what your users are clicking on and responding to. Using this information to optimize page layout should help you to make the most of the traffic that you have.

The call came late into the evening. One of my clients who I had been involved with from almost the time I started was frantic on the other end of the phone.
He sounded stressed as he breathed “I need you right now. It’s urgent - please - I need you to come right away!”

“Can’t we do this over the phone,” I asked “it’s late and I’m across town at the moment in no fit state to be seen.”

“No no no - I need you here. Please - you know I never call like this unless it’s urgent.”

That’s true - of all my clients he’s always been the one who was most considerate. Most people think that because you’re doing it for money they can order you to do anything at anytime of the day or night but it doesn’t work that way. I do this because I enjoy it. Well, maybe not all of it, but most of it.

“OK,” I acquiesce “I’ll get ready for you and be over as quickly as I can.” I know where he’ll want me to show up and it isn’t that far for me.

“Oh thank you so much! I’ll pay you double for this!” he almost seems in tears on the other end of the phone.

I grimace, still not used to that kind of talk. “Usual place I assume.”

“Of course” I hear him smile down the phone slightly and ring off.

Luckily, I know that occasionally I’ll have to go out quickly with little notice so I have a box of tricks I can grab quickly and easy to don outfits suitable for visiting a client in. In this industry clients do expect a certain style of dress no matter how little lead time they give you.

My ‘box of tricks’, which is actually a bag, contains everything I’ve found most clients require on a visit. Some items are never used, some are often required. Quickly washing and jumping in to something I know the client will appreciate, I head out to hail a taxi on the street.

I find that it’s always best to call the client in these situations so they don’t wind themselves up too much “Hi… I’m on my way now. I should be with you shortly”

“Oh thank goodness. I can’t wait - please hurry” he moans. Sometimes I wonder about my clients mental state but this one I know. I can imagine him right now and what he’s doing waiting for me. I’m fairly sure alcohol will be involved and I know other things will already be going on. In fact, I’m sure he’s started without me knowing him.

Pulling up outside the place I look up. One of the swankiest places around, it always takes my breath away. I walk in past the man at the front desk who looks me up and down disapprovingly as I go to the elevators. It’s very late and few people are up and about right now.

Arriving at the 5th floor, one of the doors is slightly ajar and going towards it, I can see inside a flickering light. He has started without me and I know something of the mess I’ll find. Straightening up my outfit, I knock on the door.

“George? George are you in there?” I raise my voice slightly as I poke my head in through the door.

“Yes, back here” I hear him call along with a slight rustling of fabric. He has started without me.

I walk through the front area and come across him on all fours under a desk. Biting my tongue against my immediate reaction of a snide remark, I clear my throat and he bangs his head in an attempt to crawl out quickly.

As he emerges, I see a tangle of wires and a few hard drives hanging by wires and nothing else. “Everything crashed and the mail server is down. I just need you to recover that for me now and I can get everything else done overnight.” Which is easy really but for some reason it seems difficult.

Taking less than two hours, the mail server was back up and in less than six the whole system was repaired.

—

For the post number 555 I thought I’d get all nostalgic about technical support days gone by.  Sometimes nothing happened when I covered 24h support, sometimes I never got a moment’s paid sleep and sometimes I helped a customer find a problem so obscure for which they were so thankful I got chocolate

It’s 6 o’clock in the morning, I got up especially early (whilst my daughter is still asleep) to write this post as I feel I can’t just let what I read yesterday rest and not comment.

As you may know SMX Advanced in Seattle was on last week, I didn’t go this year but attended last year. SMX Advanced is where funnily enough ADVANCED SEOs speak and attend to; learn more, broaden our horizon, share and network. Well at least that’s what I thought.

Yesterday I read this blogpost on Bruce Clay by Lisa Barone where she writes about “SMX Advanced going to the “dark” side.” The blogpost truly shocked me (and as Lisa Barone is prime blogger that might even been her intention) In fact it disturbed me to the point I even considered to put a no-follow on the link to the post, but decided to leave it, as rightly everyone should be able to voice their opinion, although I strongly disagree with Lisa’s comments and the way she went about this blogpost.

But even more so I am really disappointed and a little disturbed of Danny Sullivans comments in this blogpost. Yes of course he has his SMX brand to protect but don’t pooh on your own doorstep. At one point he literally singles out individuals:
“I’ll single out Jay Young. No, I don’t think it’s anything goes. I do think there are ethics in marketing and limits you don’t go past….” I don’t think it was needed to single out anyone really. I know Jay very well, and he is a first class SEO and respected in this industry. Jay simply stated the obvious saying that buying links can still improve your rankings. Because it does! Most SEOs STILL do buy links, he was simply saying don’t by 100,000 of them, over night and from a link farm. Be clever about it. Yes it can be argued that this is black hat’ish, BUT why is it blackhat? Because the Googlesaurus say so, that’s why. If the Google Algorithm didn’t put such a big emphasis on incoming links and other areas such as age of domain you wouldn’t call link buying black hat technique. Who says a new site is less relevant than an old site? The algorithm says so, that doesn’t mean that its actually true!!! That’s for the user to decide!! Hang on, I’m actually going somewhere with this….

I think the stamp “black hat seo” should be based on INTENT not necessarily technique. Still with me? Basically if you are doing SEO for a (new) site that is in a highly competitive market, it is NOT going to be possible to rank and gain traffic on a well constructed and content optimised site alone. That’s just a fact. Buying a few links and investing in a proper link building campaign is something you have to do to get into the really competitive market. Unless you are not planning on ranking before 2048!!! BUT that doesn’t mean the website in question isn’t relevant or useful to the user. And the end of the day, that’s what we are all working for right? Both SEOs (well most) and the engines, getting fantastic relevant and good quality websites ranked so that the user will be satisfied and find what they were looking for!!

Back to the point, so called “black hat seo” techniques are important for the development of your skills as an SEO. That doesn’t mean you have to use this knowledge and techniques, but KNOWING them WILL help you understand how the engines work, what you can and can’t do. We NEED these people to share, we should be grateful that they will share not condemn them and pick on them. I can with my hand on my heart say that I am a white hat SEO, BUT you know what, the ONE person I have learned the MOST from in this industry, is in fact a black hat, and a very skilled one as well. That doesn’t mean he is some dodgy marketer spamming the web with any random crappy website to rank his clients. A good black hat doesn’t do that

Anyway, I’ll leave the black hats that attended SMX advanced a suggestion for a T-shirt to wear to the next event (so that people don’t mistake advice for orders!!)

Gareth Davies just forwarded me this fun list of 21 Signs a Girl Geek Likes you

These were my favourites *giggle*

You know a girl geek is in to you if….

“She stops blogging in front of the TV and talks to you.”
“She invites you to “301 back to my place” after a night out.”
“She always tags you for memes.”

Maybe we should do a seperate one for SEO girl geeks

To be successful with your SEO campaign, you need to see beyond the simplistic ABC’s of search - looking past the typical optimization rules to get inspired. Find inspiration outside of the (chiclet) box, and you’ll likely find ways to improve both rankings and conversions!

Quick “Outside The Chiclet Box” Sources of Inspiration:

1. Help someone else. By giving ideas to another, you’ll be thinking outside of your own limited topic areas. That expansion of mind will not only help the other person, it will also help you apply similar ideas to your own campaign.
2. Future-think. What would a site in your niche look like 50 years from now? What kinds of content might it have within it? Try to bring some of that future into the present. Get creative with content, whether textual or visual.
3. Have a beer (or root beer). Find a group of creative folks in your area and meet up with them in your local tavern (or oxygen bar, or whatever watering hole works for you). Combine the party atmosphere with a group thinktank to help each other come up with off the wall ideas.

Those are just a few quickies that you can apply to your own inspirational wanderings. Nevertheless, even just one venture outside (the box) can produce an amazing array of ideas to stimulate your search rankings. Be bold; be adventurous; be boxless.

Inspiration = Creativity = Success

Ok people, have that cup of coffee, wake up and see if you can figure this one out! I’m doing an off-line to online campaign for one of my clients, CW Jobs, where the off-line ad asks you to Google the phrase “getitornot”. The idea is that the site we created (a just for fun IT test, concept being if you are in IT you “get it” and if you are not “you don’t get it”) would appear 1st and 2nd in the Google UK SERPs. With the title and meta description tag, carrying over from the off-line ad, you still with me?

We chose the phrase “getitornot” (all one word, that’s part of the concept, you get it if you type it all in one word) as it would be “easy” to rank for in a short space of time. Originally we wanted the .com as well as the .co.uk but right before our eyes (and only a week apart) the .com was snatched up (argh!!!). But seeing as the people that bought the .com hadn’t done anything with the domain (except from putting a bog standard Joomla CMS holding page on there) we thought, nah it will be fine, we just want the ranking in Google UK anyway! Right? Doesn’t seem too far fetched!??

Two weeks in, the .com is STILL ranking above co.uk! And I’m banging my head against the wall, WHY oh WHY does this domain rank 1st and 2nd in Google UK?

1. Hosting: the .com is hosted in the US while we are hosting in the UK

2. Content: they have the phrase we are targeting once in the title tag, that’s it, no more content related to the terms (except obviously in the domain itself)

3. They have NO LINKS WHATSOVER, we have nearly 100 links (some not so great, but some good quality links, AND a link from CW Jobs http://www.cwjobs.co.uk/ main site which is a high authority site (albeit the link we got is kind of buried http://www.cwjobs.co.uk/Browse/Browse/BrowseJobs.html ) Anchor text for incoming links varies between getitornot and technical test

4. Age of domain, both domains were bought in the same month (only a week apart) so age shouldn’t have an impact.

5. .Com is surely duplicate content, how many sites must feature the standard Joomla holding page?? Ok yes fair enough our two pages are in theory duplicate contentish, but surely not as much as the .com is with thousands of other sites?

SO, after analysing this to death, and asking a million and one other SEOs, the only thing I can think of being the reason why this damn .com is ranking before the .co.uk is the “power” of the .COM. Which is totally freakin annoying, as you should think a .co.uk and hosting in the UK would be a massive hint to the bots that this site is UK targeted right? Which makes me think….are the Googlebots on crack or something?

Has anyone had any similar experiences where a .com (although hosted in the US with less relevant content and no links) have outranked your .co.uk site in Google UK?

What’s your take on it?

I am a bit of a geek girl. I’m good with computers, the Internet and various other pieces of technology. However, since getting into the tech world and especially since developing a nasty Twitter habit, I’ve noticed a new breed of annoying female that I’d never come across before. If you live out in the real world, you may have seen them on occasion, but they’re everywhere on the web. Outside, where flesh replaces pixels, they’re harder to spot. Enhanced with Ruby on Rails, these women have become the sorority girls of the Internet. Get mad at me for being hypocritical if you like; I’ve probably done some of these things. However, if you must become famous on the Internet, here’s what you have to do:

1. Relate oneself to frosting, icing, cupcakes, muffins or any other variety of sweet confection which one does not actually consume on a regular basis but which is often pink.
2. Pick a blog handle, Twitter name or general online pen-name with care. Is your name Nicole Kent? (I made that name up, in case you’re wondering.) “NicoleKent” won’t do. “jnikkicakecat” would be a far better choice, but for God’s sake, avoid using numbers. No one’s done that since 2001’s Yahoo! chat rooms and you don’t even have Yahoo! saved in your browser’s history.
3. Pretend to be retarded.
4. Talk a lot about Apple products, even if you secretly use a Dell Inspiron 6000 that’s running XP, weighs more than a year’s pile of college text books and is missing its down arrow and F5 keys.
5. Attend a lot of tech-related events to give off the impression that every day of your life is SXSW. Twitter at Michael Arrington and make it seem like he replies.
6. Blog about your diet, which consists solely of tea, sushi and oddities only found at strange markets in Austin and Providence, RI.
7. Reclaim MySpace; Abandon Facebook. If in United Kingdom, flirt with Bebo.
8. Actually change your name. If people find out you’re really called Nicole Kent, things could get ugly. Hint that your name is actually Fairess Sweetakins.
9. Own a regular pet but make sure to point out that it’s not a German Shepherd, it’s a Belgian Malinois. What? I said I was a hypocrite.
10. Practice yoga and meditation in order to forget that 9,280 of your 9,302 Twitter followers are pony-tailed software developers from Omaha.
11. An oldie but a goodie: take pictures and video of yourself from strange angles. It worked on Friendster, it ruled MySpace, it’ll work in the odd life you lead that can only be dubbed Blogtter.
12. Stay the fuck out of politics, unless you’re expressing sexual fantasies about Barak Obama. You risk alienating at least half of your audience no matter what you say, and it’s way more interesting to talk about Wii Sports. The Barak stuff is fine: pony-tailed software developers don’t care if you’re fantasising about Margaret bloody Thatcher, so long as they get to think about you and sex.
13. OMG Digg.
14. Stay the fuck out of coffee politics. Claim that the people at Starbucks have your idiotic drink ready for you before you get there.
15. Choose a yummy sample of generic pop culture phenomena, such as cartoons or musicians, and obsess over them. There’s nothing better than claiming a pop culture mainstay as your own and subtly indicating that it’s far more deep and meaningful than everyone else understands it to be.
16. Learn at least some real computer skills so that you can Twitter about your server from time to time.
17. Write blog posts that consist of less than one-hundred words. In the Twitter culture, no one has time to read 900 - 1,000 word entries.
18. Have an offline friend who is very cool. Talk about the friend a lot online. “Stacey” did this. “Stacey” did that. Elevate “Stacey” to a god-like level for no particular reason at all. Don’t let “Stacey” know.
19. Refrain from talking about “Web 2.0.” It makes you look like a dick. Instead, talk about digital media.
20. Write for a blog called “(Technology-related Subject) Chicks” and wear little shirts with name of said blog emblazened across them, atop the boobs. And be a fuck ton better than the “(Technology-related Subject) Blokes” blog while you’re at it.