I do love receiving link exchange requests though – it’s great to see how people approach this technique. Here’s one I got today (the links on their link page were all marked as nofollow):

Subject: partnership with jamiedigi.com?

Hi,

John Stahl here. I just wanted to drop you a line and invite you to be a link partner for our website [sitedomain.com].

I’ve found your website with the “reverse google pagerank algorithm” which indicates that we both would get better google rankings, when we exchange links.

I’ve already gone ahead and added your site jamiedigi.com to our link directory, could you please verify the description before it will go life at: [link to customise your listing]

Talk soon,
John Stahl

If I had reverse-engineered Google’s PageRank algorithm then I think I would be doing something more interesting to promote it than a link exchange!

Hi – I’m Richard Cridford from mobiles.co.uk. A wholly owned subsidiary of the Carphone Warehouse Group, we were the UK’s first retail mobile phone website (launched in 1995) and are now the largest web-only mobile phone store in the UK.

We have been working hard creating content on our own site and we wondered if you would be interested in some free of charge content written just for [some random blog]. This is a genuine offer that could help both [some random blog] and mobiles.co.uk so if you are interested, please read on . . .

We are working with a large team of professional writers in the UK who can cover almost any theme. We can quickly agree a subject with you and commission them to write specifically for you. There are absolutely no costs and you will have complete editorial control with no requirement to publish the content on [some random blog] unless you are entirely happy with it.

All we would ask is that you allow us to include one simple text link back to mobiles.co.uk towards the end of the content which will hopefully be found by the search engines in the longer term – which is how we would benefit.

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks and kind regards – Richard Cridford
Marketing Executive
www.mobiles.co.uk
Mobiles.co.uk Ltd is a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Carphone Warehouse Group PLC
Registered in England no. 3253714 at 1, Portal Way, London W3 6RS

REMOVAL
Removal is probably the wrong word – you are not on any kind of mailing list because we identify and approach sites individually. However, I really do not want to upset anyone by making contact and if I have done so, I`m really sorry. I am always trying to improve our approach. Given that we have other sites, if you could reply with any of the following in the subject line, I will ensure that I learn from it!

REMOVE (no further contact regardless as to reason)
NO INTEREST (no interest in mobiles.co.uk but you do sometimes link)
NO LINKS (you never link with other sites)

Thanks!

The blog that they enquired about was a random little WordPress site that I set up years ago, and that doesn’t generate any traffic, so they must have dug pretty deep to find it. I wonder where they’re getting their content from – somewhere like Adfero DirectNews perhaps? It’s also interesting that they didn’t request any sort of specific anchor text – maybe the keyword-relevant domain name is strong enough.

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Feel free to drop us an email or call for any question.

Best Regards,

AJ7 Global Group Co,.Ltd (Shanghai, China)

The audacity of it is actually quite admirable. Does anyone really make a multi-million pound purchase off the back of a bit of junk mail?

For a start, they begin by saying that there are only three ways to get listed on Google – natural algorithms, PPC and link spam:

To be noticed quickly in search engine results pages, achieving a high page ranking, is essential. That keenly sought and often competitive place may come naturally through a website’s importance (as calculated by search engine algorithms) or via sponsored links such as Google AdWords, which charge advertisers when visitors click through to their websites.

There is a third way: leaving links in the comments pages of blogs – so-called “link spam”. And with the recession biting, link spam, which is almost free, suddenly looks a lot cheaper than AdWords to some companies.

Hmm – I wonder what SEO agencies do all day if there’s only those three ways, when they’re not all blog spamming anyway! They then launch into a tirade on some SEO agency that spammed a Guardian blog, and to be fair this wasn’t some nice friendly social media campaign – this was an SEO agency posting links from completely irrelevant articles to relatively well-branded clients. Not a clever move.

The Guardian get back on track with an interview with Google, which although a little Google-friendly, was fairly balanced. But then they finish with this killer line:

“Being advised to pay for Google AdWords would have saved him much time and trouble.”

Wow! What a fantastic ad for Google Adwords. Don’t bother with SEO – just pay Google to get you rankings and give up on natural search. I don’t think that Google could pay for better publicity.

If The Guardian had been bothered to look into the issue and been a bit more even handed, maybe they could have asked why SEO agencies exist in the first place? Is it because business actually need help to get their perfectly relevant pages indexed by the big G?

Teletubbies Toys, Shop Naked. Is that really appropriate?

Update: It appears its fixed. Good work ShopZilla!

hall_jason@jamiembrown saw your tweet about poor Shopzilla video ad last week. Regrettably caused by poor algo. We’ve fixed it now

ReadWriteWeb released some screenshots showing Wolfram in action not too long ago. This is just one of them:

There is also a video from a webcast that Wolfram did on April 28th:

Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine. It is an automated answer service – you type a question, it tries its best to give you a good, precise and comprehensive answer to that query. This means that you won’t be searching around for information like “population of China”, you’ll be presented with stats and a nice graph showing historical trends in China’s population. It’s unlikely to replace Google for searches like “cheap printers”, “videos of beyonce knowles” or “photos of bangladesh”. It could however (if the hype becomes true) steal some market share for informational and research queries. At the moment Google doesn’t service these queries so well, and usually just dumps a Wikipedia page at top position.

I believe that Google probably aren’t shaking in their boots about this for the short term. Those informational queries are not the ones that advertisers usually want to buy, so its unlikely to significantly dent advertising revenue – Google’s bread and butter. But they’ll be watching very carefully, and probably already working on similar projects: Google will not want to let an imposter get their foot in the door, who can then expand onto their more profitable territory longer term. By the time Wolfram can do that Google will either have their own technology, or will have given their damnedest shot at a buyout.

So do Wolfram have a chance of success? Well recent history has shown us that predicted Google killers are usually a flop (see Cuil, for example), and Google certainly seems unsurpassable in its current glory. But you don’t have to look too far back to a time when the likes of Excite and Altavista held vast market share, until a smaller, smarter player came into the game. Google Search hasn’t changed fundamentally since launch – its got better, its got more comprehensive, and it serves verticals much more effectively – but its still all about links. Something a bit different, from a company that has such a strong track record in innovation, could be what the industry needs.

Wolfram Alpha is expected to launch to the public sometime this month.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

BlogStorm were the first to notice that this string had two new mystery variables, cd= and ct=. They speculated that this might be position information, and this was later confirmed by Google’s Matt Cutts in a comment on the same post.

This change will probably pass a large number of digital marketers by, but it is definitely not insignificant. Google have never willingly shared position data with webmasters before, and the only way to get keyword ranking data on a massive scale has been to scrape the Google search results. This is not only a violation of Google’s terms of service, but is also fairly ineffective – you could only get a limited number of data points for each keyword, and usually only at one particular time of day and from one location.

Everyone knows that Google has been making massive moves towards personalisation. Now we can understand much more precisely how personalisation and geodemographics affect our search engine positions, and get much more insight into how effective (or ineffective) our SEO spend really is. With multiple position points throughout the day on every keyword, and the ability to track position to traffic and even revenue, SEO reporting suddenly becomes quite a lot more accurate and a little bit more accountable.

A large amount of the SEO community might argue that its not rankings you should be concentrating on, but traffic – this is definitely true, but without one there can’t be the other. Hopefully it won’t be long before detailed position reports start appearing in the major analytics packages, and I know that certainly we’ll be looking at the data in as much detail as possible.

But why would Google share this data? They never have before. Personally I wonder if this is an effort to cut down on the amount of scraping that Google must see on a daily basis – certainly I imagine a significant portion of their daily processing power must be used up by SEO’ers looking for ranking data, and despite blocking the most obvious offenders, there are many ways to hide from Google’s “we think you are a robot” screen.

Unfortunately for Google (and us) I don’t think the SEO community are quite done with their scrapers yet. The advanced digital marketer is not just interested in his own position, but those of his competitors too, and there are no signs that Google might be sharing that data in the near future.

You can also watch in High Definition on cutmovie.co.uk.