In a recent Google Blog post, Search experiments, large and small by Google engineer, Ben Gomes, in which he stated that at any one time Google are running anywhere between 50 – 200 experiments on their search engine results. From slight eye-test white space adjustments for a number 1 search result helping with better click throughs, to complex algorithm changes. Its interesting to get an insight into how Google, continues to manage its results.

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Being a blogger, my urge is to write! Sometimes, I know how the post should end but haven’t a clue how to get there from the start. It’s a bit like someone filling in all the edges of a jigsaw then telling you to finish it off but throwing the picture on the front of the jigsaw box in the bin. So you end up piecing things together blind. A poster over at Sphinn, baiduyou, summed it up perfectly for me, he said that blogging, in a particular reference to myself was like that old Eric Morecambe joke while he was playing the piano “I’m playing all the right notes”, Eric use to say while playing the paino (badly), “just not in the correct order”!

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Once again Google takes another stride in keeping several steps ahead of its competition with releasing another nice new tool to play with - Google Insight - but more of that later. I wanted to do this post because I have become increasingly impressed by the development guys over at Google and their constant tweaking and updating of old favourite online tools to help make life more easier for webmasters, online business owners and marketers alike.

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So we are currently in month 2 of our new headquarters and I finally decided to get some pics out there. We’re now based in Suite 26A of Caledonia House in Kilwinning, Ayrshire. Its been a great move and we cannot thank enough Newstead Properties - the owners of Caledonia House - for being supportive and making the move seem seamless.

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Being a black sheep in the SEO environment is not always a negative thing. Noticing the amount of chatter that certain SEO types who court controversy create is indeed eye-opening. Its quite alluring, an almost head-locked type of link-bait.

For one, if you have something to say, even if it rubs against the grain of the majority and it is your total belief - then say it. Who knows? The majority may just be sheep following the bark of someone already established and your outcry may make others think hard enough to look twice at what was-said-before. Individuality online is not easily classed as black or white its about being the many shades of you.

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This has been a post that has been building within myself for some time now. Even more so with Dave Naylor touching on the almost never switched off mode that an SEO must endure. Simple, enjoyment of browsing the web is almost overtaken by the need to know why that page was shown as relevant in Google to rank highly for the search term you just entered.

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I loved Twitter for its simplicity, its ease of use to communicate, its way of bringing instant friend referrals straight to my desktop (I did use Twitter Fox) then it got bloated and some executive or two never made the call not to keep-up with the data outage. Then Twitter died … almost daily, and my usage of the service curled up and withered with it.

However, before I could suck my last Twitteresque breath, some micro-blogging-evangelist leant before myself and began to chant “plurk, Plurk, PlurK, PLURK …” then my world greyed and became finally focussed on a headless something, I think it’s a pig but that debate is still open for argument.

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I’ve been reading a great thriller recently – it’s an old n’ dusty Stephen King thriller from the mid-90’s – but it wasn’t the fearful imagery that the thriller writer in question managed to raise my buns from the couch but the written words contained within certain passages of text that we are all interconnected by “hidden cables” that got me edgy and then some.

So what do I mean by “hidden cables”? We’ll to take a quick insight of my thinking I want to draw on a few heatable discussions that have taken centre stage this year in the search world. Please, be aware that I’m not mud-raking, merely using examples to illustrate my point.

The first and most famous was Lyndon’s global link bait that not only split your sides with laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all but also split a community into groups decrying each other in a scale unknown to the search community before or since. Many undercurrent thoughts went to play on this escapade myself included. So, looking back what made myself pick-up Lyndon’s torch and help fight his corner, go public with my thoughts, cut social media ties that will strain to be the same again.

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I thought I had recently run across a unique glitchz in StumbleUpon that could really harm the traffic you receive from your submissions. Thinking my theory was somewhat outlandish after talking to a on-line friend on Gtalk I decided it was best to take it to a person who knew a lot more about how the StumbleUpon algorithym works than myself : Tim Nash!

In my somewhat excited state I pinged Tim and stated that there is a process that I had termed as ‘Ghost Submissions’ that could negatetively kill your traffic no matter how many thumbs-up or reviews you would receive. Tim in his polite manner, kindly pointed myself to one his earlier posts – StumbleUpon Graveyard.

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Over at Google Webmaster Blog they recently posted a new article on “Duplicate Content Due To Scrapers”. Duplicate content has always been a concern and this latest piece by Google is intended to calm the growing murmur of discomfort by most webmasters over their web copy being scraped and used elsewhere by third-party sites like MFA’s (Made For Adsense) blogs, syndication sites and just sites ripping off content like-for-like for whatever reason.

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