Posted by : Tom Doyle in (Online Marketing) 13th Nov, 2008
As the race for the latest “greatest SEO“ hots up, I think it’s only fair to mention the site that I would love to see win it.
Cormac Moylan has completed his new site, in which he will attempt to appear No. 1 in Google by the end of November for the phrase “Geansai Gorm”.
It’s the first site for this competition to be created fully as Gaeilge.
For this great attempt, I think it’s only fair to give him a bit of link love - Geansaí Gorm | Suíomh Éadach
Best of luck to my preferred winner! 
Posted by : Tom Doyle in (Online Marketing) 29th Oct, 2008
Damien Mulley, via the Irish Web Awards, has launched the latest search for Ireland’s greatest SEO.
Entrants are asked to try and rank their site number 1 in Google for the gaelic phrase “Geansai Gorm” (translated to Blue Jumper).
The basic rules are that you must use a brand new domain name, none of the keywords can appear in your domain and you can’t use 301 redirects.
I’ve never been a fan of these competitions myself because for an established SEO it’s an easier task to achieve results than those that have nothing to start with. Generally an established SEO also has access to a number of strong sites that they can quickly get good links from.
Already this morning there are a number of blogs that are appearing in Google for ”Geansai Gorm” which will make the task for the entrants that little bit harder.
It will be interesting to see who the winner will be none the less! Hopefully the winner can do the whole site “as gaelige” too!
Posted by : Tom Doyle in (Online Marketing) 3rd Oct, 2008
Image via CrunchBase
Google have made a slight change to their webmaster guidelines that could actually be something quite major.
The following lines were removed from their guidelines:
- Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.
- Have other relevant sites link to yours.
For years Google has highly recommended a link in Yahoo! and DMOZ. Having links in these directories was a great benefit to your sites ranking. They also constantly recommended that you built lots of relevant links to your website.
This lead to huge abuse from search engine optimisers, who would simply spamming link farms and directories. What this means for the future is debatable. Maybe Google are going to disregard directories altogether regardless of their importance currently. I doubt they will undermine link value, but I wouldn’t be surprised anymore.
We’ll just have to keep an eye on things and see what happens.
