I want to take this opportunity to say I recently attended a social event after one of the days at SES London 2008 - minding my own business chatting away to fellow SEO enthusiasts I noticed a guy (Mr X) standing rather close to me at the bar - in a patronizing tone he “wanted to get to the bar“. No please, no thank you just annoyance that I was slowing down his drinking ability.

Through the night I saw this guy sucking up to the Google and MSN representatives (that looked utterly bored with Mr X) as he proceeded to tell them how to do their jobs and how great he was. One of my friends proceeded to tell me that Mr X was infact head of SEO for a well known Online Casino company. This information immediately clicked in to place as to why this guy had been swanning around for the last 3 hours believing he was only one step away from the big man himself.

Back to my point, I was by no means stalking Mr X - please bare this in mind! Outside I heard him boasting to some other disinterested people how he only used “Blackhat all the way” to get the “best results“. I did at that point want to “whitehat “his ass fairly sharpish.

Instead I found out what the exact URL was and started my analysis of the site (the next day). The site had keyword stuffing all over the place, their backlinks were so obviously all paid for, the anchor text did not change at all - 100% one phrase and where was this douche ranking? Well 2nd of course (grrr), as many of us bloggers and site owners keep receiving penalties from Google for the occasional “suspicious” link or two - sites that must make hundreds of millions of pounds can get away with it by the looks of it (old news I know)!

I’m not blaming Google but when the evidence against a site looks so obvious, why doesn’t Google do something about it?

Anyway, not to be outdone by Mr X, his site has been reported for every Blackhat evidence I could find - bit “snitchy” I know but all this could have been avoided by saying one word - “please”. Google get to work PLEASE!

It seems unlike Google to issue two page rank updates within 3 months but there has been chatter that the next update is in progress. If you check your Page Rank using Dig Page Rank then you can see the data centers are being updated.

Before you get carried up in the hustle and bustle of all the forum posts and blog posts - remember a few key points about Page Rank:

1. Page rank does not determine traffic

2. Page Rank does not determine SERPS

3. Page Rank updates all the time, it just takes time for the green bar to update on toolbars

4. Linking for PR is against Google’s rules and not the right mentality

This is something that has been on my mind for quite some time now and I wasn’t sure 100% if it was true or not, until now.

For those of you that know me I love StumbleUpon, it provides great on going traffic if you setup and maintain your profile correctly – see my post “Unofficial StumbleUpon guide”. Occasionally my blog posts would get stumbled by someone else for whatever reason but I considered SU a means of letting people know when I have a new post out, in case people have not subscribed via RSS.

Last month, one morning I typically wrote a post and used my usual means of promotion, or so I thought. Later that day I checked to see if any reviews had been made on the submission and to my surprise there was no listing visible. I thought perhaps there had been a mistake when I submitted, so I tried a different technique and looked on my profile again, still no submission – so what am I dong wrong? – Nothing at all is the answer here.

When I now try and submit my own blog content the process appears to work, when you later check it returns this result:

So why has this happened?

I suppose it’s to stop people gaming the system, which I don’t really consider it doing as the content is different each time. I have had friends get URL’s band in Digg before simply because they submitted the same domain too many times so I’m quite glad that the domains don’t get banned entirely.

If anyone else has started to have this problem too please use the poll below, it will be interesting to see the results:

I apologize to all my readers that Seounique was down for around 72 hours.

As some of you may or may not know I was hacked a few weeks back and it seems that my hosting company needed me to replace my HD on the server. This is the reason I have been away, and the site down. Seounique is back up and will I will get a posting asap.

Sorry again,

Thanks Matt

Ok, so those of you that are regular visitors to Seounique may or may not have noticed a few blog changes happening. For those of you who are not aware of my changes:

• Added social bookmarking buttons after each post
• Added a contact page (roll on the spam)
• Added an advertise page to offer spots on my “Top Spots“
• Updated blogroll and included “Seo Blogs”

I hope all these features will help with the usability of the site and make performing actions that little bit easier. As to why I have started to add “Seo Blogs” to my blogroll is quite simple. Nothing in this world is free as many people know (not all) and I have a list of around 20 seo blogs I visit on a regular basis which part of me thinks I should link to. As much as I would like to send them over a little complementary link juice I just can’t justify it at this point. Although 2 sites that have given to the site in different ways will now be positioned on Seounique.

I will only be linking to SEM or SEO blogs as thats what my readers find interesting, so no gambling yada yada…

If you feel like you could offer something to the site (however little) and join in with my sometimes rambling discussions then let me know and you could see your link here.