Author: Olly

  • Excited for Amsterdam

    In approx 32 days Gem and I will be flying to Holland, and visiting wonderful city of Amsterdam. Ive wanted to go for over 10 years, but i have either not had the cash, time or both!

    Quite a few of my mates have been and have all given me tips to find the best spots, but to be honest as im going with Gemma (not on a stag do or something) i think our experience of Amsterdam will be a different one compared to that of my friends who have been in the past.

    We’re gonna do the whole tourist thing, visit museams and attractions and basically do what we did in prauge and just wander about.

    Our trip lasts about 4 days, so we have plenty of time to soak in the sights and see Amsterdam at its finest, we are also stopping at a really nice hotel called CitizenM which is hopefully gonna make our stop that little bit more relaxing.

    Everything is booked, and we just need to clear the hotel balance once we arrive, i cant wait to spend my birthday in another country – should  be awesome 🙂

    Have you done all your xmas shopping yet? 🙂

  • Another server migration

    We’ve moved for what will hopefully be the last time (I know i said that the last 3 times) but this time we’ve gone for the top options, two mahoosive brand new server with an intel i7 quad core 2.4ghz, 8gb ram and 2TB HDD! Beasty!

    We’ve called the client one, Optimus Prime, and the work one Megatron.

    Hehe.

    I was up until 4am this morning moving stuff across, making sure that the sites that were moved and i had access to change nameservers, got changed, and any that i didn’t have access to NS i wrote down on a list.

    I then went through all the ThreeFifty sites, and updated them – then changed NS.

    Ive had an issue with 123-reg and their DNS – for some reason it wasn’t adding certain things into the registry so it meant i couldn’t change the nameservers for any of the work.COM/.NET (TLD’s) domain names, so ive had to host them on the client server until that is fixed.

    Once i was only left with client site nameserver changes to do, i updated the IP addresses of the old host nameservers with IP’s from the new client server, and bingo bango about 100 website nameservers changed instantly!

    We’ve had some bugs to squash but so far so good.

    The new servers are the sheez-neezy too, if you need a dedi then give me a shout as you wont get one better than from our hosting man!

    Anyone having issues with anything then get in touch 🙂

  • Hobbies and stuff

    When I was a lot younger I used to play ice hockey, play roller hockey, messed about in cars, collected adidas superstars and did some other stuff that was cool and could be classed as a hobby.

    Now, I do nothing but work.

    I’ve decided that 2011 will be the year when I restart some of my previous hobbies and maybe start a few more.

    I’m still “involved” in the car scene, so that shouldnt be too hard to get back into, just means I gotta spend some money on my car – and I’m planning on doing that anyway.

    The ssdb is still going strong so all I gotta do is make sure I dedicate time to the website and start looking on ebay for some cool bargains, doesn’t sound too difficult!

    Then how come I’m not still doing all these things? If they are so easy to get back into?

    I guess it boils down to time management, which is something I’ve been shit with for a long time! I am getting better planning my days out at work thanks to our helpdesk system, Google calendar and my notepad – so I don’t see why that can’t cross over to my non-work activities, too!

    I never set new years resolutions but this year Im breaking the habit of a lifetime as I have two, this being one of them – and I plan on sticking to them both!

    Wish me luck, gangstas! 🙂

  • Passing Keywords through 301 Redirects

    As you can probably see, I have recently changed the domain name for my blog to a shiny new short one – that contains only my name, and actually has a O not a zero, so I will hopefully have a better chance of ranking for my own name now 🙂

    Anyway, before i changed domains, a friend of mine suggested we do an experiment to test a theory a top SEO company has about passing keywords to a new domain name by using a 301 redirect.

    Also the keyword being passed cannot be mentioned anywhere on the page – the only reference to it was to be in the keyword used to link to my blog.

    My friend made a word up, i wont mention it in text it will contain it in the screenshots below (don’t want to screw up the results 🙂 ) and we linked to my blog from a high traffic website, using this made up word as the anchor text.

    We waited for the link to be picked up (and in fact had to give it a kick up the arse using Jumptags to speed things up a bit – I wanted my new domain name!!) and once it was ranking in google for this keyword we put the 301 redirect in place to move all pages, posts etc over to 0lly.uk.

    Again, we waited….

    And waited…

    And slowly but surely the UK domain name was being replaced in the index by the .IM domain name, and then one day we checked and;

    So there you have it! This has proven on this occasion that in fact a 301 redirect will pass “anchor text only” keywords over to your new domain name.

    NB I have noticed a fair drop in traffic and have lost some of my high positions for certain keywords switching to this domain, however I don’t care as the new name kicks ass. 🙂