Tag: google

  • Horsing around with Local Business Listings?

    Haha.. i love a good old play on words!

    Over our business life we have met many people, some of them have been great – and some of them have been naaaasssttyyy. We have recently had the pleasure of making a website for the Villa Mar Riding School, Chesterfield. Its a family run operation, and for 18 years have gained a list of satisfied customers longer than both your arms put together – yet for some reason they have been a target of some kind of malicious attack via Google Local Business Listings.

    For those that don’t know, GLBL (Nope, thats just what i call it!) is a way of being found on the internet, for free, in your local area. You sign up, the post you a postcard to ensure you actually live there and if someone types in Riding School Chesterfield in, you get a local business entry smack bang at the top of google!

    SIMPLES!

    GLBL is a fantastic way of promoting yourself – but, it can also be used against you as it has in this case. According to sources, there are a lot of riding schools in the area, and they are all very competitive. And due to the success of Villa Mar they have taken it upon themselves to add nasty reviews on GLBL about the riding school, meaning anyone looking to go there would instantly be put off.

    What do you do if this has happened to you?

    Well in a lot of cases when it comes to internet marketing and promotion – fight fire with fire i say! But as GLBL is so public and is kinda out of anyone’s (apart from the mighty G of course) control – I’d say don’t use fire, but just try and highlight the good things and the positive comments so the bad/spam ones are buried.

    Get all your existing and previous satisfied customers to visit the GLBL review page and add a nice comment and rate it accordingly, and the more good listings you get the higher your overall rating will be, until its back up to its rightful spot near the 5/5 mark 🙂

    You can of course flag the reviews as inappropriate, but I’m afraid if they sound like they could be true then i doubt very much Google will do anything about them as for all they know they could be true – and I’m sure they don’t wish to be responsible for advising someone to go somewhere and them having a terrible experience as a result of it.

    For anyone thinking of trying it on a competitor, don’t bother. There are many ways to overcome your competitors on the internet, do it properly and you will always come out on top.

  • All i lack is concentration

    Sometimes i find myself simply unable to concentrate enough to make any headway on work that i have outstanding. Our business is growing, as is our little internal network of people we have – yet after nearly 3 years at it im still as dis-organised as i was when i started.

    I often wonder how much more produtive i’d be if i actually planned my days out better.

    Can anyone recommend some decent software or something that allows me to manage my time and manage projects efficiently?

    All the software i have ever tried is built to help people manage tasks and appointments, but it only works for your typical salesman or something, who’s workload and outstanding jobs can be easily planned out etc – due to the diverse work i do, i can never plan a day out as something will always crop up and knock it all out of sync.

    I use a combination of gmail, my blackberry, a page-a-day-diary and a scribble pad. If i could merge the lot into one i would – maybe the answer is with addon software for the ‘berry? Or maybe i just need to hold on to the hope one day google will make the tasks lab feature shareable between users on the same google apps domain – ARE YOU LISTENING GOOGLE?

    Anyway, off to try and organise my bitch ass.

    Rice.

  • Links from relative websites for SEO

    Dave and i have been spending a lot of time reading up about SEO and how to build effective links campaigns. We read stuff all the time, many of the things you see on the internet conflict with other things you read, but once you’ve read enough and tried and tested some of the ideas you get a good idea what to do.

    Anyway, the point of this blog post is talk about how google knows if a website you have a link on is in fact a relevant site or not. The reason im talking about this is because we have a “Top Sites” website for the cruise scene  (the modified car cruising scene) and it links to some of the top sites in the scene, and they link back. You all know the ones im talking about! The site has been running for ages, and it has built up a PR2 and as it stands its a pretty decent site to stick a couple of links on to one of our automotive SEO clients.

    As i was adding the link, i noticed the google ads displayed pretty much nothing about cars, and just stuff about caribbean cruises. The domain name and the majority of the content relates to something called cruising and the adwords filter and picked out ads for boat cruises. I guess in a lot of ways its right, but then in the actual sense of the word its not. So does google think its relevant, or not?

    I guess there aren’t many “cruise sites” that would advertise using google, and i dont suppose that many of the car related ads on there have been set to trigger when the word cruise is picked up. If there were some then i guess they would get picked up and used on this particular site, but surely the google filters could figure its relevant content anyway and still display relevant ads?

    I guess much of what google knows is down to what people search for on google its self. So if a word takes on a new meaning then people will be blogging and searching for it so google learns about it and hey presto.

    Im still unsure as to wether or not a link off there will benefit or not, but i guess like publicity – any links a good link (unless iton a site about pr0n or vhagrah. 🙂

  • My Email Migration Journey

    Everyone has email. Some people access it via a blackberry, iphone/iphone 3g or other internet capable mobile phone, some people use outlook, thunderbird or one of the other desktop email clients. Then there are those of us who use things like gmail, hotmail so that you can access your mail easily anywhere in the world.

    When i first started using the internet (over ten years ago) i used things like claramail and hotmail – just because they were free and easy to use. I then started actually messing about with the internet, building websites and learning about domain names and pop3 etc. I then took the logical step (at the time) to outlook. I had also started an IT job and needed something more professional that came with calendar sharing options.

    Outlook was good, i had folders and filters set up so that when mail came in it was delivered to the right box and i even had a good spam filter called ihatespam. It seemed to work pretty well at the time from what i can remember.

    I soon grew tired of outlooks limitations, i wanted my mail with me all the time! So i got someone to invite me to gmail – I quickly registered my usual username@ gmail address. I was quite lucky as it was early gmail days so i managed to get the address i wanted.

    I loved gmails interface straight away. They had a totally different approach to how you store your mail, plus you use a google search to find your mail, so looking for things deep and buried (which i often do) became a sinch! I simply forwarded @maxxd email addresses to @gmail then set the @gmail “reply to” address to the @maxxd domain and you have a loop. It worked well until my server was down as it broke the forwarder, but i suppose thats true for most peoples email.

    I used gmail for many years, and ended up with about 10 different addresses for different things, when i suddenly hit a wall when looking for some old emails that i needed to clear a burning question i had in the back of my head. My emails didn’t quite go far back enough, it was literally a few days out. So i looked at ways of extracting my emails from the mail files i had hung on to from the early days.

    I soon located a copy of outlook, set it up then replaced the mail files and hey presto, i had my mail. I had got it into my head that it would be a good idea to copy all that across to thunderbird, and pull all my gmail emails from gmail down to thunderbird too, so i have everything in one place.

    All was good for a while, apart from maxing out my hard drive and having to move the local thunderbird mailfile located. Oh and then, my laptop died. And i was without every single email i had ever received (and kept).

    Bollocks.

    I quickly switched email forwarders back on to how i had them set up when i used gmail previously, in order to catch any new mail i received, and i continued to use it like this while i sorted a new charger unit for my laptop. Once that was sorted i powered the laptop back up and started researching the best way to actually store all this info and have reliable professional email system.

    We decided to go back to google, and try out google apps. We made the changes to the dns so that the domain emails go to googles servers, set the accounts up and cracked on with it. It seems to work really well, and its customisable. The only problem i find is when i need to log in from a random pc i have to piss about as i haven’t set the custom url thingy up yet – but that’s just my fault.

    As i wanted all my emails in one place, i looked to find a way to get emails from thunderbird BACK to gmail! I located a really helpful set of guides here and here that enlightened me on the best way to do this successfully. It works well, but WARNING – DO NOT log in to another gmail account in your browser on that pc until the copy process has completed. I couldn’t figure out why it kept failing at first but it soon dawned on me. Also dont forget gmail has restrictions on attachment sizes so that can always be a reason if it keeps crashing or failing.

    Anyway, im pretty much in the last stages of moving the emails back, im on over 11,000 in one and over 2000 in the other, with emails dating back to 2002.

    The next step is to do some work on the servers to spruce them up a bit. Great stuff.