Foreign Perspectives

Although there are loads of categories that you can list a blog under, “soapbox” isn’t one of them.

That’s a shame really as many blogs would sit very neatly under that particular category. After all, there are a great many bloggers who would have been standing on their soap box in earlier times. It’s not just the preachers these days of course as everyone and their dog has something to say nowadays. In fact, once you’ve kicked off one blog, you get to the point eventually when you’d like to say a bunch of stuff which doesn’t fit under the heading of the original blog.

Which is a long way of saying that I now have my very own “soapbox blog” over at The View from Arnold.

It seems like google hand you pagerank when you’re not looking for it so I’m going to run a little trial on another blog domain to see if I can pick it up delibrately.

What I’ve been doing in the past has been to use a test domain when trying out new versions of my listings sites and after a while those domains have tended to pick up page rank which I don’t really understand as I obviously don’t run any promotion on them. In fact, I don’t even link to them so I’m confused as to how some of them are even picked up by google to begin with.

Anyway, for the trial what I’m doing is moving my beta testing of the new version of the listings sites to part of ‘tother blog domain (which I’ll not mention as I don’t want to pick up links to it from here and thereby muddy the waters).

Page rank usually takes a few months to acquire so it’ll be a while before I know if it’s working or not.

Online everyone tends to assume that there are infinite resources behind every website and, of course, that’s just not the case in reality.

For example, we like to be as helpful as we can to those properties listed on our holiday accommodation listings sites and to that end we offer a range of free services notably including a free website review. In practice though few people actually take us up on them normally but when we mentioned a few of them in our recent newsletter we had rather more response than we were expecting.

Now, in itself the response wasn’t overwhelming but the reviews that we did highlighted a number of common problems and so we did a followup mini newsletter telling people how to perform one of the key checks that most sites were falling down on which in turn generated rather more response than expected although again at a level we could deal with.

What we’ve subsequently done is to enable a feature we call “marketing assistant” which basically generates a short e-mail advising people as to changes that they could make to their own website to improve how it performs in searches. In fact, that’s phase one of that particular feature as we’re hoping to develop it further.

The problem is that as we move into the peak booking season, the number of e-mails generated is starting to rise and so too are the number of enquiries that we’re getting from them. So much so that we’ve had to switch the facility off for a few days to catch up.

It’s something to be mindful of: once you move out of the field of total automation online, you can easily find that you’re swamped with the responses.

Reading the original research presentation of google highlights a number of points where the weakness of the algorithm can still be exploited and those cracks are starting to become very obvious.

One thing that they never allowed for was that once money came into the equation then people would pay to manipulate how their site was ranked in terms of pagerank. As we’ve seen late last year that has now become a significant problem for google and so they have begun to crackdown on the payment for links beginning with sponsored posts. How effective that will be given that there are now over 600,000 (yes, six hundred thousand) directories offering links is hard to say but sales of links are sure to remain with us in one form or another.

Then there’s the assumption that people would use large letters and bold fonts to highlight what was important on the page. As is plain, this is easily manipulated and is on quite a widespread basis in some quarters.

They even neglected to consider that some people would simply click on their own pages because clicks are a factor in pagerank (they know if you’ve installed the google toolbar). That’s quite noticeable if you “legitimately” do it when developing a website and one assumes that many more people are doing it for less innocent reasons.

That they’re having problems is obvious: they shouldn’t need to crackdown on the blogs and yet they appear to need to do that.

James’ nursery school is in the throes of producing a film based on the Arabian nights tales.

Well, we think it’s on that as James is less than forthcoming about his role in the production beyond mentioning the other day that he had to hand a lamp to two of the other children in his class. We’ve also seen various shapes of swords laid outside for the paint to dry and there was a photo of the little girls in Arabian nights type costumes in the newsletter last week.

Anyway, we’ll know soon as opening night (probably day I expect) is in a few weeks time.