SEO Ibiza - Superior Small Business SEO

Ok, so it’s summer in Ibiza and the silliness is starting a little early this year, everyone who is anyone (and quite a few who aren’t too we expect..) are only now jumping on the Ibiza iPhone App bandwagon.

That’s all well and good, there are rumours of some good guys working on them that we know of, the world’s best Dance Music TV (or video) site DanceTrippin.tv have one in development, as do Ibiza Global Radio.

But they were all beaten to the punch by local outfit iPhone Ibiza who were onto this over a year ago and launched their own app (the first and FREE Ibiza iPhone app) based on their main website’s painstakingly gathered GPS information, at the beginning of May 09.

More recently to the table (following Ibiza Sonica Radio’s app - another genuine homegrown “Ibiza App”) and launched with the usual music business hype  came the Ministry of Sound, who bizarrely enough ended up using one of our friends (and wannabe TV Presenter) Ruth Osborn to film their Ibiza App launch video, (and then didn’t get it ready in time for the launch )

This section has been edited to reflect latest developments 1hour and 10 minutes after first posting.

Basically it appears there was a little controversy over ownership of some data on the new MOS app, which could only have come from Ibiza App #1’s  workings and painstakingly gathered GPS information  over many months (to 5 decimal points )

Initially there was some “confusion” about the matter, but shortly after having this SEARCH RESULT pointed out to them they  phoned up, apologized very nicely, and said they were removing the offending part of the App.

See? it was all just a silly misunderstanding after all…

Apparently it takes about 2 weeks to filter through the Apple system, which is co-incidentally about how long the original version of this post will remain in the Google “cached page” index, until they re-index and replace it with this version.

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Space Opening party always marks the official opening of the Ibiza summer season, and what a party it was as usual, we were there two weeks ago,so as Dancetrippin.tv’s awesome new video of Deadmau5 in the Space car park has just gone live on the site, we suggest if anyone wants to know what all the fuss is about, check out Dancetrippin.tv

We got involved with Dancetrippin at the end of last summer on a:

“free - consulting - to - a - friend’s - awesome - business - that - deserves - to - be - huge -  because - of - the - amazing - utterly - unique - content - and - hasn’t - quite -reached - tipping - point - yet..”

..sort of basis and between the team they now have the site nearly ready for the next (major) league. We can’t say too much because it’s all in progress but you can expect to be seeing a LOT more of these guys over the next year or so.

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So there’s been a bit of a rumpus over this Pagerank sculpting U-Turn by MC this last couple of weeks, but even after further (unofficial) confirmation from a Googler, we, along with a few notable others, think this may still all a bit of a red herring of one kind or another, thrown to confuse the clamoring adoring, doting, thronging masses.

The other thing that has mainly been puzzling us about the whole furor, is the question of duplicate links on a page, to another page. In this situation, how is this is any different, whether we use nofollow or not?

Remember - we think Google only count the First link anyway..    ..don’t we?

So presumably this PR (or linkjuice) from the second link has been “evaporating” away all this time without anybody noticing? and if the new nofollow PR rule came in a while back, suddenly “evaporating off” a large part of the web’s collective PR..

..and nobody noticed.. ???

So yes, maybe nofollow now doesn’t push the PR difference back through the remaining links, but still, what’s actually the difference?  because linking twice to the same page is also link equity wasted?

Duplicate live link - value not passed on 2nd link

Duplicate 2nd link nofollowed - value not passed

Why was there not a similar outcry about PR (lets say linkjuice) “evaporating” each time you link to a page for the second time?

Savy SEOs & web designers have been cutting back on duplicate links on their pages for  longtime anyway, it’s a fundamental part of the SEO design process to ensure that you have only the links you really need on each page, and with as much linkweight to each as possible, whilst staying user and usability focused.

Obviously Superior SEO web design is about having the right links in the right places in the first place though.  Nofollow usage to attempt to adjust link weighting between pages seemed to (and still does) not generally hurt things, but if it’s actually not doing what we all think it is, it might be a laugh to just take it off everywhere (on this, our experimental site) and see what happens.

If it bombs massively and that’s all we did, we’ll know they’re fibbing.

In the meantime we’re not rushing round undoing every nofollow and refuse to believe the paranoia about it marking you as “SEO savy” either, mainly because most of what we’ve seen in the way of implementation of it, wasn’t very. And it’s just been too widely adopted to now  suddenly say:

” hah! tricked you, down you go..”

Many sites, templates, themes, blogs and forums come with nofollow configured all the way through the coding already, these can’t all be labeled as naughty SEO profiled types and Google could never tar them all so.

And anyway, of course link sculpting is not dead, it was around long before nofollow was, under various other names, and using various other technologies,  so for now the essence of

“making each link on the page count as much as possible”

..Within the rules of course, will continue to be as important as always.

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Well, the effective ones anyway, so says Lisa Barone @ Outspoken Media, living up to her company name with this post, for sure. Now obviously Google have to deal with spam on the kind of scale we could probably never imagine, but this is not about spam and black hat if Lisa is to be believed, this is more the public face of white(ish) hat SEOs, high profile “faces” Graywolf and the likes, like the FBI profiles criminals.

So if they are profiling SEOs they’re only going to bother profiling the good ones, aren’t they? The ones with the ability to place stuff high(er) in the charts, stuff that Google maybe don’t think should be there? So, this means that if Google aren’t profiling you, you’re no good?

..Cue linkbait idea (not ours unfortunately) from everfluxx.com comes..

Google “profiled” SEO badges!! of course..

Actually of course, the really good ones probably won’t be getting profiled at all, and will likely remain below the radar and just carry on doing their thing.

Doubt we’re anything like big enough to be being profiled,  but Google do read our blog from time to time so who knows..?

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So this afternoon spec ops reported movement on the perimeter around a long held “trophy term” - ie no-one searches it, but it just sounds good, we took a few of these while we evolved the site on the way to the bigger stuff, and most are still there.

But in the last few days while the sentries were asleep, basically through complacence, a new site has taken #1 on both:

Superior SEO Design and Superior SEO Web Design.

This is awesome, to finally have some jousting partners to come and play with us in the silly stuff like this.

And what’s even better is that their whole site seems to have been set up specifically for these terms, whereas our rankings in those particular terms are basically a “crossbleed” from our presence in both the SEO Web Design, and Superior SEO searches, separately.

So we’ve basically been sniped (the irony)  …And what is it they always say?

..Never snipe a sniper and not finish the job

A quick look at the site shows a lot of content based around these terms, more than 10,000 words in fact, albeit mostly hidden away in the scroll bar section, but certainly “aggressively targeted ” onsite, and because it also seems to be have been built in HTML, will make a great sparring partner against our  advanced onsite SEO system - ie Static & Blog integration & advanced Wordpress SEO .

It’ll be like our own little ongoing SEO contest, only with other people playing now too, unlike the last 18 months in most cases. So we’ve made a couple of minor adjustments to respond and this post…

The site is www.frontpagerankings.com - you can have that one on us lads, & let the games commence

In other silly games, ie sulumits retsambew, we’re up to #11 on .co.uk, mainly because matey boy over at the mighty Taree Internet linked at one of our contest support posts. Time to return the favour, from the best place we have. We’ve also started a forum post over at Taree Internet here to discuss (in a hopefully more serious fashion) what actually constitutes  “superior seo web design”.

And lastly if any of the numpty anonymous commenters want to come and try their luck in our silly (superior seo web design) games, you are of course most welcome

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The boys over at sniper HQ have been engaged on other missions recently but have been back in action again over the weekend with two new targets and brand new sniper sites to match.

First up we have Massage Ibiza supplying massage therapy and health & beauty treatments Ibiza-wide. Having been the recipient of several of these massages we have no doubt at all that the young lady concerned will be too busy to answer her phone once her name and number are actually public.

And secondly a (flat) mate of the bosses has finally gotten round to getting his private chef website done, so presenting Fungalicious - Ibiza private chef - and once again as regular beneficiaries of various Ibiza catering leftovers we’re also pretty sure he’ll be too busy already and have to sub out most of the work the site brings him, but well, he wanted it anyway.

As usual, neither of them are fully finished yet and may yet change themes and evolve further, but why wait till you’ve finished to get it ranking?  That could be months away before the clients have finished fiddling with their content, in the meantime we’re confident inquiries will start appearing in a few weeks

PS Richard Branson didnt really say that about him, apparently the boys just needed something to put in there and Fungalicious himself was last seen

“heading towards the beach with 3 women and didnt want to know..”

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So if this is true (..not saying anyone would doubt your word of course Matt ) this is massive news and is effectively the end of Pagerank Sculpting as we know it, in fact it looks as though it may have already died a little while ago..

Lisa Barone at Outspoken media has just possibly published the SEO scoop of the year, following a conversation with Matt Cutts.  Speaking on Pagerank sculpting..

“It seems like you supported PageRank sculpting a year ago and now it seems like you don’t support it anymore. Why is that and will it become a negative indicator?”

MC. No, it won’t hurt your site. You can do your links however you want. You can use it to eliminate links to sign in forms and whatnot, but its a better use of your time to fix your site architecture and fix the problem from the core. Suppose you have 10 links and 5 of them are nofollowed.

There’s this assumption that that the other 5 links get ALL that PageRank and that may not be as true anymore (your leftover PageRank will now “evaporate”, says Matt.). You can’t shunt your PageRank where you want it to go. It’s not a penalty. It’s not going to get you in trouble. However, it’s not as effective.

It’s a better use of your time to go make new content and do all the other things. If you’re using nofollow to change how PageRank flows, it’s like a band-aid. It’s better to build your site how you want PageRank to flow from the beginning.

Danny follow up - Why is it less effective?

He (Matt) talks about the YouTube case and talks pleasantly around the issue about how YouTube sculpted their pages for users so that “random videos” didn’t shoot up. Initially, if you had 10 links and 5 were nofollowed, the other 5 would get all that PageRank. That’s not the case anymore.  They didn’t it change it because people started sculpting.

Michael Gray: If you’re trying to mitigate the nofollow, doesn’t that say it’s working the way we want it to?

Matt: We’re not trying to mitigate it. [Matt's doing the Google shuffle trying to get out of the clenches of Graywolf.]  He ends up explaining his way out rather well. Graywolf seems settled. For now.

So it’s official, PR sculpting v1.0 is dead, Long live PR Sculpting v2.0, which is sculpting it into your link structure from the very beginning, or SEO by design as we call it

(and Search Engine Land’s post here)

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Is your Google Honeymoon over?  ..The Google Sandbox effect is known to be:

“a phenomenon that people have claimed to observe in the ranking of web pages that is performed by Google. It is the subject of much debate. Its existence has been written about but not confirmed, and several observers state that they have observed the contrary to what is claimed for this perceived phenomenon.

The phenomenon that people have claimed to observe is that Google temporarily reduces the page rank of new domains, placing them into what is referred to as its “sandbox”, in an effort to counter the ways that search engine optimizers attempt to manipulate Google’s page ranking to bring sites to the top, by creating lots of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they own before creating that web site.

We do not believe there is a sandbox currently in existence, although there may have been up until about 2-3 years ago or so, but not seen by us or any of our friends or contacts since then.

There are many confirmed (by cases of) Google filters you can fall foul of, but  seemingly no evidence relating to this particular one. We have been involved in or observed approx 50+ new domain launches in the last 2 years and have not seen anything that looks even remotely like this effect, (although we have of course seen new sites rank extremely low in SERPs, just because they are new.

This reasoning that it only affects high volume kw searches, or very competitive searches is just silly, the reason a new site will plummet after the initial fresh content and/or Google “honeymoon” effect is simply that in competitive searches, as a new site, your site is a very long way down the rankings.

Do you really think it’s realistic to expect a brand new site to appear anywhere decent in tough searches, and stay there? It will simply rank where it should, given it’s linkstrength (including age of links etc) domain age (to a small extent, as decent links will overpower domain age weighting almost every time)

We’ve had a thread running on Digitalpoint for the last month asking to see live any examples of the sandbox and offering to take a (free) look at it to try and diagnose the the problems, or to confirm that it could in fact actually be the legendary Sandbox, no luck thus far..

So we’ll extend this offer here too, if anyone has a live example of what they consider to be a genuinely Sandboxed site, please leave the URL here in a comment and we’ll have a free look and see if we can help.

If we can’t, then it may well be that you have helped us with a real live case..  ..we live in hope. - Personally we would also like to see proof of Alien abductions and the Yeti too, but are not holding our collective breath..

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Ok it’s time for our annual punch into the charts to test domain strength in non SEO-related areas, and what better than to celebrate official the start of

Ibiza Summer, Space Opening weekend.

Ibiza 2009 promises to be an exceptional summer for us for several reasons, not least that our good mate, and Bora Bora resident DJ  Will Johnston who also owns the internet’s best Dance Music TV site - Dancetrippin.tv is spending the summer at SEO Ibiza HQ.

The IMS 2009 (Ibiza Music Summit) is in it’s second day today, you can catch up and follow a live twitterstream from there on the Ibiza blog but one of our journalist friends who was there was quoted as saying yesterday (through the Ibiza rumour network, obviously)

“It’s just a load of old blokes patting themselves on the back and telling everyone who’ll listen how successful their club nights are.. ”

Another mate of ours and top female DJ Smokin Jo is unfortunately not playing Space Opening this weekend but will be here for We Love Sundays on the 21st June and then flying in and out all summer from the UK where she now lives, very much looking forward to catching up with her, and she’s actually getting married to her boyfriend James Mountford on the Island in September, congrats guys, wouldn’t miss that party for the world.

As to what the season is going to be like is still anyone’s guess, some are reporting quieter than usual, but this weekend will be the proof, if the Space car parks are all rammed as always (and that’s just the Guardia Civil ) then it’s probably not going to be too bad, (for Space at least).

Ibiza Voice’s countdown to crisis 09 sums up all the pre season club shenanigins better than we can, and suffice to say that (there are rumours at least) that DC10 is to open again.  …How long for is anyone’s guess as always.

And we’ve also got the Ibiza film festival this week too, who look like they could actually use a bit of help SEO-wise as it happens, check the page they’ve got indexed at #5 here

Ibiza Film Festival …”Frames” ?

And we’re kicking it off officially tonight with a team night out (and right old stuff-up) at of one of our favourite Ibiza restaurants - San Antonio’s Tijuana TexMex, and just wanted to finish off with a quick shout to all our mates over there in the UK, and all you (ex-colleague) office workers too, remember all those conversations about there “being a better way of life than this..?”

..well, yup, there definitely is…  and “let’s ‘ave it”, indeed.

Hasta Luego amigos, SEO Ibiza are off to the beach..

Update 10-06-09 - with regards to the domain strength test, this is kind of what we were expecting..

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This is a newish site we had to pass on, due to time constraints but handed over to our mate Matt Inertia who specializes in online music marketing, it’s a new music social networking site called Mixm8.

It’s still under heavy development at present but promises a virtual world clubbing experience, forums, music uploads and downloads, videos, chat and more.

The site’s already undergone some more big changes again since Matt got involved and we expect big things from them both, check it out.

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