Lots of SEOs think they are rock stars, but that’s not what were talking about here. It’s actually been quite a long time since we’ve felt the need to blog about SEO, and have been super-busy on lots of our own projects as always, but felt that this one was probably worth a mention.

We’ve stated before that Ibiza is an amazing place to live and work, and that had we stayed in London and been called “SEO Clapham”, (for example) that things might not have worked out quite the same, and this is a perfect example..  Back in August, the phone rang, and was answered:

“Hello, is that SEO Ibiza?”

- Yes indeed, how can we help?

“Hi, it’s Andy Taylor, I’ve been recommended to you by Ade (Ibiza blog) “

Well it’s got to be said that it’s not every day that one of your childhood heroes (Duran Duran) ring you up out of the blue..  only in Ibiza in fact.

So (bizarrely enough) it turns out Andy is already a bit of a WordPress expert, (arent all Rockstars? ) but was getting frustrated with the limitations of  Wordpress.com because he is working with a pioneering new system called Topspin which allows artists to market and sell their products directly to the customer, thereby cutting out the (broadly hated) middlemen (record companies)

But WordPress hosted systems don’t allow you to do what he wants to do, and so a few months and lots of design tweaking (by Ade) later we are (slightly surreally) happy to announce and soft launch:

AndyTaylor.tv

Now we just have to get it past the other 38 million or so sites about Duran Duran..

Watch this space..

Just a quick shout on behalf of one of our favourite SEO consulting clients, the fabulous Mr & Mrs Smith hotels are looking for an in-house London php developer to work on their multiple and consistently award winning web site & blog.

“ The role will be developing both front- and back-end systems, using several technologies, including PHP, XHTML, JavaScript and MySQL and suitable for an ambitious and experienced web or PHP developer wishing to join a company that aims to push the boundaries of technology and creativity.

You will need to progress fast, and settle in quickly to form a linchpin part of a small team working on the Mr & Mrs Smith website”

For full information and application details Go Here

Dancetrippin on your TV!

So it’s been a long while coming but we are very happy to announce that  the fabulous Dancetrippin TV are now broadcasting their amazing and utterly unique content via their TV channel on the  Eurobird 9A satellite and are currently in talks with multiple distributors following this years Cannes TV festival

DT have spent the last 10 YEARS attending and filming the World’s best DJs at the World’s best clubs..

..and therefore have utterly unique content covering the last decade in dance music history, and in a quality NOBODY ELSE can match, we fully believe that over the next few years Dancetrippin.TV will become a household name like MTV, go and check it out and see what you think.

The satellite details are

• Name: DanceTrippin TV
• Wherefrom: The Netherlands
• Genre: Music
• Coding: FTA

• Satellite: Eurobird 9a (9′E)
• Freq: 11747.00
• Polarisation : H
• Format: DVB-S
• Symbolrate: 27500
• FEC: 3/4

Some of our favourite episodes can be found here

• Carl Cox @ Space
• Moby @ Space
• Deadmau5 @ Space

Ibiza summer 2008 - 2009 girlies

Ok so it’s not quite summer yet, but we’re jumping the gun with this one, the annual (apart from 2010 when we must have forgotten)  domain strength test, now into it’s 4th year, and rearrange the Ibiza girls” image search a little again if possible.

We first did this in summer 2008, and then again in summer 2009,  you may *possibly* recognise our nominated ladies to represent the island on the left here,  but they have served their time and we do need to officially retire the pre-2010 girls (so 2009) and hereby present our new Ibiza 2011 Girls, and trust that you approve.

Ibiza girls 2011

We hope you appreciate the effort that went into this, because this was a tough photo-shoot pushing Ibiza photography to it’s very limits.   ..So ok, on with business, lots of new sites and rebuilds going (gone) on lately, including:

Ibiza Rocks Info

Ibiza Rocks Info – brand new site from the Ibiza blog fold, with news, views and exclusive (apart from 2005, they took them all) band and gig photos from 2005 through to 2010, plus line-ups and ticket sales

Dancetrippin TV new site

Dancetrippin TV have launched another new site, only seems like a little while ago the last new site went up, but they now needed something that could grow and expand as fast as they are, and cope with the technological needs the TV station will require going forwards.  They’ve also brought their blog in-house, revamped the forums and feedback on the new site has been well received so far

Deliciously Sorted have another very cool new site in HTML5, with all kinds of clever stuff going on, definitely check this one out.

Deliciously Sorted Ibiza new site 2011

And finally we’d like to wish all the new Ibiza small business start-ups this year the best of luck, dont forget you can advertise your business in our Ibiza directory for immediate search presence to your customers,  for only 99 Euros, and you don’t even need a website.

Any company who has an individual “brand” with some customer awareness or loyalty will already understand the value of that, in search.  Companies such as this will very likely see substantial proportions of their hits from brand searches and will find that PPC campaigns are cheaper on those keywords, and conversions in general (both PPC and organic) are far higher around brand searches, so the value of this is not in question.

But of course, anywhere there is money to be had on the internet, marketeers and competitors will be present too, often ranking for your brand name, or advertising on it using PPC, so the ability to basically dominate your brand SERP, and push brand snipers down the page, often below the fold plus spice up the results page with your real-time presence, complete with colorful eye-catching logos to ensure  searcher’s eyes are drawn to you first, (on after all what is basically your market) is potentially a very  good thing.

Better still though, is the ability to basically scroll your latest news, including competitions, offers, incentives and anything else you desire, live in the Google SERP for anyone looking for you, this is a powerful SEO win over your competitors if you can achieve it. In fact, we think this has now made Twitter quite useful for some real SEO work at last, which granted is a bit of U-Turn from a previous post – The Truth about Twitter - but then in fairness we hadn’t seen this happening at that point.

The Real-Time search results shown above now appear any time we let off a flurry of Tweets (more than one) and whilst we don’t fully understand all the hows and whys yet, below is summarized observations about it with regards to how it works on our site and the few examples we’ve looked at so far.

1. You seem to have to be the *authority* site on the matter, at #1 for your name.
2. You (obviously) need an active Twitter account in the brand name.
3. Multiple Tweets seem trigger it, one every few hours does not.
4. The (our) results will then stay there as long as new Tweets go out at least 1 per hour.
5. Once conversation / Tweets dry up,  (our) Real-time is usually gone after 2-3 hours max.
6. We **think** that your Twitter profile maybe needs to rank first page for your brand too, wouldn’t bet the house on it, but haven’t seen any instances yet where it hasn’t been first page.

So lets look in a bit more detail..

1. Of course if it’s your brand, you should be #1 anyway, there’s something seriously wrong if you’re not already, this should always be a first SEO priority.

2. Any company trying to build brand awareness these days cannot ignore Social Media, and will likely have already dabbled with Twitter etc.  You will need to organize yourselves, assign someone the job of regularly Twitting, and interact with people.  Ensure this person is familiar with your company and brand values, do not leave it to the intern, because this person will be representing your company with their real-time thoughts direct in the Google charts.

There’s a good article here about the implications of real time search for businesses, if you’re in charge of this and you’re not familiar with business social media, it would be very wise to acquaint yourself.

3. Multiple tweets signify ongoing action around that word, i.e. news, one a day does not, and will not usually trigger this. It’s also likely that the authority and engagement levels of your Twitter account is a factor, i.e a reasonable amount of followers and mentions / ReTweets etc.

4/5. We’ve seen our real-time box go again anywhere between 39 minutes and about three hours, but one Tweet an hour will usually sustain it. It also looks like more authoritative Twitter accounts have longer staying power, see Rand below, his last utterances can show up to 48 hours sometimes.

6. This may not be connected at all, but for total Brand domination and reputation management reasons  (should you ever need them) it’s always a good idea to fill the page up with your profiles if possible.

What else can you do to enhance your chances of getting this effect? Well now we are getting into pure  speculation (even more so than usual)

1. Obviously, your Twitter account needs to link to your main site.
2. The main site should link back to the Twitter account, and using your brand name as the alt text on the image will help with ranking the profile page 1. We’ve never much liked the idea of site-wide PR leakage to Twitter, but if it leads to this  it’s a bit more acceptable.
3. It seems very likely that the more active and authoritative your Twitter account is, the easier this will be to get pop-up real time real estate in the SERP, and as above, the better known your Twitter account the longer real time hangs around.

Other (much higher profile) examples of SEOs we’ve seen that have got this down:

Lyndon Antcliff or Lyndoman – they appear for either.

Rand Fishkin / Randfish

There are lots more SEOs besides, but if anyone knows of any good examples of brand businesses of any size (not celebrities) using this to good effect, or any other observations about getting this to happen where previously it did not,  instances where the Twitter profile isn’t there etc, please do let us know in the (dofollow – just behave yourselves) comments.

Ibiza over and out.

Almost every SEO forum these days is littered with questions about “Link wheels”,  and there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding around concept,  implementation, and Google “legality” of using a Linkwheel, and lately even the occasional question from clients has been popping up too,  and so being both helpfull and lazy, we thought we would summarise the subject and then just point people here, rather than have the same conversation over and over again. The first time we saw the actual term “Link wheel” used was by a young guy  calling himself Lemonarian, who has since achieved relative fame around the subject, even though since the Pro SEOs got involved he’s not at the top of the charts for “Link Wheel” any more, but he was the first using the term we are aware of. However the idea of using a group of sites interlinked together for better rankings is not new at all, it’s just going under a different name and very much easier to do these days, it used to be known as a Mini net, famously written about by Michael Campbell in Revenge of the Mini Net

So What is a Link wheel?

A link wheel is basically a bunch of  “sites” or you will also hear them referred to as “web 2.0″ properties” which actually just means pages hosted on other large, free-to-register sites. As above, you can see each “property” links one to the main site, and once to the next property, in a ring, like a wheel. If you envisage your site as the hub of the wheel, and each link in is a spoke, from a property on the wheel “rim” , that’s about it the strength of it.

Do Link Wheels Work?

This is a bit like saying “Do dogs bite?” Some will, some won’t, some might just nip you.  The fact is, that done properly by people who know what they are doing, they can have a very positive effect on rankings for specific keywords, we have seen them used in various situations, and with varying measures of success.

Are Linkwheels “Black hat” SEO?

This is where the subject starts getting controversial, because as linkwheels become more commonly spoken about in general forums etc, lots of the public are starting to assume that they must be OK because everyone’s doing it. In our opinion, Link Wheels range from the “Not really White Hat” right thro’ to “Witchety Black Hat” depending on the intention and the methodology (automation) used.

“Not really white hat”, because the Google guidelines, while not actually mentioning them directly, (yet) do clearly state that anything done with the purpose of manipulating Pagerank, for rankings, rather than for the benefit of your visitors, is against their TOS and *may* affect your rankings.

Through to blackhat, whereby people are using automated programs to spin articles, and churn out interlinked wheels, sometimes using hundreds of properties, further using automation to submit the feeds from each to multiple RSS directories, and can put Link Wheels up from zero to done in two hours, well clearly that’s pretty black hat behaviour.

Will Google Ban Me for Using a Link Wheel?

Anything *could* happen, but the reality is that it in practice it seems very unlikely, simply because it is Google’s stated policy that it should be approaching impossible to hurt competitors by anything you do, so if it was as easy as just pointing dodgy link wheels at your peers and waiting for them to vanish, everyone really would be doing that. Also, circumstantial evidence perhaps, but we have never once seen a “Linkwheel got me banned” forum post, which is not to say there arent any, but we roam the SEO net all the time and have never seen one, which kind of suggests it doesn’t happen often.

It is far more likely and makes good sense for Google to attempt to detect and devalue link wheels, so the whole thing is a waste of time and effort, rather than any kind of direct penalty, as it’s impossible to actually say who built or commissioned the wheel.

Should I Get a Link Wheel Built?

This has to be a personal decision, based on your own individual needs. We do not recommend their use for clients, and especially so “proper” clients, who have any kind of brand or brand ambitions. If you are not on a super-tight timescale, or urgently need better rankings to improve sales, save your business from going bust and feed your family, then it’s probably better to play by Google’s longetivity rules. However, if you need a quick inexpensive boost to certain rankings are are prepared to  maybe either lose them again further down the line, or possibly waste your money in the first place, then playing the slightly more risky and less bluey white game might pay off for you.

Should I Build My Own Link Wheel?

Again, depends on the individual scenario and your technical competence, although since things have moved on greatly since the basic closed linkwheel shown above worked, so if you want one that definitely works you would be better finding a good linkwheel supplier.

More Link Wheel Reading

• Lemonarian’s Ultimate Linkwheel FAQ
• Link Wheel Tips – How To Make a Linkwheel That Works
• More Linkwheel FAQs (from a helpful supplier we know)
• White hat Link Wheels – backlinks from forums and stay on Google’s good side.

Update: 18-May 2011 – Nathan sort out the issues and recover the domains at your cost – ticket numbers below, and then we can talk. Do not think this post will not follow your new name. Lesson, do not pi$$ off an SEO company if you need Google for business.

Web Mania have put a new website up and re-named themselves YorHost DO NOT BE FOOLED!

Web Mania may have changed their website, but they havent changed their habits!

Ok so Happy New Year to everybody except Web Mania hosting who are utter utter $hite and will be having a most unhappy new year if this is their ongoing level of customer support.

We’ve held off with this post to give them a chance to deal with what is after all a very basic support request – what with the “Season of Goodwill” etc, but they have been warned it was coming, and still ignored all emails with no response at all, the last of which was sent on 13th December last year as shown in the trail below, and it’s been all-quiet from these numpties ever since.

So Web Mania, when you read this, we suggest you contact us  (ticket number at bottom of post) with the required information and how you have solved the  issues which have arisen since you have been ignoring the initial request  we may consider then removing the post if everything is satisfactory, otherwise the public really deserves to know:

..just how $hit Web Mania Hosting are these days.

Lets start by saying that in the past this hasn’t been the case, although this is the first time that we have ever tried to move a domain away from Web Mania, but there have been support issues in the past that have been dealt with reasonably efficiently, so quite what has happened lately is unknown, but it’s just not acceptable.

So following a live chat support request with them, to unlock two domains registered through them and supply the authorisation codes for a transfer,  which ended up with the support person leaving to “look into it and get back to us” in mid-November, the following emails have occurred.

SEO Ibiza to Web-Mania Hosting – 13 Nov 2010

Hello.

I want to transfer these 2 domains to another registrar, and want to know how to unlock them and request the authorisation codes please? my hosting account doesnt seem to have any domain details or tools, DNS or anything? so I would be grateful of some advice or assistance asap.  I look forward to hearing from you.

best regards

Web Mania to SEO Ibiza – 26 November 2010 ( 2 weeks later)

Mark has responded to your help desk request.

———————————————–
(Mark)
———————————————–

Hello,

Thank you contacting us.

We are sorry to hear that you want to transfer your account. We value your association with us so please let us know if there’s anything that we can do to retain your business or to improve our services. Is there any technical query which was not answered and due to which you have decided to transfer your account? Please let us know so that we can reach to the root cause of the problem.

Please do not hesitate to contact us again if you have any further issues or doubts. We are available for 24X7 to provide you the quality support and assistance.

Regards,
Mark.
Web Mania Support.

SEO Ibiza to Web-Mania Hosting – 26 Nov 2010

Hello Mark

No nothing like that, there will still be a site on this hosting package, I just want to transfer these 2 domains. please unlock them and supply me the auth code/s or explain to me how I go about it?

best regards

Web Mania to SEO Ibiza – 26 November 2010

Simon has responded to your help desk request.
———————————————–
(Simon)
———————————————–
Hello,

Thank you for contacting us.

we are sorry for the above response.  We have escalated your issue to our Senior Admins and they will be soon working on it. We will keep you posted on the progress they make.

Meanwhile your patience is highly appreciated.

Regards.
Simon,
Technical Support Team.
Support@web-mania.com

SEO Ibiza to Web-Mania Hosting – 03 Dec 2010

Hi, any news on this? why is it taking so long?

SEO Ibiza to Web-Mania Hosting – 07 Dec 2010

ER…. HELLO?? !!

this is approaching 2 weeks now to unlock domains and supply a code?

is there a problem?

SEO Ibiza to Web-Mania Hosting – 13 Dec 2010

Hello again, as per previous email , this is now approaching 3 weeks without even an answer from you, never mind a solution.

So you now have 24 hours within which to respond and sort this out to my satisfaction, or Im going to make you famous using the power of a well established SEO blog which will rank for whatever we want it to, and spread the story far and wide.

I’m sorry I don’t like to resort to such tactics but I also don’t like just being ignored for 3  weeks on requests either.

One of the domains we wanted to move had been hacked and rather than struggle through trying to deal with it on Web Mania’s virtually non-existent hosting panel tools, it was decided easier to move the domain quickly and put the site somewhere else.

On looking this morning this domain is now not even resolving to the site at all, and 404-ing.Inside their “Control” (LOL!) panel the domain in question is no longer even there, and Google has de-indexed the vast majority of the site.

The transfer requests to the new registrar have been canceled and refunded due to inaction and the whole thing needs starting again. To an observer, it would appear that Web Mania have not the foggiest clue about how to unlock or supply an Auth code for domains they are in charge of.

So Web Mania, when you read this, the ticket code is {4000-246522} - please contact us to let us know that whatever the issues are causing the 404 have been solved, and the that the domains are unlocked and the Auth codes are attached, otherwise we will now just be ignoring you, until you produce the goods.

Wishing everybody else a happy & prosperous New year from Ibiza.

Update 08 Jan  – SERP Protest gathers pace.

So a little late to the party, we’ve been playing with Google search stories and finally got round to putting something up on the SEO Ibiza Youtube channel.  So lets have that on the 1st page too, get rid of some of that flotsam at the bottom 

Here’s a couple of quick efforts

- SEO services Ibiza

The Power of Search

& The Superior SEO story

The system defaults to Google.com US so isn’t so good for UK based sites, but it’s ok if you cherry pick your termswhich you need to, to “tell your story” anyway?

What do you reckon, we’re surprised not to have seen more of this so far?

Just a quick shout to our pals from iPhone Ibiza and to say sterling work with all the apps, but especially the Blackberry one which is standard issue at SEO Ibiza HQ.

It’s been been 18 months since the first Ibiza app, and the (in) famous run in with a certain “super” club over some carefully collected and collated data, and in that time they’ve written Ibiza Apps for Blackberry, Android and further developed the iPhone one too.

We have it on *good authority* that “it’s all about the apps now..” 

keep up the good work lads..

source: Ibiza Alliance

As the social media phenomena continues to expand it’s influence into the web in general, and in particular Facebook & Twitter continue to grow strongly, of course there are several contenders looking to develop “The” Ibiza-based social media site that the residents and locals will use, as well as tourists, that’s perceived as one of the keys.

Unfortunately it is often difficult to get the average Ibiza resident to care very much about going on the internet to network about Ibiza, as they are already here and can network out and about. Everybody has got forums, but again, apart from one or two, these are notoriously hard to get busy, because of the broad international and multilingual needs of Ibiza tourists.

Obviously Facebook is full of  random Ibiza chat between friends and people trying to rent their apartments or villas or whatever, but there’s  also several  newish Ibiza-specific networking sites in development (and redevelopment) aiming to fill this space.

• “Ibiza Eyes” - beta launch until 31.12.2010
  • private Ibiza community.

• “Ibiza Talk” - already up but being fully rebuilt for 2011
  • headed up by Social Media specialist Aaron from AEA1 – one to watch.

• “Essential Ibiza“ – again already live on soft launch but being rebuilt for 2011.
  • rumoured high tech & app-based Ibiza VIP & club-ticket booking systems.
    

Of course, we know them all will working with them on their own individual missions.

Stay tuned..