jim boot is what the guys over at warcom.com.au are trying to rank for because we went to no.1 for this post http://jimboot.com/alex-hallett for the phrase Alex Hallett. It will be interesting to see if Google caffeine indexes this Joomla blog as fast as the wordpress site.

How to break the Internet filter

It's been revealed that it won't be illegal to circumvent the Australian Government's proposed mandatory Internet filter, so today I show you how. There are also unintended consequences for business from this revelation

Also a couple of questions from viewers on country level domain best practice for ranking.

We're hiring again! We're looking for another Account Manager, tell your friends! :)

Mumbrella Bully

Mumbrella Bully - strange heading eh? In a recent post on Digital Citizens Tim Burrowes (@mumbrella) mused that he thought Laurel Papworth (@silkcharm) was trying to rank for that phrase in their ongoing, online very public spat.

Without going into the very boring, tedious, time sapping details on what the feud is about, it's a dangerous thing to do in a social media world.

Back in the late 90's I used to do a daily tech news vid that was syndicated to all the major portals at the time. It received about 50,000 views per month. Those numbers were easy back then as there was not much other video around online. Especially not Aussie content. I regularly used to lambaste, harangue, criticise & insult others whom I thought were making dumb decisions for the Aussie IT industry.

I'm older & hopefully less stupid now. I regularly unfollow people on twitter whose streams are constantly negative or whingeing all the time. I even check prospective employees attitudes via twitter. Yes I twitterstalk them. I'm not interested bringing in staff with negative attitudes or a history of whining about their current employer.

I understand more than most how quickly flame wars can start (as I've started a few). These days I save my public derision for Politicians. I'm not saying you have to be something you're not online but you may want to consider dividing your personality into different Twitter accounts if you are prone to public grumpiness. I look at it a bit like black hat SEO. I don't have any moral qualms with it. We just don't do it here because it would mean dumping our domains & IP once Google discovered what we were up too. The same could be said for Twitter. Your tweets precede you & leave an impression in people's minds. Rightly or wrongly.

HP Email Spam

This morning I got a spam email from Hewlett Packard Australia. I define it as spam because it was sent to an email address created purely for a directory entry.  The only way to even know this email address existed,  was to have harvested it from a web page.

Back in the late 90s a lot of this went on. That's why today most content management systems will automatically hide an email address in the code so it can't be harvested automatically.  So I was flabbergasted (yes my flabber was completely gasted) when I got the spam email this morning.



The Spam Act 2004 says "Under the Spam Act, it is illegal for unsolicited commercial electronic messages that have an Australian link to be sent, or cause to be sent. A message has an Australian link if it originates or was commissioned in Australia, or originates overseas but has been sent to an address accessed in Australia. The legislation sets out penalties of up to $1.1 million a day for repeat corporate offenders. "


I'm not a lawyer (thank deity of your choice) but my reading of the above says that HP is breaking the law. So I looked a little closer at the footer of the email.

and followed the "Why are you receiving this email?" link.

So Reed Business Information was the "marketer" that was responsible for email being sent. Presumably HP is utilising lists created by them.  Were they seriously harvesting email addies with bots though? Surely not. Then I read this.

Collection of information

The four main ways we collect personal information about you are:
when information about you is posted on a RBI website, either by you or by a third party;
when you log into a RBI website or otherwise submit personal information to RBI;
when you use a RBI website, in which case our system automatically collects information relating to your visit to that website, such as your IP address; and
through the operation of CatchBot, RBI's web crawler (described in more detail below).

That last one caught my eye so I scrolled to the bottom of the page.

CatchBot

CatchBot is the web crawler for RBI. CatchBot investigates websites for publicly available information about companies. CatchBot is not designed to access or index any personal or other information about individuals. However, if any personal information is collected inadvertently through the use of CatchBot, that personal information will be held in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

I don't know anyone who appreciates spam. Sure we all subscribe to newsletters or other information emails lists but it is OUR decision to subscribe. I would have thought HP would be a lot more sophisticated in their marketing than to blatantly buy spam lists. The really annoying thing about spam is that it passes the costs on to the addressee. Think about if you are on a mobile plan and you get 50 pieces of spam a day. This email was only 10K but that would be 500K/day or 3.5MB / week. Not to mention the annoyance of them cluttering the inbox.  The reason that spam has always been so popular for "marketers" is that is very low cost when compared to search marketing or social media or display ads. Sure there is a LOT of waste but it's cheap. What is the cost of acquisition for spam I wonder.

Payroll Software

I was asked a question about payroll software yesterday. It is a good excercise in keyword research. For instance, the two most popular brands for small business bookkeeping in Australia are MYOB & Quicken.

As you can see Payroll software comes no where near the same level of popularity. So the people looking for payroll software are probably in a different market. They are more likely to be SMEs who require a dedicated payroll system. So maybe the people looking for payroll software are also looking for payroll system?

Well yes they are. If you were in the payroll business I would be having a think about which searcher is more important. The one looking for software or a system.

Mark Dreyfus, Libs have responded.

Below is a response from Liberal Senator Julian McGauran to my question on whether the Libs would block the Internet filter legislation in the Senate.

Dear Mr Stewart

I wish to acknowledge your email of 10 March 2010 regarding internet filtering.

Thank you for bringing your views to my attention. Rest assured I will raise your concerns in the appropriate forums of the Liberal Party.

I have received many emails and letters on this issue supporting this position.

Regards

Julian Julian McGauran
Senator for Victoria
Suite 17 Collins Place
45 Collins Street
MELBOURNE VIC 3000

I'm still waiting for a response from Mark Dreyfus my local member. He had said previously to me in public he though filtering the Internet was impossible. That was before Conroy announced they were pushing ahead with it last December.

I followed the EFA directions on 'Lobbyalib'

SEO Developer

• Are you Google analytics qualified? Or do you think the piece of paper is load of crap and can prove you're better. * Do you eat custom profiles and advanced segments for breakfast?
  
• Were you secretly ogling at pivot tables, conversion funnels and exit pages while your colleagues are sharing susan boyle youtube videos
  
• Does Internet marketing hype piss you off? Yet you stay on all their mailing lists just to keep abreast of all their new techniques and tricks?
  
• Are you a Google webmaster tools guru? Fondled their API?
  
• When you need online tools do you tend to invent them?
  
• Do you consult code.google.com more often than dictionary.com?
  
• Ever played with the webmaster tools/adwords/analytics API 's? 
• Do you have google alerts setup for your own name? Your competitors name? Your tier one keywords?
• Do you laugh at jokes like this -"How many SEOs does it take to change a light bulb? None. They just 301 it to a working one"
  
• Do you enjoy working in teams and to deadlines?
  
• Does your heart skip a beat when you get a no.1 in Google?
  
• When you have weird dreams do you wonder who coded that rubbish?
  
• Do you smile wryly when you meet social media 'Gurus'?
  
• Does your resume rank in in Google.com.au pages from Australia for the phrase "Stewartmedia are a bunch of rankers" ?
  

If you can answer YES to three of the above & are Melbourne based then we need to talk. You could have the chance to work for one of Australia's most innovative SEO companies. No peak hour heavy traffic and all the free parking you could ever want. You will be working in mainly a LAMP environment on a variety of projects.

We are looking for someone who ticks as many of these boxes as possible who also considers themselves a design nerd at heart. You've probably had a love affair with a Font before, and design BEAUTIFUL websites and landing pages that show flair and creativity.

We're an SEO and digital Marketing family based close to the beach up the East link. We drink beer on fridays, BBQ when its hot, have a coffee machine and we're iMac all round. This really is the best job south of the Yarra, North of the Fankston bypass but east of Eastlink. If you find videos like this embarrasing DO NOT apply, otherwise email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it with your resume

Mark Dreyfus Email

Still haven't had my first email to Mark Dreyfus responded to yet but here is a follow up question which I will be sending today.

Hi Mark, Still waiting to hear back from you on my technical question regarding your Government's proposed ISP mandatory filter.

I'm getting a lot of friends and family asking how can they bypass the filter. If I was to explain to them that simply downloading the TOR plugin (free) for their Firefox browser, would bypass the multi-million dollar filter, would I be breaking any laws?

Or if I told them that simply using Google proxy server would bypass the filter could this get me into trouble with the authorities?

It's not that my friends and family are interested in RC material, they just don't like the Government monitoring what they read. Just like they wouldn't appreciate it if all their mail through Australia Post was checked by your Government before they received it.

Site uptime, page speed & filtering tag clouds

Speed is becoming a major issue as is hosting reliability when it comes to good google rankings. One of our clients got a massive boost in their rankings this week when we changed their hosting company. Today I have a look at a couple of ways you can check if your hosting company is adversely affecting your rankings.

What is long tail & how do I find it? I show you a couple of ways you can find new high converting keyword markets.

Senator Conroy, (like any politician) is attempting to shape the message on ISP filtering, to the point where he has filtered it from his own site. Now he is breaking copyright as well according to the author of the code he is using. That's what happens when you try to control the message online. It ends up backfiring. It's not a passive medium.

Mark Dreyfus response

Well there isn't one yet. However we now appear 8th for Mark Dreyfus. If you could link to this page http://stewartmedia.biz/myblog/mark-dreyfus/ with the anchor text Mark Dreyfus that may help speed up his response :)