Do you subscribe to many SEO blogs? If so you’ll have had a hard time NOT noticing the whirlwind of posts about the recent pagerank update. Personally I couldn’t agree with Lyndon more on this one. Yawn.

So why am I writing about Toolbar Pagerank then?

Well – this recent frenzy in the blogosphere for me proves two things and they’re very important things as you’ll see below

1 – Almost everyone in the SEO community has the Google toolbar installed. In fact, a very high percentage of all users online have the toolbar installed.

2 – Give people an ego trip (no matter how fake it is) and people will flock to it like moths to a flame (which in this case is quite accurate!)

What I’m essentially saying is that while Toolbar Pagerank still exists people will still have the Google Toolbar installed.

But here’s the catch. The secret, the dagger to the cloak, the hidden agenda. Call it what you want – for me this is key:

Whenever you perform a Google search the Google toolbar automatically sends that data back to the Googleplex. Ok, no big deal – they already have that data anyway right since I searched on Google? Yes, but what about MSN, Yahoo, Live, Ask? The capture that data as well you know. Don’t believe me? Open up Live HTTP Headers (I talked about this in more detail here) and run a search on any search engine. You’ll see the following URLs loading:

A Google search:

http://toolbarqueries.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&features=Rank &client=navclient-auto-ff&googleip=O;64.233.183.99;63&ch=8756b4688 &q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co.uk%2Fsearch%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3 Ddistilled%26btnG%3DGoogle%2BSearch%26meta%3D

A Yahoo search:

http://toolbarqueries.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&features=Rank &client=navclient-auto-ff&googleip=O;66.249.91.104;94&ch=8ac97e8d5 &q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fuk.search.yahoo.com%2Fsearch %3B_ylt%3DA0oGkucPvyVHJqAAuPNKBQx.%3Fp%3 Ddistilled%26ei%3Dutf-8%26iscqry%3D%26fr%3Dsfp

A Live search:

http://toolbarqueries.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&features=Rank &client=navclient-auto-ff&googleip=O;66.249.91.104;78&ch=81ebcdb9f &q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.live.com%2Fresults.aspx%3F q%3Ddistilled%26go%3D Search%26mkt%3Den-gb%26scope%3D%26FORM%3DLIVSOP

I’ve highlighted the part I find interesting. You can see how Google is gathering search data on any search you perform online, on any search engine when you have the toolbar installed. Think how important that information is to Google and you’ll quickly realise why they won’t discontinue Toolbar Pagerank anytime soon!

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In contrast to many of the programs that we hear coming out of government and thinktanks about inspiring more young people to be entrepreneurs, I stumbled across a Business Week article about their ‘Best Young Entrepreneurs’ awards (sadly, we’re too old for BW to be interested in us, even if we were US-based and interesting enough – their definition of ‘young’ is ‘under 25′!). This is a great example of young entrepreneurs inspiring the rest of us.

Sure, many of them only just qualify as entrepreneurs (running what appear to be lifestyle businesses) but many of them are having real success already and it doesn’t take much imagination to think about where they might be in just a few years’ time.

As well as showing us their 2007 shortlist, BW have also caught up with all but one of the people on last year’s list: Best Entrepreneurs, class of ‘06 today.

One from last year particularly caught my eye (because I have been reading his blog) is Ben Casnocha.

Anyway, have a dig through – there are some amazing success stories.

[Update: I meant to write that the one thing I would like to see more of from the BW format is more consistent financial information about the businesses they are profiling. Some have quite detailed information - revenue and profit for this year alongside projections while others only talk about 'per-item' financials (e.g. "each event brings in about $2,000") and others hardly mention the financials at all. While money isn't everything, it does give a good idea of scale of a business and I think it would greatly improve the format.]

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Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed the post a while back about hiring staff (and the really attentive will have spotted a couple of new commenters). If you have been to see us in person, you will have found me (director, founder and generally important person) sat in the corridor. We ran out of space in our little office at Waterloo when we hired Christophe Maximin (web developer) and Leonie Wharton (Graphic Designer) at the beginning of September.

As a consequence, we have moved office – to 151 Tower Bridge Road (still in SE1 in central London – a short walk from London Bridge) (again, eagle-eyed readers already knew this – after we blogged the break-in). But more of that later. First, we need to introduce the newcomers, but before we do that – what’s going on? How come Distilled which was just Duncan and I at the beginning of the year, now numbers 6? (and that’s not including Michael who is hopefully coming back for more punishment when he’s finished his dissertation and Graeme who is still doing a sterling job keeping the various servers safe, secure and speedy).

Well, you see, it’s all Andy and Deborah’s fault. Back in February, Andy advised us that our first hire should be an account manager (hence Emily) – in order to free Duncan and I up to grow the business in the way that we wanted to.

That worked pretty well.

Then we started being coached by Deborah. Initially, we turned to her to help us cope with the stress of running a small business. She quickly diagnosed competitiveness and an extreme impatience for success in Duncan and I and advised that the best way of avoiding the stress of running a small business was not to run a small business, but to be stressed by running a bigger business.

The final straw was learning about the valley of death – a recurring theme after that in our coaching session was in the need to grow a bit. By this point, Tom had already joined us part time and we were well on our way (you’ll have seen him around!). It was at this time that we decided to grow aggressively (as Deborah says “what’s the worst that can happen?” (she also says “how does that make you feel?” a lot, but that’s different…)).

As a sneak preview of the future, by the way, we think the next hire is most likely to be a writer (preferably with marketing experience as well), but that is yet another story for another day.

Adding a graphic designer

In recent times, we have passed our branding leads to our favourite branding agencies: Stedman Oliver Creative (responsible for the Distilled identity) and Bull Rodger (direct response kings). We are going to continue to do that – we don’t have any ambitions to get into big branding projects. We have gradually realised the benefit to an agency like ours, however, of having great design resource in-house. I think this first started to dawn on us when we had Krystle Cho work with us for a couple of months on an internship from UC Davis in California. In her first week, she had made our presentation for our how to make PR work online seminar look fantastic as well as typesetting our how to make PR work online ebook. As we realised the benefit to our internal projects, we made the call that even if we wouldn’t initially be keeping our new designer busy full time with client work, everything about the business would benefit so much that it was definitely the right direction.

Enter Leonie Wharton – Distilled’s employee with the current dubious distinction of having the longest commute (unless you count Tom trekking to London from Leeds) – who joined us straight from university. The references her tutors gave her went so far beyond polite acknowledgements that they knew her – one was possibly the best reference I have ever seen.

We are thrilled to have Leonie on the team. You’ll start noticing that everything we do looks better. You can already see her influence in the design of the icon for the AdWords to AdCenter converter.

Our Guadeloupe-ian prodigy

The other position we advertised was that of ‘web developer’. Taking some advice from the SEOmoz hiring guide (and learning from our prior experience of the number of ridiculously rubbish applications you get when you advertise online), we put together a wufoo form containing a number of pertinent questions about best practices in web development and gently probing to understand the experience and aptitude of our applicants.

One application caught our eye early. We really hoped that the interview would go well, because his application made us laugh. Written in practically perfect English (with just enough of a hint of interesting phrasing to let us know that he was telling the truth when he asked us to excuse his jokes because “I am French”), it was funnier, had better spelling and a clearer understanding of the relevant technical issues than any of our other applicants.

This was despite its author having:

• come from Guadeloupe (that day, practically)
• no-one in his family who spoke English (he taught himself mainly on the Internet and with TV – proving that education is what you make of it, and that there is a use for lolcats!)
• never been taught English
• left college after 4 weeks
• not yet turned 20

When Christophe Maximin arrived for interview, he quickly proved that, although he was never going to be a safe hire, he was the right answer for us. He parsed some deliberately poorly-written HTML in seconds in his interview and found all the mistakes we had planted.

On his first day, we needed to make some changes to a client’s website template and as I was explaining how to find the folder, he had already finished making the change (in his trusty vim editor). This was despite me not yet having explained our content management system or the smarty templating system (which he had never seen before).

Although he’s a Ruby on Rails fan, he’s learning CakePHP in order to play nicely with Duncan and I think you’re going to see a lot more applications built by Monsieur Maximin.

The new office

So. With our fantastic new employees, and their shiny new computers (Leonie with her 24″ iMac and Adobe CS3 Suite and Christophe with his dual 19″ monitors and Ubuntu (mainly many virtual desktops full of vim as far as I can tell)), we were well on our way to building into a powerhouse. Or we would have been if we could all fit into the office.

The little office in our quirky space in the crypt of St. John’s Church had 4 desks in it (and only just enough room for that many!). Which leaves us where the story started – with me sat in the corridor – tidying my laptop away every time I had to go anywhere (awwwwwww).

Following a traumatic search, we found a shiny new office (to go with the shiny new computers) on Tower Bridge Road – a short walk from London Bridge. I’ve just been trying to look it up on Microsoft maps’ fantastic new “bird’s eye” view, but it looks like it was a building site when the picture was taken: our office. To make up for that, here’s a picture of our neighbourhood.

We’re now in and up and running. It has 8 desks initially, which will mean that we all fit (even if Tom comes down and Michael brings his dissertation to the office). The office move itself was subject to its own traumas caused by our lovely telecoms incumbent, BT. Hissssss. At some point, we’ll get some pictures (or even a video) up.

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Everyone know who Matt Cutts is?

As one of the highest-profile Googlers to SEOs (he heads up Google’s anti-spam team and has made himself the person to ask about all kinds of search, indexing and penalty issues (if you can get to him! Hi Cuttlets!).

Pretty much everyone in SEO reads his blog, so it’s not normally worth shouting about things he writes, but he has just put out a call for international bugs at Google. Now, he doesn’t mean things like:

my website doesn’t rank well in the UK, waaaaaaaah

but true internationalisation issues – things like currencies handled incorrectly, geolocation issues (websites being identified as in a particular country or not erroneously) etc.

If you have anything like that – perhaps you’ve been sitting on it for a while wondering what to do with it – head on over to his post and leave a comment with an example query that highlights the issue.

This is a really valuable forum to raise these kinds of issues in as Matt is going to be sitting down with search engineers so real issues are very likely to get a real working over.

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Ever since the new version of Google Analytics came out earlier this year which allowed you to do date range comparisons I have been itching for the day when Adwords would include something similar. Compared to Analytics, the Adwords reporting has been a little bit behind and hadn’t been revised for some time. Now though I’m over the moon to see that they’ve added this feature.

See a screenshot of it in action:

You access this under the account snapshot tab within Adwords and it works in a very similar way to the date range comparison within Google Analytics. This is a big plus for Adwords and will make analysing the performance of accounts and campaigns much easier.

Note that they still have a few bugs to iron out, such as determining when a stat should be green or red. As you can see in the next screen shot where the most recent date range has a higher CPC and a higher cost/conversion. Both of those changes are green (for good!) but those are both negative changes.

Regardless of the bugs though I’m over the moon about this. I’m probably not the first to blog about this, but I certainly haven’t seen mention of this anywhere else online so I thought I’d blog it.

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When you are blogging, you often need to accompany your blog posts with images:

OK. Now pictures of kittens are obviously not necessarily ideal for business blog posts, but use your imagination and you can find all kinds of things. In order to find pages containing content that is free to use (or modify, or use for commercial purposes), you simply perform your normal search and then select ‘advanced search’ next to the search button on your Google results page.

On the advanced page, you want to select from the Usage rights drop-down:

Google explains a bit more about this feature in their help text. As you would imagine, it is looking for creative commons licenses on the target websites. Note that Google is careful to say that they don’t actually verify that all the content on the sites is covered by the license – this is up to you to check, but it’s still a huge time saver.

Now, you can obviously buy images from somewhere like iStockphoto, but sometimes blog posts call for ‘quick and dirty’ illustration. And for this, creative commons licensed information is perfect.

(The picture above was found using the search: kitten photo.)

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Sometimes, when you are building a blog that is all about pictures, you want to give people any easy way to include those images in your own site and you don’t mind if they hotlink them (i.e. leech off your hosting) as long as you get a link back for your efforts.

I was building a site that needed exactly this functionality this weekend and, after a bit of searching around, I found Patrick Altoft’s Google Images hotlink wordpress plugin which did nearly what I wanted it to. Whenever a visitor comes from Google Images (or other search engines’ image searches) it pops up an instruction dialog box with code for embedding the image and linking back to the original post. Note that it only does this on individual post pages – not on images displayed on the homepage, category pages etc.

I wanted to do exactly that, but for all visitors – not just those from image searches.

Luckily, due to the open nature of the platform and the fact that Patrick released his plugin under the GPL, I was able to modify it to do my bidding. Since it’s all about the community, I am releasing my efforts here in case anyone wants to do the same thing as me:

So I’m happy to present my first wordpress plugin (even though it’s a modified version of Patrick’s – who I spoke to before releasing): hotlink builder. The linked zip file contains a file named hotlink-builder-distilled.php that should be placed in your ‘plugins’ folder (in wp-content) if you are running a wordpress blog. You will then be able to activate it from the plugins tab within the wordpress admin area and modify the default bit of text from the configuration link.

The zip file also contains a readme.txt file as per the wordpress guidelines that contains instructions etc. I hope you find it useful!

Here is an example of the information dialogue it places on the page when someone right-clicks on an image:

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It’s not often that I get to talk about poker on this blog, but a unique opportunity has arisen! Absolute poker have a reputation management crisis. Check out the following screenshot:

From a search for absolutepoker. Notice the PPC ad?! That can’t be good for business.

And further down the page (currently at number 10 in UK results) you get this:

Why all the fuss about absolute poker cheating? Well you can read the freakonomics post here, or if you know a thing or two about poker there’s a more detailed breakdown at www.absolutepokercheats.com and an up to date version of events at the absolute poker cheats blog.

Now I’d love to talk about the ins and outs of the cheating but here isn’t really the place for it (there’s plenty of poker forums for that). What I’d like to focus on is the reputation management and in particular the use of social media by the poker community to get this story out. Here’s a very short summary of events:

• Cheating is suspected by various high stakes poker players at Absolute Poker due to some incredibly dubious play over enough hands to make it statistically unlikely that it was just ‘luck’.
• Investigation and general speculation becomes a very hot topic at the major poker forums, at which point many players are sure that cheating has occured but the evidence is difficult to understand for non poker players.
• Absolute Poker denies anything suspect has occurred, denying both the cheating and chip dumping.
• Players feel strongly enough about the issue that www.absolutepokercheats.com is created.
• More evidence is uncovered about the cheating which now proves beyond doubt that cheating has occured. The evidence is clear and you can even watch videos on youtube of one of the players cheating during a tournament (note you still need some poker knowledge to understand this).
• Absolute Poker continues to deny that anything has happened.
• Stories about the issue are starting to appear on mainstream media, two stories about the cheating hit the homepage of digg.
• Absolute Poker denies anything has happened but voluntarily subjects itself to a gambling audit (note that some doubts were raised about exactly how independent this audit would be since the company that owns the auditing company has ties to Absolute)
• The poker community rallies together, the major poker forums remove Absolute Poker adverts.
• Absolute Poker enters into talks with the prominent figures in online poker. Some questions begin to get answered but nothing concrete is found out.
• Finally, Absolute Poker admits that there was a security breach and promises to refund the players affected.

This whole process, from rumours starting to evidence being uncovered to Absolute Poker finally admitting there was a problem took over a month. In that time, the SERPs contain some harmful pages, PPC ads have appeared on their brand name, their name has been slandered all over the blogosphere and they have had terrible exposure on social media sites. If you were Absolute when would you have stepped in?!

In my opinion this whole affair was handled very badly by Absolute – they just sat back and flatly denied that anything untoward had happened. They claimed to have “investigated this themselves and found no evidence of cheating”, and stuck to that party line until people with some serious detective skills unearthed the truth. If Absolute had stepped in earlier and engaged with the online communities I think they could have seriously reduced the blow. I’m not saying nothing would have happened – since a security breach like this involving $700,000 was always going to create a stir but by listening, responding and engaging with the community I think they could have avoided a large part of the damage. By the time this is over, not only will they have left a sour taste in the mouth of anyone who dealt with them but they will also have negative results in the SERPs and a brand in tatters.

Update: I replaced the first screenshot with a better one which fits on the page. 

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Our friends at Credit Today asked us to comment for their October edition on the following question:

Globally-speaking, sub-prime lenders have been some of the biggest web advertisers until the credit crunch. How is this lost revenue likely to impact the UK technology/media sectors?

It was a pretty interesting question, and it caused a fair bit of discussion here in the office. None of us really had any idea what the right answer was, until we sat down to work it out and try to write up an answer. The constraint of only have 200 words to work with was actually very powerful in making us come down on one side of the fence or the other. With more space to work with, we could have prevaricated a little more and essentially expressed both sides!

It was also interesting, because we were asked our opinion before Search Engine Land pointed to people who know far more about these things than we do, and yet we seemed to broadly agree!

In the end, the short answer we came up with was:

A large proportion of internet advertising is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising where companies pay for their advert to appear alongside search results.

A reduction in the spend of the sub-prime lenders in this market would reduce competition for some key phrases. The highest-volume phrases, however, do not identify the quality of the lead (as many people will search ‘mortgage company’ even if the search should be classified as sub-prime).

The competition on these phrases will remain fierce. While the cost-per-click may reduce slightly, it should be negligible and we don’t anticipate a significant downturn in the search engines’ revenues as a result.

When looking at advertising on individual websites, the only people likely to suffer are websites dedicated to sub-prime lending or possibly those in the wider financial sector. We do not anticipate an effect on the UK technology sector.

The level of competition in the financial sector leads us to believe that even post-crunch, advertisers will continue to compete hard for the available online inventory. While some individual advertisers may leave the market, we would predict that the growth in online advertising in general will outstrip this effect. We may therefore see a slowing in growth, but not an overall decline in advertising revenues unless the credit crunch spreads into a more general downturn.

You can read the full article including other people’s opinions in this pdf: Distilled Credit Today Article.

As well as allowing us to give our opinion, this article was also interesting to us because it quoted a friend of Tom’s, Cheryl Clark of MoneyQuest, who said:

When news broke of the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US lending market, we were sure we would feel the effects and the UK financial industry certainly did. As an experienced online marketeer specialising in this market, I am surprised, but delighted to say that so far, I have not seen the same upheaval in our online lead volume, quality or spend. Yes, UK mortgage rates have gone up and UK lenders have taken popular products off the table, but for the most part, people are still looking for prime and sub-prime mortgages and remortgages online.

However, it is early days and we are still bracing ourselves for a shift. Internet marketing strategies generally do have to be very flexible as even the slightest dip can fluctuate results. Although Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Ad Centre are all essentially search engines, they all operate on different levels and to different audiences, providing a plethora of results. If I had to pinpoint any slight changes this early on, Microsoft Ad Centre has given us slightly more traffic, which makes sense, as in my experience, research-related keywords perform better here rather than on Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. All in all though, the credit crunch has not had a significant effect upon our day to day online business.

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Yet another gem out of the Microsoft seminar – I think the example is probably relatively widely-known, but I hadn’t come across it before because it is US-centric. Chevy recently solicited their customers to submit ideas for a new advert for their Tahoe SUV. They set up a site where users could build their videos with sample clips, music and voiceovers. The finished products were submitted to be judged and evaluated so that Chevy could use them in their advertising.

I don’t know exactly what they were expecting, but you have to hope they have a sense of humour, because now, when you search for ‘chevy tahoe’ on either Google or Live (gotta give Live some love for showing me this…), you find Youtube versions that may not have been exactly what Chevy were hoping to achieve:

My personal favourite: you are God

It’s great to see large companies embracing user-generated content and getting input into their advertising, something as controversial as a gas-guzzling SUV was a pretty brave place to start…

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