Google Forcing American Spelling on British Public

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Back in May 2009 Matt Cutts head of Google’s Webspam team talked about Spellmeleon.

Finally, there’s an even more aggressive feature (internal Google code name: “Spellmeleon”) for when we really think the user messed up. In that case, we’ll include a couple results for the corrected query first, then results for the user’s original query. Take the query [ipodd] for example. Our algorithms strongly suggest that the user meant to type “ipod” so we’ll include those search results first.

At the time I commented that “Spellmeleon needs to be more aware of British English spelling when on google.co.uk”.

Fast forward 8 months and it’s been reported by Starstruck who runs Search Engine Optimisation that Google have actually made things a lot worse for the British.
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Links On Page Bookmarklet pt. ii

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After I wrote the Google Results Bookmarklet some feedback form Marty Lamers led me to revise my previous Onpage Links Bookmarklet to also include the text boxes that make it easy to grab the links.

I’ve updated the styling to highlight the nofollow links, and to “stripe” the output to make it easier to read.

At the bottom of the page I’ve created several of the textarea boxes, so you can grab various types of links:

  • All the no followed links
  • All the followed links
  • Just the external links
  • Just the external followed links
  • The external nofollowed links

Once more drag the link in the big green box to your bookmark bar and when you’ve on a page you want to analyse hit the bookmarklet. It will open a new window showing all the links and with several text boxes with the links as detailed above.

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Google Results Bookmarklet

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Update – The latest version (2018) is discussed here and the bookmarklet itself is https://www.onlinesales.co.uk/tools/tools/bookmarklet-serps.php.

This video is using a version from 2009:

I used to have the code here for you to inspect and adapt, but several sites have stolen the code (which is naturally and automatically covered by copyright) and re-branded it as their own. :-(.

Code and contents © Liam Delahunty, 2009 – 2019.

Bookmarklet To Trim Google Search URL

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Matt Cutts, Google’s head of the webspam team, answered Which search feature would you add to Google? in the following Google Webmaster Central video.

In it he said he’d like to make the URLs cleaner, leaving just the search?q=whatever parts. He mentioned writing a Greasemonkey script, so I thought I’d write a little bookmarklet to help him out.
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Canonical Tag – Mostly Harmless

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Several months ago the canonical tag was announced and seen as a solution to the issue of duplicate content.

Now, you can simply add this tag to specify your preferred version:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />

inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678

and Google will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.
Google Webmaster Central

I have a client and their shopping basket was being reported in Google 293,000 times. Each link to the basket had options, and within the cart there were remove links. All of these got crawled and added to the index.
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Google Local AdWords Icon

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This morning Aaron Wall published Excuse Me, But Where Did Google’s Organic Search Results Go? in which he shows that the organic listings for the term San Francisco Dentists has all but disappeared below the fold.

Curious as to the equivalent UK results I tried London dentist and saw a similar pattern. When I clicked through to the map results though I saw something I’ve never noticed before:
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Building Web Success Series

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I recently co-wrote a series of articles Building Web Success with Marty Lamers, a writer and SEO with AdvanceMe, Inc, America’s leading Merchant Cash Advance provider,

The first couple of parts are already live:

The final part Conversion Rate Optimization will follow in the following week. (Link will be updated here when available).

Marty is a great copywriter and editor and it has been a real pleasure working with him on these articles.

In the near future Marty and I will do a back and forth SEO “Ping Pong” interview and particularly focus on copy writing as an integral part of the sales process.

Web Development Ennui is the SEO Kiss of Death

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Many sites are examples of the endemic difficulty that faces most internet entrepreneurs and small businesses. A lack of focus on making the site or business remarkable.

Even now, with the web being even-my-mum-makes-money-on-it popular for much of the last decade there is still so much opportunity. However with that popularity comes the feeling that like the land run the opportunity will soon pass. As such the web pioneer may forge ahead into new territories grabbing as much land as possible, but hasn’t yet fully developed the properties already picked out.

The truth is, ten years ago people thought it was too late to get involved, that circumstances had changed and all the good ideas had been done; the same was said five years ago, three years ago and in years to come people will look back to the time we are in now and regard it as a golden period full of promises and easy fortunes.
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