Paddy Power: World Cup odds

by Dixon Jones

World Cup Widget

Next week (15-19th of Feb) I’ll be at SES London. I’m helping Incisive Media out on the moderating and I also have a presentation and – new for me – I’ll be running a site clinic on the Expo floor on the first morning. That means I’ll have a full MajesticSEO account ready to help you analyse your links. It’s a bit of a free one-on-one session. although anyone else on the expo floor will be welcome to join in. If you want to get your site’s (or more useful… your competition’s) backlinks analyzed, come and see me. during that hour. Be warned – if you are attending the main conference, I think my hour is during the sessions – so you would need to duck out. If you are only there for the Expo, though, then it will be a great chance to get some free consultancy.

After that, it’s going to be an absolute whirlwind in March: Jerusalem; Retjavik; Amsterdam & New York!

by Dixon Jones

Crazy Spring Conference Season

Dropbox is pretty much everything you ever wanted in a web disk in the clouds. It just DOES what you want. It feels like a local folder on your computer. Indeed, it IS a local folder on your computer. So even if you are offline, you can update and work on files in your Dropbox folder. Doing it this way is great, because there is no worldwide wait problems. Whenever a file is updated on your computer, Dropbox encrypts it, zips it, and syncs it with your cloud based Dropbox folder on Amazon’s s3 servers – all in the background.

It’s simply brilliant!

Yesterday I found myself doing a spreadsheet on my Mac, which wasn’t connected to my printer. I had a Windows machine on the desk fired up. I saved my spreadsheet on my Mac, ready to put the file onto a USB stick, but Dropbox worked faster. In the time it would have taken to save the file, it was aready there on my Windows machine. I printed it off without a second thought.

Then, later, I took the printout to the pub (Taking spreadsheets to pubs is a whole different problem for me) and gave it to a colleague. He didn’t have his reading glasses… so no problem. I just took out my iPhone and showed him the file directly from the phone.

Brilliant. Simply Brilliant.

I like that the data is encypted, hosted on decent SSL server.

I like that even Dropbox employees can’t even read the files without your username and password (which they don’t have)

I like that, once installed, you don’t have to enter your username ever time (although this as a preference option might be good)

I’ve tried it on my Mac, Widows XP, Windows Vista, my iPhone and through the web. It works on Unix machines too.

I like that it keeps a changelog history – so I can always role back up to 30 days for any file. Brilliant!

I like even better that it is free for the first 2GB of space, but if you register using THIS LINK, you’ll get an extra 250MB free (and so will I, so please use the link!)

Dixon.

by Dixon Jones

The Best Virtual Web Disk in the Clouds

Let me start things off. I just found Google’s Internet Stats page:

Try to search for anything containing the word “internet” and the system just seems to hang. It was still hanging after I downloaded and upgraded my Wordpress installation.

Dave Naylor, another UK SEO has been finding loads of broken SERPs recently around Geo-issues. He spotted this one today:

There are BOUND to be more. Got an insane search result? Found a way to crash Google scholar? or Chrome? I would love to build a list of ways to break the system. I’m sure the boys and gals at the ‘plex would be interested too!

by Dixon Jones

Top Ways to Break Google

I thought that a new UK press release system would be a great case study for my presentation next week at a4uexpo.com so I thought I would do them a favour and email them, asking if they would give me some credits to do the test. I couldn’t promise to say it was brilliant, but I also said I wasn’t out to slate them.

Well – firstly – they never replied. So this test is now costing me £110 out of my own pocket, and if it doesn’t deliver, I feel every justification in slating them! But then – I’m not bitter – .

So the release went live this morning. Observation number 1 – unless you want to pay lots more, you need to plan the release several days in advance.

I’ll let you know what exposure I can glean at my presentation at A4U. If there is anything you want me to test and report on, maybe comment here and I’ll include it in the presentation but also reply here in case you won’t be at A4U.

by Dixon Jones

Review of PRWeb in the UK

London Excel conference center, but apart from that, it generally rocks!

I always TRY to give something out that very few people will have heard before. Now that I am also Marketing MajesticSEO, I have taken the chance to delve into it probably more than most. I recently did a link audit for a very powerful affiliate site and found a new way to find links. Since Lee McCoy is going to be getting ready for honeymoon, I thought it would be great to annoy him by sharing the technique when he wasn’t around. (I’d link to the Facebook thread that would have made that last sentence make sense… but can’t work out how!).

There are two reasonably well known link intersect tools out there. The original hubfinder tool and the new Moz one. I’ll talk about both of them, for sure – but I also think I’ve found a way to get a much larger list than both of them.

You can get 10% off the ticket price by using the promo code SPKD10.

by Dixon Jones

A Guaranteed Link Trick at A4U Expo

Here’s my challenge of the day. I have five worksheets in an Excel document. Each sheet contains a list of at LEAST 1000 cells, and each cell contains ascii.

I need a list of duplicate cells in worksheets 2-5 which do NOT appear in worksheet 1.

Can anyone tell me how to do that please? Will – if you do it in the seminar, I’ll do my damnedest to send someone onto the webinar.

by Dixon Jones

A Tricky Excel task

I think that once upon a time Dixon Jones itself was on the list, but it seems I have been slacking!

Dixon.

by Dixon Jones

Top 50 SEO Blogs list

So black hat SEO is all about artificially manipulating the algorithm. Online, that’s apparently bad (according to Google, anyway) – but it turns out good if you want to save rare breeds from extinction. (Does that make conservation minded Zoos black-hats?)

Daron Rubin spotted an article on the BBC  about an unusual use for the Page Rank Algo.

I think that’s absolutely bloody brilliant!

by Dixon Jones

SEO skills can save the planet

First the article: (reproduced with permission – they have a neat linkbait trick on their articles. SO nearly well implemented for SEO. Never mind guys. Shout if you want to pay me to improve that embed article code)

Now Receptional has been around a long time – and it tends to be November or December when the Agencies come a hunting, with elusive check books, looking to buy up a few smaller fishes. After a decade I am getting the idea. They sign you up to a non disclosure agreement, then use that as a cover to really slice and dice you. See what you’ve got, and what’s worth building themselves.

Then in January, the calls stop. They know who you are and how to change direction in their own business if that’s what’s needed.

In my experience, these acquisition investigations don’t tend to have lawyers in the room. That would be way too expensive for what is essentially a competitive intelligence exercise. So it doesn’t surprise me when a large agency’s “people” simply forget that they were told truths under an NDA. It’s endemic in the industry and a practice that somebody probably should challenge before it gets out of hand.

I’d love to go into more details about investigations from at least three such agencies. But hey… I’m under NDA.

by Dixon Jones

WPP/JWT in Lawsuit: My experience