Geek Dinner

I went to a geek dinner last night even though I'm not sure I count. There was a broad spectrum of people from Google java developers to Craig, a .net guy, who is working in the mining industry.

(Craig Murhpy's Flickr page)

Moo.com (hey - I didn't know they were based in London) gave a talk on their history which is a nice little story. They're now doing ~30,000,000 cards printed per year which, at £10/100, is a turnover of £3m on cards alone before other products are taken into consideration. They also state their gross margin is 70% so I guess they are approaching (if not already at) profitability.

The one thing that struck me about them as bunch was the team dynamic where everyone could answer a question and there seemed to be no strict hierarchy which is the way it should be.

I also bumped into Alex from SmallBizPod.

Review of Thaismile Restaurant where the event was held.

Google kicks in

Just beginning to see some huge growth in Users of BView off the back of better Google listings producing long tail search results.

We produced a XML site map for launch which was frowned upon by a couple of of SEOs I know. The argument here is that SEO activities are harder to monitor because there is no direct correlation between a page being in the index and effort applied to get it there via internal links while the traffic boost is non-existent.

I think this is subjective as we have been able to monitor how Google is crawling pretty accurately. Now that we have some examples of content hubs and crawl pathways we will try to be a bot more selective in what is returned in results because some of our pages provide a better User experience than others and we want to provide great search results every time via Google as it can only help us.

Google update rates

WOW! Add a new story on Digg and it is returned in Google results less than 10mins after addition. I've also noticed this happen on Yahoo Answers.

Sometimes Google rankings still confuse me

Can anyone telle me why for the term "business insurance" Direct Line is #1? Here's an example ofan inbound link. So if you advertise with Google then all the affiliate links count towards your inbound link score. If it wasn't a Googlead then I think Google would treat it as spam.

The above Google result desperately needs reviews against each service. Watch that skew click thru...We'll gere there slowly but surely (insurance on BView).

Tracking inbound links and monitoring Google

We have just seen the Google bot start to crawl around the BView domain for the first time. It's path appears to be this blog and the "find me on" links I have added to the RHS nav. It is debatable whether we should have no cache, no crawls against User profiles but that will emerge over time. From my profile the bot moved to another User's profile and a couple of reviewed businesses. 14 pages picked from the domain as of now.

I have been recommended SEOMoz tools that track inbound links and allow monitoring and impact of off line efforts (press etc.) on the inbound concentration.

I think we'll track the domain using this tool rather than the old skool manual process I used to have to employ back in the day.