I have had a Yahoo! mail account since 1999 - it was one of my very first email accounts & I still use it today even though it now gets bombarded by SPAM emails. I heard a while back that there was a way of being able to hack into a Yahoo! account, by basically ‘tricking’ the system into giving you your login details by using the ‘forgotten password’ options. I don’t know the full details of the rumour, and if I did I wouldn’t re-post it on this site (so don’t ask!). Anyway, I later dismissed this as nothing more than just another rumour / scare mongering that we see and hear on a daily basis.
However, I recently tried to login into my Yahoo! account, and it would not let me progress until I provided a secondary email account which they can use in the instance that I have forgotten my password. I managed to click in and out of the site, and could access my email without having to provide this information. I don’t know why, but I simply did not want to give them any more information about me, and I’m not going to forget my password - I’ve been using it for 10 years! Anyway, I’ve been avoiding entering this information and I’m now completely locked out of my account unless I enter in this secondary email.
This suggests to me that perhaps there may be more to the rumours than I originally thought. Sending the information to a secondary email address would resolve the issue. However, I don’t want to give them that information. Perhaps I’m just being difficult, but what if this was my only email account? Would I have to create a new account just so that I could continue using it? The other thing I found annoying, is that there is no way to refuse to enter it or to contact Yahoo! about it. Has anyone else experienced similar issues, or can you shed some light on the issue?
Elevator SEO has been working closely with Canning O’Neill, office property consultants that help businesses find office space (to let and to buy) in Manchester and the North West. Canning O’Neill specialise specifically in Manchester office space, and as they are based in Manchester City centre that have great local knowledge combined with years of experience to help you find suitable premises. We have recently re-designed, developed and launched a new website for them to enable potential customers to browse through available properties online using a new online search facility. Each property has it’s own page complete with a detailed description, list of facilities, images of the property and it’s own dedicated agent that you can contact directly through the site.
Canning O’Neill also offer a whole host of other services, including:
- Search & Acquisition (Canning O’Neill will search for suitable properties based on your requirements)
- Investment Consultancy (full investment advice on the sale and acquisition of properties)
- Rent Reviews and Lease Renewals (they can reduce / negotiate your rent at the renewal stage)
- Expert Witness (their agents can act as expert witnesses at planning appeals, public enquiries etc)
- Much more…
The new website is already starting to get good feedback. We have built it complete with a CMS so that they can manage all aspects of the site content & structure, and we have made sure that all the new pages are optimised for search engines (SEO). Over the next few months we will be carefully monitoring their traffic and rankings within the SERPs while working on the off page aspects of their campaign. You can check out the website by visiting www.manchester-offices.co.uk.
A blog is a great way to get regularly updated, relevant, unique and good quality onto your website. Getting fresh content like this onto your website everyday can play a big part in the success of your website and your SEO campaign. Most blogs will allow users to post comments on your blogs, which have to be moderated before they are published. Comments are great because they can start discussion and add new content to your site. Infact, Google treats comments as updates to the pages.
However, be aware of SPAM comments. Most of the time these are easy to spot. They won’t make much sense and are normally peppered with dozens of links to very dubious sounding websites! These should be deleted and definitely shouldn’t be approved. However, some of the comments are starting to quite clever and are quite generic in that the response doesn’t look out of place in most blogs. Recent examples I have seen include:
- Nice blog! I’m now subscribing to your feed, and I’m looking forward to your next post
- Thanks for this post, I found it really interesting
- I came across this website and I’m so glad I found it
It’s easy to see why most people don’t suspect these comments to be SPAM posts, there are no obvious links and people like receiving comments that are complimentary to their site. However, these comments contain links in the ‘name’ of the user, and often link back to gambling sites or worse. Recently, I have heard of a number of cases where websites have dropped considerably in the rankings purely because they have approved comments with links to these types of site. Because their site is linking to a site that could be blacklisted, or is a known SPAM site, the website has been penalised. Remember, a link to another site is effectively an endorsement for that website so being seen as endorsing that site reduces your credibility and trust ranking.
So what can you do to prevent this? First of all, check all your comments to make sure they do not contain links. If they do, and you’re unsure if they are reliable, simply delete them before approving the comment. You can also ask your programmer or SEO company to “nofollow” all links within the comments section which will help. Be on the look out, and if a comment seems a bit fishy, check it out before you approve it!
The end of May 2009 saw another update to the Google Page Rank, the second update of 2009 which indicates Google is sticking to the afore mentioned quarterly updates (as oppposed to the previous monthly updates). As with every Page Rank update, we have seen many sites gaining and losing rank. No doubt many SEO companies are getting calls from their clients asking them to explain why they have dropped from a Page Rank 5 to a Page Rank 1 overnight. Some of them might have inexplicably lost rank, whereas others may be being penalised as Google continues to crack down on websites that have purchased inbound links to their site. It has been common practice with some SEO companies to purchase links to websites in order to try and manipulate the search engine results, which has always been a ‘grey area’ in terms of ethical SEO practices. However Google is now cracking down on websites with paid links, and as such these sites are losing both Page Rank and dropping in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).
Many people are now talking about the relevance of Page Rank, and how important it actually it is now. The general consensus is that Page Rank is now more of a guide, and that having a Page Rank 7+ is really more SEO vanity than anything else. During analysis of a website, Page Rank is taken into consideration however you should always investigate the inbound links to the site to get the full picture. What is more important at the moment, is domain trust and domain authority. More on this to follow soon… 
The dangers of SPAM comments on your blog
However, be aware of SPAM comments. Most of the time these are easy to spot. They won’t make much sense and are normally peppered with dozens of links to very dubious sounding websites! These should be deleted and definitely shouldn’t be approved. However, some of the comments are starting to quite clever and are quite generic in that the response doesn’t look out of place in most blogs. Recent examples I have seen include:
It’s easy to see why most people don’t suspect these comments to be SPAM posts, there are no obvious links and people like receiving comments that are complimentary to their site. However, these comments contain links in the ‘name’ of the user, and often link back to gambling sites or worse. Recently, I have heard of a number of cases where websites have dropped considerably in the rankings purely because they have approved comments with links to these types of site. Because their site is linking to a site that could be blacklisted, or is a known SPAM site, the website has been penalised. Remember, a link to another site is effectively an endorsement for that website so being seen as endorsing that site reduces your credibility and trust ranking.
So what can you do to prevent this? First of all, check all your comments to make sure they do not contain links. If they do, and you’re unsure if they are reliable, simply delete them before approving the comment. You can also ask your programmer or SEO company to “nofollow” all links within the comments section which will help. Be on the look out, and if a comment seems a bit fishy, check it out before you approve it!