tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68795582009-11-03T21:13:40.408-07:00Personal and professional blog of Ian McAnerin.Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.comBlogger203125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-29597191883853912552009-09-06T17:29:00.004-06:002009-09-06T17:50:50.528-06:00

M$ (automatically) killed my Outlook 2007 last night on my Windows Vista 64 system. It was one of those "Windows Update is finished so we restarted your computer for you even though you didn't say we could" issues, followed by the usual Microsoft screw-up of hosing the system they were supposed to be fixing and protecting.I'd be a little more patient with them if this wasn't caused directly by

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-10164842017087875462009-09-02T12:33:00.007-06:002009-09-02T14:47:09.826-06:00

Most SEO's are taught the simple mantra that a 302 (temporary redirect) is bad, and a 301 (permanent redirect) is good.This is wrong. Or at least, part of it is.An SEO quoting the above to someone who is really knowledgeable in web servers will have just shot themselves in the virtual foot, and probably made their job harder, since now the server expert is more likely to dismiss other things they

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-16835698845344226152009-07-21T12:23:00.005-06:002009-07-21T12:42:54.514-06:00

After some testing and a confirmation from Google, I've discovered a new (to me, anyway) twist to Google's PPC Ad targeting for international sites.In SEO, Googe decides on the country your site is relevant for first by ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain - like .ca, .uk, .mx, and so on) and then by IP and other methods.Turns out this thinking also applies to PPC.If you target a specific country

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-85649589496356574342009-06-08T20:19:00.004-06:002009-06-08T20:29:20.901-06:00

It's not uncommon for people to "google"you before hiring you, renting to you or even dating you. So you might want to do some damage control regarding that crazy weekend in Vegas you were hoping no one ever posted pictures of online...Social Media Reputation Management is a whole art and science by itself, but you can start today by filling out a Google Profile.Then you can at least try to tell

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-23391640531736774242009-05-28T10:55:00.005-06:002009-05-28T11:06:13.231-06:00

Microsoft has just announced that the new name for it's "Live" search engine (which everyone disliked) is called "Bing" which everyone will also probably dislike, but at least isn't as confusing.The other candidate was "Kumo", which I admit I would have disliked more. Poor Microsoft, I'm pretty sure no matter what they chose it would have been wrong.You can give it a test drive and find out more

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-28297900797641571922009-04-28T15:34:00.005-06:002009-04-29T01:42:50.142-06:00

UPDATE:By complete coincidence, MS announced SP2 for Office 2007 *today*. Which I found about 10 minutes after complaining in this post. I'm installing it and I'll let you know how things go.-------------------------If you have an embedded Excel 2007 file in a Word 2007 document, and happen to have Excel open as well, Office, (in it's brilliance) informs you that Excel is not installed and tries

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-3627811824596248202009-04-02T00:17:00.002-06:002009-04-02T00:22:23.170-06:00

If your keyboard starts spitting out strange characters, it's because you've probably switched keyboard language layouts by accident.It's easy to do: Press / and then Ctrl ShiftI do this sometimes if I'm just trying to type a "?", which has me pressing the / and shift already. If my finger slips a bit and I hit the ctrl under the shift at the same time, suddenly my typing is all nonsense.Fix:

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-85299241550015769772009-03-26T14:11:00.003-06:002009-03-26T14:16:18.198-06:00

I was checking the robots.txt file of a client today, and it was far more complicated than normal, so I went looking for an automated syntax checker.I found this one from Motoricerca, (an Italian SEO company) and can recommend it: Robots.txt Syntax Checker (it's in English).I like it so much I'm adding a link to it from my robots.txt generator.Ian

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-28552388002728692462009-03-08T11:20:00.004-06:002009-03-08T11:54:29.734-06:00

My son Tas plays an online game called Mabinogi and today mentioned to me a new feature in the game, which had been overrun by something called bots.Bots are basically programs that control player characters within the games, taking over for the person who is supposed to be doing it. There are many types of bots, including ones that do repetitive tasks so they player doesn't have to, and the

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-5511692336500770242009-03-01T21:54:00.003-07:002009-03-01T22:00:35.781-07:00

I've been messing around with it, and I believe that I've found a new use for the Canonical tag - geolocation of gTLD's.Simply park (not redirect) a ccTLD on your site, upload an HTML sitemap that points to all your pages with the ccTLD, then place the canonical tag with the gTLD on your pages.Viola - the search engine "tags" your pages as geolocated via the ccTLD, but only displays the gTLD.You

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-74194228199553476262009-02-28T07:36:00.008-07:002009-02-28T09:18:37.798-07:00

This is the second and final part of a 2 part series on the relationship between search behavior and SERP landscape. Part 1 is here.PART 2: THE EFFECT OF SERP LANDSCAPE ON SEARCHER BEHAVIORThe seeds of this article arose when I was studying differences in searcher behavior between countries.I noticed that in many countries, especially those who are relatively new to the internet being widely

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-6718956894256037432009-02-27T18:42:00.021-07:002009-02-28T09:19:56.672-07:00

PART 1: STAGES OF SEARCHER BEHAVIORThe following is original research developed from several hundred interviews across 9 countries (Canada, USA, Mexico, Brazil, China, Japan, Korea, England and France), combined with insights gleaned from both formal training in cultural anthropology and HCI (Human-Computer Interaction - aka usability). That said, I could be totally wrong. But I don't think so.I

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-45879386342874601782009-02-09T08:38:00.008-07:002009-02-09T09:12:03.563-07:00

I was doing some keyword research this morning and was reminded of a very important issue that I'd like to share.It's February, and I just did some KW research related to Calgary (my home town,and a place I'm very familiar with, as far as KW research goes).Services like KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker typically default to showing what's in their database for the last few months (usually around 3

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-87326266516631364952009-02-06T10:04:00.008-07:002009-02-06T11:50:46.491-07:00

The new thing all the "cool" social media spammers are doing now is impersonating famous people on twitter. They sign up for a name that is very similar to a well known person (ie "mattcutts" becomes "mattcutts_" and then sets their screen name to the exact name of the person they are impersonating: "Matt Cutts". I use Matt as an example here because it happened to him recently by a particularly

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-40918885560039704942009-01-26T13:45:00.006-07:002009-01-26T14:41:00.549-07:00

It's the Lunar New Year (aka Chinese New Year) again. Many people call it Chinese New Year but of course the Chinese are not the only ones who celebrate it, so Lunar New Year is more correct. This year (2009) is the Year of the Ox. Specifically, the Earth Ox. If you were born in 1961, 1973 or 1985, you are an Ox, as well.The expected characteristics for this year are that success will come only

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-47410828921696766232009-01-12T18:13:00.017-07:002009-05-28T11:05:20.035-06:00

I'm currently working on a very, very cool tool that I can't tell you about (yet). However, part of it (an extremely minor part) allows the creation and export of PPC text ads for all major search engines.Although I can't share the full tool yet, it took me some work to collect this information in one spot, so I figured I'd share it with you.Where bulk upload is allowed, the listings use the

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-42967144341005196312009-01-07T08:06:00.010-07:002009-01-07T10:08:45.246-07:00

I give a lot of presentations, and I optimize things for a living, so it was just a matter of time for nature to take it's course and for me to start wondering what the hell I was doing.See, there are a lot of different types of presentations (I'm talking about ones that use slides or PowerPoint here). There are presentations intended to inspire, presentations intended to sell, presentations

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-44229462406748413172009-01-06T11:00:00.005-07:002009-01-06T11:07:06.280-07:00

I'll be visiting Mexico from Feb 16-24 and Brazil from Feb 24-Mar 3 for the purposes of meeting other SEO's, learning about the local search marketing environment and culture, and generally beginning to learn more about and promote those two countries as excellent SEO targets for international businesses.If you live in either place (specifically Mexico City, Acapulco, Cancun, Sao Paulo and Rio de

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-45608777322039369652008-10-07T09:55:00.005-06:002008-10-09T22:33:11.498-06:00

As you may know, my company offers the most popular robots.txt generator in the world free to visitors, and we are continually adding functionality.In response to a recent request, we've added Naver to the robots.txt tool. Naver is the most popular search engine/portal in Korea. I've been to Korea several times, and (because it's my job) I always ask everyone I meet what search engine they use.

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-21862864978296419572008-10-07T09:12:00.002-06:002008-10-07T09:16:36.716-06:00

I came across this sign during a recent trip to Banff, and thought I would share. Google is everywhere...

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-50496864770755612712008-10-01T14:37:00.003-06:002008-10-01T14:41:12.087-06:00

This is a followup on a previous post complaining about my beloved Google Toolbar being lost during the upgrade to IE7 and Googles own Chrome not even allowing me the option.I guess Google gave up on getting their toolbar to install on IE7, so they appear to have used the Admin Kit provided by MS to create a version of IE7 that has the toolbar included.http://www.google.com/toolbar/ie7/Works for

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-38911896753117896852008-09-30T09:35:00.008-06:002008-10-01T12:31:22.741-06:00

International SEO is just like regular SEO, but with a type of personalization.Arguably, the first step towards true search personalization by the search engines was international search. This was followed by local search and universal search, with even more coming ideas coming along, including logins, "answers" and so on.But it started with international search, because that was the big issue -

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-53300255332685412832008-09-09T01:45:00.003-06:002009-05-28T11:05:20.036-06:00

I just made these for a presentation, based on the latest information I have for this year. Enjoy.Organic Search Engine Share 2008 for North AmericaPPC (Pay Per Click) Search Engine Share 2008 for North America

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-1464015933694423612008-09-02T21:58:00.009-06:002008-09-02T22:42:02.600-06:00

I like the Google toolbar. There, I said it.Today, I decided to take a chance and upgrade my IE 7 to IE 8 Beta. I use Firefox for SEO purposes and IE for normal browsing, so this was a big deal for me, since I use IE a lot.Upon installation, IE 8 promptly informed me that the Google Toolbar isn't compatible with it. A quick check on the web showed that it can cause all sorts of freezing and

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6879558.post-20633573584360764512008-08-12T16:33:00.010-06:002008-08-13T11:39:19.283-06:00

You know you are getting old when you have an uncontrollable urge to start a post starting with words like "in my day.." , "I remember when.." or "I've seen this before..."But it's true - that's the problem. People who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, or to even live through something worse. I was reminded of this while reading a recent forum thread about ranking reports.Someone

Ian McAnerinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06033492048277422132noreply@blogger.com5