MatBennett.com

There’s a fine line between optimism and lunacy, and I’m rarely accused of the former.  So why is it that I have just taken on a small contract to try to get a new client ranked on Google in under 2 weeks?  Well.. I like a challenge.

Gorgeous & Co. have a great boutique store specialising in all things for the romantic bedroom.  It’s a nice looking site with a great range of products, but the one thing that they don’t have is search engine position.  Due to some imminent press coverage, that what we are now going to try to get them and in less than two weeks (13 days to be precise… and we don’t yet have FTP access).

As one well known UK SEO put it well need to “be lucky as a leprechaun with a 4 leaf clover on St Patricks day standing at the end of a rainbow”.  Fingers crossed eh?

(Of course if any kind blogger stumbles across this and is feeling helpful, do feel free to link to gorgeousandco.com and help out!

Received a nasty spoof mail today. Here’s the text:

Hello My name is Dave and I am from the Support of WorldPay. We have received the payment order (ID 0220712,Receipt Date 09/07/2006) from you and we need to make a verification of the details you have filled in, as we have received a notice from your card service stating that there was a chargeback made by the owner of the card with which you have made the payment and that your level of authorization has been altered during your last transaction. This is a very serious matter. We have deducted the amount of the chargeback, GBP 149.89, from your account and added our standard fee of GBP 24.00 as well (you can see your payment details in the attachment). We have failed to contact you using the telephone number you have provided earlier, meeting no response. As a precaution, we have limited access to your account in order to protect against future unauthorized transactions.Please understand that this is a security measure intended to help protect you and your personal information. Please contact your credit card company to resolve this matter. Best Regards, Dave Gollick shopper@uk.worldpay.com

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With over 70 million registered accounts at the time of writing, myspace is an internet phenomenon that is hard to ignore for those involved in online marketing.

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… and the lifeblood of intellectual property lawsuits.

I saw this post on Freelancer.com last night and wasn’t quite sure whether we should be flattered, indignant or just plain amused.

Here’s the salient part of the post:

I want a clone website of www.mypropertyforsale.co.uk with all the funtionallity that it has but with a worldwide search and the website must be in two language English and spanish. I want everything done by the winning bidder because I don´t know anything about this, I don´t want any question about the funtionallity nor information needed for completing any task neither.

I should point out that www.mypropertyforsale.co.uk is a site that we developed at work and have an ongoing interest in, so seeing someone ask for coders to rip it off makes me want to put a call in to the lawyers. On closer inspection though it is actually quite amusing.

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Just been looking at optimising some Froogle feeds and wondered which site were used to produce the Froogle merchant ratings. Oddly I can’t find much written about this on the web at the moment, so thought that I would pop a quick list of the ones that I have unearthed so far:

• www.resellerratings.com
• www.DealTime.co.uk
• www.Shopzilla.co.uk
• www.Ciao.co.uk
• www.PriceGrabber.com

Sure that there are others as well, but they seem to be the most common for UK stores at least

As anyone who has ever seen me in profile will testify, I am not the kind of guy who shies away from a bit of chocolate, but this week I’ve had plenty thanks!

We’ve being doing some of the close-up photography for a new site that we are working on, ChocoholicShop. The photos are coming out great, but the number of Belgium chocolates we are being left with is just too much! Yes, I suppose we could bin the left-overs, but it just doesn’t seem right.

We haven’t got a finalised date for when the site goes live yet, but I can heartily recommend the plain chocolate covered candied orange peel. ;¬)

OK, I know that this is old hat, but the entry about the Matt Cutts Blog made me think of it again, and I thought it worth noting here.

Google-guy Says is simply a site that notes when a particular user posts on the Webmaster World and Search Engine Watch forums. Not all that interesting unless you bare in mind that Google-guy, as the name suggests works at Google.

I’m not a huge fan of either forum as the signal to noise ratio is generally way off, but there is good information on both if you care to dig. Some of the best of it comes from Google-guy, which obviously makes Google-guy says a useful tool.

There now appears to be at least 2 sites running under the same name, both of which appear useful. I’ve therefore linked to both below:

http://www.markcarey.com/googleguy-says/
http://googleguy.zorgloob.com/

If you know me then you’re probably wondering how I came to end up running a website about caravans, as it’s not something that I have a particular interest in.

The c4caravans.com was started a few years back as a demonstration of a free advertising system for a customer interested in running such a site for a another market. By the time the project unfortunately got shelved I had developed a fair bit of code and it seemed a shame to just scrap it, so decided to put it up in some form. As it didn’t seem right to use the same market as the customer had intended I picked another at random and decided on Caravans.

Since those beginnings the site has steadily grown in popularity into a busy caravan sales portal. So much so, that I decided to re-write the entire site earlier this year to incorporate and ever growing list of improvements that I had in mind.

Today the site still operates as a free caravan sales portal and continues to occupy when I am off work. Popularity has continued to grow and small improvements continue to be made and the site seems to be going from strength to strength. So much so, in fact, that things are coming full circle and we are now looking at starting another site, along similar lines, as a commercial work project.

I’m not a huge fan of blogging, as the vast majority seem to have little new to say. Good ones though can be great.

I haven’t yet read enough of Matt Cutts’ blog to decide whether it will be one of the rare good ones or not yet, but at first glance it could be interesting. What immediately made Matt’s blog stand out for the crowd is the fact that he works for Google.

I’d love to know what his employers think of the blog and how much of it he has pass committee before it hit the pages. Certainly what I have read so far is not ground breaking, but does put an interesting human face on the inhabitants of the (in)famous Googleplex. I’m sure that SEO engineers around the world are adding it to their RSS readers at a huge pace, something that Matt himself must be very aware of as he decides what to include.

Anyway, it’s here to remind me to take an occassional look. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/