Right Time, Right Place

I commute to work, as many of you surely do. Twice a day I tootle across the countryside in our long suffering MX5, which aside from being 20 years old now is suffering distinctly from the gravel road portion of the trip it endures five times a week.

On the way home, for a few months of the year I'm travelling during golden hour. For those not of a photography bent, golden hour is the magical bit before sunset and after sunrise when the low sun angle creates the wonderful golden light you see on sampler biscuit boxes and the cheap post cards your auntie Mavis sends.

For that reason I regularly lug a camera along with me. Many suspect it's because I'm always on the hunt for road accidents but in all truth I'm more likely to cause one when I see something interesting and veer suddenly off the road to satisfy my itchy shutter finger.

On the way home tonight I had just such a moment, although....

Are You Part of the Four Percent?

I just bought a pair of shorts. Puma 'essential workout shorts' to be precise. I don't think I've ever purchased a Puma banded product before, although I was aware of their brand. Puma are well known but the only reason I chose them was that I was looking for shorts, and their local outlet store had a sale on when I walked past I the mall.

Now that I've made my first Puma purchase, the likelihood of be being loyal to the Puma brand in the future is very high. Not because the product was cheaper or better than their competitors, although the price was good due to the sale.

Not because an attractive and successful athlete endorsed them, or because they give 5% of all their profits to the crippled outer Galapagos tree frog foundation.

I'm am now converted to the Puma brand and products because I am part of the 4%.

Bing checks in after 13 days. Dave Collins' blog

Finally some action from Bing in my search engine race, just after I said I'd given up. Thirteen days is not a startling performance by any measure, and there appears to only be the home page in the index so far, but that's at least a good start.

Searching for phrases on the home page works, so it's fully indexed, and the content it's indexed appears to be from yesterday. What's more exciting is the old URL's which were invalid have now vanished from the site:trash.co.nz search, although the one disallowed in robots.txt is still there.

While we're on the subject of Bing...

So much for a Search Engine Race

I've just finished watching a re-run of the BBC's Top Gear. Richard Hammond took on an RAF Eurofighter in a Bugatti Veyron in one of their classically contrived races.

The Eurofighter came in first, but the Veyron wasn't too far behind. It was a race of sorts, give or take. I only wish I could say the same for my attempt at search engine spider racing.

Google came in first by a country mile, with a complete indexing done in about 84 hours. We're 10 days, a full 240 hours, into the race now...

I felt special for about 30 seconds

"It is my pleasure to inform you that on September 30th, 2009 your information was reviewed and accepted for inclusion in the 2009/2010 edition of our registry.

Strathmore's Whos Who each year, recognizes and selects key executives, professionals and organizations in all disciplines and industries for outstanding business and professional achievements."

It sounds almost too good to be true. Well, as it turns out....

Bing and Yahoo slow off the mark

Well, in my humble opinion it’s been a very poor showing from Bing and Yahoo in my search engine race so far. Google has now spidered, and indexed pretty much the whole site, but Bing and Yahoo have failed to fully index even the home page despite visiting the site a couple of times.

Yahoo is coming in runner-up as it has made a start on the process, with their site explorer showing the new <title> tag from the site. That’s a clear step up from Bing which still shows URL’s which have not functioned on the site for a number of years.

Searching for site:trash.co.nz on Google shows me 35 listings, which includes...

Huston, we have a winner in the search engine race

The race is in its final stretch now, with Google coming in the winner sometime over night NZ time. The new content of a few of the pages is up there, and searchable.

Not only that but if I cherry pick some phrases from my blog posting from last night I’m hit number one and two which re-enforces some of the basic precincts of search engine optimisation. What’s also interesting is that the content snippet that Google presents under the title is different for a given page depending on what you searched for. Hmmm, SEO theory #321 out the door. The meta description is not always...

Content presentation vs link ranking in Google results

As part of the search engine race to index my new blog site that you're reading now I've noticed some interesting behaviour from Google.

It's pretty well known that Google calculates a page rank for every website it indexes, and that the page rank is a complex beast created from an aggregate score of a whole bunch of things. Link popularity, keywords, content, meta tags, the phase of the moon.

Millions of words have been written about the mystery box that is Google page rank, and all I can say definitively is that it exists, and SEO 'experts' can only guess at exactly how it works because the people at Google in the know are keeping their lips tightly sealed under non-disclosure contracts and the pain that only...

Google, bing and yahoo race to index my blog

I'm not much of a racing fan normally, but I thought it'd be entertaining to see how long it took the big three to spider and index my new blog after submitting a valid xml site map to their respective webmaster tools pages.

This domain, trash.co.nz has been around for a fair while. It used to have my web services information on it back when I had pretensions of being a small time ISP. However.......

Welcome to my new blog site

The title says it all really.  Welcome to my new blog / website.

The intention is to slap all sorts of random things on here.  The topics will be as varied and random as my wandering attention will allow. Occasionally some of it will be interesting as well.  Although probably not all that often!

If you've landed here and this is the only posting it's probably a bit early to understand what I mean, come back in a while and you'll get the idea.

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