For anyone that doesn’t here’s a very brief summary.

No Follow Links

There was a time where any link on the web passed page rank juice whether it would be on the header, body footer or comment of a webpage. Because of this it did not take long before many SEO peeps were browsing for as many blog with a high page rank and posting their comments alongside their link to get some of that page rank juice passed onto their own sites. This obviously created a huge amount of forced, spammy comments on most blogs that quickly became an admin nightmare for any respectable blog that wanted only relevant comments on their articles. Now, shortly after this chaos, Google announced a new link attribute in which a web master could put on their links to show that they did not trust the link and therefore did not want to pass juice. This attribute was “rel=no follow”

History lesson over and back to the present day. I have just taken on a client’s website in which I am going to perform link building on. I started by analysing the page rank of the homepage which was a page rank 2. I then analysed the links on the page to see how it had got this far already. Looking at the back links to the page there were barely any links at all. Especially any links that would carry a lot of value or any relevancy, except one. This one link was from Wikipedia, this website had a link from the Wikipedia page for the village that it was based in.

From finding this out I immediately went to the Wikipedia page and needless to say it had a “no follow” attribute on the link. Now, in theory this should not pass any page rank at all, but I can guarantee that looking at the other back links this is the only link that could pass on that much juice.

This now raises many questions for me. Has Google axed the no follow attribute? I doubt it. Does Google still pass juice from certain websites? Maybe so, this definitely requires more research from my part and I will be searching many sites to find out the true meaning of the No Follow link as it clearly isn’t as defined as I thought it was.

I have not been posting on my blog a lot lately but I wanted to put this on to see if any fellow SEO peeps had their own opinions or findings on this.

Simply had to post this.

There has been 2 games that have been affected because of the incident. One is called Disaster Report 4 which has been cancelled and the other is Yakuza of the End which has been delayed.

Disaster Report 4
With this game being a third person, free roaming style game in a city that has just been struck by a gigantic earthquake you can see why this has been cancelled. This game has already suffered delays in the development and just as it was preparing for release they were cancelled as it was deemed inapropiate because of recent events. I think that’s a fair point to be honest.

I still can’t help but feel sorry for the developers on this one. An entire game gone to waste. Even if they do wish to re release it they will probably have to revamp it to keep up with the current trend of games.

If you know of any additional games that have been affected because of the earthquake. Please comment below.

I started at the obvious place, Amazon. Here I saw that their best price for pre order is £197. Considering the RRP for the 3DS is around £230, I thought this was the best buy and pretty much had my mnd set.

Then on my weekly shop at Sainburys I saw their offer for the 3DS at £199.00 with 1000 nectar points. Now I havent done the math but this does work out at a slightly better offer if you use your nectar points and shop at Sainsburys enough.

Then I finally came across the cracking deal. I heard that at Morrisons they have slashed £10.00 off Amazons selling price and are pushing out the 3DS at £187.00. It only costs 10.00 to pre-order.

From looking around a bit I have changed my mind a few times but I don’t think this price will be beaten.

I thought I’d put this out there as I am sure a few people will find this useful. Of course if anyone knows of a place where the 3DS is being offered at a better price, please let me know in the comments below and I will update the post to include it.

£187.00 is definitely not too bad of a price for a brand new handheld console. I am just waiting for the decent games to follow. Theres only so long I can play Pilot Wings Resort.

Updates 20/03/2011

Amazon have just dropped their price to compete with Morrisons. Seems to be a price war going on. Get your 3DS at this price before March the 31st and before stocks run out.

Full Details on Nintendo 3DS at £187.00

Most people have heard of the famous Zygors World of Warcraft Game Guide. If you haven’t and you are an avid WOW player, or even just starting out your WOW ventures. It’s definitely worth a look.

Check out the Full Review Here

Or

Visit Zygors Levelling Guide to DOWNLOAD IT NOW

Whilst all this is going on, attackers know that it is tax season and start pushing out malware and scams to capitalise on this time of year.

If you have got your books done on time and handed into the HMRC, this is the point where you should take care on any emails you get supposedly from the HMRC. There is one particular email starting to float around that once recieved, forwards the victim to a convincing look alike of the HMRC website informs them that there has been a miscalculation on the amount of tax they owe and they are owed a large or larger refund (You can see where this is going). The website whilst looking convincing kindly asks for the bank details so that they can issue the refund. Once the victim has put in the details, it runs a piece of code to check that all the data has been entered in the correct format. Then send the data to the attackers, whilst sending the victim to the HMRC homepage. i must admit the process can look very convincing and if you do not know what to look out for you can get stuck in this trap.

What to remember so you do not get caught

There are 2 main principles to remember to make sure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen to you.

Firstly ,the HMRC have stated that for tax rebates, they would never contact a person by email to issue it. So any email seemingly from the HMRC about tax refunds are not legit.
Secondly if any email address sends you to an email address always check the address bat at the top to make sure the email has sent you to the correct place. For example, if the HMRC did contact regarding a certain topic and forwarded you to their website, the address at the top of your browser would be “http://www.hmrc.gov.uk”. If it is anything else it could be phishy.

The attacks at the moment are currently only targeting UK victims. But this is soon to change as the date for the tax returns for the US and Europe draw closer.

If you want to see some examples of these scam sites and email addresses, please see the examples on the HMRC website here.

Have you been attacked by one of these scams? Please comment below if you have and let us know if it was easily detectable or not.

I picked this book up about year ago and at first I was very sceptical on whether it was the book I was looking for. I purchased it completely by judging it by its title and amazon reviews. I started readin it from the start and at first wasn’t impressed as I was eager to fly through it and hopefully  find out something new that I could put to good use. The book didn’t give me that, and for good reason.

I stuck with the book and kept on reading and soon found out that this book is a true masterpiece and has been well thought out. Instead of explaining pure Search Engine Optimisation like most books like it, each section was explained thoroughly and in the end showed how to implement the SEO to really get your traffic converted to sales. This isn’t a book purely about new seo rules, this is a bible that explains how all the online marketing aspects work and how to use them. I must admit that reading this book taught me a lot about the fundamentals of blogging and social marketing and allowed me to put a completely different spin on my techniques. The following is a list of some of the aspects you can expect to be covered in this book.

• How the Online World has Changed Marketing
• Blogging
• Using the web and audio content (Podcasting)
• Forums
• Viral Marketing
• Building a content rich website
• Building a full marketing plan to reach your audience
• Writing content to influence buying
• Good old pure Search Engine Marketing

 A lot of people will dismiss this book as one for beginners as it explains the compete process, but I guarantee you there is something in it for everyone and I was surprised on how much I thought I knew about Web Marketing. In truth I did have the knowledge but not the knowledge on how to implement that my techniques correctly. This book solved that.
The book is written in a very clear, chatty manner, it’s possible to read through the entire thing but I have found jumping to certain chapters as and when I need it more useful.

Any business or individual will find this useful to start marketing their products or knowledge online.

If you have read this book then please let me know what you think. If you want more info on the book please see it here on the amazon bookstore.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR – Amazon Book Store

If this hasn’t happened to you, it’s still as funny as hell. Watch the video created from Dorkly Bits and see what really happens when you crash on one of the Mario Kart games.

This didn’t take very long to do and once it was fully hacked a stream of homebrew content for the Kinect came out. This one in particular has to be my favourite. The guy goes by the name of Roboczar and has made a synthesisizer out of the Kinect device by using different shapes on a piece of paper. I could tell you exactly what it does but its better to just watch the video here .

This has kicked off even more since gamespot started taking preorders yesterday at a $999.99 price point. This concerned many people as Gamespot are usually pretty good at their prices since they were absolutely spot on with the Kinect pricing. Since then however, this price has been removed from Gamespot’s website.

Sony has came back and informed that the NGP will not be $1000, it will not even be $599. But further than this they are still sticking to their “affordable” statement.

So there we have it, the BGP is not going to be as ridiculously prices as expected but still has a long way to go meet the $250 price mark of the 3DS. Maybe they could push it to this mark, who knows.

Let me know what you think.