Mindy Gofton's Blog
Is Twitter the New MySpace?
You know that Twitter has crossed over into the mainstream when instead of bands telling people to check them out on MySpace, they instead ask the audience (several times) to follow them on Twitter.
Last night, in front of a packed crowd in Holmfirth, Wedding Present and Cinerama front man David Gedge, asked the crowd to follow him on Twitter (he's @weddingpresent) and assured us all that it is, indeed, him doing the tweeting and that he is in fact extremely interesting and he does reply to people.
It's the first time I've seen anyone tout for more Twitter followers at a gig and if you're really bored, try checking on how many new accounts referencing the Wedding Present have been set up since last night.... More...
Setting Expectations for an SEO Campaign
Twitter Introduces \'Name Results\'

While we're not seeing this sort of result for all name searches, on selected searches Twitter is returning results for potential Twitter users that match the searcher's query.
We assume this is just another way of making the search feature more useful as Twitter's own variation on blended search results. As it stands it can be quite difficult to find other people on Twitter without knowing their exact username, so this looks like a step in the right direction to us. More...
Why Keywords in Domain Names is a Stupid Ranking Factor
So you have a brand. You sell red widgets, but really high end, luxury widgets with all the bells and whistles. You learned to make widgets by hand when you were 14 and you take great pride in your work - and people phone you from all over the country when they want a really special red widget.
When you first set up in business, you chose the name your brand very carefully, so it's unique, memorable and evokes your brand values and history.
This week you decided you wanted to make the move online. People are always asking whether you have a website so they can see pictures of your widgets and read information about how you make them. More...
Your dofollow does look silly
Here's the thing - there's no such thing as a "dofollow" attribute.
The search engines created the "nofollow" attribute so webmasters could indicate links to which they did not want to pass PageRank/link authority - for example, advertisers, sites they were talking about negatively, etc. You don't need a "dofollow" because any link that doesn't have a "nofollow" attribute is by default going to be followed - it'll count. More...
By Destroying DMoz the SEO Industry Has Eaten Its Own Head
SASCon Roundup
I dare you to invoke the copyright provisions of #debill on this blog post
In honour of the UK Government rushing through the Digital Economy Bill despite mass online protest about the provisions regarding copyright infringement online, we're republishing a selection of responses.
Naturally, as our own ISP we are now legally required to monitor ourselves and report ourselves for copyright infringment to the copyright owners.
I'm sure they'll all be very upset by the free publicity and links and as a result we'll be required to shut off our own internet access, but hey ho. Such is life in 2010 when laws about the internet are made by the people who understand it the least. More...
There Is No Magic SEO Red Button
Some readers may have seen our "announcement" this morning about a new "premium" SEO service called the "SEO Red Button" which purports to get you to the top of Google for a single keyword (in fact, to remove all other listings but yours for the keyword) with the push of a red button by our SEO team here at I-COM towers. Funny April Fools joke, ha ha, but it was a reaction to a much wider issue with both the way some SEO companies market their services and with some misconceptions outside of the SEO industry as to how search engine optimisation works.
In short, anyone who tells you that SEO is a quick-fix, that they can get you to the top of Google in a day/week/month for a specific keyword or set of keywords or that they can guarantee you a certain level of traffic for a certain term is lying. More...
XML Sitemaps for SEO
We get asked frequently about the value of XML sitemaps for SEO. Apparently many SEO firms are saying, as part of their sales pitches, that where a current SEO company hasn't created an automated sitemap they are damaging a company's potential for ranking.
I say this is total and complete rubbish.
The sitemaps feature in Webmaster Tools was created as a way to help sites identify all their pages to search engines and let search engines know when they add or modify content. They also enable search engines to flag errors in reaching specific pages. They have nothing to do with ranking - they merely serve to help with indexing, if your site needs a little help. More...
