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Congratulations Amit!

Congratulations go to our friend, Amit Sontakey at The Energy Saving Trust who recently went on holiday to India and came back a married man.

Codegent's best wishes to the happy couple!

McD in Tea Brewing Shocker!!!

It has only been two years but a mixture of guilt and slow loading programs somehow fused into a rare desire to make tea for my fellow workers. Thankfully most of them were at meetings so only Sarah got to sample the sacred brew. I am planning some exotic herbal blends for my next trip to the kettle in late 2007.

- McD

Google Death Penalty for BMW

It appears that Google has handed out the harshest punishment to BMW for breaching its technical guidelines. Whether this is 'fair' or not is a moot point: the fact is, if Google doesn't like the way you do something then there is no authority you can report them to. Even if their actions have a negative impact on your business.

So what did BMW do that riled Google so badly? They allegedly created "doorway" pages. The way these work is that you create a page that is well-optimised for a group of keywords. It could even be a page that is nonsense as long as it has a healthy smattering of keywords. In BMW's case they apparently optimised a doorway page for the term "used car". The reason the actual content can be nonsense is that the user never actually sees the page. As soon as they arrive at the doorway page, they are instantly redirected to another page with different content on.

Understandably, Google hates this. The whole value of Google is its accuracy on giving people relevant content. BMW say that they were just mirroring what was on the actual redirected page because the actual page was using code that Google cannot read.  (Incidentally, a doorway page is different to a splash page - the real "crime" here is the redirection. You are perfectly free to create a page that is well optimised and perhaps summarises what is on subsequent pages, just ensure that the user chooses whether or not they want to read on further.)

So what does this mean to us? I've seen some really lame and unsophisticated attempts to fool Google. Our advice is always DON'T EVEN TRY IT. The main guiding principal is this:

Make sure that what you show Google is the same as what you show the user.

Burying keywords at a tiny point size on a background colour that is the same as the font colour might seem clever, but you will get caught and if you get penalised you'll be in a much worse position. 

Oh - one thing that many people won't know is Google's position on automated software to measure ranks of pages based on specific keyword terms. It seems some search engines don't mind, while others, such as Google really hate it. This means that for Google, measuring the success of particular words should be done manually. Just in case you were wondering.

- David

Is this funny?

I was on the tube and it pulled into Oxford Circus and a girl got off in front of me. She was walking purposefully - obvioulsy a woman in a hurry.

I absent-mindedly followed her as she dived off the platform down the first exit she came to. (Normally I would follow the 'Way Out' signs). Anyway, she had the air of someone who knew where she was going.

We marched a little way down the exit where as I looked ahead I noticed there was one escalator. The trouble was, it was a down escalator and we wanted to go up.

Although I had noticed this, my platform exiting companion clearly hadn't and continued to stride determindly ahead. A second later and she had stepped onto the escalator. I saw her start to tumble headfirst and span on my tail. I kind of wanted to spare her the embarrassment. 

UK firms risk brand hijacking by not registering .eu domains

An article in New Media Age this week reminded us that the deadline for UK companies registering .eu domains is 7th April 2006. After that, anyone in the EU is open to apply for those domains.

It's probably not relevant for lots of our clients, but for some of the larger brands that operate across the EU it could cause some headaches down the line.

We've told everyone we can think of who it might effect. After all, brand guardianship is just as important online as it is off.