Author Archives: Nadir Garouche

Internet Explorer: Microsoft admits the “Mess Up”

“We messed up”. That’s what Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft Internet Explorer general manager said yesterday at the Mix06 conference in Vegas, while talking about the delay they took in releasing the new version of IE. Indeed, the latest version of IE was released in 2001, and nothing new has been released since, until IE 7.

According to this article from The Seattle Times, Microsoft promised to “refresh its browser technology more often in the future”. If you look at his main competitor, Mozilla, it’s true that they update their browser very often and are fixing all the bugs on a constant basis.

Bill Gates knows that they cannot lag anymore, and have to provide browsers capable of handling new kinds of pages without any problem…
“You can expect to see us moving very very rapidly there because we see great opportunities there” he said.

When your SEO company isn’t even able to spam properly

Today, I’m going to replace Matt Cutts. I was doing some research yesterday to get some information about setting up a company in Luxembourg.

With Google, with the keywords “creation entreprise luxembourg” in French (“set up company luxembourg” in English), the first listing that I find is the Luxembourg Minister of Economy and Trade…. Great, I should be able to find the best information with this site.

Well, not if the SEO company that worked for them didn’t mess up with the site. Because the CSS spam they used is currently explicitly viewable, it’s impossible to read the site.

If you look on the right bottom of all this list of links, which is inside a CSS div, you can see lots of anchor text spamming focused on the site’s keywords, but also a link with the anchor text “Référencement”, or “SEO” in English that goes to the excellent SEO company who did the job for them and added a link to themselves in the mean time. I looked into the code to find their URL, because I couldn’t click on the link… The company is referencement.com, a french SEO company that calls itself ‘A leading SEO company’ on their site…

Now, can someone tell me how you can do something like that to a client, disrespect his visitors and take so many risks?

Find a flight easily with Google

I’m going to London next week, so I was looking for a flight using Google and noticed a nice feature provided by the search engine.

It seems like Google recognizes your intention if you are typing something such as “paris london” which is obviously the query of someone who needs to travel, and displays a link that allows you to find a flight with different companies.

So with my query “paris london” in Google, the first result is a personalized feature that allows me to look for a flight directly from Google. What I have to do is enter the departing and returning dates. Then, I can choose amongst 5 reservation companies such as Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity etc.


After one click, I’m all set and just need to choose my flight. I’m just wondering how this function works, I’ve never heard about that before.

However, if I use Google.fr, Google displays a link that allows me to see the next train departures with SNCF, the french train company.

By the way, I recommend you to read the last post at SEO by the SEA, where Bill Slawsky tries to explain how vertical search works in Google.

SEM Salaries: How much are you worth?

P.J. Fusco, writer for Clickz, replied to an email sent by a reader who asked “What’s considered a typical salary range for non-management and management positions in the SEM industry?”

Because SEM is still a new industry, it’s true that there’s a lack of information regarding salaries. That often causes people to wonder if their salaries match with what other earn. Of course, salaries are mainly justified by experience but it’s a good to know the tendency in the SEM job market.

P.J. said that entry level positions tend to range from $30,000 to $45,000. With 3 to 5 years of experience, she thinks that people can earn from $50,000 to $70,000, and even up to $90,000 if you are amongst the most tenured SEOs.

Senior Management Positions are able to earn up to $120,000.

She concludes her article by saying that money isn’t the most important, but rather how much you enjoy your work. I agree, if you’re all about the money, you can make more money elsewhere, SEO/M is more about providing quality, achieving great results and is also a very exciting job and our industry is very diversified and full of fun!

Performancing releases Free Web Analytics Service for Blogs

Performancing , the famous site dedicated to the bloggers’ community, has just released a free Web Analytics Service for bloggers. It’s called Performancing Metrics. I’ve already installed it for SEO Principle and it has a pretty neat configuration. The metrics allow you to get plenty of information about your visitors, but also about the search engines they used to find you, and much more.
It’s a pretty neat service that they provide here. For example, you’re able to see which posts from your blog people have read, you can have a comments summary, you can see your visitors’ languages, and you can also have adsense information.

And the great news is that everything is free! I guess I don’t have to wait for Google Analytics anymore… Congratulations to the Performancing team! They already have 500 blogs which subscribed to the service. If you don’t have a Performancing account yet, you can sign up now.

Supplemental Results Issue with Google seems to be fixed

The last few days, a couple of sites that I know which had for example hundreds of pages indexed in Google were only showing a few pages in Google, with the command site:url.com. Google was displaying a message saying that some results were omitted while there was no reason for them to do so. (pages having unique title tags, search engine friendly urls etc.)
The problem was reported in WebmasterWorld and also on many other forums.

As of today, these sites that  I know are showing the same number of indexed pages as they were before the issue. Matt Cutts hasn’t commented on this issue yet. “GoogleGuy” over at WMW apparently said that he knew where the error came from and that they were working on it, but we haven’t seen anything on Matt Cutt’s blog yet.

I’ll be interested to see if people are still facing this issue, so please be kind to leave a comment if you do.

SEO: why you need to keep up with the news everyday

I’ve been away for more than a week, while preparing my return to France and taking care of a few things back here. Therefore, I wasn’t able to keep up with what was going on in the SEO world on a daily basis. It took me a few days to catch up with all the posts on SEO blogs, forums and other SEO related resources.

While participating in forums threads recently, I realized that if you’re away for a while, even a day or 2, and aren’t able to keep up with SEO readings, you can really be lost… For example if you weren’t aware of the supplemental results issue in Google, which was mentioned a few times in forums, it will be hard to understand what’s happening and also, let your client know about this issue. I faced this problem and had no idea of what was going on before seeing that others were having the same issue with their sites.

The solution when you’re travelling and don’t have access to a computer: get a good mobile to surf and also the right contract…

Are you Web 2.0 or not?

These days, it seems that people are talking about Web 2.0 more than ever. Many sites that I visit everyday just changed their design recently to look more Web 2.0, and the number of new web applications is booming.

There are just too many things going on that it can be hard for someone to know what Web 2.0 really is… I am myself sometimes confused and wondering where’s the limit between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

It’s true that some people seem to consider Web 2.0 as the use of the AJAX language only or to community sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr etc. There are actually more elements that define the new Web and some people are trying to help people understand this new era.

Dion Hinchcliffe tries to give a definition of Web 2.0 and seems to be complaining about the confusion amongst people when it comes to define what Web 2.0 is. He wrote an article yesterday called: You know you’re Web 2.0 when… , a very interesting and comprehensive piece of paper where he tries to help people see if they’re Web 2.0 or not.

Here’s his Web 2.0 checklist:

  • You can easily comment on, or preferably, actually change the content that you find on a Web site.
  • You can label your information with tags and use them to find that information again.
  • Your Web page doesn’t reload even once as you get a whole lotta work done.
  • You are actively aware of other users’ recent activity on a site.
  • It’s possible for you to easily share with others the information you’re contributing on the Web site.
  • You can syndicate your information on a Web site elsewhere on the Internet through a feed like RSS or Atom.
  • You can pick and choose the pieces of a Web site that you like and then add that functionality to your own site.
  • There are easy ways to find out what content is the most popular or interesting at the moment.
  • You heard about a new Web site because a friend enthusiastically recommended it to you out of the blue.
  • There happens to be a mind boggling amount information and a lot of people on a site, yet it seems easy to find what you want and communicate with others.
  • Everything you ever added to a given Web site can be removed easily at your whim.
  • The Web site actively encourages you to share and reuse its information and its services with others. And it even provides a license to do so.

That’s a very comprehensive list. That doesn’t mean that every site should respect all these elements, but this is a good list to understand if you are close to Web 2.0 or not… Hmmm, I think my blog misses a few web 2.0 things: should I add tags or links to social bookmarking sites? 🙂