Google News has been a big topic of conversation in the office over the past few days, with last week’s United Airlines debacle leading to a wide ranging discussion on the nature of how we connected types get our news.

Between the run on United stock, the collapse of XL Airways and last month’s crash in Madrid it seemed to me the travel business is very much in the doldrums. Google News - my main gateway to non-specialist news - has done nothing to disabuse me of this notion recently: as I explained to the guys it seems like every time I visit there’s another headline spelling doom and gloom for the travel/leisure sector.

Dave pointed out I was guilty of the exact same sin we’d spent most of last week mocking the United stock dumpers for: taking Google News headlines on faith. If anyone had asked I’ve have told them with confidence the whole travel industry was going down the pan, but that would have been based on scanning a few headlines, not knowing all the facts. In fact I happened to be speaking to Nick Webb at Virgin Holiday Cruises and he told me the Cruise market is going great guns, as are many areas in the travel and holiday sector. The decline of air travel is making all the headlines, but people are still travelling to enjoy themselves…the difference is they’re doing it on cruise ships or trains or, god help us, in caravans.

The moral of the story? Don’t form your opinions based on headlines, particularly from aggregators like Google News. The web teaches you to be a scanner rather than a deep reader, and while that might be appropriate when scouting product information it’s only going to make you look a bit of a thickie when you’re discussing current affairs.

8AM 

Dave has a better start to the day but is anxious to see how the UK stock market opens, so hangs around at home until 8AM, thinks that AIG will go pop before the month is out.

9AM

Dave arrives at 9am. His first comment is that we are indeed heading for a depression not recession, surprised that this comes as a shock to many, especially as there as been so much focus about this from the media. More importantly though the DaveN blog is still not feeding out correctly, the indexed content is less than fresh. Will Google be kind to us ? Dave mentions friends within the industry who have had similar experiences with their blog and it has taken 3-4 weeks to get back in.

Google news is the topic of discussion in the office, more on that later.  Dave takes a call from a client to get up to speed with the direction they want to go in, as usual a flurry of ideas come from the DaveN corner.

11am

Dave now in a meeting with one of the original UK Seos and yes I’m earwigging you’d be surprised the amount of information you can learn in this office.

Meanwhile, the new Dan and myself are reviewing the latest in-house development project.

2PM

Dave is spending  the day with one of his oldest friends in the industry NFFC, he was an Administrator  at webmasterworld when Dave first Joined. Emails and few phone calls done in the interim,  he’s still miffed about Google News and the United Airlines so I he is tasking one of us to see how hard it is to get some quotes from companies in the travel sector..

3PM

Still talking SEO and how the industry has changed over the years. I reflect on this and wish I had been in the industry longer.  Talk focuses on major corporations on the net and their site SEO. I smile as  NFFC  works on an Apple Mac, I know just how much Dave dislikes them hehe.

5.40 PM

Dave is talking to a client about effective URLS and giving site advice. He stresses the importance of being descriptive on web pages about a product and getting the right call to action in. I know it’s going to be a long day/ night for him once again.

This may sound a little odd, but the other week I had an accidental meeting 5000 miles away from home with Philip Blair Product Director HTC Europe. I had a lay over at LAX when I flew back from SES at San Jose, and a mix up in security meant that I walked off with the wrong laptop and I quickly had a guy chasing me waving what looked like my laptop at me.

I joked about the fact that I wouldn’t have found him in LAX and off I went on my way. Bored I headed up to Air New Zealand’s business lounge, (strange but true, they had some great business class flight deals from the UK to the USA) where I met the same guy that I had accidentally picked up his laptop in security. We got chatting and even though we both had Lenovo Laptops, I was surprised that he had the exact same Laptop carry case, a NON-lenovo one. Even more surprised that this was his and my first time on Air New Zealand, I’d flown in from San Francisco and he’s flown into LAX from Canada somewhere, but what totally freaked me out was when I found out he lived 10miles away from me !!

Anyways we got chatting about HTC because they are awesome, and I wanted to really know what he thought about android, well it’s going to happen soon and it’s very stable and fast, was the message I got from Philip.

so maybe, just maybe I will invest in a HTC Android driven mobile phone to replace my existing HTC.
DaveN

Are we starting to see Google turn the screw of “we don’t like you” on blogs? For many months rumours had been flying around that Google was going to purge a lot of blogs, at the beginning of last week I noticed that some of my pages were not getting indexed like they normally would.

example :
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/taking-your-laptop-into-the-us-how-to-protect-yourself.html
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/a-week-in-the-life-of-david-naylor.html
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/seo-wiki.html

None are indexed in Google…

I knew we had done some backroom work on the blog so I checked webmastertools to see what errors it had turned up, and noticed some general errors. Today we have spent most of the day tracking and Greping logs files and server files to find these errors, but really haven’t turned up anything. Other than we are fine in Google’s Blogsearch and Dead in Google Organic? Of course I have had a few emails from people offering me advice lol.

Most people now think that DavidNaylor is banned in Google or at least under a penalty. This doesn’t sit right with me as most people are saying I have either gained too many links over the past month due to the Google and Twitter debate, others feel it’s because of the NON seo posts on a seo blog which again I feel incorrect and I have cited each time, most of the links gained Via the Google and Twitter thing Matt Cutts gained them as well. For off topic posts I pointed out Matt Cutts ranks for Seo Blogs, but his last posts have been :

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/best-yogurt-in-silicon-valley/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-delete-files-from-a-directory-i-own-in-freebsd/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/arrrrr-you-prepared-for-talk-like-a-pirate-day-with-fonts/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/twitter-added-nofollow-to-www-links-in-their-bio-field/ < the one that started all this LOL ;)
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-user-agent/

I also pointed out in the emails, that if Google is banning me because I SPOKE OUT on certain topics, wouldn’t that be Web Censorship? I understand what Spamdexing is and I understand the T’s and C’s at Google. Anyway I have pulled a few Posts and I’m going to put the Blog on Moderation and pull the full RSS feeds, until I can get to the root of this.

DaveN

update 1 am, Bed got really annoyed about Google news for some reason,we will do a blog post on it later

update 8 O’clock, Got Back home 15 mins ago, ready to start Strikepoint with Mikkel going to chat about Google Chrome : United Airlines - can you click spam you way to a billion? and My Blog issues with Google

Update 6 O’clock , I did get lunch, Becky walked in with carrot and coriander soup for me, mmm .. i get looked after! I then spent the afternoon chatting on IM about possible issues with the Blog, read and started digesting a 12 month business plan of a website we will be doing SEO on, chatted briefly with Mikkel about tonights Strikepoint on Webmaster Radio, and also decided with Becky that Bronco will close from the 24th Dec -5 Jan this year so that everyone should be well rested and have a good Christmas break.

Still wondering why we haven’t had a quote back on a new fibre optic line (Becky reminded me), can’t decide whether to release Blog to twitter Plugin, Interesting that Matt Cutts commented on my blog about the issues I’m having which would indicate that I’m not banned I guess or under any penalty, guess I will have to wait on the Crawl Team.

In total I have answered 43 Seo related questions to clients ( I love Mondays ), agreed to work with a new client and have to call 3 people that want to work with Bronco, I have also booked an appointment in lancaster on thursday, not a bad days work really ( only twittered 3 - 4 times todays :))

Update 1 O’clock, looks like a missing lunch day today,

The new in house spidering tool is taking shape nicely hopefully be ready for beta testing.

My Twitter plugin is working well and stable now :) might release to the public.

Finished answering emails, only 4 hours behind now, I still need to check back link profiles and competitor analysis on the 2 new clients signed last week.

________________________________________

A week in the life of David Naylor SEO starts here…

Day 1)

OK, we are just into the first hour and Dave is currently talking to our technical team about this blog. Certain specific pages of the blog are not being indexed hmm.

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/seo-wiki.html
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/msn-messenger-down.html

Hat tip to the webmaster central team. The index page in particular is throwing up errors , so the search is on for a rapid solution. A technical issue? The initial thoughts were on an Internal Sever Error.

Dave will also be speaking at the Affiliate Marketing Conference in London 14-15th October. He is on the Extreme Strategies for Affiliates panel day 1. So Kieron emailed him this morning looking forward to the event and mentioning the opportunity to win 1 of 2 Affiliate Passes worth £299 each just for leaving a blog comment. Now Dave is back to answering emails from clients and checking up on their latest ranks.

He’s asked me to do some client checks and the other Dan is working on an SEO report.

Update : 12:32

Been with Ben (server admin expert) all morning so far due to the technical issues with the David Naylor blog,

I noticed this last week :

Now General errors IMO are the worst kind, I mean

HTTP errors

Google encountered an error when attempting to view the URL. See RFC 2616 for more information about HTTP error codes. Google encountered an HTTP error when attempting to view the URL. In general:

• Ensure that the file exists at the specified location. ) Done and OK
• If we attempted to crawl the URL from your Sitemap, make sure that your Sitemap lists the URL correctly. I don’t have a sitemap
• If we attempted to crawl the URL from a link on your site, make sure that the link is correct. Done and the links are fine
• If another site lists a broken link to your site, we may list that URL but you may not be able to fix the error. Hmmmm that can’t be it surely
• If the file exists, your server may have returned an error when we tried to access the file. I have spent the morning going though server logs

so as you can guess this is a Pita, thank god we have 2 Seo Dan’s working on the client side at the moment.