Jill Whalen has finished another piece of her excellent “how to” series of articles at Talent Zoo. This one covers writing a killer title tag. I agree with all she says, and would add that after I’ve written my title tags I’ll do a quick search on Google for each of the keywords I’m targeting to compare my tag with those that appear on the first page. I want to make sure that whatever I can control to appear in the search results is more clickable than anyone else’s title tag and description.

Read Jill’s article here: http://www.talentzoo.com/website/columns/ColumnContent.aspx?Id=2140

I was meaning to write a post last week about the newly launched Ecocho.com as I had another of those “Why didn’t I think of that?” moments. Ecocho combine Google and Yahoo sponsored search listings, and allows people to search and feel good about the environment. Everytime once of their searchers clicked on a sponsored listing in the results, Ecocho would receive a tidy payout from Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher. From some of their enormous bucket of money they would plant some trees so everyone feels warm and fuzzy.

But I read today in the SMH that Google has pulled the plug on them, saying it’s against AdSense policy. As Ecocho is founded by Tim Macdonald of the Found Agency I kind of thought – oh – how sad (in a somewhat green-eyed manner), he already made a mottsa last year by selling to the Photon Group. But reading through the article, I feel it’s somewhat unfair and I’m wondering just what is going on in Google Australia.

This is the second major company this year who has shown Google Australia what they are doing before executing it and not being told it’s against Google Guidelines.  I’m referring to the Flight Center debacle at this years SMX – they too had shown their stuff to Google earlier in the year, were not told it was against the Guidelines, then made to look rather silly in front of crowd of eager optimizers.

So I take back my oh – how sad attitude. If I was Mr Macdonald I would be rather peeved that someone’s standing in my way of earning another million this year…

Argh! My client, who just happens to be my husband, has had his Google maps listing hijacked. And this time it’s not a case of him not registering his maps listing in the local business center and it being unverified. It’s really hijacked!

We created the listing a few weeks ago for his newly launched website, CodeSense, and added all the details together. His listing was doing pretty well for web development Sydney, when this morning I discovered overnight he’d transformed into an Indian software company called Nestsoft. Interestingly my husband is a director of a company called Netsoft, however they are not in India and whilst their website is not pretty, it’s certainly not as tragic as Nestsoft.

See in the listing – it’s the second one down – it’s got a phone number that’s switched off (we’re presuming fake), but it’s still got our original CodeSense description. The title is different too. It’s on the first page page if you search within Google maps

And when you click into it, it’s just mighty confusing…

See the CodeSense description and email address are still there, along with Nestsoft and their crappy logo.

We’ve checked out the local business center to see if it had been hacked and no, it looks normal – no sign of Nestsoft at all. So at this stage we’ve lodged an enquiry to Google and will wait to see the response.

Has anyone else seen this happen before?

I know you’ve all been waiting, and even performing your own Google searches on the peeps at My Website Designer, and alas, these searches are returning nil poi.

I think their site must be fairly new, the archive is only bringing up a Plesk page from last year so perhaps they are just hanging out in the sandbox…nothing’s going to happen to them for a while so recheck in a few months to see how the keyword stuffing is working out for them.

Interesting title hey… yes the subject is exactly the same..yawn…