Google has released a statement about having low quality backlinks to your website. In typical Google fashion it’s not very specific, however I’m reading that having a heap of low quality links to a site that doesn’t hold a lot of weight can effect rankings. Read the article here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/dealing-with-low-quality-backlinks.html

The more time you spend shopping online, the more you want to shake web developers and site owners. If each site owner spent some time buying from their top competitors and then tested their own site, then surely they too would be pulling their hair out in frustration at the stupidity of their website.

Well e-shop owners, if you just read and implement this guide from Smashing Magazine there will be no more hair-pulling for us customers…if you need help in implementing these efforts into your e-commerce website contact us.

Now go and read 15 Common Mistakes in E-Commerce Design

Todays hottest 100 website is home to the French first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. Ok, so she’s an ex-model so it had to be pretty and she’s French so it had to be stylish, but as an ambassador for her country it also had to be practical and it is. A fashion first – no Flash!

See for yourself www.carlabrunisarkozy.org/en

How much time do you think visitors spend at your website? I know most site owners like to think visitors will spend in excess of 15 minutes browsing pages in their website whilst sipping on a cup of tea. Jakob Nielsen, usability guru, has an interesting article about the power of 10 and roughly how long each website action should take (or not take)…

Read the article here to make sure you aren’t losing customers in the first second. Not sure if any of these apply to your website? We can audit your website to find out.

I’ve been ignoring Bing as a search engine, mostly because it’s made by the evil Microsoft. However, it’s now overtaken Yahoo for most of our clients sites as the second largest search engine referrer. That is no threat to Google as the Big G still takes about 90% of the search engine credit, but I’m surprised it’s overtaken Yahoo so rapidly. It could still be the novelty factor, but it could also indicate real competition.

So, not to be left out in the cold, the key factors for number one websites in Bing seem to be:

• having an old domain name
• having quality inbound links, specifically from pages that have the same keywords in the title
• then the usual good amount of quality content (I’ve read Bing likes more than 300 words on a page), clean code and a sitemap

If you’ve done a good job of optimising your site for Google then your rankings shouldn’t be too different for Bing. If you’ve got loads of spammy links holding your website up in Google then these won’t help you in Bing. Bing seems to like better qualified links than Google – it’s about time!

Read more over at Bing