Today – 31st October 2011 – is a day for the diary as it marked the day when the world population officially hit 7Billion.

The car gets a fair chunk of blame when it comes to over consumption of materials and causing polution. It is said that all cars should be Hydrogen cell based as this is by far the cleanest and possibly the most sustainable technology we have produced to date – the problem is that it is just too expensive at this time, but so too were the first commercial computers (The Ferranti Mark 1) they were the size of a small van and cost several annual salaries of the average person.

7 Billion & Counting is a post from: NigelFrith.com

It is a sad day. As a late comer to all things mac, I am fully converted and no other person has made the computing experience so simple, intuitive and sophisticated. Not to mention the advances in music playing and storage.

When Pixar is only your 4th greatest achievement, you can hold your hand up to having a very special life.

What other innovations have we lost with the passing of Steve Jobs?  Thank you Steve, you will be sadly missed.

The King Is Dead, Long Live The King. R.I.P Steve Jobs. is a post from: NigelFrith.com

So yet again a big brand gets caught trying to game Google, what JCPenny did (or rather their SEO agency did – allegedly) is, in Google’s eyes wrong but is it uncommon practise? On this occasion they got caught out but in the modern world of ranking; I would hazard a guess that most big sites (by that I mean sites with over 5m UU per month) have, at some stage engaged in a little link purchasing. I am lucky to have got to know a number of people who have successfully grown some big sites and only a couple of them can honestly say they have never had link purchasing as a major part of their SEO strategy at one point or another.

So, on to the subject of this post. Clearly and proven beyond all doubt, Google (by their own admission) cannot keep on top of “illegal” link activity. It must sap a huge amount of resources and effort to try to keep up to date with known illegal activity and also dealing with spam reports. Sometimes it pays to think the unthinkable when trying to work out how the whole business of linking may change in the future to combat issues and find a genuine way to rank sites importance. Below are some random thoughts: (and boy do I mean RANDOM!)

Conspiracy One – “nofollow” links carry more weight than “dofollow”: like all the suggestions below, this sounds crazy but let’s think about this a second. Anyone who sets a link as a nofollow is likely to be either engaged in PageRank sculpting, a tight-arse who does not want to pass link love or more likely a site that is simply referencing another site for genuine reasons.

Now herein lies the clue. The fact of the matter is that very few SEO’ers are going to spend cash on “nofollow” links. So therefore it stands to reason that more of the nofollow links are likely to be much more relevant and created for the true intention of why we are supposed to create a link: to reference a useful page, not pass PageRank. A crazy idea? woud it really surprise you to find out that TrustRank has a major component that upweights nofollow links. One to test at some point soon – comment if you know

Conspiracy Two - Outbound links are as valuable as Inbound links: Many of us have suspected and even proved that outbound links can be critical, it is why you see so any pages linking to authority sites like wikipedia. What intrigues me and makes me think that we are all underestimating the true value of outbound links is a little line hidden somewhere in the Google Webmaster Guidelines (I can’t locate the actual line so I think I may have seen in the the Q&A section on the link provided) but it states to the effect that “you are responsible for sites that you link to so if you link to poor quality or irrelevant sites, your ranking could be

Google, TrustRank, PageRank, Conspiracy Theories and More. The Future Of Ranking? is a post from: NigelFrith.com

The last few years has seen the

Will Ipads & Tablets Be The Death Of DS & PSP’s? is a post from: NigelFrith.com

The writing has been on the wall for a long time about data charging – I commented on it recently about the effect negative effect Twitter would have on the small but growing social media industry by charging huge amounts for its content.

Well things have just changed up a gear or two…. I just got off the phone with a leading social media monitoring firm (Vocus) to hear that Facebook have stated they will be charging over $1m per year for

Content is King! Long Live Data…Until We All Make It “Private” is a post from: NigelFrith.com

As someone heavily involved in social media and being a founder of SocialLabs I was as concerned (as other social media start-ups

Twitter API Charges May Start To Kill The Social Media Industry is a post from: NigelFrith.com

That may seem a controversial question but let us ask ourselves this: If Google do not make any sizeable acquisitions that provide them new sources of traffic they do not get from their owned and operated properties, where will the growth come from?

It is very possible that this years

Has Google Really Had Its Day For Search Traffic? is a post from: NigelFrith.com

Comscore Historical Cyber Monday Stats

Over the last few years we have seen a continual rise in the amount of traffic concentrated on just one day of the year for online shopping. It is true to say that from about November 1st, web traffic for online retail really starts to build up but there is one day in the year which it all comes to a peak – this year, that day that is expected to be on Monday 6th December 2010 – aka “cyber monday”

Having studied traffic trends from some very large shopping comparison sites over the past 5 years the trending of traffic has been quite interesting as it has shown clearly the generally peaks and flows throughout the year – what we see as a normal pattern is a very strong January, with numbers being as high as all of December and sometime beating December but never is there one day which surpasses the cyber Monday stats.

February is a big drop – usually atleast 30% lower than November numbers and as much as half of December/January figures. April is poor normally then it climbs back up to stabilise for May and stays pretty much consistent for the rest of the year with a few low points during summer holidays and bank holidays. In 2010 the General Election in May had a very negative effect on traffic so 2010 has some catching up to do in general.

Traffic starts a slight growth in September with October coming back strong and then, as said above, 1st November seeing the first real signs of the Christmas rush

This year will be even stronger mainly due to two reasons – 1) many more retailers are pushing their online strategy and also using social media to get more users and 2) sites that provide sales information on cheap electricals and voucher codes sites are set to see a bumper increase in consumers hunting down the best deal. What a lot of consumers are starting to realise is that the main retailers do not always put the best deal on their own sites – instead preferring to get extra traffic by letting affiliate sites offer goods at just a few % less than the deals on the main site. This is especially true with voucher codes.

Which Day Will Be The Biggest Christmas Shopping Day 2010? is a post from: NigelFrith.com

How will it change things? well for one thing I think

How will Google’s site preview function change search behaviour? is a post from: NigelFrith.com

How Will Social Media Marketing Change User Behaviour? is a post from: NigelFrith.com