I spent the weekend in Cork for the Irish Blog Awards. Great time, fantastic night, lovely people and cool place. Blacknight were the worthy winners of the Best Business Blog category sponsored by Red Cardinal.

Well done to the shortlisted blogs in the Best Blog of a Business category. Details inside

RedCardinal.ie is sponsoring the Best Blog of a Business category at the forthcoming Irish Blog Awards 2009. I’ll be in Cork on the night to award the winner his/her prize, and I’m delighted to publish the shortlist here. See inside for more…

If you see issues with my RSS feed I’d really appreciate if you could ping me.

Sorry to any feed subscribers that had to put up with complete gibberish.

Text book example of a Wordpress upgrade gone terribly wrong…

Linking out is a good thing for any website. It can help to signal topicality. It can help o create networks.

But sometimes excessive outbound linking can and does hurt your Search Engine rankings…

Quick funny about Technorati’s developer wiki getting spammed to death…

What happens when Google just wont pick up your site?

The first thing to check is whether Googlebot can actually access your content.

If you have Ruadhan O’Donoghue’s Wordpress Mobile Plugin with WURFL plugin installed you may want to consider deactivating it.

Serving mobile content to Googlebot and Slurp is going to impact your Search Engine rankings.

If I had a penny cent for every time I’ve had to re-upload my .htaccess file to this site….

If you suffer from Wordpress overwriting your custom .htaccess rules fret no more – the solution is deceptively simple.

Understanding and controlling how search engines access and index the contents of your website can greatly assist in achieving higher rankings for the pages that matter the most.

Why I blog. You could say it’s fairly obvious, but then I could retort by saying that this post is schizophrenic.

And then I might not retort at all. Now I’m confused.

This post was to be all about how Krishna could make her blog more Search Engine friendly. Unfortunately it became a discovery of the site being hacked.

There is also some advice for Krishna, and I hope her site has already been patched or is soon to be so.

Given the right signals search engines will reciprocate with good rankings.

But what are the signals you can control, and what should those signals be?

A look at another Irish Blog Award nominee might help answer these questions.

Wow, what a week. First there was Search Marketing World 2007, and then there was ShareIT down in Cork. Oh, and did I mention that I might be leaving the Irish SEO industry?

Optimising thin-content sites is a difficult task. Search engines, by their nature, love text. So image rich sites can be especially hard to rank.

Site architecture is such an important factor in crawling and ranking, and it becomes even more so when your dealing with a thin-content site such as an image blog or an e-commerce site.

I’m not sure why so many people are finding my site while searching for ‘whore’.

But I do want to say a big Thank You to the Cork Telecoms Entrepreneurs who sent me a fab little Pocket PC.

It’s a fact of life that spammers wouldn’t be in business if they weren’t making a dollar. Another fact of life is that very often SEO and spamming live very closely.

This is a post about some particularly well-known SEO tools that were pushed through comment spam left on my blog. A mini-rant? Yes, and a look at the effectiveness of ‘long copy’ pages to sell products.

Please let me know if I’ve missed your acceptance of my Free Consulting Offer.

Please check the list and let me know if you need to be added.

Want to comment directly on Google Google blog posts? User commenting has always been disabled on all Google blogs. Until today.

Google has just announced that user commenting will be enabled on the Webmaster Blog.

Absolute class. The ‘So what’s happening’ comment has me in bits.

The animation is fantastic, and I think this is a great example of how new media can draw attention to your website. In fact, it’s so good here it is:

The first count is in. Find out who was voted into this years prestigious Blog Awards.

Links to each and every nominated site and page are inside.

What started out as a friendly blog thread has quickly escalated into one of the biggest on-line give-aways the Irish blog scene has ever seen.

Something tells me this is just the beginning. But if you fancy €2,000 of free web design read on.

There’s a contest going on and the stakes are high.

Your feed subscribers could win you free drink.

A nice little service that lets users vote on the impact the actions of large companies have.

Do you think this would be a good idea for Irish politics?

Roam4Free eh? Sounds compelling – something that everyone who roams wants.

I think Pat is on to an absolute winner. And with a couple of tweaks to the website I think this will become even more of a no-brainer for customers.

But is my advice any good? You decide (and there’s a free link for anyone who can figure out what I’m thinking at the end :mrgreen:)

Did you know that the META Description tag can be one of the most important factors dictating whether searchers will actually visit your website?

But META descriptions aren’t useful for attracting search engines, they’re useful for attracting the people who use search engines. Read on to learn how your META tags can get you more traffic (and I’m pretty sure you aren’t thinking what I’m thinking).

After taking down GreyWolf’s blog, a hacker threatens some of the biggest webmaster-related sites on the Internet. Digg.com included on the threat list.

Irish Blog Awards – do I deserve a nomination?

A quick fluffy link to an interesting post about Search Marketing in Portugal.

As the title suggests, this is A Really Simple Guide to RSS.

When and why do Google de-index pages?

Perhaps it’s just me, but when 2 pages about Thinkhouse PR disappear from Google’s index there’s something fishy going on…

Sometimes spammers can put a smile on your face.

For me today is one of those days

I’d really hate to be the guy or gal who gave Ireland this first.

If you want a good laugh…