info [ AT ] redcardinal [ DOT ] ie
Coming Out
A weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I’m happy, I’m apprehensive. But the future is uncertain.
I started this blog on July 22 2006. The first post is dated July 18 and the site went live 4 days later. Since then I’ve met a whole bunch people through Red Cardinal. Clever people. Witty people (*glances at snr.*). Disgruntled people (*glances at snr.*). And quite a few souls who seem to spend disproportionate amounts of time on the Internet.
It’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve received a lot of emails and calls about SEO and Internet marketing. In this short time I’ve also discovered that Ireland has a long way to go in terms of Search Engine marketing and promotion.
I can see an eagerness to do better. I can see attention focusing more on Internet marketing strategies. And I hope, in some small part, that I can help bring about change.
But there’s one thing I really have to do before I can go any further.
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is a North American holiday commemorating a feast first held in 1621 by Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. It falls on the fourth Thursday in November in the United States (and the second Monday in October in Canada).
Thursday last was the fourth Thursday in November. It was one of the biggest holidays in the States, a day on which to give thanks for what you have.
Well something special happened on Thanksgiving. Something that lifted a weight from me, a dark cloud disappeared and brightness shone forth.
Someone gave me a gift:
The gift of ‘trust’. After just 4 months of blogging and actively building links, Red Cardinal came out of the sandbox on Thanksgiving. I had expected to wait at least nine months for that privilege…
Thank you Google and many happy returns 
Good stuff. Did you run that report on Web Trends?
Comment by Peter — November 26, 2006 @ 2:59 pm
Hi Peter
No. I use a number of sources to gather the ranking data. All free. One proprietary. You don’t need to pay for this sort of data.
Webtrends tends to be for corporates (you never see a published price for their Analytics software).
If your looking for a simple way to track keywords I would head over to digitalpoint.com and sign up for the free keyword tracker in the tools section.
Rgds
Richard
Comment by Richard Hearne — November 26, 2006 @ 3:16 pm
Richard, exact same thing happened to me. Looks like we’re in direct competition now.
And don’t you worry, I’ve been noticing your little wikipedia edits
Just joking. Congratulations.
Seriously, I thought this thread was a personal one.
Comment by Dave Davis — November 26, 2006 @ 4:29 pm
I second Dave there. Misleading title!!! I was thinking: that’s strange for a business site!!! Still, whatever gets people looking at it.
Congrats… you should do a before and after shot of some of your clients too and put up a portfolio page?!? Congrats again!
Comment by David Behan — November 26, 2006 @ 4:49 pm
Oh, and what tool is that? It looks like the DP keyword and backlink tracker (Shows same info) but slightly different.
Comment by Dave Davis — November 26, 2006 @ 4:53 pm
Wikipedia was totally above board. The original link on that page was pointing at content derived from my figures (with my consent). I’m sure the mods over there would have taken down the link if it was dodgy.
When did you pop out? I see your at #4. Well done Dave. Nice to see people who know what they’re actually talking about doing well. As they say, ‘the cream always rises to the top’
BTW I’m working on getting #3 removed as it’s not resolving (and TBH I’m not sure what RedSky are at – they’ve obviously had their site caught for duplicate content LOL). If you use Google webmaster tools you might consider submitting a spam report via your console (it has more weight than the normal report page). That would get you up to #3
I’m wondering have Google made some fairly big changes just this past Thursday. I’m seeing a boost in quite a lot of sites in the last few days.
Comment by Richard Hearne — November 26, 2006 @ 4:56 pm
Ahhh, Richard! It was all in jest. I’m proud of you for getting the wiki links. Really, they are deserved and relevant. I’m just jealous.
Yes, I’m glad to see you spotted that result too. I would have assumed it was a mistake on Googles part if Redsky hadn’t have branded it!
I’ll throw in a spam report in the console now.
I’m happy to be up there, although I’m not counting my chickens. I have not even got all my content ready. I’ve been working on it offline, and wasn’t expecting to get out of the box until the new year at the earliest. Still, it’s a bit early to be be doing any back patting just yet.
Most of my time this month has been spent working on learning and mastering the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. I have not concentrated **too** much on SEO.
Lots of other sites for me are popping out too. I have to say, I’m delighted.
Comment by Dave Davis — November 26, 2006 @ 5:05 pm
@DD I use the DigitalPoint tracker along with a few other toys, but I want to move over to something proprietary that is sitting on an Irish IP.
Must start reading up WCAG 2.0 but I don’t give it much chance considering most people (experts included) don’t seem to understand 1.0.
You’ve done really well to get to #4 so quickly – I had a look at your link profile (and found quite a few sites you have about the place :mrgreen:).
@DB I had considered it and had done up some nice graphs and the like, but the more I think about it the more I’m inclined to keep my powder dry in public.
Comment by Richard Hearne — November 27, 2006 @ 8:36 am
“something proprietary that is sitting on an Irish IP” Like? Care to share?
About position 4, I actually wasn’t targeting search engine optimisation primarily. It was a few others. A long road ahead I guess. And yes, I have a few sites all over the place. I assume you were looking at the w3c sites profile. Many I did for customers and are only hosted with me, I don’t actually own them. But I have permission to garnish some link love
Others are experiments I set up a long time ago and all the adsense revenue adds up and allows me to play SEO 
Spending too much time on domaining at the moment, guess I should get back to SEO.
Finally, inspired by you and my rants on your blog, I have set up my own. Partially. Will be working on it the next few weeks. So thanks are in order.
Comment by Dave Davis — November 27, 2006 @ 8:57 am
I found your dogs website (cute) and your sister’s (in-law / half-sister?) site, amongst a few other business sites. I think that people could do well by looking at your backlinks to see how you managed to get to #4. Well done.
But you already have a blog
Comment by Richard Hearne — November 27, 2006 @ 9:03 am
The “sister in law” is my Girlfriend. It’s a family joke that the dog is a sibling. So naturally, my girlfriend would be here sister in law (We’re together nearly 7 years, so practically!). Hope that cleared it up!
My other blog was a travelogue for my friends when I did my round the world trip. Content is so valuable these days, I decided to keep it up. You would not believe the longtail searches to my Hong Kong posts. Some are pretty sick.
Well, anyway, I’ll be posting the results of a few experiments I have been doing on the RedFly Marketing Blog, including the Optimizer tests. Gives me a chance to rant about web stuff without my friends and family complaining that they don’t understand.
Comment by Dave Davis — November 27, 2006 @ 9:59 am
Very good indeed, though I was holding my breath when I clicked on the title.
Do you know how this information is obtained by these tools?
Do you think you’d need a Google API Key (free) and then start querying via it?
I know there’s a 1000 query/day limit on it though, that’s why I was wondering how you’d go about checking PR and Links in/out etc.
I haven’t gone much into the SEO side of websites, mainly just desiging and developing but it would be an interesting area to develop a custom tool on.
Comment by David Doran — December 3, 2006 @ 12:21 am
David
These tools almost all require an API key. The 1000 query limit isn’t such a problem if you pull out 100 results per page. Technically the pagerank lookup doesn’t require an API key.
Links in/out would probably be based on LIVE!/Yahoo! data.
Pulling the data isn’t the hard part. Storing, indexing and displaying it is more challenging.
Rgds
Richard
Comment by Richard Hearne — December 3, 2006 @ 11:07 am
Hey Richard.
Notice the redsky spam pages are climbing even higher?
I have found 9 so far and reported them in webmaster console but for some reason they are still showing.
Sits giving a constant 404 or 500 and receiving spam reports are usually removed faster than this. No longer (If ever) cloaked. Changing your useragent to GoogleBot still returns a 404/500 (Depends).
Any insight into this? Any way to prove who is responsible?
Comment by Dave DAvis — December 4, 2006 @ 9:38 pm
Dave
If memory serves me correctly, Dave over at AKA mentioned to me that he did some work for them. Now sure what exactly.
The SEO ireland SERP seems to be quite fluid at the minute. And I thought that subdomain spam no longer worked
Even stranger is the main domain just showing a Plesk default page.
That might be why it’s not getting removed – the request is just timing out rather than 404. Maybe Google is giving it time to ‘fix’ itself.
Comment by Richard Hearne — December 4, 2006 @ 10:13 pm
Looks like I spoke a little too soon.
Most DCs are showing a little…. update. Not removed, but an update.
Comment by Dave Davis — December 4, 2006 @ 11:14 pm