Notice of Right to Cancel

It seems even if you have a small SEO company and offer work from your home, which can be referred to as 'Doorstep Selling', you may need the legal documentation of a 'Notice of Right to Cancel'.

Seems a little extreme, but I have it on good grounds.

What does this entail, well it means instead of offering your services and carrying out the work and then wishing to be paid; somewhere in the middle of all that you should have got your new client to sign a Notice of Right to Cancel. Otherwise you could be leaving yourself open to firstly, none payment and secondly legal action if your new client is so inclined.

It's not the end of the world though as a simple form like this could solve all your problems and allow you to sleep soundly at night.












If you're interested in the subject or just want to find out a little more, here's a site full to the brim with information on Doorstep Selling.

Google Personal Search

Don't get me wrong I like Google.

I like Google a lot more than I like Bing and the now defunct Yahoo!

But personal search, well it seems to be going a little too far...

I carry out searches every day for different clients, I need to, to check how their selected bench-marked keywords are performing in SERPs. But every time I do this now I need to remember to 'disable customizations based on search history' - why should I have to.








Why can't I opt out.

It isn't just the forgetting to disable - I can't it's implanted.

It's when I carry out a search of my own before dinner and visit a few sites, go and eat, then carry out the same search query again after dinner, hey presto everything I visited before dinner is now at the top of the page. This is frustrating, because now I don't which site was genuinely the best - or should I say performed best in Google's SERP.

Maybe some users like this, well if that's the case let there be a big on/off button.

It seems to me that the web is dumming down, aiming for the lowest common denominator. Our web pages are becoming more cluttered with advertising, you need to scroll down half a yard with most blogs now to get to content - you can't see the wood for the trees.

Is this really what we imagined a few years ago, that the web would become just one great big battle for which api, web service, website &c will get the most advertising revenue.

It seems so, and its really putting me off.

Like I said I like Google, but localising & personalising my search, well I might just have to start looking elsewhere.

Google Labs - Site Performance

You probably have tracking measures set-up for your website to let you know if it ever goes down. How accurate are these and do they give you information about when your website is running slowly - probably not.

In Google Webmaster there's a little tool that's been in operation for a short while now, it's under 'labs' and it's called 'site performance'. It's basically a nifty bit of kit which lets you see visually (see above) how your site has been performing. It also tells you how your site is performing compared to other sites on the web - that is, is it faster or slower.

I've been complaining for quite some time about the speed of websites, basically I find too many sites too slow, this is usually down to adding too many apis, or poor consolidating of JavaScript and CSS script.

Google bringing in their 'page speed' is a blessing and hopefully it'll shake up the developers who persist in trying to bring web users machines to a staggering halts.

By using the site performance gadget in Webmaster Tools you'll have more ammunition to throw at your web developers when they tell you, you are wrong and that your website runs just fine - be that on their system!

West Penwith

The glorious solitude to be found throughout Cornwall's moorland.

Ping Goat is Not Down

It seemed at first that Ping Goat, the blog pinging service, was down, which would be a real shame.

But it isn't really.

I think they basically got a little fed up with users simply copying and pasting the 'very long' URL, saving this as a bookmark and then once a week giving it a click, without paying any attention to their site - they do have tools!

Therefore you can fortunately still use Ping Goat to ping all your familiar sites: Technorati, Icerocket, weblogs &c. All you need to do is go to:

http://pingoat.net/

Notice it's a .net and not .com site now.

Simply fill in your blog details like you did first time you used this excellent pinging service and hey-presto your blogs just been pinged.

Fetch as Googlebot - Not Just a Gimmick

When I first seen the 'labs' button and 'Fetch as Googlebot' in Webmaster tools, I thought to myself what good is this? I can render pages in SERPs if I need to see if they're working or not - or can I?

By entering the page you want to check and clicking 'Fetch', if your page is available on the net Google will return a green tick and 'success'.











But that's not all - there may be something hidden.

By clicking on the 'success', you get a full blown view of exactly what the Googlebot sees when he visits your page.













Not very interesting if there's nothing to hide, but if something somehow got into your code, which you didn't intentionally put there, well, it could just save you, not only a headache, but also a little time in Google jail.

Val Martello - Number 5

Driving made fun again through the Val Martello.