Internet

Hate the new google homepage ?

If you hate the new google homepage try this instead,

 google demonstration

&channel=linkdoctor in referrer log from Google

found a strange thing in my stats today from google &channel=linkdoctor

google.co.uk/search?q=KEYWORD&channel=linkdoctor

no idea what it is yet, but if anyone knows please comment below.

Warwickshire Business Directory

I gave my Warwickshire Business Directory a bit of a revamp today, it was all looking a bit stale and was never set up right in the first place anyway, so it was well in need of something doing to it.

The first thing I did was to sort out all the business categories and then I created a directory for each major town within Warwickshire.

It was previously set up with a directory/folder for each category, but this was too time consuming and I found I was getting in a right mess. I decided to run the categories of just 3 files;  a general category file, a category in Town file, and a category in County file.

I also created an Alphabetical Category Search,
A : B : C : D : E : F : G : H : I : J : K : L : M : N : O : P : Q : R : S : T : U : V : W : X : Y : Z

and a Search By Business Name Facility:
A : B : C : D : E : F : G : H : I : J : K : L : M : N : O : P : Q : R : S : T : U : V : W : X : Y : Z

Buying antique furniture on Ebay

As a UK based antique furniture restorer with over 30 years experience, I have purchased a fair amount of antique furniture on Ebay for restoration and resale. It’s very easy to come unstuck and end up with a lemon of a piece and here in this article, I’m going to highlight a few of the important do’s and don’ts of buying antique furniture on Ebay. Not everyone will agree with my observations but it’s worked well for me!

Search Terms

Remember, not every seller knows how to list their item and they often either choose the wrong classification or more importantly write a bad title. If the title is wrong, the item will be hard to find. If it’s hard to find, less people will be able to bid on it and the selling price will usually be lower. Here’s some examples of misspelled titles that spell good opportunities for buyers! chest of draws, tabel, book case, dinning table, mahogony, the list goes on. Using any of these words in the sellers title means the item will not show up so well for searches, so if you are looking to buy, its worth searching using these miss spelt words. Many sellers use all sorts of weird words to describe their item in the title for example “old desk” or “large desk”. If you want to buy an antique desk, you’ll search “antique desk” or “desk” in the antiques section but what about if someone has listed “old desk” in the wrong section? You won’t see it! The answer is to enter the word “desk” in “all categories”. There will be 1000’s of “desk” some old, some modern, the way to do this is to spend time searching all the “desk” up to most recent – yes it’ll take a while! Once you have searched them all, then its just a simple matter of logging onto Ebay once a day searching “desk” and catching up on the most recent listings since your last search – won’t take long! This way, you’ll see every single desk that’s listed on Ebay. Get a list going – desk, bookcase, table, dining chairs etc go through the backlog of listings in all categories and then update your search for each once a day.

Sellers

Get to know the sellers by viewing their listings time after time. Check their feedback, see who’s bought their items by viewing “items for sale” and completed listings and see what’s sold and what hasn’t. View their current items for sale, view the items they’ve sold in the past and the items that haven’t sold. Doing this will tell you very quickly whether the seller is a trade or private. If there’s a long list of furniture going back months then odds on its  a trader, If there’s the odd furniture plus ordinary household possessions, most likely it’ll be a private seller. Check for negative feedback in the usual way but remember everyone makes a couple of mistakes so don’t be too hard on them if they are 99.9%!

Whilst you can buy well from trade on Ebay, you’ll buy better from private sellers. Check the prices their items have sold for, if some of the prices are obviously low, it suggests that the seller is prepared to take a loss on some sales which is good news for you the buyer and show the seller is honest.

Making an offer

Some regular trade buyers make offers for items before an auction has ended, be aware that this could happen because if it does and its not you who has made the offer, the item will vanish from Ebay just as you are about to bid on it – very exasperating! Those most likely to accept offers are newcomers to Ebay who worry their item won’t sell, so look at their feedback number, if its very low, they will be the sellers most likely to opt for an early offer. There’s nothing to stop you making an offer using the ask a question facility, I personally don’t do this as I don’t think its in the spirit of Ebay but that’s just me.

Honesty

Is the seller being honest in their description and answers to your questions? Some sellers stretch the truth, others are ill informed and know no different! Try to work out which you are dealing with. Example – if the piece is listed as Georgian, it may not be, either because the seller is economical with the truth or because they just don’t know – you have to make a judgement on the true level of knowledge of the person who you’re dealing with.

Titles

Look at the title for the listing – is it well worded and professional with all the right keywords, is the listing itself wordy and persuasive, look at past listings for the same seller, if it all looks good and as it should be, that will most likely be a trade seller. If the title is a bit iffy and the listing itself doesn’t read too well as if the seller doesn’t know what they’ve got or what they’re doing, then the seller is most likely private.

Images

Check the images on the listing. Are they well taken and consistently good? Probably a trade seller. If the images are under/ over exposed, often a private seller using a mobile phone camera. Look at the backgrounds of the images – what can you see? Domestic clutter? Tidy? Untidy? Valuable furnishings, nice car on drive? All these things point toward a certain quality of seller and it can be very easy to ascertain what sort of seller you are watching and therefore get some idea of whether the item is any good or not. Look closely at the images – are they taken from a distance on purpose so as to hide detail of the item, is the picture blurred for the same reason, how much detail does the image show, few images will enable you to judge the state of repair of an item so tread carefully at all times and be wary of buying from an image alone.

Ask a question

Always, always ask a question pertaining to condition and make the question specific eg is the item damaged at all and if so what’s damaged? Don’t ask, what condition is it in. Ask if the item has any cracks or splits in the top or sides, or are the chair frames loose at all, anywhere? be specific and nail the questions so the seller can only answer honestly. Look to the answers given – if they avoid the question or are ambiguous, be careful! And, don’t sound too keen!

If the item doesn’t have a condition description, ask yourself why. Is it intentional or is it lack of thought. If they don’t describe and you don’t ask and the items a dog, you’re stuffed!

Condition

Condition is everything with antique furniture. Colour, original finishes, past repairs and all these are subjective and open to abuse when describing either intentionally or innocently. Ask if the item has EVER been repaired and if so what has been done, this puts the seller right on the spot and their answer goes a long way in allowing you to make a judgement on who you’re dealing with. Evasive answers could either be an intention to deceive or are put out by sellers innocently covering their backs, you have to decide which!

Bids

In my opinion, only bid using a sniping tool. The main reason for me saying this is that if you bid early in the auction, the seller has a lot of time to work you out in terms of what you’ve bought in the past and what you’ve paid. If you bid at the last minute they cannot do their homework on you and therefore they cannot bid their own item higher (yes it happens) because they know you’ll pay more, so play your cards close to your chest, bid in the last 7 seconds and catch others by surprise also. If the item is something you desperately want, put a manual bid in about one minute from the end of the auction so you know you’ve bid.

Paying

Always try to pay cash on collection, this way you have the upper hand and can walk away if the item is dubious, which it sometimes will be. Try to negotiate, it maybe be better to agree to pay the seller £20.00 for their trouble and walk away rather than allow them to stick negative feedback on you. Once you have bid and won the item, keep in touch with the seller. If you have bought the item at a really cheap price, collect it fast in case they back out of the transaction. Treat the seller well and go out of your way to keep them happy, this way if you need a favour eg can you keep it a few days more before I collect, they’ll be happy to oblige.

Enjoying your purchase

There are many great buys to be had – almost always from private sellers but some from trade too. Do your homework on the seller, keep your wits about you and the chances are you’ll come away with a fantastic piece for a great price. By the way, if it does need any restoration or repair work undertaken, you know who to call!!!

http://www.antiquework.co.uk/

What on earth is falconry furniture?

Bit of a blip the other day when we were searching for a leather sofa on the internet, when one of the results led to a website all about furniture for falconry. Surely this couldn’t be a site selling bookshelves for Owls or sofas for Peregrine Falcons? Our curiosity got the better of us and we delved in…

 Falconry furniture actually refers to all the equipment used to train and control birds of prey. Each bird wears a bell and has an ID tag too, with a bracelet so long strips of leather called ‘tresses’ can be attached and the leash is then tied to the bracelet using what is called a falconer’s knot. You can even start to train your bird of prey with a ‘dummy bunny’ to get the bird into the swing of chasing rabbits!

 Getting even more sidetracked from our original mission, we then started looking for falconry courses so we could experience all this bird of prey malarkey for ourselves, as it sounds like it could be quite an amazing thing to do. We particularly liked the look of the falconry centre in Suffolk, as you get taught how to tie this famous falconer’s knot and you can take part in a workshop session learning to make things like the jesses and hoods out of leather.

 Now back to the search for our new sofa, which, quite frankly isn’t quite as intriguing as learning about falconry!

Gerald Duck – Don’t Duck the Question

Gerald Duck – Website Marketing Expert shares his marketing tips in the fantastic new eBook Don’t Duck the Question

Podline asks Gerald why it has taken this long to publish his work openly, asks why it is free, and also asks the question others have feared to ask “Why are there only 2 D’s in Gerald Duck?”

Kaspersky blocking AdSense Google

I’ve been running Kaspersky as my AV and security suite for a couple of years, haven’t changed any settings recently, but all of a sudden it has started blocking AdSense.

Not only is Kaspersky blocking AdSense it is also flagging the site displaying it as a potential phising site.

Not sure yet if it is a Kasperkey setting been changed or a Google AdSense setting. Will investigate more soon.

Update 17:46

It appears there was a problem at Kaspersky and was a False Positive which was reporting AdSense as phishing. A manual update of the Kaspersky database solves the problem.

I wonder how many millions of dollars this cost AdSense publishers and Google?

YouTube UK Google not showing Youtube in SERPs

A lot of the time when searching I use google.co.uk pages from the UK as I dare say a lot of other UK based people do.

I was browsing a few sites today then thought I would have a look at YouTube Being too lazy to type the full URL in to the address bar I just typed Youtube in to google and hit search.

Suprisingly YouTube was nowhere to be seen.

I know that’s the point of using google.co.uk pages from the UK, but as YouTube have a UK version and automatically direct youtube.co.uk to it, you would think Youtube would appear in pages from the UK when doing a search for Youtube

Is brokencontrollers.com using your content for profit

Came across brokencontrollers.com over the weekend.

Initially it just looks like any other forum until you see how many posts have been made, I noticed a member named RSS Feed had made 1.3 million posts, and soon realised they were using an automated system to pull in content via RSS Feeds and post them in to the forum at an amazing rate, at least 10 posts a second.

Basically, what it looks like they are doing is using snippets of other peoples content and monetizing it for themselves by creating pages with it, and then surrounding the content with ads.

A quick look at Alexa shows a massive spike from above 100,00 to under 10,000 so the content they are aquiring from other people is obviously bringing them in lots of traffic, all quite possible on the back of your content.

link:brokencontrollers.com

SEO is Dead – This is Why

Following on from my post over at maps optimisation about a little game I am playing to find the search phrase that creates the most google features in the SERPs, I found a word that creates all of these features;

Adwords = yes
Sitelinks with a listing = yes
jump to links showing with a listing = yes
See results for. (suggesting another search) = Yes
Maps = no
Shopping results = yes
News results = Yes
Video results = yes
searches related to = yes

It basically has virtually every feature that google shows in the Serps except maps.

The word is Ramps when searching on google.co.uk pages from the web.

I would like to take a screenshot of the SERPs page, but it is just to bloody long!