Change is good. But yesterday I noticed some websites that once had very important links to my clients’ websites had changed. The layout changed and so had the content. The links were missing.

I wish changes to old websites would include keeping the old content. Whilst there may be more work to do in the short-term there’s ultimately less playing of “catchup” and you’ve already got a raft of content that may be indexed in the SERPs, even ranking quite well and picking up some traffic.

Please people, think about a site upate as a full, holistic upgrade including keeping your old content.

The hijack doesn’t appear to have had a massive effect on boosting their brand awareness except, in my case, in a very negative way. I know Alexa isn’t the perfect guage of site usage, but a quick squint at the traffic details for crawler.com shows that their rank and page views have increased but that their reach has gone down. It should all be going down for their cynical installation strategy.

So how do you remove Crawler.com from Firefox?

Well, after a quick search on the web, using Google.co.uk, I found that in Firefox you need to do the following:

In the address bar enter about:config

Look for the following entries as these were the ones that had been hijacked on my Firefox:

browser.search.defaultenginename
browser.search.order.1

My entries here were Crawler Search so I changed them to Google.co.uk

Bugger! That didn’t work. What was I missing? I searched through the settings and figured that all the ones in BOLD were user defined, so I ran through just those one s and found:

keyword.URL

THIS was the last setting to still have Crawler in it, so I right-clicked the entry and selected the last option: RESET.

That cured my Crawler hijack problem. Good riddance.

From England I typed in “Small business news” and got served a dish of useless American websites – useless to me anyway. Why do I sit in an office in (Old) Hampshire and wish to see small business news from Cleveland, New Jersey, Michigan and Alabama? For the $33 million of venture capital that was reportedly spent on floating this search engine, I expect better.

Cuil is as daft as its name is – which is also French for arse is it not?

Cuil is dead, long live Google.

Microsoft have apparently offered $44.6bn or £22.4bn, in cash and shares.

It sounds like a good deal for shareholders who’ll get 62% over the closing value of the share on Thursday (31st Jan) night when the shares are down 46% on their high of last year.

But will this be a good thing for search & the Internet or not?

As well as consulting for their web design & web development projects we’re project managing their SEO strategy and slowly but surely raising their profile in the search engines.

The site will be undergoing a redevelopment & redesign to help their SERPs and we’ll be adding features to make the site more useable.

Watch this space.

Their current SEO company have submitted their URL to a few dozen search engines and are apparently re-submitting every month for a fee of £40. For this £40 my client receives a report emailed to them once a month. And what does this report say? It tells my client where they rank in each of the few dozen Search Engines for their own name! They’re the only company with their name so they’re highly likely to rank in position #1 or rank on the first page for their name/term and they do.

There are two “Search Engines” where they do not have a rank or position. One is Ask.com, and the other is “Open Directory” or DMOZ which is a directory and not a search engine!

Now apparently the contract with this SEO company is due to expire at the end of this month so this is the last report with the SEO company. I have already advised my new client not to waste their money on this “service” again.

To simply run a report and email it to the client on a monthly basis for £480 a year is money for nothing in my book. I’d expect to do a couple of hours work every month for that sort of fee and I suspect the SEO Company is using some simple piece of software to generate this pointless report.

I have to add that this may be a reputable SEO Company but this is certainly not one of their reputable products!

Look, we’ve searched Google for 22i design Farnborough. In the page that Google displays there’s a “Note this” link at the foot of the listing. The link opens My Notebook, the Google Notebook.

The Google Notebook is then your online, inGoogle tool to have all your bookmarks to hand AND to allow you to add notes to your bookmarks. Tres handy indeed although you do need a Google account to set this up. You can associate it with any current Gogole account you have or there’s the option to disassociate it