I opted for a $50 bid and made the payment via PayPal from a different location than normal and it its wisdom PayPal decided that the payment was suspicious and the transaction was put on hold. I went through the verification process as requested which required me to re-enter my bank details and take a call from their computerised voice but the payment has now been on hold for two and a half weeks.

“Inquiry by PayPal Temporary Hold” and “Being Reviewed by PayPal” are not things you would like to see in your account. “Documentation received from seller” has appeared four times in the event time-line and I have given PayPal everything they have asked for so I have no idea why they are still holding my money.

I wouldn’t mind if they refused the transaction and gave me back the funds so I could go elsewhere or if they let the transaction through but this limbo does no one any good. My project is on hold, the freelancer and Guru have been messed around and worst of all they probably both think this is down to something I have done wrong.

Naturally when they didn’t receive my payment Guru suspended my account (I suspect they get a fair amount of chancers using hacked/stolen/fraudulent payment accounts).

The last action from PayPal was over a week ago. Pathetic, yet PayPal is so widely accepted that I will have to continue to use it.

Sure I’ll admit to googling myself – I like to see what is found there and how high this site ranks!

I’ve been attempting to find out what differences the sites ranking have above me have in order to work out what I need to concentrate on to boost my position and ideally achieve the number 1 ranking.

Freeg131.com ranking for Google.co.uk search of 'Philip Gamble'

Choice of domain

When it came to choosing a domain name philipgamble.co.uk and philipgamble.com were both taken as was philgamble.co.uk (and possibly the .com but that is now available) so I opted to use my alias/username freeg131.  Ranking top for that has been no problem.

I had assumed that the lack of the words ‘philip’ and ‘gamble’ in my domain name was the main reason for my bad ranking but then I discovered that I am above philgamble.co.uk on a search for “Phil Gamble” despite not having used this in anchor text for a long while (my article attributions at Game Maker Blog used to use this but I changed it to my full name).

There’s also www.philip-gamble.co.uk who is a gardener and PhilipGamble.com which is parked at Sedo.

Use of redirects

In an attempt to have a more professional looking domain I registered pgamble.co.uk about a year ago which I presumed was being 301 redirected it to freeg131.com.

However whilst writing this post I discovered that this was not actually a 301 redirect [see below]. When I took control of the CassioburyPark.com domain name I set up a cPanel account for this and did the 301 manually, but have gone through cPanel to set it up for pgamble.co.uk to freeg131.com now (and it is working).

The pgamble.co.uk domain was simply parked to my public_html directory so it displayed the freeg131.com site. pgamble.co.uk hasn’t been indexed by Google however so I don’t think duplicate content is an issue here and both domains also had PR3 and I presume this is because Google had realised they were essentially the same.

Backlinks

The vast majority of links are from GameMaker Blog as I have authored over 500 posts each of which include a link back in the author credit.  According to bad neighbourhood 85.41% of the links in are from a blog.

Perhaps there isn’t enough variation in my anchor text – the other Philip Gamble’s have their industry mentioned in some of their links where as most of mine are either me or friends referring to me or my site.  Maybe I should take the links off GameMakerBlog.com and start looking to get some links with anchor text such as “Philip Gamble’s blog”, “Philip Gamble from Watford”, “Phil Gamble is a really nice guy” etc.

Discovered there is a free version of SEO Spyglass which revealed these results (MajesticSEO tracks about 1,500 links in):

Selling links

You don’t have to be a genius to realise I am selling links from this site to a gambling website. Three links can be found at the top of the homepage. I think this must be the main reason for my poor rankings as it has associated my site with a bad neighbourhood.

An interesting point here though is that my Pagerank does not seem to have been effected. Using the SEOmoz Chrome toolbar to look at my mozRank (which is supposed to approximate page rank) pulls up 4.13 which is not much more than my page rank 3. On another of my sites, which previously sold links through text-link-ads.com, a page rank penalty is clearly in place – the site has PR 0 but a mozRank of 4.37 and many links from pages with pagerank. Thankfully, unlike for freeg131.com, this doesn’t seem to have affected the sites search rankings. Interesting that if this were the reason in would mean there are 2 different kind of penalties applied by Google here for doing the same thing – perhaps this site’s PR value will return to 0 after the next update.

I have been reading a bit about page links recently after having another approach from a casino company wanting to get links from what they see as a “Gamble” related domain name and might be taking the current ones off soon.

Recent changes

I recently made some changes to the site bringing “Philip Gamble” to the front of the title tag, updating the homepage meta description, removing sidebar links which duplicated those across the top of the page and adding nofollow to the WordPress and theme footer links. There are also now only 5 blog posts per page as opposed to 10 previously.

I also removed the twitter sidebar feed which was displaying 19 followed external links out of a total of 35 on the homepage.

Hope this works!

Full list and more A-level stats from the Guardian.

A good example of this is comes in the form of a re-tweeted message (via Will Critchlow) where someone asks for a solution to the P versus NP problem (for which a $1,000,000 millennium prize is on offer). The project was given a $500-1000 budget. It received four bids.  ”Hello, Easy job for me,please send me a PM.” and “i can do it. please, write in chat. thanks” are the complete copy of two of the bids, all of which came in under budget.

I’ve used ScriptLance in the past both as a buyer and provider of services but because of their policy of suspending an account if it is inactive for a certain amount of time – they then ask for a scan of your passsport and demand to know why you haven’t used the site for x months in order to reactive your account, even if it has funds in it – I decided to head elsewhere.

My project specification was for eight 300-500 word articles on the making of the Harry Potter film series. These would be part a section detailing films made at the Leavesden film studios. I had already written pages for two (not Harry Potter) films but opted to outsource this work as I have little interest in Harry Potter myself (and also as an experiment to see how it goes!).

I gave the project a target price of “Less than $250″, the lowest available option, and left a 7-day bid time. As you can see from the project specification I outlined what I was looking for, provided a sample article that I had written myself and asked bidders to include a sample of their work.

I received 11 bids. The highest was $225.00 and the lowest came in on the last day at $25. I discounted those that didn’t provide samples, gave a generic bid or had extreme prices and opted for a $50 bid which below the average bid value. It comes in at about £4 an article (plus whatever fees Guru charges for making payments, finding a freelancer etc). Put that way it seems quite expensive but since it isn’t purely writing (some research will have to be done) I am quite happy with the price.

Whether or not I will be when I see the work I don’t know! I’ll keep you updated.

Instead of having a meal at the weekend I had a series of very loosely German themed sandwiches throughout the week.  Sadly unlike in Brimingham I don’t have a large collection of German meats a couple of minutes up the road at Aldi so I had to be content with slices of Sainsbury’s “German Salami”.  How generic.  And I just realised I ate it after its use by date.  Hardcore.

I think I am going to get this Rob Smedley t-shirt from unlap in honour of the moment and the most famous formula 1 race engineer:

Of the 7 requests:

• 4 were spam – the first I have received on Facebook and all which appeared within seconds of each other.
• 2 were people I recognised the names of but have never met who presumably added me because we have some mutual friends regardless of the fact I know nothing about them
• 1 was a Game Maker person that I did not know at all well

Along the way I found out some rather interesting things such as the fact that you can very easily bulk harvest your friends e-mail addresses in text form and that my friends are overwhelmingly male (well I do Computer Science).

I conducted a very-mini purge removing 13 ‘friends’.  Without exception these people were people that I have not spoken to since I left school 2 years ago either in person or online and had never been particularly friendly with.  At the time it seemed like a good idea to accept all friend requests coming my way though now everyone is on Facebook I can be more selective!  From now on I intend to operate on a one-in-one-out policy so I don’t feel so bad about ‘unfriending’ so many people at once!

Also got an unusual message asking me to “tag a friend” which turned out to be me.  Can only presume this is the start of auto tagging friends in photos.  Hurrah.

Today joy of joys the BBC is headlining with “Students to face higher costs as graduate tax proposed” whilst a quote from today’s Guardian Online reads “It makes gloomy reading for those studying computer science and IT – they have the lowest employment rate for any area of study”.  Lucky us.

Natwest also sent me a nice letter saying they are going to stop paying me interest on my student account. I don’t know what the rate of interest I had been receiving from them was but it is the principle of the matter! The savings I have elsewhere are earning me something like a pathetic 2% a year thanks to low interest rates caused by all those people buying houses they couldn’t afford and inflating the prices so I will have no chance of owning one for the next 20 years or so.

So the parents of my generation not only got paid to go to University and benefited from vastly increasing house prices once they were on the property ladder they also get to retire at an age which is totally unaffordable leaving us to work longer and pick up the bill!

Grrr. I bet that if I do manage to save up to buy a house interest rates will magically be much higher then.  </rant>

Poor Mark Webber (and, I didn’t think I would write this, Alonso).

As normal I found myself getting bored towards the middle of today’s F1.  Vettel’s comeback towards the end of the race and counting the number of times Legard said “extraordinary” livened things up though.

Nice to hear Martin Whitmarsh’s stating the obvious response to a question posed by Brundle on his grid walk.  ”Will you be able to get anywhere near the Red Bulls?”  ”I imagine at the first corner we’ll be pretty close” (or words to that effect).  Reminds me of Ross Brawn’s response at the start of last season.  Red  Bull’s ability to self-destruct is at least keeping the championship race well and truly open.

• Sadly it hasn’t been updated for a while but one of my favourite ‘funny’ websites to visit is the Formula 1 parody news website The Runoff Area.
• As far as I can tell the “For Sure” championship counted last year by RealBrawnGP is not running this year.

Photo by ph-stop (cc)

Effectively it is the Search Engine Marketing branch of a large digital agency.  At the moment the Search Engine Optimisation and Pay-Per-Click teams are based in the corner of an office belonging to another department of the agency but next month they are moving to a snazzy sounding new office.

In my first weeks I have mainly been conducting “mini audits” of sites assessing the current standard of their SEO which in some cases is absolutely abysmal.  Although I must admit this isn’t the most interesting task in the world I do think I am learning quickly.   There are a large number of potential pitfalls and problems that sites may fall into and I think I have become quicker and better at identifying them.

I blogged earlier stating that I had suddenly reached a realisation that I must go out and actually do something that would be beneficial to me obtaining a future career this summer if I actually wanted to get anywhere. So I am obviously pleased that when I started applying for unpaid Internships at smaller companies the feedback I received was very positive.

I was ready to apply to a couple of job adverts I had seen on Gumtree and Monster but held off until after I had my careers appointment. The careers lady effectively said the only thing I had missing from my CV was an Internship so I quite happily sent off a couple of applications after that.

By the time I received an invitation to attend an interview with the second company I had already agreed to start at 20:20. It seems I am more employable than I thought. The Head of SEO has since said I am good enough for a full time role with them as an SEO Executive.

I have quite a few Computer Science friends who have either already started or are shortly due to start Internships at larger companies.  The kind of assessment centre/induction days places which I don’t think really suit me.  When I told my friends that I had secured an unpaid Internship a portion thought I was mad – some people doing year placements are on quite lucrative salaries – and others I know are receiving £3,000 or so for a summer of work.

I’m glad to be doing something productive at summer.  Though this makes me think I should have done something last summer too!