Ken McGuire, MaxRoam And The N95

I feel I’ve been neglecting my blog of late, getting drawn into the many other blogs one keeps and watching my workload pile up online and offline.

However, here’s an interesting one.

Keeping an eye on Twitter during the day, I caught a tweet from Laura Czajkowski referencing potential employers googling your name. I’ll admit that I do have a Google Alert set up to catch mention of my name (as it turns out, it’s quite helpful) but I wouldn’t regularly Google myself.

On top of that, I’ve always wondered about the secondary results on Google, especially those one-word or sectioned links under the primary search result.

So to my amazement I run a google search for Ken McGuire just now and I’m presented with the above.

Explain that one…

That said, if a potential employer was to indeed “Google me”, I’d be quite happy with the results thrown up on the first page highlighting my blog, my photography, my music, my work with KilkennyMusic.com and a newspaper interview covering everything else (about a year ago).

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up to date with kenmc.com. Maybe some of my earlier posts will interest you too! Thanks for visiting kenmc.com!

Tagged: Charity Link Meme

I’m all for charity and charitable causes and Gavin at Ireland SEO Marketing has tagged me in relation to ‘passing the juice’ for an ongoing charity link meme.

The rules are simple, copy the list of charities and links (grab it from whomever tags you) and add your 5 favourite charities or non-profit organizations to the end (link to their sites with anchor text of the causes they champion). Of course finish things off by tagging 5 other webmasters/bloggers and then publishing the post or the webpage.

So, here is my own list of five anyway which don’t also appear on Gavin’s list. I’ve chosen the five for personal reasons as well as the fact that they’re five great organisations in Ireland.

• Young Irish Film Makers - Centre Of Excellence for production of youth film, outreach media programmes
• Cancer.ie - Irish Cancer Society
• Irish Hospice Foundation - Hospice and palliative care in Ireland
• Barnardos - Ireland’s leading children’s charity
• RADE - Recovery Through Arts, Drama and Education

And here’s Gavin’s own list (and original list)…

• The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity - Polish Charity
• CPR For Schools Across Poland - CPR Training
• Program of Insulin Pumps in Diabetic Children Therapy - Insulin Pumps For Children
• Non-invasive Neonatal Breathing Support - Infant Flow
• Program of Universal Neonatal Hearing Screenings - Neonatal Hearing
• American Red Cross - disaster relief
• Raleigh Rescue Mission - homeless raleigh
• SOS Children’s Villages - sponsor a child
• Samaritan’s Purse - emergency relief programs
• St. Jude Children’s Hospital - cancer research
• Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors Without Borders - Humanitarian Relief
• American Red Cross - Emergency Preparedness
• AMREF - African Medical & Research Foundation - African Health Development
• DOROT - Programs for Elderly
• Feed the Children - Protect Children
• Service International - Disaster Relief
• Pujols Family Foundation - Children with Down Syndrome
• National Alliance to End Homelessness - Homelessness
• The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research - Parkinson’s Research
• Ronald McDonald Care Mobile Program - Child Healthcare
• Aids Research Alliance - Aids Research
• Wildlife Conservation Society - Wildlife Protection
• Cancer Research Institute - Cancer Research
• Second Harvest - End Hunger
• AARP Foundation - Helping Senior Citizens

• Bubblegum Club - Children In Crisis
• Autism NI - Autism Northern Ireland
• Adoption Ireland - Irish Adoption Charity
• Ireland Funds - Peace and Reconciliation In Ireland
• Dublin Simon Community - Combating Homelessness in Dublin

So, after all that I’ve got to tag five bloggers… in that vein I nominate the following…

• John Butler
• Aidan Coonan
• Sean McNamara
• Pat Phelan
• Paul Browne

Get Yourself Banned From Live.com

Check this out…

Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content. Techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated spam links in order to increase ranking are considered spam and your site has been excluded from our index as results. Please contact us once you’ve removed these links and we will reevaluate.

Its an extract from an email sent by Live.com staff. This wasn’t sent to me, instead I picked it up here at seroundtable.com. Looks like Microsoft are coming down heavy on the use of link exchanges or gathering links from other sources to help boost your traffic / incoming links.

Gotta love the new approach search engines are taking. “Sure, we let you search the web but you’re only going to find things that we want you to find”.

I also noticed last night that Google are now filtering sites on their search engine result, clicking particular links (namely related to warez, cracks, anything illegal - no, it wasn’t on MY machine(s)) that you’re now taken to an interstitial warning you of the dangers of viewing such websites.

A search for asta-killer.com on Google will bring it about when you click the first result. Very clever on their part. (edit - turns out that its old news but hey, I was only shown it yesterday)

Is Page Rank Really Important?

Are you concerned about your Page Rank? Or do you really know what it is?

People that have been blogging for some time, or are familiar with the way websites work and Google works will have heard the term Page Rank at least once in their lifetime. In more recent times Page Rank has really become a golden currency around the web - the higher your Page Rank, the better your chances are of swapping links with someone, earning revenue from advertising, getting traffic through your site or blog.

This article that I picked up this morning looks a little at the two sides of the coin that is Google Page Rank - and if you still don’t know what it is all about then its worth a quick read with your morning cup of tea.

SEO Checklist for Google

Certain things I am aware of, certain things I guess I wasn’t after reading this SEO checklist for Google.

There are “over 100 SEO factors” that Google uses to rank pages in the Google search results (SERPs). What are the search engine optimization rules?

Linking to bad neighbourhoods, over optimising your site, poison words, keyword dilution… its all here, and if you’re into SEO for your site or blog its worth the read.