Ouse Bridge House, Bassenthwaite, nr Cockermouth, Cumbria,

Ouse Bridge House

My sister in law experienced the worst BnB experience in Cumbria last night when she was turned away after 5 1/2 hours on the road stuck in traffic.

Bed and Breakfast Cumbria

I am originally from Cumbria and went to School in Cockermouth and always rave about what a lovely place it is and how friendly the people are! However my Sister in law got a completely different impression of Cumbria from Stephen and Katie.

My sister in law was visiting Cumbria on a business trip to actually take photos of north Cumbria for her work. She had an early start but as she was working the day before had a late start. She set off as soon as she finished work but even with good traffic it is a 3-4 hour drive. Unfortunately it was not good traffic and their were road works and accidents meaning she was running late. She new she would arrive late and had told Katie of Ouse Bridge House that she expected to arrive at 10.30. However with the traffic accidents on the M6 she was running late so rang Ouse Bridge House to let them know she would be around abother 40 mins to an hour so 11.30 at the latest...

Ouse Bridge House - Unacceptable

When she spoke to Katie at Ouse Bridge House, Katie informed her that this was unacceptable and she had to find alternative accomodation. My sister in law had no money - end of the working month and had paid up front. She does not know the area, is tired from driving for over 5 hours already- understandably she is upset!

Arguing with Katie my sister in law got very upset on the phone and raised her voice in distress at which point Ouse Bridge House hung up on her and refused to answer the phone. She left an angry message on their answer phone and proceeded to phone everyone she knew to go online and find accomodation in the area.

She was struggling with her phone signal so her fiancee rang around, everywhere was booked up and time was ticking, the thought of being alone in a place she didn't know with expensive equipment in the car making her feel even more vulnerable was distressing enough and the temperature was dropping.

Luckily she did find alternative accomodation although had to drive an extra 30 miles out of her way.

Ouse Bridge House Reviews

We are all happy she is ok although they emailed a respoinse to her trying to turn this around on her. Well mt sister in law works for a web company who do SEO as well and she knows the value of online reputation. Ouse Bridge House and their complete disregard for her safety obviously don't understand the value of online reputation as she is making sure every Ouse House review has her story on it, she is even blogging about it on a Cockermouth Bed and Breakfast blog .

The Times Disappears from Google

The times is one of the most powerful websites for publishing news and content in the UK and today it disapeared from Google!

Many other internet explorers spotted this and commented as this could be a trial for when the paywall comes up. Murdoch wants Google to stop stealing his websites content.

Having looked at the website their was no obvious tags such as no index in the robots.txt or the METAs which would cause the site to not be crawled. I don't know what happened but this afternoon the times went from having no pages indexed to 250,000 pages indexed. This could be a technical blip, a trial for the paywall, or has Google spat it's dummy out and decided to show the Times how much they really need Google.

The funny thing was Google news was still picking up the stories and some of the subdomains were still getting cached and indexed.

More problems with Fasthosts

After my recent rant about Fasthosts I hoped I wouldn't have to deal with them again, but we built a website for a builders in Staffordshire. We put up an SEO friendly holding page on the domain they had, but throughout development the client decided to use another domain. Webuild the site and sent it live but needded to get the holding page down as there was some duplicate content and the holiding page was actually ranking better than the new site.

This holding page was on a fasthosts server - yes here we go again!

My husband Luke called fasthosts and they said they would call him back - after a week and no call (even though he explained it was urgent as if was affecting the SEO campaign), I advised Twitter as this was how I got my issue resolved. He Tweeted them but no reply.
The client Tweeted Fasthosts - but no reply
I tweeted my annoyance at Fasthosts(to my 600 + followers) and they finally got in touch - 2 weeks aftetr the initial call and still no phone call from Customer service as promised.

My client tweeted the details but nothing happened.

After another week I complined to Fasthosts via Twitter again and the Twitter team got back in contact, my client was getting frustrated and asked they deal directly with my husband.

Yesterday after numerous calls, and Tweets and Emails we finally got the small issue of removing the account and forwarding the domain name to the new site.

Such a small job but took four weeks of constant pestering to get this sorted reinforcing that you should never use fasthosts!!

Tweet you later...

Twitter has revealed there plan to monetise on the popular social media platform and their idea is - promotional tweets and advertising!

Woo hoo!*sarcastic tone*

We were expecting some amazing announcement on a new way to make money but it seems they are following facebook and Google with pay per click style adverts and are now offering businesses the chance to pay people to retweet there comments and posts!

I'm not sure if this will work but I will be pissed off if my timeline on Twitter suddenly gets filled with Starbucks adverts and posts!

Businesses can use Twitter to manage their reputation and engage with their clients, this is a natural progression and has worked well for businesses who have genuine information and informative articles to share. Businesses that do the best will converse with other users and share other peoples posts as well as their own.

We'll see if Twitter makes this work and if the adverts scare off users like they did on MySpace. I hope they make it work and progress from phase one of the buisiness model to omething a bit more elaborate.

Digital Economy Bill

Here is a good video on the Digital Economony Bill, it shows the main issue of Music and Film downloads and how it is the corporations that have pushed this free.

I do agree with some aspects of the Digital Economy Bill, but the biggest issue is pariament and MP's are not listening to the people, but the corporations and this will have a big effect on freedo of speech, social media and the blogosphere.

Have a look at this video and see what you think....

British produce the most web pages than anyone in Europe

Amazingly the British population produce on average 17 pages of content per person! Not sure of the timeframes for this but considering the population this is quite a number especially as many people still do not have internet access or are web savvy!

I expect this to go up as more and more people get blogging and it isn't that surprising as English is the dominant language on the internet. It is also the language most spam is in so the quality of some of these web pages is probably not to be desired!

2nd place in the European content writing race is Germany who produce 10 pages per person (again not sure of timeframes for this) always nice to beat the Germans at something!

April Page Rank Update

This weekend has seen a Google Page Rank update and we are really pleased that all of the sites we do SEO for have seen an increase in their Page Rank.

Also SEO Creative our main website has seen the Page Rank go up to a PR 2, this may not seem great to you but the site only went live in September (we bought the domain and put a holding page up in May) so for a 6 month old site we are really pleased. Especially as we haven't done any aggressive link building for the site- a case of spending more time on clients sites than our own.

Box Pro however has dropped slightly so this quater we will be increasing the work on the Box Pro site to get it back to the level it was. We think this is because we haven't done much work on Box Pro no link building and the site really needs to be updated with recent work.

I had a look at a few competitors and it seems many sites have stayed the same with this update, I have also noticed a poor distribution of PR on some sites, due to cannonical URLs or bad navigation. SEO Creative has seen many inner pages get an even distribution of page rank so we are going to work more on some of our landing pages over the next few months.

Paid Links for SEO

I have worked for a number of SEO companies in the past and experienced results using paid links as well as sourcing links ethically. I consider myself to be a reputable SEO, my clients sites are whiter than white and I am meticulous to detail to on page work. However links to sites will help the rankings and compliment any on page SEO work we do.

Links are like recommendations that you should visit a site and search engines like Google hold some weight on these links, especially if they are relevant to your industry, from other reputable sites, and use a keyword in the anchor text.

The thing is it is against Google guidelines to purchase links for your website, but any competitive industry has obvious paid links. So what do you do?

As an SEO you often look at the competition and replicate or beat their link portfolio, but when a site is using paid links do you do the same?

There are other methods of aquiring links, blog posts can encourage natural links, link bait and viral campaigns can do very well, press releases, article submissions etc but there are no guarantees.

My question is do you buy links to increase the clients back links knowing it is against google guidelines? Or do you carry on in the knowledge you may struggle to compete?

Be interested to know peoples thoughts....

Fasthosts

The past few weeks SEO Creative have been re designing some websites for clients, normally this isn't a big issue and it all runs quite smoothly but 2 of our clients had previously been on Fasthosts servers.

We haven't used Fasthosts for over 18 months as the servers were very slow and they prevented the use of htaccess files meaning that 301 redirects and SEO friendly permalinks were impossible. This is a fundamental functionality. This combined with no proper cpanel meant second rate sites with problems with re designs.

Having lost the will to live after various issues with fasthosts I eventually closed all accounts down and moved everything to another server. We have had no problems with any servers we use now and forgot about our previous issues with fasthosts.... until now!

We tried to rebuild the sites using the current servers but it was clear once the new site went live there were going to be 404 errors all over the place and without htaccess we couldn't 301 redirect them. We decided to move the sites to our own servers but even that was an issue.

I could go on for ages about the technical problems we were having but what really annoyed me was the customer service. Trying to close the accounts you have to ring a premium number give them account details and tell them the problem. Instead of sorting the account however they always say we will get someone to call you back.

After 4 days waiting for a call back and another call to customer service I ranted on my Twitter page. I was quite pleased when Fasthosts Twitter account got back to me. It was an unorthodox way of working but they fixed the first problem quickly.

However the second site we went through the same issue, we called up and were told that this elusive customer service team would call us back... this is now 5 days ago.

I suggested using the Twitter method and 3 days ago tweeted them - nothing....

I have tweeted them again but not a peep from Fasthosts. In the mean time we have a client very angry at us that we can't sort this problem out.

Word to anyone considering using fasthosts- DON'T - Just Don't!