I have been playing with Blekko for a few days now, and I am loving it, great for SEO analysis and just a generally great search engine which will only get better as their crawl expands. I have 10 Blekko invitations to give away, if you would like one, leave a message on this post (using your email so I can send it).

From what I have seen of Blekko, I can’t wait, well, hopefully, get onto the beta testing list. Blekko looks really cool, with lots of awesome SEO tools which anyone can access, and the slash system combined with the social aspect is simply amazing. If I do manage to get into the program, I will share my experiences. Go check out Blekko

Google Sorry…

We’re sorry…

… but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

Man, I hate when this happens, how many times are you seeing this? Sometimes link building can really throw up these silly Google God messages. Yes, when building links, I may throw a few queries at google, but isn’t that what a ’search’ engine is for, I am not even using any automated software of any kind, I am trolling the internet myself, in my time, and yet I still get these stupid messages!! Thank goodness there are personal VPN systems in place so I can get back to doing my job…

Gripe of the day over.

Is there a -5 google penalty for narrow anchor text in your backlinks? Does anyone have proof this exists. It is silly to target 1 or 2 words in your link profile, especially if you have 500k backlinks, but would this penalty, if it exists, count to brand links? hmmm….

SMX Sydney 2010, done and dusted… the conference is wrapping up and I will soon be jet setting home to New Zealand. I managed to learn a few things at SMX this year, and having not been to a conference in some time, I was slightly disappointed with parts of this conference.

I followed mostly the ‘Advanced’ track hoping to get some hot tidbits and insider info that you would expect to get with the price of admission, but sadly, as usual, there wasn’t alot of dirt being dished up by this years speakers. There were some hard hitting questions to Greg Grothaus by Brent Payne during Q&A, but the most answers he gave were typical Google, ‘Sorry, we can’t talk about that right now, but if you could see it, you would be amazed’ answers, and yes, that was an actual answer!

I was really looking forward to Greg Bosers bullet proof link campaign, as link building is what I spend most of my time helping clients with, but there were technical difficulties and was cut short, he had some good sound advice for people in the room, but I wanted that little more.

I am not sure if or when I will attend another conference, when I think you can get most of the information you need following people on twitter and facebook etc.