After our recent post highlighting a recent duplicate content issue we faced, we decided it would be a good time to start giving out free advice for building your web rankings.

One of our most commonly requested services is web site optimization. Unfortunately (and fortunately) web developers are just now starting to implement a better practice of building sites to be search engine friendly. As web development continues to be outsourced, many developers just don’t feel like putting in that little bit of extra effort that truly does go a long way.

You may be familiar with some of the following issues, as I’m trying to keep this list simple, but hopefully there are a few gems that may help you on your way to the top. If you have any questions, don’t be shy to comment and we’ll help in every way we can. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been following Twine for a good bit now, and are very excited to see it finally open in Beta. Twine is a tool that allows individuals, and more importantly, teams, to send items such as emails, notes, presentations, documents, webpages, pictures, and any other material involved in your personal and professional life to a twine or personal page. Their cutting edge semantic inferencing engine will then organize the data for you, helping you to gain a clearer perspective on what you and your team are working on, and also bring in creative recommendations from other individuals and teams with statistically and linguistically correlated twines.

We are especially interested in this because as a startup team, Twine’s system will prove invaluable in increasing productivity and creativity by having an outside party/unbiased mediator (their semantic inferencing engine) analyze our information and help align our thoughts and ideas. As a team, there is a commonality and vision that brings us together and binds us, but unfortunately without a purely unbiased outsider, the differences of each persons’ perceptions will leak into the project and slow it down due to self-interest. However, if you are sending your data to a team page/twine and their inferencing engine is what it is cracked up to be, then it will undoubtedly show us the most important linguistic and semantic components of our project, allowing us to creatively and productively move forward at a faster and more competitive pace. Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE:  Vinolin has taken steps to remedy the problems that were caused.  If you feel your site is being affected by duplicate content, and would like an analysis, please visit our SEO Services Page.  Thanks!

I’m not sure how many of you are aware, but there is a website in the wine industry that claims to be an blog aggregator for the purpose of “content analysis”. Here is what they say about themselves - Vinolin’s justification for being thieves. To make matters funnier/worse, the layout of their site looks like a slight rip-off of cork’d’s.

I noticed Vinolin was aggregating our content when I discovered this post on their site about a year ago. In all honesty, it didn’t really bother me all that much, as they were just displaying the excerpt, and I saw there was a back-link to our site.

Now… just take a look at this page: Vinolin’s Rip-Off of our last post. This link takes you to google’s cached version, I did this in the event they pull down the page after this article goes public. On this page, you see they didn’t limit themselves to an excerpt, they blatantly copied the entire post and displayed it on their site. The audacity is unbelievable, especially considering they are aware that people have a problem with it(as people should).

So, not only do I discover that they are stealing content from our site and others, but as an even further sign of disrespect, they have not managed their robots.txt file so as to keep those articles from being spidered by the search engines. For those of you who are unfamiliar with search engine optimization, most search engines exact a penalty for duplicate content. It is not uncommon that an original creator of content can lose page rank, and even their indexed version of a page if the spider crawls the the duplicate first. The fact that they are providing a back-link doesn’t help anything as they would lead you to believe, because they are not linking back to the original content, they are just linking back to the main page of (y)our site. Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend I’ve been in grocery stores, close to the spice racks, sneaking whiffs of cardamom, anisette and vanilla pods; migrating over to the butcher to smell steak and game and blood, before finding my way to the fresh fruit section to smell berries and fruits of all kind. Indeed, I’m calibrating my nose and palate for next three days in London: The London International Wine and Spirits Fair, where the Grape Thinking team will be hot in attendance, and bringing daily coverage to our readers from Tuesday through to Thursday. Will any of our readers be in attendance? 1500 producers all in a space the size of two football fields, simply aching for you to sample their stuff, sounds like heaven and to be honest - I don’t know if three days is enough.

I’ve just received a notification from http://www.tastingbuddy.com/, a new and innovative site that I learned about just this minute. It compels visitors to the site to use their new service which uses unique software on PDA devices to rank wines according to your preference. We’d been discussing a similar concept a couple months back at Grape Thinking, and while we were still thinking about it, the idea of a pocket-tasting guide has come into realization. It seems that the wine industry is assimilating to the digital era at an unpredictable speed, and if you have an idea, you need to act on it now, because someone else may get there before you. Tomorrow, there will be in excess of 1000 PDA’s walking around the London International Wine and Spirits fair, all using the Tasting Buddy Software on their PDA while connected to the Tasting Buddy database. Can you imagine the impact of this on the wine world? Tasting Buddy is going to build up an amazingly diverse and broad database of opinions over the next few days, and this is going to revolutionise wine scoring. In fact, they’re opening up a Top 100 Rose’ competition to the PDA’s, and for the first time in history, the Top 100 will be ranked in accordance to instantaneously logged user reviews.

I see this catching on big time. Over the next few years, perhaps wine makers will no longer bother submitting their wines to Wine Spectator for one person to taste… Instead, if you place your wine in an international tasting room attended by hundreds of people with software akin to Tasting Buddy, every person present will have the ability to score the wine on a wide range of attributes right the way through from packaging to actual profile and we’re likely to see many more meaningful recommendations emerging as a result. Such tastings en masse will also be revolutionary, in that it will give people the occasion to grow their knowledge, taste widely and gather in the same room as thousands of other people with a similar interest. I’m not sure if Tasting Buddy exists yet in the USA… but somebody better get onto the concept quick.

There are limitless applications for this. In fact, instead of filling in stock-standard customer satisfaction surveys, as PDA’s become more frequently used when the i-Phone is launched (where wine taste and music taste will perhaps become correlated), methinks that customer reviews will explode. You could rate a restaurant at the restaurant, as well as get a recommendation for a wine, movie or book at the spur of the moment when you get to a new city. By having a profile that allows you to share opinions with a global community of like-minded people, travel will be enhanced, as you will be able to have a local perspective wherever you go in the world. This means that ‘tourist-traps’ will suffer, whilst local industries will thrive… and we’ll all be on our way to being a community of people who think globally, and have the power and technology to act locally. Cheers to that!