Progress on this domain is going well. Only worth blogging because the best result is a single and fairly popular keyword - "Percale". This keywords on the first page and in second position below the Wikipedia URL. I'm very happy with the fact Marks & Spencer's are below. Lets see if we can get the top position and knock ALL the competition out of the water!

Google Plus1
So Googles new plus-one plus1 +1 or however you like to describe it is here and very likely here to stay, but what's it all about?

If you plus one a website you are voting to say the site is useful. This can be then shared in connection with Gchat, Google Reader, Gmail, Buzz and Twitter.
This is the first time anyone has added a direct social signal into search results. The end game to this will be a more human interactive approach to search engine ranking. It will be interesting as to whether SEO techniques change much due to +1.

"When someone recommends something, that's a pretty good indicator of quality," said Matt Cutts, Google's principle engineer for search. "We are strongly looking at using this in our rankings."

I have read that Google will start using the +1 for advertisers; this means we can click to like the advert without costing the advertiser a penny.

"Injecting a social layer into the algorithmic search is key to relevance," said Dave Karnstedt, CEO of Efficient Frontier. "Do a search on 'DVD player' today now you will see 35,000 results in less than 3 milliseconds. It's meaningless, but if you can sort through those by people who have given a social signal and those rise to the top, I think that can only enhance the user experience."

At the moment Facebook's "likes" are integrated into Bing's search results but not the algorithm. I have also read that Google has no immediate plans to add Facebook connection to their system. "It would depend on whether that data were available," said Mr. Cutts.

"It's important for Google to bring in social influence into search results to prevent the social web from becoming a parallel universe," said Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i, a unit of Dentsu. "I do think they need to have the Facebook 'likes' in there because you're going to have two webs, the social web and the open web."

All this is all well and good but when I make an attempt at a search on Google all I really want is to have accurate and upto date information on the first page. There is nothing else I want Google to offer me to be honest; I mean why do I need to know how popular a link is to other people - doesn't mean it's going to be relevant to me.

Whether your a web designer offering SEO services or you own an online business and are trying to rank to the top of search engines, finding your competition’s backlinks is an essential step in your link building campaign. Why would someone need to know what backlinks the competition holds?

Firstly, this is a great strategy for trying to get the similar links your competitors have. Secondly, finding how they think, what methods they approach and if it is a winning method could literally put your website to the top. Do they pay for links? What about their activity on forums, blogs, social networking websites? Are they doing article marketing? These are some questions that can be easily answered when finding their source for backlinks.

As with any method SEO-related, this can be done with free tools or paid tools. For free ones, we have Yahoo! SiteExplorer as first one. Although it can be really useful, this will not show more than 1,000 links and will not disclose important facts like anchor text, sites’ IPs and other essential for getting a complete view over a company link building strategy.

The second tool can be found both in the free version and paid version, it is literally an awesome piece of software everyone should make use of – SEO SpyGlass. Although it is limited to 1,000 links by Yahoo, this can squeeze about 2-300 more backlinks than the SiteExplorer, but the beautiful thing about it is that can reveal impressive data about the backlinks. This includes the anchor text, if a backlink is dofollow or no nofollow, pages’ PR, domain IP and many more, thus making this tool a must for anyone “spying” on their competition.

Last, but not least, here comes the MajesticSEO. These guys provide the most comprehensive reports for almost any given website. Owning their own index, they can reveal hundreds of thousands of backlinks a website has with the anchor text for each and any backlink, in just a matter of minutes. Claiming they hold their hands on an index with about 2.5 trillion unique URLs, their subscription packages start from as low as £ 9.99 each month and definitely worth every penny.

Yes, that is right, Google rolled out a new PageRank update after almost 1 year of total “silence”. This is probably the most expected PageRank update ever, many webmasters complaining about this “issue”.

We all know that PR is not relevant nowadays, it has only a little connection with the trust Google sees in a website or almost no connection with the rankings a website has in the search engines. However many webmasters still put a lot of hope on “Getting a higher PR”.

Why is this? Well mostly because of the links selling market; higher PR means higher prices and also, lots of website owners are still searching for “High PR” pages when doing link building. Will this run after high PR sites end once and for all?

In the end, webmasters should read this answer from Susan Moskwa , an employee at Google, related to why PR is no longer shown in Google Webmaster Tools and to stop thinking too much about their PageRank:

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”