As Search Engine Optimisation experts and social media / online promotion fans in general, we watched much of the exciting competition. During the competition there were several odd occurrences, and possibly unethical and illegal behaviour. More facts and cries of scam seem to be coming to light hourly.

In the end, Zac Martin (“Digital Strategist” at George Patterson Y&R), a male described as “BFF” – best friends forever (who says that?) of the internal employee and competition manager Simon Oboler ended up winning the major prize. Another friend, who some claim was a girlfriend of Simon, also won a high value weekly prize.

Since the competition was a game of skill, knowledge, intelligence and time, the odds of both winners (out of an estimated 3 to 4 thousand entrants) being very close friends to the employee who was running the promotion is more than a little curious. This has obviously led to a lot of suspicions and even anger from some other vocal facebook fans and other media outlets.
Such a result is not impossible, since employees would naturally encourage their friends to enter to spread the word (and would be some of the initial and earliest entrants). That is how social media works, and was within the terms and conditions as far as we know.
We are not aware of any proof of any direct passing of clue answers on to entrants/illegal behaviour occurring, and would be impossible to prove. They could have genuinely won, and being early adopters into the competition would have given them a substantial but fair advantage.

However, due to the skill required to win the prize we find it absolutely astonishing that 2 friends won, and the social media channels are starting an uproar about this and throwing around several accusations. Some people are raising valid concerns, but some are flying off the deep end, in what has been an otherwise fairly well crafted social media campaign.

We are not aware of any proof that would indicate cheating.
At this point we see no reason why they do not deserve their prize (and they personally do not appear to have broken any conditions), but certainly there are several other entrants that may have been shafted out of a prize, due to altering the terms and conditions and adjusting the results, as has been admitted by Nissan. These people, if not all entrants too should also be fairly rewarded.

The main issues we have are that are fact are that Nissan Australia has admitted to manually adjusting times for 1 or more of the bonus clues, which could have changed the overall times for some by hundreds of hours or more. By adjusting these times, giving some an advantage, and giving disadvantage to others, it is a fact that the overall spot times are subjectively changed, and would have definitely changed the rankings of many entrants.

The reason for them manually biasing the data this way was given with the reason that the terms and conditions had changed part way through the competition. Making such adjustments, whilst possibly against government body regulation rules or illegal, would have definitely given a bias to some, after the competition has already started.
Given the fact that a statement was made by Nissan Australia on their facebook feed that such action would be taken (and was) that was contrary to the edited term, and was at best confusing to many, it makes an unethical change to terms and conditions even more questionable.

Such manual adjusting of both the terms and times in the database could have easily turned some one ranking in first place to then losing several positions, and turn someone with a discovery time of hundreds of hours and a low ranking, into a person ranking in first position, and “unfairly” winning a prize.

Even if run with their intention of best ethics and ethical rules, and non intentional rigging (not purposefully rigged to a particular individual’s favour) this would have affected the overall rankings and altered the entire leaderboard. If it changed weekly or overall first place winners or not, we can not say without analysing the secret data.

Even Qantas did better with their embarrassing #qantasluxury PR campaign (which has been a huge laughing matter on Twitter, and widely cited as yet another public relations blunder), and at least offered some gifts to their customers.

So what can we learn from this?
What you should not do in online competitions and promotions is change the terms and conditions half way through.
You should definitely not manually adjust entrants and rankings, this will inevitably bias some entrants and disadvantage some, taking away the objectiveness and fairness.
Even if no intentional rigging has occurred, such mismanagement and the fact that
adjusting the times inevitably gave an unfair advantage to some brings your whole brand into question, and defeats the whole purpose of you running the promotion in the first place. Rigging or not, the fumbling, moving the goal posts and complaints now leaves thousands of people with a bitter taste in their mouth.

If you do stuff up like they have, you should do your best to admit your mistakes and offer a generous prize/gift to those concerned, not something cheap like a showbag/pyjamas as some have.
It is also a better idea to outsource such promotions to a dedicated firm of social media management, not run by internal staff (who may have little experience), to leave it in the hands of experts. This way you mitigate much of the brand damage and legal responsibility if something does go wrong, and you’re more likely to get a smoother running, a positive campaign and a better result in the end.

Business owners looking to gain many more customers and better rankings and results from Google and Facebook should get in touch with us today.

We’ll discuss the top 5 reasons to stop SPAM, and then tell you how you to set up the invaluable facilities to help stamp it dead in it’s tracks.

Leaving comments open on your website can be a fantastic opportunity for your readers and customers to discuss your content, products and services. If you engage your visitors not only will they appreciate the interaction they are also likely to come back again. The more they come back, the more likely they are to buy from you.
If not managed correctly a comments feature also allows a fantastic opportunity to receive a truckload of SPAM.

What are the top 5 reasons to properly stop website spam email and comments?

1. SPAM comments on your website can hurt your SEO.
Such comments can damage your rankings in the search engines. If you link to one (or perhaps hundreds- as we have found on one client’s website) of “bad neighbourhood” sites; certain types of dodgy industries and dodgy websites, Google can punish you.

2. SPAM Links and comments are often generated by automated software.
The auto generated text uses poor grammar, and is almost always overly general, so it can be plastered on thousands of sites in an attempt to bypass webmasters screening methods.
Poor grammar and spelling mistakes can be detrimental to your SEO campaign.

3. Why advertise dodgy products on your own website?
Your business website should not link to other websites it is not familiar with or have any connection with. It is fine to link to other businesses and other sites of interest, just be selective and make sure the sites are all reputable.

4. “If we let one of you in, we would let everyone in”
Spammers use tools to test the waters with their junk content, often with randomised letters and text that seems to make no sense.
If one of their test comments or links gets through, especially without any moderation, this can alert their software that your website is an easy target, and open the floodgates! Once this happens, expect to receive hundreds or thousands of SPAM emails.

5. Website vulnerabilities can shut your business down
Most webpages are poorly designed by people with no security knowledge, and can allow SQL injections and other simple forms of abusing and hacking your website without your knowledge. This could be happening right now! Not just hackers, anyone with basic knowledge can use tricks to hijack your own website into sending thousands or millions of SPAM emails, making you the spammer. You could lose a lot of customers and you personally could get into legal trouble!

Long story short, not only does SPAM waste your time and resources, it will hurt your ranking in search engines like Google.

With simple systems and programs 100% of SPAM can be prevented on your website.
If you require help to stop junk spam email being sent and received via your website forms and clogging your email inbox, or you wish to prevent your site being hijacked, damaging your reputation and costing you money, we can implement extremely quick and cost effective measures.

Everyone with a website should have these systems in place to prevent SPAM, do you? Contact us to find out how.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can dramatically benefit local Melbourne businesses, it will help your page rank higher in search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and increase the amount of visitors who will find your business on the web. How would you like to capture every person looking for the service or product you offer? You would no longer need to advertise, people would be knocking down your down to get what you are selling.

If you are a charity or non-profit organisation, we would love to offer you some free SEO consulting services and advice (limited availability where our time permits). We share your dream of making the world a better place.

For all other Melbourne businesses that are out to make a profit and grab market share from your bigger competitors, we are planning our next education lecture. When these simple lessons and material are applied, we promise doing so will help you be better optimised to rank well in search engines. We are also available for consulting and professional SEO services to Melbourne, Australian clients, and worldwide. For quick and easy results, we handle all the technical SEO tasks an d hard work, leaving you to do what you do best; run your business.

Get in contact with Control Alt Elite SEO now to find out more and get started today. We are based in St Kilda, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Don’t be fooled, there are reliable and affordable hosts out there, who are also the cheapest and offer better services than any of the rip off merchants. For some reason the Australian web host industry thinks they can charge you a lot more than most companies, and offer you less. We want to put an end to this, and let you in on a well known industry secret of much better web hosts out there.

The majority of Australian based website hosts are expensive and offer less service than most, and less functions than a modern website actually requires to run core functions.

Here is a list of what to look for with cheap web hosting providers:

Hosting / Disk space

At a minimum your host should offer you at least 2GB of disk space for all your files and uploads for a small site, and 10GB for a bigger site.
This will allow you to comfortably host high quality pictures, graphics, scripts, databases, flash animations, a few documents and a small video or two. Unfortunately most hosting plans from other people don’t even cover this basic need!

Bandwidth / Data Allowance

This is directly proportional to how much disk space your site uses, and how much traffic you get. If the average user used only 1MB of bandwidth with each visit to your website (loaded a few pages that had a few pictures/graphics on them, and no videos), 1000 of these typical visitors would use 1GB of bandwidth. If your monthly web host only offers you 1GB of data (as many do), your website could be temporarily shut down for the remainder of the month!). At a minimum we would suggest a host that offers 10GB of bandwidth. If your site has downloadable documents, videos, scripts, and flash animations or you expect a reasonable amount of traffic then consider 100GB+ minimum, unlimited is even better.

SQL Scripts

A simple modern website often uses 2 or more SQL scripts to run the database and Content Management System (CMS), more advanced sites will need to use many more. Unless your website is 10 years old (and if it is, you have much bigger problems), it may not use any. But then when you go to update and add new features or upgrade your site you will be unable to since your host prevents you running any SQL scripts. Many Australian web hosts, even the expensive ones, offer zero or only one SQL script. If you plan on having a functional website with useful features you should chose a hosting provider that offers at least 2 SQL scripts.

Extra Domains

Most business owners now have more than one website for one or multiple businesses, or at least own more than 1 domain name. perhaps a .com.au and a .com, .org or .net.au for the same business name.
Any reliable and serious host should provide the ability to host at least 2 domains as part of the hosting package deal (most Australian host companies only offer to host a single domain). There are specialist SEO hosting companies that offer unique IP for each domain. The jury is still out for dedicated SEO hosting companies.

So who is the best and most reliable web host?

You can find cheap web hosting that achieves all the above requirements for a very affordable cost, cheaper than the majority, more reliable, and offer much more services.

The only host we recommend (and we’re sure any other knowledgeable web design or SEO expert will agree it is the industry’s best and cheapest web host) offers:

• Unlimited space
• Unlimited bandwidth and data transfer
• Unlimited domains
• Unlimited SQL scripts
• A 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
• They even give you $100 Adwords credit!
• Many more advanced features and bonuses…

All this for only a few dollars a month. This is an unbeatable service, offering you much more than a standard company in Australia normally offers, and for much less. They offer some of the most comprehensive services for any size web business, and offer some of the cheapest web hosting!

Right now if you are with anyone else it is likely you are paying too much, and not getting the features or plan your website requires.
To get the cheapest web hosting, follow that link. For a special additional 25% of the advertised price, use the secret discount coupon code: cheaphost4aus
-This is biggest discount code you can get, on an already great deal.

Why should you avoid using Flash with SEO?
If you care about SEO and how your web page will rank in Google then you’ll want to avoid Flash heavy sites. Why? Because currently, search engines like Google can not read any text contained within a Flash script. Google has made advances in their ability to index certain Flash content, and it is likely within a year or so Google will have the technology and resources to be able to understand and read animated text, human speech or any other content contained within Flash websites and files, but it is likely never to fully support it, or favour it for SEO purposes.
If you’re whole site or sections are contained within a Flash script, including the main menu, text content, banner headers etc, all Google will see is a blank page. This is terrible for optimisation. Google will have no basis to rank your site for any particular keywords, or at least severely limit it.

Not only is it bad for SEO, any Flash on a website viewed with an iPhone or iPad will not be visible. With these products growing market share, you may be seriously limited your websites visibility, and hurting your bottom line.

Some website designers, in particular graphic designers, love to use Flash in their websites designs. It looks pretty, but little do they know you can do just about everything Flash does without using Flash, and make it user friendly and SEO friendly!

Whilst it is possible to apply SEO to a website built with Flash, you are restricting the potential. Without an aggressive link building campaign Google will rank a website with visible relevant text above a site that relies on Flash. Avoid Flash and SEO.

As long as you have a .com.au top level domain Google wont see it as anything but Australian, you cant even tell it to NOT be Australian in Google’s webmaster tools.
We even have US hosted, US domains (.com / .org) ranking well for Australian searches, just by setting the Google webmaster tools option as Australian).

But it’s a matter of degree.

Officially Google says the IP address/location does matter in these issues.

But Matt Cutts word isn’t 100% reliable, and is intentionally vague.

Sure, without any other geographic SEO applied to the site to steer Google in the most relevant direction to determine the country, by itself IP address will be a deciding factor.  This is easily overcome with simple SEO tricks.

What Matt doesnt say, and my reasoning it could matter is the only practical impact would be server load time VS distance, which does impact SEO. If you were Google, what site would you rank higher, a site that takes 1 minute to load, or one that takes a second? Naturally, due to the physical factors of network technology, a website stored on a server in the USA or UK or anywhere on the other side of the world has to travel further over the internet before it reaches your computer in Melbourne than an Australian hosted one. However this does not by default mean it will be faster, and often is not.

You might get a slow Australian host, making it rank worse for SEO factors. The difference between most hosts will make little difference to SEO compared to a poorly coded website that is not well designed by website designers who can make a well coded and efficiently run site. We see sites all the time that would rank far better if only their site structure and backend was programmed more smoothly, in fact most sites are effected by these SEO problems.

In reality, what Matt does not say is that the server location in the scheme of all SEO factors summed together holds practically no sway compared to other SEO factors if you were to rank them with an assigned percentage weight. When you do your Search Engine Optimisation the right way, and put in place all the geographic pointers, IP address makes extremely little to no difference at all to results, nor give any power to improve ranking results based on location. We have disproven this time and time again.  There are other more important factors that do affect geographically relevant rankings much more than IP address, and most definitely will hurt or improve your position in the search engines.
From my own extensive testing and work the benefit/penalty difference is negligible as US hosting is the standard and it would be impractical to get penalised. In any event you can tell Google you are an Australian targeted site with the TLD or in Google’s Webmaster Tools as a first step towards steering the relevancy towards Australian users. It should (and has for me) nullified this every time.

With the sites we experiment with and host, we now only have 1 site hosted on Au hosts, and its exponentially more expensive. We only keep it there because the site was bought off someone else for playing with and testing the SEO/pagerank/authority, and didnt want to set off any red flags changing hosts/host info in the whois information.

Non Au hosting has been working for us. If having Au hosting on top of that could have pushed up the rankings even more is hard to say, as all of our sites already do very well.
Many Au hosts are actually just US host affiliates, so be careful not to get shafted that way if you are considering paying through the nose for Australian expensive hosting.

You won’t NOT rank for Australian searches with US hosting. We have position 1 with US domains and US hosting for some Australian Google searches, as do thousands of other people/websites/seo experts, but Au hosting may give you a very tiny boost. i.e. server speed, which would also impact conversions to a small degree, especially if your site is media heavy.

All things considered we say just go for the most reliable host.

We highly recommend Host Gator, you get about 20 times the bandwidth/services and support than most Australian hosts, and more than most US hosts.

Use coupon cheaphost4aus for 25% off here: http://controlaltelite.com.au/hostgatordeal

We feel they offer the best service at the best value, and is the most feature packed of any web host we know.

We have yet to not get a website on page 1; for not just one, but multiple targeted search terms / keywords.
The more success and profits we can make for your business, the more successful our own business. We like to work only with businesses where we are confident this will happen.
If you do not succeed, we do not succeed.

We had one case where we got a client to the top of Page 1 for a very popular search term, and one day it suddenly vanished from Google, and traffic dropped completely. The client’s website designer (without checking with us) had uploaded a new version of the website, accidentally undoing all the SEO work we did on the web page, and making the website code completely unoptimised again (It was reoptimised, and back on Page 1 the next day). This is one reason we don’t make guarantees.

Due to factors out of our control, such as your store running out of stock, us having no control over your business practices, and a host of other 3rd party factors, we don’t want to promise and guarantee you an exact amount of increased profits and promise specific results when we can not control everything that determines your success with SEO. External factors aside, our system is very well proven, which is why people keep using our services.

We guarantee we believe we are the best SEO experts, technically savvy, hardest working, and most skilled.
Try us, we’ll let our results do the talking.

If we do not help you gain many more customers and increased profits we wouldn’t be in business for long, that we can guarantee.

The forefront of SEO of a few years ago is now obsolete. Some people with experience say they know how SEO works. They say things like just repeat your targeted keyword several times in your text and your meta keywords, hide text using colour and size etc. This worked for a little while a few years ago (but even at the time was not considered good practice), but now trying those things to SEO your page will likely get your page banned from Google. Do you want to trust your SEO to someone who doesnt specialise in SEO? If you leave your optimisation to your web designer, your neighbour, or anyone else who is not the best at what they do, and really knows what they are doing, then stay away from them.

We love what we do, and we are constantly constantly dedicated to educating ourselves more every day as the internet and companies like Google keep evolving and changing constantly.
To see our clients succeed online and offline is what makes us happiest.

When utilising the services of an SEO professional in Victoria, or anywhere else, we recommend you ask them hard technical questions, and really test their SEO knowledge. Also, Google their company name, see what others are saying.

Fortunately you’ve come to the right place at Control Alt Elite.
Feel free to ask us any questions to improve your websites rankings.

We are SEO expert consultants from Melbourne, Australia. We work with businesses to get them to the top of Google using SEO (search engine optimisation).

We have spent countless thousands of hours studying and reverse engineering search engine’s algorithms to work out exactly how companies like Google and Yahoo rank every website on the internet.

Our advanced technical capabilities and knowledge of special cutting edge technologies to rank your website on page 1 of search engines is second to none.

We do all the research and implement the optimisation work for our client businesses, and at affordable prices. All they have to do is be able to handle the new stream of customers and profits. Not such a bad problem to have, right?

By tapping in to our expert SEO knowledge, you have the chance for your business can gain a massive boost to your online presence to push your website above your competition. When you gain higher rankings in the search engines for competitive search terms related to your industry you can gain a heap of new customers and sales.

Work smarter, not harder.

We currently have several openings for businesses who need to gain more high quality customers and clients to increase their
Contact an SEO expert at Control Alt Elite today for your chance to gain the enourmous benefits of being one of our select clients.

Google uses a top secret algorithm, to automatically rank every website it finds. Firstly it decides how relevant it is to a topic, subject, and specific keywords, and also calculates it’s popularity by counting all the references/links across the internet pointing at this page. It then ranks all pages, and the results on page 1 Google feels deserve to be there. The exact specifications are a lot more complex than this, but that is the basic general principle. We won’t bore you with the thousands of hours of technical information and studies we have conducted, you have better things to do, like run your business.

This is what is known as SEO – Search Engine Optimisation.

How do we know all this? We have studied thousands of websites, reverse engineered these pages to scientifically measure factors that assist getting pages higher. We have done this for many businesses just like yours, and understand what the search engines love. We test our findings, start getting results, test more factors, and build up the business popularity across the internet until your business is ranked on page 1 of Google.

If your business needs more customers contact our friendly experts now to get started.