I've spent the last couple of days … shopping in the sales! Haha yes sorry I've not actually had to spend that much time working over the past few days and decided to take a break from client work. However, besides my excessive spending over the past couple of days I have finally put the finishing touches to the site I bought – osCommerce Templates.net. I won't be disclosing how much I actually paid for the web site however I hope to make my money back fairly quickly. The site came designed and pretty much ready to go. I've done a little keyword research, added a list of osCommerce eBooks for sale (as an affiliate) and introduced a new 'osCommerce Hosting Package' to my own business hosting offers. I do have other ideas but for now I will have to put those on hold until I clear the towering client work I have is cleared a little.nnFor now I've set the site live with a basic one click ordering system. Let's see how things go!

Finally my new camera arrived yesterday afternoon. I ordered this on the 6th December along with a Christmas present for my brother, and they finally delivered the lot (sorry bro!). I bought a Nikon Coolpix 7900 for £219. This camera is TINY! I think it's half the length of the strap that goes on it!! The only downside so far was that it was actually silver and not black like in the picture (but that's just me being pedantic!) and there is no extra SD memory card for it, internal memory being 13mb (about 17 photos at medium resolution, 7 at top res). However I'll pick up a nice large SD card to take lots of pictures as I can see me taking loads of photos with this. Once I've got a case for it (that didn't come either) it'll be in my bag 24/7. I'm intending to take as many pictures as I can for stock photos for web site work. This way I can build up a nice large selection and can use them however I want.

I've still got to put the software and drivers onto my computer so no photos right now, shame as it's a beautiful morning of blue sky, sunshine and white frosty ground, however I'll be sure to get some photos done before the end of the week.

I've been checking out printers for myself recently. I've had a Diddy Cannon Inkjet but the cartridges keep drying up (possibly cos I've not used it much) plus it's noisy and not really designed for quick basic prints of say something I want to read later or keep a note of. All my invoicing printing is done by accounts (that'd be my Mum!) so I've not been overly fussed over a lack of printer. But there are times when I've needed one. So at first I was looking to replace the HP Officejet at my Parent's and have that for myself, however I then realised I could spend less and buy something new for myself instead.

So I priced up a few Copier/Scanner/Printer combos from PC World, and liking the Epson RX425 at £99.99. I figured I'd go straight in Boxing Day on their usual price cuts for one day only, and hopefully grab that if it was reduced significantly. Comet had it at £79.99 which wasn't too bad a reduction already but I figured I'd wait to see what Boxing Day brings.

I popped into Currys today to get a flash card reader for my parents digicam for them and took a look over the printers. For the non UK readers here, PC World and Currys are owned by the same company therefore usually sell the same computer stuff at the same price. Not today! Currys had the RX245 up at £49.99! Apparently a £30 discount (just goes to show double check the prices in future before assuming PC World is the same or cheaper price!). So I grabbed the last one. That saves shopping on Boxing Day

I've read on forums, argued on forums with one or two people over the Google Sandbox. Does it exist? Or is it just an excuse for site owners and SEO enthusiasts who can't seem to get their new site noticed? Search Engine Watch Forums have had a thread running for a few days which has sparked a lot of comments from either side of beliefs. Even amongst the site moderators there is a split decision between whether it's there or whether it isn't.

Oh sorry, for those who don't know, the Google Sandbox is the nick name for an apparent Ageing delay for new web sites getting listed on Google. Whilst the new sites will be indexed they will not appear for generalised key phrases for around 9 months. Suddenly with no changes people have reported seeing their rankings jump and visitor count in from Google jump after 6-9 months. One reasoning behind this is that I've heard that Google is trying to cut down and prevent the amount of Spam sites getting into their indexes, so therefore any new site is instantly penalised ie. a spam site would not make money off it for at least 9 months and presumably by the end of the 9 months they'll have given up. Other various reasons can be found all over the web and on the thread at Search Engine Watch.

My thoughts on this? I agree with those who believe it's an excuse. Why? Because I've not been affected by it. I work on both old and new sites on a daily basis. Some are mine some are clients. Now despite what I do for a living I do not expect any business from my web site due to the simple fact that I am advertising in a saturated market. My domain has been owned for at least 3 years now (I keep changing business names!), so why do I not rank at the top of Google for "web design in the uk"?? In fact why am I not on the first 50 pages? Simple, because there are far more agencies and people out there doing the same as I do, and the ones above me have a lot more inbound links and standing than I do. I'm not fussed, I have far too much work at the moment to even worry over it! I often read comments on forums as well saying "would you purchase from an 'SEO' who can't even get theirselves ranked highly in the Search Engines?" – again, would I buy from the companies that do? No because they probably charge a fortune! I advertise the services available from my business on my web site for anyone that comes to it – mainly for people that have been referred to it by my clients. I have to have a web site, that's what I do for a living so it's there to demonstrate what's available, explain what can be done, but I've only made sales to 2 random visitors so far. Admittedly I've had 2 other people ask for duplicates of the biggest site I've done to date but I've laughed at them (especially the one in Australia who left a number and no email!!!). But my site is not really there for passing trade. I'm not an exceptionally established company. I have 155 backlinks to it according to Digital Point, most of these are client sites.

So there's an example of a site older than 9 months that doesn't rank well for the most general key phrases (note I still rank well for the phrases I've targetted). At this point you may be thinking, how about an example of a new site that works well…

Tribal Tattoos is now just over a month old. The domain name was bought mid-late October. The site was launched in mid November. Within 48 hours I had the site spidered and indexed by both Google and MSN. Within the 1st week we'd hit the average 70+ visitors, the following week the visitor numbers rose further. This month has seen the lowest number at 67 (on a Sunday) and the highest at 113. The average is around 85-90, various days of the week, especially the weekend, tend to be slightly lower. That's on a web site that has been set up and not touched since due to lack of time. What's the top phrases for visitors?

"lower back tattoos" – 204 search visitors
"tribal tattoos" – 169 search visitors

that's as of today and those figures are for December only (sorry I'm not going to add them all up, I think it proves my point). There are 600+ search phrases in total and Google has sent an average of 830+ visitors to the site this month compared to 733 from MSN and then in 3rd place, 77 from AOL. Also this site was originally set up on the basis of results from MSN so I'm not suprised MSN is working to our advantage. Could there be a lot more from Google? Perhaps. I have these phrases set up on my Digital Point account (Digital Point is a free keyword ranker tool that tracks where your phrases rank in Google, using the Google API tool) and check them on a weekly basis. The Tattoo phrases just seem to be rising, maybe by a few spots, some by a lot more.

Someone mentioned on the SEW forum that maybe people should look at it from the view of a new business starting up. There's not established, their content is possibly lacking and they probably won't have the inbound links that more established sites have. That makes a lot more sense to me than some aging delay in Google's indexing algorithm. How did the Tattoo site manage it? Well apparently it doesn't happen to all web sites, perhaps I was just lucky? Tattoos seem to be quite searched on according to the statistics I researched, so it's a big market. But I still stand by my thoughts, an algorithm cannot let some through and not others, it's a set of rules that every web site has to go through, it doesn't alter just because a site has a red background or 100 more words in its content, an algorithm is not a human it's a computer program. I keep explaining this to work – my script doesn't work one day but fail the next unless human error has caused it to! Only human intervention can change the way the algorithm works. Perhaps these specialists and site owners should stop arguing over it and start putting all that energy into the marketing of their websites instead.

I'd welcome thoughts or own experiences on this.

I woke up this morning to 250+ emails mainly returned emails. I know exactly what this is as it's about the 5th time it's happened to one domain or another of mine/clients. Some idiot last night decided to use my domain for spamming people and now it's all being bounced back. Bizarre thing is though, not all were returned email, some were emails from people, presumably autoresponders, I didn't pay too much attention to be honest I just let Mailwasher delete them all.

However I've set up email filters on both the SwishWorld cPanel and also on the other domain that it's actually forwarded to, and it's not doing anything. I'm filtering out the email address and the word [SPAM] but to no avail Whilst I don't actually use email on the domain (and just forward it as you can tell), I don't want to kill all email just incase.

This time last year my brother's domain was hijacked for a similar thing but thousands upon thousands of emails were bounced back and killed the server. Why are there people who do this without any disregard for others? I spent a good few minutes this morning first downloading the emails into Mailwasher and then having to tick them all off for deletion but check for my own in between. It's the last thing I need when I wake up with a head cold and just want to go back to bed! I'm obviously considerate to other people's feelings (most of the time!) and cannot understand why someone has to resort to this type of rubbish. Go buy a domain, they're hardly expensive, instead of leeching off others.