Having said that, I’ve decided to be a bit more transparent in 2012 and publish some general goals:

1. Blog regularly and grow a subscriber list of over 1000 users
   In actual fact, I plan to start a new blog and leave this one for more personal/opinion led posts. More info on the new blog coming soon but it will be strictly SEO/affiliate oriented.
2. Increase my Twitter follower count to 4000+
3. Push my passive income above £3000/mo
   Some time ago I wrote a post about how I wanted to pay my mortgage with my affiliate earnings. Well, I’m pleased to report that I’m currently earning around £1000/mo so it is mission accomplished in that sense (although I’ve learnt there’s no such thing as 100% ‘passive’). The one thing I didn’t do was document the process which I regret now. I plan to change that for the next £2k/mo.
4. Build and launch a web app
   This one goes hand in hand with point 3 but I have several ideas for web apps that could make good money. I want to have one live in at least a minimum viable product format by January 2013
5. Lose weight and increase fitness levels
   Now, I’m no fatty by any stretch of the imagination but I’ve developed a bit of a beer belly over the last 12 months. I want to lose a stone (down from 12 to 11) and be regularly running 5-8k (couple of times a week). The bigger pitcure goal is to run a marathon in 2013, but it’s also about getting motivated physically and mentally.

So that’s it, not a huge list but one I think I can certainly make a dent in.

• Automating and Scaling Keyword Research
  While the techniques and tools discussed are a little bit harder without an Adwords API key, @richardbaxter provides some great insight into scaling keyword research and prioritising keyword targets.
• SEO P.I.M.P Music Video - T-Money feat. Craig
  Probably the funniest SEO video you’re likely to see this year - seriously good work by the master @ToryMcGill with the usual G.I.T. cameo by @animaxy. I’m hugely surprised this didn’t go a bit more viral among the UK SEO scene.
• SEO/social reporting with Google Spreadsheets
  This is so awesome. If you ever wanted a Google Docs Spreadsheet to use as a client dashboard then you’re prayers have been answered. I can think of a few extensions but it’s a fantastic first draft.
• Copy Detection Mechanisms for Digital Documents
  This is a paper written by Sergey Brin way back in 1995, it’s scary to think where Google could be 16 years on - and yet they still seem to fail massively on occasions (hat tip to @paddymoogan for sharing).
• 7 Technical SEO Wins for Web Developers
  Speaking of @paddymoogan, here’s a post on Distilled covering 7 SEO wins for developers. In conclusion - “Love your developer!” and “Give developers credit where its due”.
• Conquer Link Directory Best Practices for SEO
  A useful post and well worth a read for anyone in the SEO game.
• Keyword Research for Affiliates
  A video from @wilreynolds (of SEER Interactive) for a talk given at Affiliate Summit to “help you understand where pockets of opportunity exist” with affiliate keyword research (slides here).
• Ex-Googlers Debut Zillabyte To Let Business Users Easily Analyze Big Data
  Some ex-Googlers formed a company called Zillabyte and one of their ‘off-the-shelf’ datasets will include a full crawl of the web. Yes, you heard me right. Holy shit.
• Data Scraping Guide for SEO
  Ultimate round-up of how to scrape every kind of data imaginable for your SEO campaign from @seohimanshu.
• Competitive Backlink Analysis
  Fantastic post on the Ayima blog by Jane Copland on how to analyse your rivals strong and weak points in regard to their link building campaign.
• Excel Dashboards
  Not strictly just for SEO, but we can all do with improving our Excel-fu (via @stuntdubl)

• Engeeno
  What happens when two ex-Google spam-team engineers (@pedrodias and @ArielL) leave and create their own startup? We don’t know yet, but I’m on the list and you should probably be too.
• 62 steps to the definitive link building campaign
  Great post on wordtracker from Mark Nunney covering everything you need to know for link building. Well, maybe not everything, but it’s a big chunk of knowledge anyhow.
• Google News Ranking Factors 2011
  I’m too lazy to find out who’s directly behind this site - but if you have a strategy that involves targeting screen space in Google News (which you should) then this is probably one for the bookmarks.
• Step by Step Guide to Spying on the Competition with KeywordSpy
  So this one isn’t strictly SEO - but if data on a competitor sites PPC strategy isn’t something you’d sit up and take notice of then you aren’t doing your job justice. We’ve all heard of KeywordSpy but SEER has gone the extra mile and even provided a downloadable Excel file to make sense of all the raw data.
• Basic SEO for Facebook Pages
  I haven’t delved too much into social media profile optimisation as my focus is heavily on enterprise SEO and technical issues but this is a great starting point for anyone looking at giving it a go.
• How to Game Klout
  Who knew Klout was so easily gamed? and more importantly, who knew that with a high Klout score you could get all sorts of perks in Vegas? time to knuckle down and then book some flights methinks….
• Google -50 Penalty Research
  Some good discussion on WebmasterWorld of a -50 penalty dissection. Certainly worth a read if you ever have potential leads contacting you over similar issues.

• Tracking the KPIs of Social Media
  You rarely see a poor post by @randfish over on SEOmoz and this one is no different. If you’re from the agency world then you’ve no doubt had a conversation with a client who is scared of dabbling in social because “there’s no way to track it”. Rand covers some great advice on how to get a bit more insight into the impact of being friendly.
• Using Google Docs To Generate Hot Content Strategies [Tool]
  Very nice tool from ex-HP SEO @DBSEO that takes a little bit of pain out of the process of content strategy research. This triggered a few extra ideas in my head too, which is always nice.
• Google+ Developer Platform
  Awesome! it’s finally here - the Google+ developer API! oh… no, hold up… let me step back a second here. It turns out it’s pretty much a one-way API right now, so essentially just a data export tool. Looks like all of those spam bots will have to be put back on hold for the time being.
• A Guide to Long Tail Link Building
  Yet another great post by the famous @rishil this time tackling how to create sub-sets of your head terms and create those all important long-tail anchor text variations. A seemingly simple guide but one I’m sure many SEOs don’t action often enough.
• Quora: Kevin Lacker’s Answers about Web Search
  I think it was Rand Fishkin that tweeted this out originally but I’m too lazy to go and check. Anyway - this guy “wrote search algorithms at Google” so he knows his shit. There’s some really interesting answers that any hardcore SEO will enjoy reading.
• Introducing Twitter Web Analytics
  About freakin’ time. Twitter finally launch an official analytics tool. Well, I say launch but it’s still closed to a selected beta group for now. Hopefully it will roll-out more widely pretty soon.
• Blekko Web Grep
  Blekko certainly get the kudos for empowering the modern SEO with decent tools. This one does exactly what it says on the tin - allows you to essentially grep the web using strings or patterns. This could be awesome for certain niche research tasks.

I received the following email this afternoon, which I initially thought was an error (emphasis mine):

As stated in the AdWords API Terms and Conditions (Section II.4), we periodically review AdWords API activity. We noticed that there has been low usage of the AdWords API developer token associated with your My Client Center (MCC) manager ID XXXXXXXXXX in the last 30 days. For the purpose of ensuring quality, improving Google products and services and compliance with AdWords API Terms and Conditions, we have disabled this token.

If you wish to re-apply for the token, please visit the AdWords API Center in your account. Remember to answer the following in detail if you re-apply for the token:

1. Describe the uses of your API application or tool with specific examples. For instance, account management or bid optimization.
2. Who is or will be using your API application or tool? For example, colleagues in your company or advertisers or agencies to whom you are selling the tool.
3. Please attach screenshots of your API application or tool. If the application or tool is yet to be developed, please provide relevant design documentation.
4. Please provide a list of clients that will be using your API application or tool in an automated way.

Please know that that we will take between 5 and 6 weeks to process all developer token re-applications.

Regards,
The AdWords API Team

TL;DR - We got screwed for ‘low volume’ usage, we can request re-inclusion but it will take 5-6 weeks.

It would be great to know what Google considers to be ‘low volume’. The developer token in question is used by our research tools (which matches the original application description) and makes under 500,000 API calls per month. Our usage is mostly all at once (pulling fresh data) plus ad-hoc usage throughout the month as new data is requested (sure, this is mostly KeywordEstimator queries). The thing is, there are people on the Adwords support forums who are making in excess of 8 million API calls per month and have also been disabled - so what exactly constitutes low volume, and how much data do we need to pull in order to get re-included?

My theory is that these blanket rejections are actually nothing at all to do with volume of usage. Instead, I think they’re entirely to do with specific usage patterns only. Google doesn’t like 3rd party apps using their keyword volumes for automated keyword research as they see this as ‘gaming’ - instead they want to control the spread of this data through captcha-controlled properties of their own.

This is of course great news for tools like Wordtracker who, once they get their own access back (and they will), will likely clean up in the SEO market as everyone seeks an alternative method to accessing Adwords data outside of the Google API.

• Sneaky Keyword Research
  A great little 5-slide deck from @rishil on some outside-the-box techniques for gaining some valuable keyword research/traffic data.
• The Reason GA Launched Multi-Channel Funnels
  Ever had a client ask the question of why their Adwords data doesn’t match what GA tells them? just point them at this fantastic post.
• Hire a botnet! (or just loads of cheap proxies)
  I first saw this via a tweet from @richardbaxter of SEOgadget. It looks pretty dodgy if this is anything to go by, but I can think of TONNES of uses for a service like this where you need access to a large pool of IPs for one-off tasks (did someone say search volume manipulation? [yeah, it happens]).
• Narrative Science creates machine-written copy that looks human
  A good piece from the NYTimes covering a startup that’s using AI to create unique copy with machine-chosen ‘angles’ that is virtually indistinguishable from human copy. Certainly of interest to anyone in the SEO space.
• Winning at SEO with duplicate content
  I wasn’t at BrightonSEO but by all accounts this preso went down well. It covers an interesting topic and one that definitely warrants a bit of attention and research time in the near future.
• How I wrote 500,000 unique GoogleBase Descriptions in 2 hours
  Another post tackling dupe content, but from a completely different angle. Anyone who works on enterprise sites will have hit this problem on multiple occasions and not just for GoogleBase purposes - mostly for repetitive manufacturer blurb on retail products. I took a similar route recently on a client site, albeit with a slightly different process and implementation.

It starts up with truncated meta description and then goes straight into using the H2 tags on the page along with a “5+ items” indicator. I’ve seen Google substitute heading tags for the title shown in the SERP before, but never for the snippet and certainly never in this manner.

Is it new?

UPDATE: looks like this is a perm change to the SERPs and not just a bucket test - New snippets for list pages (Google Search blog).

This laptop is by no means an all-singing all-dancing Goliath, but £500 doesn’t buy you an amazing bit of kit no matter how hard you shop around. It is however perfectly fit for my needs (web surfing, coding and some Photoshop). The tech spec is by no means feeble either:

• Intel Pentium DC T4400 2.2GHz
• 4GB RAM
• 500GB SATA HDD
• 17.3″ HD LED TFT
• DVD RW
• NVIDIA GeForce G103M
• Webcam
• Windows 7 Home Premium

I had a few different machines in my final decision pool but the LED screen, dedicated graphics chip and healthy RAM are what swung it for me. On top of that, the webcam is very handy for Skype’ing with work folk, N wireless means I get a decent 150mbps to my Belkin router, HDMI output is great for hooking up to my Plasma and the 64-bit Windows 7 was a plus seeing as several other laptops in this price bracket seemed to come with 32-bit only. All-in-all, this laptop was head and shoulders above anything else I was looking at so really it was a no brainer in the end.

I was also pretty pleased to discover that the listed 5400rpm SATA drive was actually 7200rpm - this was probably the only aspect of the machine that was lacking when compared to others I was looking at so this was a nice little bonus to discover during the un-boxing.

This is a 17″ laptop (I won’t work on anything less for any lengthy period of time) so as you can imagine it’s physically pretty big. This is NOT a laptop that you would want to travel anywhere with. While the weight is not all that bad for a big screen laptop (< 3Kg), I certainly wouldn't want to carry it around.

Overall as a general purpose machine I would give this a healthy 8/10 but for my needs specifically it scores an excellent 10/10.