The website claims;

“Press releases will be produced to promote the site across the UK.  These will highlight the advantages of employing you because of your loyalty, training, proven experience , transferable skills and the fact that you are redundant through no fault of your own.
It I hoped that employers will be keen to snap up such workers . You can choose what to say and highlight your strong points. It may save you time and expense and disheartening rebuffs from taking CV’s to employers and ‘knocking on doors’ .
Also if more than one employer wants you then you may be able to negotiate a better deal . There may be other employers out there besides retail ones who would welcome you because of your transferable skills but you may not necessarily know who to approach…here they may come to you.
By acting as an identifiable group,  exposure to the job market and potential employers will be higher….an employment co-operative!”

The shopworkers union USDAW is urging former Woolworths employees to avoid a website set up by a Cheshire company which is offering to help them find work. (source: crainsmanchester)

On what is supposed to be the busiest day for internet retailers.. comscore reports increased traffic during this christmas period, however trends suggest that web traffic is somewhat lower than previous years..

Top-5 Internet retailers 10% down on same period last year

Source; comscore

• Applied Language Solutions (translation services provider) of Delph, appeared in 23rd place
• Bolton based household appliance supplier DRL appeared in 28th place
• Henleys clothing wholesaler / designer / retailer appeared in 80th place.
• Crane hire & Lifting solutions provider GGR-Unic appeared in 95th place.
• Felicini the restaurant chain which owns the Grinch and Felicini outlets appeared 99th place.

The group says the site could be the first of many new projects.. “Several complimentary domain names have also been purchased that may be of use in the future.” No launch date has been set for the saveonsofa.co.uk site..

Home Retail Group is one of the UK’s leading retailers with sales of £6bn in the last financial year. HRG recently purchased intellectual property rights to Alba and Bush trademarks for 15.25m.

They predict the peak online shopping hour will happen between 1300-1400 GMT when £28m may be spent online in an hour. Today we expect to see sales soar by 25% compared to last year, the firm predicted. Some 29 million people are expected to use the internet to buy Christmas presents this year.

source http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7770338.stm

Anyway… if you’re reading this… thanks for dropping by ? I have a feeling I’ll be talking to myself for the first couple of months etc… However I do hope you’ll take time to read the odd post & occasionally pass comment…

More about me… I’ve pretty much remained incognito for the past 5 years of my SEO Life… mainly due to the fact I spend so much time representing other seo agencies & web design companies that i rarely had the chance to voice an opinion or indeed share my professional thoughts on SEO & internet marketing.

I’m married & a dad of 3… I’ve been actively promoting websites & making a living online for the past 5 years… My background is UNIX consultancy… mainly providing Solaris based solutions in the enterprise space… unfortunately whilst I still have a nerdy/geeky affiliation with UNIX.. the daily grind of driving up & down the M6 just proved too much in the end….

more to follow…

Google publishes New Business Listing Quality Guidelines

Summary of major points:

• Represent your business exactly as it appears in real life. The name on Google Maps should match the business name, as should the address, phone number and website.
• List information that provides as direct a path to the business as you can. Given the choice, you may want to list individual location phone numbers over a central phone line, official website pages rather than a directory page, and as exact of an address as you can.
• Only include listings for businesses that you represent.
• Don’t participate in any behavior with the intention or result of listing your business more times than it exists. Service area businesses, for example, should not create a listing for every town they service. Likewise, law firms or doctors should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
• Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title or address fields

Of course if you believe somebody is abusing the system… you can report it at Google Groups