Best Birdwatching Binocular 2010

At this time of the year many industries, especially in entertainment and sports like to look back over the year and go over some of the highlights as well as the best in a particular category - The BBC Sports Personality of the Year springs to mind.

So I thought why not do something similar within the field of binoculars and highlight some of the best binoculars in a range of the most common uses, including Best Birdwatching Binocular. Nothing new here as it turns out that with a little research Binoculars.com, on of the best on-line retailers of optics already has one.

Why I bring it up is in their choice of the best bird binoculars for 2010:

Pentax 8x43 DCF SP Binoculars
Now don't get me wrong, I think that these are a cracking pair of binoculars and they have a bunch of excellent features including aspherical eyepiece lenses, high-resolution phase-coated roof prisms, scratch-resistant hydrophobic coating on exposed objective and eyepiece lenses and multi-coated optical elements.

Where the lack a little is in one of the most important areas of any really great birding binocular and that is in their field of view. These Pentax binoculars have a field of view of 330ft at 1000 yards (110m at 1000m) or an angle of view of 6.3°, which to be honest in my view is only just above average - really great 8x42 wide angle binoculars like the Swift Audubon binoculars (see below) can have a field of view as wide as 430ft @1000 yards (8.15°)

The winner of the Best Binocular Reviews Best Birding Binocular 2010 was indeed the porro prism version of the Swift 8.5x44 Audubon ED Binoculars that does have a massively wide field of view as well as a host of other great features including BaK-4 Prisms, fully multi-coated optics and extra low dispersion glass (ED) that all add up to produce a very high quality and bright image.

For more take a look at the Best Binocular Reviews Annual Binocular Awards 2010.

Side Note:
For those who are interested the short-list for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2010 is below:

• Mark Cavendish
• Tom Daley
• Jessica Ennis
• David Haye
• AP McCoy
• Graeme McDowell
• Graeme Swann
• Phil Taylor
• Lee Westwood
• Amy Williams

My Love Hate Relationship wih Google

Recently Google decided that it no longer liked my Best Binoculars & Binocular Reviews website and keywords that I was previously ranking in the first 5 places for, were now down to the tenth page or worse.

I was totally gutted, because I have been doing a lot of work on this website for many months now and it was slowly starting to pay off with the traffic to it, steadily increasing and as such so has to has my income

So what I had done to incur the wrath of Google?

In my opinion nothing, because I am looking at this site as a long term project I am purposely keeping away from any shady ways to improve my search engine rankings and producing quality unique contenet that I feel is genuinely useful should you be looking for advice on binoculars.

I did wonder if I may have too many internal links on the homepage, Google's own Webmaster Guidelines recommend that you keep it to less than a hundred and mine is pretty close to that, but surely this is not the worst crime in SEO?

After racking my brains and not coming up with anything and as a last resort, I submitted a Reconsideration Request from my Google Webmaster Tools account. This was done in frustration more than anything else as I have written to 'Big Brother' in the past and never received a reply and so was not expecting much.

Five days later
Yeagh \o/ - all my rankings have now returned and I even have a very generic reply from Google that says:


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We've processed your reconsideration request for http://www.bestbinocularsreviews.com/ July 30, 2009

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: www.bestbinocularsreviews.com.

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.
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I still do not know what (if anything) I did was wrong, but at least now I now once again have people visiting my website although I have a horrible feeling it may happen again.

So if someone in the reads this from the Google Search team reads this, thanks guys, but to improve it, why not tell us why it happened, this would help people who are genuinely not trying to trick you to to produce better websites for your search engine and for the billions of people who use it.

Discount Binoculars

I have been working hard on my Binoculars website lately and it seems to be paying off with the amount of visitors up buy just over 87% for the month of June as compared to May and this in turn is converting into an equal increase in sales.

One of the most recent features that I have added is a page where you can quickly compare discounted binoculars, these are real discounts on binoculars found on either Amazon, Binoculars.com, Eagle Optics, Optics Planet or Jessops here in the UK.

I think that it helps users of my site quickly check to see what is available at a discounted price and so far according to my analytics, it is being used a lot which is great.

Leica Binoculars
Also new to the site is a page on Leica Binoculars - not cheap, but definitely some of the best quality binoculars out there.