January 2008

Prisoners of War in the Battle for Paid Links

Yesterday I came across a post from Dazzlin Donna entitled Matt Cutts, Why Am I Still Being Punished, there are several points in that post worth noting and discussing in more detail.

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Privacy and Security Aren’t Opposites and Google as Tool

You know I speak against the Google machine a lot, sure some of it is good theatre, but deep down our Google overlords and the church of google can get two powerful. Here’s and article from wired that knock it out of the park: You can see it in comments by government officials: “Privacy no [...]

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Google The Double Standard of Being an Authority Website

If you’ve ever been to search engine conference and attended a site review session chances are you’ve heard panelists mention duplicate content penalties and filters. For “normal” people these problems are real, however with Google a double standard exists for trusted authority websites.

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Wanted Amazon WordPress Plugin

I’ve been looking for one of these myself for a while but have never found one. A plugin that lets me put in my amazon aff id and then appends it “automagically” to all previous and new amazon links that get created. All of the amazon plugins I’ve seen work with a search mechanism requiring [...]

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Using Stats and Goal Tracking for Your Blog

I was reading Matt’s post today about stats and it reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to write about. What are the goals you have for your blog, if it’s a commercial blog and not a personal one where is your ROI. Is it making a sale (direct or affiliate)? Is it clicking on [...]

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Hey Network Solutions Sniffing Domain Searches By Chance …

People have been making accusations that domain companies have been sniffing customers searches for quite some time now. No one has any hard conclusive proof, but you have to admit it’s hard to make a case why network solutions might have registered this one, check out the whois http://www.youguysseriouslyregistereverythingisearch.com/

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Want an Editorially Approved Link Become a Google Partner

in this mornings post I chastised Google for giving straight links to partners, However now I’ve found a whole bunch more Here’s a Google adwords customer Happy Hounds getting an editorially approved link from Google, lets not forget twiddy.com or cordarounds.com not to worry while they may keep other robots out but they let googlebot [...]

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Google Gives Free PR8 Links to Paid Partners, and Doesn’t Follow Their Own Guidelines

One of the more entertaining aspects of the entire paid links debate is Google is pretty quick to dole out the punishment, even though in many cases they haven’t taken the time to get their own house in order.

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Optimizing WordPress Page Titles, Post Titles and Page Slugs

While wordpress is one of my favorite CMS platforms, out of the box it isn’t search engine optimized. Combine this with people who aren’t SEO aware, and publish a blog, and you almost always end up with an implementation that’s sub-optimal. Here are some tips to help you get things on track and moving in [...]

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Excessive Length URL’s and Social Media

Most CMS systems today are capable of generating clean URL’s. Unless you are dealing with newspapers or magazines where existing legacy systems it’s almost a non issue. However I came across two incredibly horrible URL’s in the same day http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/commercial_aviation/TowersAndTarmacs/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&plckPostId=Blog%3a8427003a-9a63-4261-aa47-5e4b356bb224Post%3adc1b7f60-ab5d-4d6b-85cc-b81b43775a97 and http://blog.stylehive.com/index.php/weblog/entry/everyones-got-posh-spices-bob-and-youre-next while these URL’s are bad for search engines they are also bad for [...]

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What Websites and Programs Do You Use to Get Things Done

Michael Arrington has a great post listing what web 2.0 websites he couldn’t live without. I don’t know that there are any sites I couldn’t live without but there sure are a few I use that make my life and my day more productive. I’m also not going to limit myself to web 2.0 sites, [...]

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Google Universal Search is Just Weird

So if the word “the” is a stop word an generally speaking just ignored, why does the search for [the golden compass] have a Google news result in the #2 slot and [golden compass] does not.

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Google has it’s Head up Wikipedias Ass

C’mon Google WTF how can you possibly say that Wikipedia deserves to above Delicious for the search term [delicious] screen shot because the ridiculous ness of this SERP is mind boggling inept

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