Expert advice on search engine optimization
I wrote a few weeks ago that Google was devaluing Wikipedia in the SERPS. ( “Google and Wikipedia seem to be having a lovers spat”). At the time I could only see the results on some test data center that Google likes to serve me every so often. Well now I am actually seeing it on actual datacenters that I know the IP of. These datacenters seem to have an index update on them.
Yesterday Google made it to some posts in the SEO world with their Valentines day logo. I did not think much about it. We are always talking about what Google is doing. Today I was on CNN.com and saw a link to a Time Magazine article titled What Was Google Thinking?. This made me wonder if Google did this to get extra attention. Remember link bait is not just for search rank. Link Bait is a way to get links that bring traffic as well. It is also a way to get type in traffic. All somebody has to do is mention your name or company name. People will type it in Google and find you. This is why it is important to rank for you name or company name.
Link Bait is not new by any means. People have been doing things to get attention for years. Like in Hollywood the phrase has always been “any publicity is good publicity”. Actually Guerilla Marketing is the same thing really.
I was just reading over at Googleblog that the Google toolbar 3 is out of Beta. The big feature they mentioned is that you can open your documents and spreadsheets directly in Google Docs & Spreadsheets. They also mention that it is available in 12 new languages.
They released the new firefox tool bar and Google Docs & Spreadsheets in 12 new languages.
French, Italian, German, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil)
If you don’t have Firefox yet you can get here.
Technorati Tags: google docs, google spreadsheets, firefox, google toolbar, firefox google toolbar, google toolbar beta
Over at Googleblog they are talking about how people are created web mashups for the blind. One of the most interesting ones they mention is a website that offers a way to access Google Calendar from a phone or using skype. I’m going to try that out.
Wikipedia has been in the news a lot lately because it put the nofollow tag on certain links posted by authors. Well I think that is not enough. I think they need to exclude their whole site from the search engines and every page needs to load a warning first or the site needs to just shut down. I think Wikipedia was a good idea before the whole world knew about it. The problem with the idea of a WiKi encyclopedia is that you can’t trust it. The founder of Wikipedia says that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has earned them fail grades. Read the rest of this entry »
I spoke about the rel=”nofollow” tag a while back and thought I would talk about other bloggers using it. Many SEO blogs are still using rel=”nofollow”. I understand why Matt Cutts uses it. He works for the company that is trying to convince bloggers Google is trying to do something for them. But why are all the major SEO’s using it. They either use it or flat out don’t allow url’s or have some fancy redirect to do the same thing. Some even have posts about how stupid and useless nofloow is. rel=”nofollow” is not the solution. What they need to do is install proper spam detection like spamkarma and there are many good CAPTCHA programs out there. I know many of these people and they all to this day complain about comment spam. SEOMoz even made a big deal about how they use rel=”nofollow” because some of their commenter’s were linking to bad sites. It is funny that all they were worried about was what Google thought of them linking to these bad sites and not their readers. We still have to see these bad links. Obviously the rel=”nofollow” has not helped them at all. It is very simple to take off of your blog. There are at least 2 plugins that work great for wordpress. (plugin1, plugin2) If you guys are reading this please install one of these.
Here is a list of people that still show rel=”nofollow” or some other method to not link to people like redirects. The ones with *’s are the ones that have spoken out against rel=”nofollow”. Not all of these are SEO blogs some are blog written by SEO’s on some other subject.
www.seobook.com
www.jimwestergren.com
www.seomoz.org
www.seobythesea.com
www.seologs.com
www.webguerrilla.com
www.jensense.com
daggle.com
www.wolf-howl.com *
www.seroundtable.com
www.ewhisper.net
www.oilman.ca *
www.davidnaylor.co.uk
www.goodroi.com
www.stuntdubl.com
searchengineland.com
This is not a comprehensive list.
