The week in search - week 2

January 13th, 2008 Jason

A weekly roundup of articles I found interesting and useful in the last 7 days.

Week 2 of 2008:

Wikia launches:
The much-touted launch of Jimmy Wales’ stab at user-generated search results. Is it really an SEO free-for-all? Only time will tell.

Graywolf on Wordpress SEO
Michael takes a great look at how to maximize the keyword benefit of your post titles, post slugs, and page names.

Self Made Chick
Self Made Chick talks about blogging in first person. A particularly useful post as I ‘find my voice’ here, but the rest of her blog is great as well. It probably resonated more with me this week than it might normally as I’d just been talking with a friend about ways she could get a little extra income for herself, and SMC has some great first-person experience doing just that.

AdSense changes the rules
 Google announced changes to the AdSense referral program, and there’s lots of interesting commentary going ’round about it. Problogger calls it flat out stupid, while Andy Beard rationalizes and then looks at exploiting it, and Bruce Clay offers a very reasonable opinion: it is bad business to alienate your best customers. I couldn’t agree more.

I also brought a new assistant into my team this week, and so have been reviewing a few useful beginner links I’ve had stashed away:
SEO Best Practices at KingFriday.co.uk
Tips for Your First Day In-House at SearchEngineWatch
The SEO’s Guide to Linkbuilding at SlightlyShadySEO
and the white papers at SEO-Theory.comI intentionally include the slightlyshady link because we strive towards completely ethical SEO, and I think it’s important for the new person to have a sense of what is and is not generally acceptable to do. There are also things in the SEO Theory reading that I don’t agree with, and I expect that some very worthwhile discussions will stem from the team diving into them more.

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The Week in Search - Week 1

January 6th, 2008 Jason

The plan is to do a weekly roundup of articles I found interesting and useful in the last 7 days. Holidays and guests and travel this week, so just a few links for week 1 of 2008:

Google Operating System: Google Artificially Promotes Recent Web Pages
One of many articles on the subject which probably caused the most stir this week. I even contributed my own two bits about whether ‘new’ equals ‘better’ at Google now.

DomainTools blog: Lazy webmasters cost their employers millions of visitors
Whether it’s laziness or thoughtlessness, I’m running into this all the time. From the user POV, making a site work both with and without ‘www’ is just a no-brainer (and, frankly, I want people to anticipate my mistypes.)

On the other hand, from the SEO POV, it’s a pain in the ass if there’s subdomains or alternate spellings creating duplicate content issues that I don’t know about. But, letting our domain management service profit from our parked domains is also a huge wasted opportunity.

Problogger.net: Using stumbleupon to get on the radar of other bloggers.
A useful reminder that the best results are not instant results.

10e20.com: Top 50 search and social media happenings for 2007
Of course loads of people did ‘end of year’ posts; this one was particularly exhaustive and includes a number of small but significant events. Definitely a good collection, with loads of links that are worth a read.

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