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Showing posts from September, 2011

Why I won't link to your blog

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Today I received the above comment, unsolicited, and after about two minutes' investigation I moved it into the Spam category. Here's a numbered list explaining why: Although my name is part of the blogspot domain I use, and promote in most places, the message addresses me as "Webmaster", which is possibly today's equivalent of "to whom it may concern". Actually, I have interchangeably experimented with the vanity URL provided to me via my alma mater, such as on Technorati and STC.org. The request is for cross-linking, which already devalues the proposition (as it's a "black hat" practice). If this person truly valued my blog, he would link to it without asking me to link to his. The request uses my domain, implying that it is a "keyword". I've blocked out the destination URL and the keyword he asked for (which, although partially reflecting his website address, was also far too generic to stand a chance at ranking well

How I syndicate web content

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Like most individuals who are working on establishing an online presence, I have multiple SNSs (social networking services) on which I wish to share content. The four main services that I use currently, along with my audience demographics are as follows: Twitter : mostly topics of professional interest or music, and breaking news, scientific articles and alma mater related newsbits. My twitter follower audience is still small and largely impersonal, which encourages me to be mindful that tweets may be mined publicly by anyone. Google+ : add to my preferred Twitter topics, photos that I've begun to upload to Picasaweb, which is primarily Vienna-related. On + my audience is academic and more professionally allied than on Facebook, with very little overlap. Facebook (The link to my FB profile is not publicly available, which was my deliberate choice): most of the above, plus the occasional "true status" - things on my mind that only actual friends would find of slight int

Bing's "SEO Fundamentals" are everyone's fundamentals

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  As a followup perhaps to the Bing/Yahoo! quality checklist, Searchenginejournal.com subsequently provided 18 points of what Bing expects web content publishers to implement for SEO . Well, it seems to me that all their advice applies equally as well for those aiming to optimize their web content for any search engine. I think perhaps that there should have been a disclaimer associated with point 1, which concerned the implementation of robots.txt and XML site maps. It's still my understanding that both of these files only provide a set of suggestions for search engines, and their parameters may not necessarily be obeyed by crawlers. Point 8, create an RSS feed, also may imply quite a few additional points, such as that new content is expected to be published with some frequency and that said feed can be easily subscribed to by those who may not know how to hack the URL (via point 11, enablement of social media). In fact, segmented audience studies have shown that the pu

Trying out Technorati (claim code)

Their FAQ advises against using redirects, so this may not work - nonetheless, here it is: M467DDBXQN92 I may need to re-claim with my actual domain URL.

Criteria for "quality" from Bing/Yahoo!'s perspectives

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About a month ago, Searchenginejournal.com published this article on things that Bing have disclosed that they penalize web content for from a ranking perspective. Most of the points they made concerned concision, but the final point on actively discouraging machine-translated text caught my eye. I'd posted in the past about how translation did not equate to localization , so I was rather pleased to imagine that someone was incorporating grammar and spelling checks into the ranking algorithm. However, I also have the following questions: Do they verify that the language attribute found in the HTML matches the body text language that people read? If the language is a distinct flavour, such as English as spoken in India or the Kansai dialect of Japan, is that taken into account during the linguistic quality assessment? Do they penalize on slang, profanities or "text-speak" orthography, or will they process them accurately and take that into account in evaluating the

The benefits of trunk.ly

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Some months ago my team lead had mentioned trunk.ly to me. It's a social bookmarking service that aggregates links that the user has shared out via various social media services. As I often try to share web content that I find interesting but rarely spend the time either completing an in-depth perusal of said content, I've found the cumulative archive of what I've been tweeting and publishing via Google+/Buzz and Facebook to be most useful. At the least, it spares me the effort of maintaining browser-specific bookmarks and trawling through my Facebook profile export or tweet history. LinkedIn shares are also supported, but due to the way I cross-publish, I haven't bothered to use it. Furthermore, trunk.ly has a Top SEO Experts group , which I was able to join. Through it I can find not only the most up to date content that benefits me in my current role, but I can see via the number of shares, how popular or vetted the links have been. Now, if only I had the tim