Posts

A tale of two search engine result pages (SERPs)

Image
As many of us are wont to do, I periodically perform exact match searches on my full name on various search engines. For neutrality, I use a cache- and cookie-cleared Firefox, and happen to be on OSX. The results I see from Google and Bing today, are surprisingly different. While it doesn't surprise me that Google prioritizes its own sites (of which blogspot is one), the Dogear and Lotus presence are listed in the top SERP, which is a bit surprising, considering how old they are. Bing, on the other hand, doesn't show any of my employer-hosted pages, not just in the top set of results, but anywhere in the 45 listings it provides. Google also claims there are "about 476" hits for my name in double quotes - that's more than ten times the number acknowledged by Bing. Also, due to a combination of its emphasis on Facebook matches and my high security settings, 4 of the Bing hits are of someone eponymous to me, whereas only 2 of Google's points to that same p

Thoughts on cross-linking, back-linking

Image
In the early days of the world wide web, most links to external sites were, in my opinion, "legitimate" rather than contrived. My first site dated back to 1994, and consisted of a landing page along with some samples of my academic writing. Back then, besides having no Wikipedia (but a plethora of Usenet newsgroups to refer to), I was able to mainly browse and select what I considered to be quality sites to which to link, and I gave no thought to soliciting inbound links from those destinations. Something that I recall about Japanese sites before the turn of the millennium, is that the cultural concept of " giri " was being commonly applied to making links mutual, and more interestingly, that authors of content gave explicit permission to have their content linked to by strangers, with the proper etiquette that when one created an external link, the owner(s) of the destination page would be notified. Now, most SEO blogs and resources speak of the painstaking ro

The importance of values - corporate and personal

Image
My employer formally arrived at corporate values, several years ago. I actually am not just in agreement, but strongly supportive of these values, fortunately perhaps. One of them is "trust and personal responsibility in all relationships" - and I believe that aligns well with the secular humanist school, to which I ascribe. Growing up as a visible minority in a culturally diverse environment, I recall how often classmates and their parents alike, had pre-conceived notions - what I'd call mainly prejudicial assumptions - of what values I may espouse, all based on my parents' heritage (and statistically, I was more likely to be Chinese, so was often mistaken to be one). What they didn't seem to consider, though, was that my parents had clearly had to have fundamentally rejected some of the strongest values supposedly held by the Japanese: conformity (at least outwardly) and avoiding familial shame, in order to embrace a Westernized country, and become immigrant

Link bait thoughts - Infographics

Image
I have a love-hate relationship with Infographics. For those who haven't seen many examples, they're concise sources of information presented with plenty of visual aids. Here's a source of a self-referential infographic, followed by 49 great examples. I love them, because my first language uses a logographic script, kanji , and as I grew up with manga , I'd always known that practically any subject, ranging from history to arithmetic and even abstract concepts such as those covered in philosophy, could be learned via a mix of graphics and text. As an aside, when I mention manga to non- Otaku , invariably I receive two questions: "Aren't comics for kids?" (Answer: not in Japan - there, manga exists for every age and demographic.) And, "What subjects do non-kid manga cover then?" (Answer: what do you think "novels" cover?) However, the concise presentation of information found in many cases also reminds me of "executive summarie

Where on-page SEO and essay writing practices coincide

Image
Casting my mind back to (well) over a decade ago, I still remember being taught some principles of short essay writing: The title should reflect the primary topic. As with well-formed markup language (HTML, XML), the opening and closing sentences should summarize the topic, assertion or opinion.  Each of the middle paragraphs should cover interrelated ideas that expound upon the main topic, and be ordered logically, building upon the prior paragraph. Boldface and italics can emphasize important points, though they should be used sparingly. In looking at Google's algorithm for keyword density and prominence factors, we see that they seem to expect these exact best practices in every web page in order to determine what the topic is for said page: The <title> and <h1> tags should contain the primary keyword - the prominence is also dependent upon overall length of the text strings, and the position in which it occurs. The keyword should occur in the first and closi