Posts

A tale of Wikipedia's dominance

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As illustrated in the xkcd comic above, Wikipedia has had an enormous impact on many web users. A contributing factor to their success in the more recent years, may be attributable to how visible their pages are in organic searches. Google has been long reputed to favour Wikipedia content in their SERPs. However, recently Search Engine Watch established that (albeit by a narrow margin), Bing is even more likely  than Google to return a Wikipedia page organically. Personally, I find it completely unsurprising that Wikipedia articles would dominate organic rankings: Their URLs are easy to hack: I often go directly to the topic I wish by crafting the URL, and they also have extensive redirects in place, allowing me to reach the desired content even if my guess wasn't the canonical term. They make an effort to police their content to minimize bias and conjecture. Many of its pages are updated frequently, again with the power of crowd-sourcing. The writing quality is also mon

Build it as if they will come

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Building something though people may not immediately attend? Karlskirche in Vienna by night Last Friday, Search Engine Journal transcribed part of Matt Cutts' talk which pre-announced changes to Googlebot that will address "overly optimized" content: What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now. First, it's my impression th

Is larger (PPC) better? Size matters, but... the #G+ strategy

After winding down from what still feels novel but is actually BAU (business as usual) for me today, I read an article which includes this passage: In testing for the ads, Google mentioned clickthrough rates were significantly higher than the previous 2/3 line sitelinks. One would argue that is hardly surprising givent he[sic] real estate that these new ads take up, and that in itself presents more interesting scenarios to SEO’s[sic] who are already under pressure with many of the changes Google has made to its search results set. Further more[sic] these results bear many similarities to those of the sitelinks already in place within organic search results. More real estate to PPC which this undoubtedly will mean, should mean yet more traction for PPC results, and less visibility on organic results potentially resulting in the following scenario - More advertisers using PPC as organic visibility is being throttled - Competition within both PPC and SEO significantly increasing

Pinterested? A(nother) primer

Since joining a few weeks back, I've seen quite a few blog posts and articles (such as this one ) crop up about how best to use Pinterest , which I would succinctly describe as a visual social bookmarking service.  It's still in invitation-only mode (if you'd like an invitation, feel free to contact me for one), it allows for users to: Create collections of bookmarks ("boards"). Boards may be assigned a category, which others can then search for and browse through. Boards can be either solely editable by oneself, or contributed to by other users, whom one can specify by name. Boards may be "liked" via Facebook plugin. Add bookmarks as represented by either images and videos, either found anywhere online (publicly accessible), or via upload. At the time of pinning, one can use Facebook and/or Twitter to share out the pin. Comment on any pinned items. "Like" and "re-pin" items. Follow all of or a subset of other users' bo

SOPA, PIPA: aka explaining today's site blackouts

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If you haven't read about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or the Senate version, PIPA, today's blackouts (of prominent sites including Wikipedia) may have surprised you. Courtesy of the Oatmeal , which is also blacked out today, here's an animated graphic that humourously (and effectively) demonstrates why this legislation should be stopped: For a more serious (but concise) look, here's an infographic about SOPA . Finally, from today,  Forbes' interview with Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) about SOPA and why he opposes it.