Caydel’s SEO Blog

I just got this by way of Google Blogoscoped…

If you visit and type ‘ple’ into the search box, you get a fun result popping up…

If you find this funny, !

Jamie Sirovich recently made a post about why SEF URLs are still important, despite the fact that the perception of their importance as an SEO tool has dropped somewhat in the last year.

Jamie focuses mostly on non-SEO factors apart from the fact that the keywords must still count for something. He focuses on the user-friendly aspects of SEF URLs, such as ease of memory, visual appeal when compared to a string of arguments, useful when the URL is cited as anchor text, and the fact that because it is so very visible in a search result, it may very well help provide a major call to action for the user.

These are the types of things I enjoy reading on SEO blogs. Web design should be about user-friendliness and content first, and SEO secondly. Too bad so many SEOs forget that order of events.

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It appears that Microsoft is starting to get protective over their digital property rights. Recently, they have begun a new set of lawsuits against companies, and individuals who have registered large numbers of domains that may possibly infringe on Microsoft-owned Trademarks, such as WindowsLiveTutorial.com and HaloChamps.com.

Once again, a company getting retarded over digital rights. Don’t get me wrong - if someone had a website corresponding to a product name of mine, then I would push to get it back. In Microsoft’s case, I could understand if the were pushing for XBox.com, Windows.com, MSN.com or similar names. But bu targetting sites such as HaloChamps.com, they are shooting themselves in the foot.

While the vast majority of the sites which are being targetted in the lawsuits are merely parked domains which contain Microsoft trademarks, think about what Microsoft is accomplishing with this - in essence, they are killing of their communities.

How many community websites do you see which contain game or product names in the domain or title of the website? I can think of hundreds! By scaring people from using their trademarks, Microsoft is going to stink community support of their products. Who wants to open a website, if they have to be afraid of using certain names and titles in their site lest the Microsoft monkey jumps on their back?

Now, if someone was pretending a direct association with Microsoft ont their site, that would be another story alltogether. And I don’t think they are going after existing, growing community sites. Rather, they are targetting cybersquatters. Nevertheless, I think much of what I have said above with respect to community acceptance holds true.

I am tempted to purchase a Microsoft trademark-infringing domain, and see what type of a response I get - it could be fun to get a C & D notice. As it is, I wonder what will happen to IE7.com… In one of my favourite ironies of the year, some smartass registered it and placed an oversized Firefox banner on it, pointing to the Firefox website….

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I’ve just noticed this, although it may be old news by now. In the last few days, Wikipedia has begun adding rel=”nofollow” to their external links.

Now, I have a whole bunch of educational, informative sites, and between them, I have about 10-12 links in Wikipedia, in different languages. Please note that these links are legitimate, added by other people, since my pages are valuable resources for a variety of Wikipedia articles. So the fact that nofollow tags have been added to the external links kinda pisses me off - I have no doubt that they influenced the indexing and SERPS for the affected sites of mine.
What caused this change? As far as I know, there was no sudden insurgence of link spam on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community has in the past made it clear that they do not want nofollow links on Wikipedia, and the Wikipedia developers have publicly stated in the past that the setting to enable the nofollow tag was add to the mediawiki software for the use of smaller wikis, which do not have such large, active communities to fight linkspam. So why was it done? Who made the decision?
The recent increase in the use of the nofollow tag has me somewhat concerned. So many major sites are implementing it to avoid link spam, but where does that leave us? Link popularity is a major factor in most search engine algorithms etc…

Now, I realize that there still is a large debate ongoing on exactly what the effects of rel=”nofollow” are. There are some who content that the only effect is to stop Google PR from passing. On the other hand, if the nofollow tag happens to stop TrustRank, or authority from being forwarded to linked sites, well, this kind of threatens the stability of of any and all search algorithms that depend on such factors.

Anyone with any information, lease comment - I want to know more about the background of this, but I can’t find anything on Wikipedia, or Technorati that explains any of the reasoning for this!

EDIT: Many of my pages have been translated into languages other than english, and as such have recieved links from Wikipedias other than en.wikipedia.org. The English Wikipedia DOES NOT have the nofollow tags.

Wikis with nofollows: es, eo, de, fr, it, ja, nl, no, pl, pt, ru, fi, fl, sv… I suspect all except for en… So maybe this isn’t news… Either way, I still hate nofollows…

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Well, I don’t know what is going on - The last three days, I have noticed my blog go from an average of 6 feed subscribers per day to 59 subscribers as of today. By examining my Feedburner stats, I can see that while some if the increase is just added pickup from bloglines and similar services, I ahve also gained 30+ readers who are reading this via real clients…

So, I wanna know - who is reading this? What type of people are you? Programmers? SEOs? Web Developers? Something else entirely?

If you could be so kind as to leave a few comments letting me know a bit about who you are, and how you found this blog, it would do a lot to ease my confusion.

Thanks alot, and thanks for reading!

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FOR THOSE COMING FROM REDDIT, READ THE EXPLANATION BELOW BEFORE YOU VISIT THE VIDEO:
If you look at the tags associated with Matt’s video here, you will see that someone has managed to get it associated with the Gay Porn tag. Is this a joke by an SEO or fellow Google Employee? Other attached tags include ‘Shoemoney was here’, ‘umpa umpa love’, ‘gilligan’ and more.

I think this is bloody hilarious. Obviously, someone has a great sense of humour, and couldn’t resist the opportunity to poke one at Matt. To whoever did this, great job!

Check out the

From a Digg post:

“SEO Black Hats have found a major loophole in the comment preview of the Moveable Type blogging platform. This exploit let’s them insert active links into any post, avoiding the “nofollow” penalty usually associated. This allows them to artificially inflate the importance of spam websites, leading to less accurate search engine results!”

This is really too bad, seeing as their are hundreds, if not thousands, of high-ranking blogs out there based on the Moveable Type platform…

read more | digg story

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