Caydel’s SEO Blog

Wow - the last couple days have been full of surprises.

A few days ago, I wrote an article called, ‘‘. I didn’t think it was anything special; I was just rewriting something that was written in the comments of a previous post.

Well, much to my surprise, Search Engine Land picked it up (thanks Barry) as well as . WebProNews is of course scraped to high heaven, so I immediately got tons of backlinks as a result of that.

The post on SEL was seen by a number of prestigious bloggers, and soon the story was getting linked from ProBlogger.net and among a large number of other sites.

Here’s where the big surprises came in - the article started getting linked from sites in different languages such as Korean, and a German sites.

At it’s peak, the post made the Techmeme frontpage, which sent about 150 readers.

As a result of this post, my Technorati rank dropped greatly, sitting me at 98,277. From tracking my referrals, I suspect that I got between 200-300 new backlinks, and the number of RSS subscribers reported by FeedBurner has doubled. My Blog Juice jumped from 2.1 to 2.6.

Welcome to the new readers - I hope you are somewhat entertained and informed by my posts. Thanks for the link love everyone who linked to the article - I will be giving you tons more like it

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Today, a set of Wikipedia articles about Barry Schwartz, Matt Cutts, and Ben Pfeiffer were moved into the Articles for Deletion list by Wikipedia editors.

The editors are removing them on the basis of a lack of notability. Of course, these editors are obviously not involved in the search industry; otherwise, they would immediately recognize that these three are household names to the industry.

In order for the editors to acknowledge the notability of these three, they need a set of news sources about each of these men and their contributions to the search industry. If you know of or can find articles mentioning or about Barry, Matt, or Ben, please post them into the discussion pages at the following Articles for Deletion pages:

• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Barry Schwartz (technologist)
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Matt Cutts
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ben Pfeiffer

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Ever since my early days in the webmaster sphere, Shoemoney’s adsense check has been a motivation and an inspiration to me. Well, now I’ve had mine and become a successful webmaster myself, so I would like to provide a new image so that the next generation of marketers will have something to work towards:

Adbrite is perhaps not proving themselves to be the most efficient company by sending checks for that amount, but I can never say they didn’t pay me in a reasonable time. I only ran Adbrite for the last day of that pay period… Hopefully the next check is somewhat more impressive

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About a week and a half ago, I wrote a post ‘Adsense Should Allow Contextual Ad Filtering by Keyword‘. In it, I made the suggestion based upon an article posted by EGOL at SEOmoz that in order to prevent certain types of ads from showing, Google should allow us to set negative keywords for the Adsense ads on a site.

In the comments, Joost de Valk informed us that Google is indeed beta-testing such a program, and that he is actually part of the limited beta-test.

I know for a fact that Google is testing with negative keywords like that, since I have been testing it myself

I can’t tell to much, except that i was given the possibility to give a series of terms for which they broad matched and didn’t show ads. And no, no release date…

That is extremely encouraging - I can’t wait for this feature to be released to the general public. There are some categories of ads that I would *really* like to see banished from my site (such as the $0.07 CPM ads Google is running advertising Adwords and Adsense). I think that this toold could really help Google - I think the publishers know what is on their site better than Google does. It seems every day I see ads which are close to a good match, yet still manage to miss the point of the page entirely, and thus result in unsatisfactory, off-topic ads which probably don’t get the CTR they should.

Plus, this would be great for people who have definitions of ‘family friendly’ that are perhaps more stringent than those of Google. I don’t really want to see seduction tips and other crocks advertised on my site, regardless of what one or two keywords I may have that might trigger those ads.

What do you think?

So, the holidays are over and we’re all back at work.

Fun, isn’t it?

My nose is back to the grindstone today again, which isn’t so bad, actually. Over the holidays, Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Ed. came in from Amazon, so I’ve spent the day so far reading through the book.

You know how sometimes you find a real gem of a book? I am amazed by how great this book is - things are laid out clearly, Dave Thomas has a great style and strategy for getting across what a Rails developer needs to know. Within a few hours of reading, I already had a few pages of notes written down concerning things I could have been doing better with my Rails coding.

I am not approaching this book as a complete beginner, of course. I have done quite a bit of work in Rails before. I had already worked through David Black’s , which is also an excellent book. The two books together complement eachother in style and approach.

So, in short, if you are a Rails programmer and you haven’t already purchased it, go out and get your hands on this book - it will definately give you a much better understanding of Rails. The new edition has been heavily updated for the coming release of Rails 1.2, so it will be a good reference for future releases of Rails!

BTW, if someone wants to get me Rails Recipes… *wink*

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