Archive for June, 2007

What’s The Wierdest Thing You Rank For?

In the WebmasterRadio.fm chat, we were talking about what was what was the strangest thing we accidentally ranked for. So how about it - what is the strangest thing you rank for?

I rank #3 for ‘‘. Now - fess up!

I Am Only 72% Addicted…

I took the Mingle2.com test to check how much of a blogger I was. I was surprised to see that I rated 72%, considering how apathetic I am about blogging most of the time.

Of course, I’m not one of those blogging super-nerds who approach 100%. You know, the type that whip out a camera during a wedding because they wanted to blog about the salad

72%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

For any of you out there, I’ve just created my first Google Gadget. It drags in a random quote, fortune, or humurous bit to display.

Why, you ask? Yes, I know, such a thing has been done before. However, I wanted to try for myself!

Enjoy!

Using Ask.com for a day

Ask.com Large LogoAfter all the recent buzz over Ask.com, I am (finally) going to give them some serious usage. I am curious how they stack up against Google, my defacto ‘go-to’ engine. Of course, I will still be using Google for the SEO-type work I do today, but I will be using Ask.com for my personal queries.

One thing I’ve already noted - the SERPS returned for an Ask.com query on my name are much less relevant than . Well, we’ll see how it goes…

Need Keyword Tool Suggestions, Preferably with an API

I am in the process of preparing to scale an SEO tool I have prototyped to make available to the public. However, I need to find a decent keyword tool to use in a script, something that:

  • Returns a list of related keywords based upon the keyword I specify
  • Can be banged on repeatedly by a script
  • Preferably returns estimated search volumes as well

Cost is not a huge factor, although the cheaper, the better. Also, if it has a decent API, so much the better. If there isn’t one that you know of that gets the search volumes, what would you recommend to obtain those? Do any of the major search engines provide search volume data?

If worse comes to worse, I could code my own. However, I would much prefer to save time!

Ahhh! The Internet is Shrinking!

Scott Horne (Webprofessor) just noted the latest ISC report which is indicating that the number of Internet hosts has dropped since January 2006. This is the first drop in hosts seen since the statistics were first taken in 1993.

The Internet Systems Consortium reported that for the first time ever there has been a decrease in the number of internet hosts. The Economist speculates that this may be due to an aggregation of internet hosts on a single domain. I am not sure what it means just yet so its a curious statistic I’ll be pondering for a few days. Any thoughts?

For those that don’t know, the number of hosts reflects the number of websites and other servers/systems connected to the Internet. A smaller number indicates that the ‘mass’ of the Internet is less. There is some speculation that this is due to slowing economic conditions.

In the era of Web2.0, we are seeing the advent of AJAX technologies to drive web pages and applications. Which is good, for the most part - AJAX is a great tool. AJAX-powered pages and applications are often quicker and more responsive than their predecessors, since they don’t require full page loads for every possible operation, opting instead to reload and refresh only those parts of a page necessary.

On the flip side, AJAX can cause problems for search engines. Since the browser does not necessarily move to a new URL to display new data, much of the data and text content on an AJAX-powered site may not be accessible to search engines. Search engines will not submit forms or otherwise interact with the AJAX-powered sections of a site to cause page updates to be triggered, causing much of the content of an AJAX-powered site to be missed.

This is an issue for SEOs everywhere - as AJAX becomes more prevalent, client demand for this technology will continue to increase. So how do we deal with AJAX from an SEO perspective?

Rich McIver of SoftwareDeveloper.com emailed me yesterday to inform me of their latest feature article entitled, ‘‘. The article goes into some detail over techniques and best practices to help make your AJAX application search engine friendly. Some of the information is pretty standard (’submit a sitemap containing static copies of the fragments returned through AJAX’), while some of it deals with the problem at a more design / technical level, such as a presentation on ‘Hijax’ model of AJAX web design.

The article also goes into some common ways of handling AJAX for SEO purposes, and shows the shortcomings of these approaches.

How have you handled AJAX in your web pages / applications? Anything you would add beyond what the linked articles suggest?

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