Caydel’s SEO Blog

While looking through my analytics last night, I happened to notice a small spike in traffic from Sphinn, the new social media site for the Search (and related) community. It turns out that a story I submitted, ‘What’s The Weirdest Thing You Rank For‘ went host on July 14th.

Now I’ve also been dugg in the last few weeks for a post I wrote about Dreamhost leaking 3500 passwords, so I thought I would quickly examine how the traffic from each spike. Sphinn is on the left, Digg is on the right:

So as you can see, the spike from Digg is much larger than that from Sphinn, approximately 400X as large. However, I find that I am much happier with the 40-visitor Sphinn than the 17,000-person Digg.

The 40-person Sphinn holds more value to me due to the demographics of the site. While Digg has a very general, mixed demographic, Sphinn is browsed by some of the top people in the search industry - the direct demographic this blog is meant for. Since this blog is about branding (and venting!) more than trying to make a sale, I value it being read by Sphinners more than by Diggers. In my mind, each Sphinner is a potential contact, contract, or partner. Each Digger is just another person, sucking my bandwidth for 20 seconds.

Also, I noticed that each digger spent an average of only 17 seconds on this site. Each Sphinner spent an average of a minute and a half. I will leave you to your own conclusions over which group is more valuable.

So there you have it - I think being Sphunn is great. I guess I have to start blogging regularly again. And yes, I know I’ve said that before…

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I just read an interesting post by Brian Clark on the Performancing blog giving three reasons why Del.icio.us bookmarks beat Digg traffic. His reasons are logical, and I can’t find anything there to disagree with - perhaps I should start paying more attention to Del.icio.us. Lately, I have been aiming my posts more at the Digg crowd, hoping to get some attention and promotion that way.

That said, I don’t plan to Digg-spam or Delicious-spam my way to fame…

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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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Digg.com is a service used by us all. For some of its users, it is a quick way to promote the news that concerns them . For some, it is a way to promote products. For others, it is a way to quickly achieve a large burst of traffic, if the can make it to the front page.

The best thing about it is, it is free!

But what does that really mean? How can that be interpreted in light of the ‘Open Source/Free Software’ ideal expressed by such organizations as the Free Software Foundation?

‘Free’ as a term can be understood in two ways, each best described in the statement taken from the Free Software Foundation website:

‘Free Software is a matter of liberty not price. To understand this concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech’, and not as in ‘free beer’!”

It can be argued without a doubt that the digg.com service is free in terms of ‘free beer’, in that you pay nothing for the privilege of using the service. But is it free as in ‘free speech’?

Digg allows you to use it’s service, regardless of your motivation. Digg does not really care about your politics, or your religion, or your social and ethical views. You may use the service whoever you are, and you may promote whichever news items you would like to see on the front page. Of course, this is subject to their terms and conditions which generally say, ‘Don’t break the law, and don’t do anything that could get you, or us, sued, or arrested’.

Of course, there have been issues with people using digg to promote their stories using tracking software, and forming groups to mass promote Digg stories of members. This kind of activity has been punished by Digg.

But is it really within the ‘free speech’ methodology to ban users for use which you disagree with? I won’t argue that it was Digg’s right to ban such users. But does it fit with ‘free speech’?

I would argue that it makes sense with managing a proper community. But, I do not think it can be reconciled with ‘free speech’. Order is necessary, especially when dealing with a website which has over 250,000 accounts. If Digg were not to retain order by banning individuals who do not work towards the continuance of the site.

I would argue that there is nothing wrong with submitting a story on your own site for some Diggs, and the chance to become popular. This is a way for webmasters who have really good ideas to break out. If the story is good, it will become popular. If it isn’t, it will fall, and no harm done.

Of course, it galls a little to see users cheating the system. But I cannot condemn them. If free speech is supported, then they are also allowed to promote what they wish to promote, regardless of their motivation. If they group together to game the system, it is a shame. But in terms of free speech, I would not be able to condemn them.

That is the root of why Digg could never exist as an Open system. In order to maintain it’s own existence, Digg is forced to lay restrictions and enforce policies on it’s users. And banning users for what they say and/or do is not reconcilable to free speech.

So is there any system or place where free speech the way it should be interpreted is to be found? I would argue that there isn’t.

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I just came across this on Digg… There are alot fo great suggestions for anyone who codes with Rails. There are about 20 tips here, most of which I thought were good to know, especially as I hadn’t come across them, read, or even thought of them before….

This is a must-read for any serious rails coder!

read more | digg story

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Elementary explanation of the Model/View/Controller design pattern, particularly as it applies to Ruby on Rails. Extremely concise explanation that should be everyone’s first stop in understanding Rails (or any other MVC based framework). I wish I had found this a month ago.

Anyone who writes any Rails code should have a solid understanding of MVC, since it is the basis of just about everything you do in rails. To provide a bit of a preview to what you find in the article, MVC, which stands for ‘Model-View-Controller’ is a design pattern commonly used by Web apps. A Design pattern is an architecture for writing software. Common design patterns such as MVC have evolved over time as developers find better ways of doing things.

The MVC essentially advocates dividing your program into three somewhat seperate parts. The Model, which handles your data records, the Controller, which handles what operations can be performed on the data, and the View, which governs how the results of Controller operations are displayed.

If you are new to Ruby on Rails, or haven’t heard of the MVC pattern before, I would really recommend you read the article!

MVC: The Most Vexing Conundrum

read more | digg story

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Hey - all you Mac Ruby on Rails People - this is for you!

This was just posted on Digg, so I thought I would post it here as well. While I myself don’t have Mac/Textmate, after all that I have seen about it, I am kind of tempted to switch over to take advantage of this platform. Does anyone know the latest state of getting MacOSX running on an Intel Machine?

Pragmatic Programmer, Mike Clark, has produced a single page PDF cheat sheet of about fifty TextMate keyboard shortcuts to speed up your Ruby development. As a long time TextMate user who never uses the shortcuts, this is very useful.

read more | digg story

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