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 want to throw this out there quickly.

I just came across the ‘Leadership Matters’ campaign which Ontario PC Candidate John Tory has launched in preparation for the 2007 Ontario General Election. Although there has been a lot of focus on the use of social media by the 2008 Presidential Candidates, I think they could learn a bit from what Tory is doing here!

Check out the site, I am curious what your impressions of it are!

Also, keep your eyes on the blog for a mega-post on Ask.com and its new features in the next couple of days!

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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!

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After 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…

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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!

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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?

Yesterday, Microsoft and Linspire Inc. announced for the small Linux vendor. Linspire develops and markets the Linspire distribution of Linux, marketed as ‘The World’s Easiest Desktop Linux’.

In the terms of the deal, Microsoft has required that Linspire set the Windows Live search engine as the default web search on all future copies and releases of the Linspire OS. In return, Microsoft will grant Linspire permission to use Truetype Fonts, the Windows Media codecs, and has agreed to waive their right to patent litigation against Linspire Inc, along with the users of their Operating System.

This move is bound to make some waves in the Search industry for the two things it signifies:

1. Microsoft is beginning to really throw weight behind their search product.. Ok, this isn’t exactly earth shattering, but the point is that through their patent-backed extortion practices, Microsoft could have gotten just about anything they wanted. However, all they asked for was the default search. What does this imply for the future?
2. It’s an implicit recognition of the potential threat Linux is posing to Microsoft. Although the searches generated by Linspire before users reset the default search to Google probably will not make up a. overly significant portion of Microsoft’s search volume. On the other hand, this seems like just the first in a series of battles Microsoft can fight against Corporate-backed linux distributions. Will Microsoft be cutting similar Search deals with other corporate-backed Linux vendors?

Linspire is a distribution with a lot of potential. It is not aimed at the geek crowd; rather, it seeks to imitate Windows to a certain extent in order to make the switch to Linux as simple as possible for businesses and individuals. In real world terms, it means that the users are your average business people - salesmen, secretaries, and the like. In practice, such users used Internet Explorer and Microsoft Search regularly; they would probably happily continue to use Microsoft Live search if that came as the default on Lindows OS.

This is not Linspire Inc.’s first encounter with Microsoft. Back in 2002(?), Microsoft filed suit against the company forcing them to change their name from ‘Lindows Inc.’ as part of a $20 million settlement. Therefore, they were likely an easy target, since they already knew the legal weight Microsoft could throw at them.

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