SEO

The original Plaxo is a little address-book organizing tool that I had always liked quite a bit. It’s got an Outlook plug-in which lets it sit in there and pay attention to the email addresses of people who email me and the people I email. There’s some global information superhighway sort of thing out there that it uses to synchronize these email addresses with everyone’s profiles, so my address book has — for many years now — been more or less up to date. It’s cool.

But now, however, I am having second thoughts about this seemingly-innocent little company.

They’ve started a new Web 2.0-type program called Plaxo Pulse. (It’s in beta.) Plaxo Pulse is sorta-kinda a good idea. It traipses through your address book and emails people to tell them whenever you do something on the tubes. I am now being barraged with emails telling me every time any of my friends post a blog entry, change their cell number, move, post a photo somewhere, etc. I can only assume that the people who consider me a friend (and who use Plaxo) are receiving the same barrage.

That in itself is not so evil. The creators of Plaxo Pulse were wise enough to allow me to disable these email alerts.

Here is why this is evil, and why people should be getting angry: (1) Plaxo Pulse uses blog RSS feeds to import a user’s blog posts into itself and (2) Plaxo Pulse steals blog comments.

1. Plaxo Pulse uses blog RSS feeds to import a user’s blog posts into itself.

   That means every time I post a blog entry, the entry appear here on my blog (as it should!) and it appears again on the Plaxo Pulse site. This is bad. For years and years there has been a great debate over how Google feels about “duplicate content”. Most people feel that Google penalizes content which exists simultaneously in two places. Whether you believe in the Google “duplicate content penalty” is irrelevant. Google may very well not explicitly penalize one site for plagiarizing another, but there is definitely some sort of effect. Let’s say I write the world’s most brilliant post on the topic of swimming pyromaniacs. There are probably not a lot of other people writing about this. My website would theoretically start to rank highly in Google SERPs whenever someone searches for wet fire-lovers.
   Now let’s imagine that eventually lots of people start talking about swimming pyromaniacs. When other people post blogs about it, they naturally give me credit for exposing this insane practice by linking back to my site. My website receives a SERP ranking “boost” because it is receiving inbound links from other websites mentioning the same topic. (I also — again, theoretically — receive a “boost” because of the age of my post on the topic — I talked about it first — and because of the general popularity of my site.)
   I have advertisements on my site. I get paid when people click these ads. I have a vested interest in ranking highly in Google SERPs.
   But now the exact same content I posted about swimming pyromaniacs is appearing on the Plaxo Pulse website. Plaxo Pulse is a huge website with hundreds of thousands of pages and is growing like kudzu. Plaxo itself is tremendously popular, much more than David Gagne. It is very, very likely that the content I wrote which now appears on the Plaxo Pulse website will rank higher in Google SERPs than that same content on my davidgagne.net website. (When someone searches for swimming pyromaniacs in Google, the Plaxo Pulse link is going to appear higher than the davidgagne.net link.) The huddled masses tend to click what’s at the top in Google. That means that my ad will not be seen. That’s bad for me.

2. Plaxo Pulse steals blog comments.

   Even more nefarious is the fact that the blog entry which appears on the Plaxo Pulse website allows visitors to post comments to it. These comments are not posted to my site. They appear on Plaxo Pulse. This is wrong on so many levels. If I don’t ever check Plaxo Pulse (and, presumably, if I have all my Plaxo Pulse email notifications disabled) I will never know that someone commented on my eloquent dissertation on swimming pyromaniacs. If enough people post comments to the Plaxo Post plagiarization of my writing, it will most definitely appear to be more popular (as far as Google is concerned) than my original essay. In fact there will likely be people that read and comment on swimming pyromaniacs at Plaxo Pulse who don’t even know that davidgagne.net exists, much less that it / I was the author of the topic.

Here is an example:
My friend Bob has a website called Numenware. On January 1^st he posted a blog entry about an esoteric math news item. Bob’s original post is here. Bob’s content is plagiarized verbatim on Plaxo Pulse here. A savvy reader will note that someone named David Fotland has posted a comment to Bob’s blog entry at Plaxo Pulse. This comment was “stolen” by Plaxo. It does not appear on Numenware where it should. If I was Bob I would be quite peeved about this.

An excellent tutorial from G: AdSense Optimization Demo

A day or two ago I was pinged by a co-worker from my previous job. He wanted to know why, during its recent redesign, I didn’t include keywords in the URLs of the pages on a site I originally built a long, long time ago. I told him that there was no concrete evidence anywhere to support the theory that search engines give any weight to keywords in URLs. He then pointed me to an article at Search Engine Land that begins by stating that, “Keywords in the URL can help rankings,” and, “Hyphens are better than underscores when separating multiple words.”

First I noted that I don’t include keywords on this site, either, and it’s been doing just fine. Then I argued that I find it very, very hard to believe that Google (or any other search engine) has some sort of negative bias against the underscore character but that hyphens are just fine. So basically I completely disagree with the single piece of actual “advice” in the article.

Am I saying that it is wrong to include keywords in your URLs? No. I don’t think that at all. I just don’t think you should be stuffing keywords into your URLs in an effort to boost your pages’ rankings in search engine result pages. It makes great sense to use words in your URLs if you’re doing it to improve the usability of your site or to make it easier for people to link to your site. Unfortunately most site designers and blog engines — WordPress included — fail to effectively do this.

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A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me to build a WordPress plugin to display a Gunning-Fog analysis on his blog. The math part was pretty easy stuff. I was having a borch of a time getting the plugin to count syllables, so I hunted through Google and found someone else had written a pretty good function to do that. I squished it all together and it seems to be working pretty good.

You can download the plugin here and see it in action here.

I’ve often wondered how Alexa manages to get its data. Their stats never seem to synch with mine. It turns out there’s a fly in the ointment over there.

Everyone knows that I own the davidgagne.net domain name. I also own the davidgagne.org and the davegagne.org domains. Here’s my question: Should I configure those two domains to redirect to this one? Or should I set them to be mirrors of this one? Dreamhost gives me both options, and I’m trying to decide which one makes more sense. I know some screwball side-effects can arise if you redirect. But creating mirrors seems fishy, too. Your thoughts?

Awesome! I am the 46th most important “David” in the world. That’s according to Google, at least. Today I read a post over at Tempus Fugit about being a top ten Mark and figured I’d take a look and see where I rank among the Davids of the world. Forty-six! I honestly didn’t think I’d even make the top 100. But there I am — sitting just barely a notch below David Lee Roth and David Gilmour (of Pink Floyd). I’m pretty sure I can take those guys, too.

October 20, 2006 Update: I have somehow since dropped to 89th. WTF?

Tags! They’re everywhere! It seems like every site on the ‘net is adding tagging now. Tag clouds — ridiculous, pointless, and annoying — are not the reason. Tagging is a good way to get into Technorati and a good way to get more traffic to your site. It’s a nifty way to organize your posts and to help your readers find what they want on your site. Is it the wave of the future? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Several of the early adopters are now saying that they are useless, and the search engines seemed to be doing a fair job of indexing blogs long before people got tag-happy. But it’s not exactly terribly painful to add this functionality to your site — it only took me about a half hour, so how hard could it be? Plus you’ve got me to explain it all to you.

This how-to assumes that you’re using WordPress to manage your blog. If you are using something else — blogger, MovableType, etc. — then you’ll have to look somewhere else. Technorati is a good place to start.

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Today I attended a panel at SXSW titled “Web Standards and Search Engines: Searching for Common Ground”.  The description of the panel was “Experts from the web standards community and developers from the major search engines discuss how semantics can help websites and search engines accomplish their goals.” It was moderated by (MOD) Molly E Holzschlag of Molly.com Inc.

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I get a lot of spam. A lot. No, really. I get a lot of spam.

I am directly or indirectly connected to the whois / registration of dozens and dozens of sites. I get a.lot.of.spam.

So. Tonight I happen to notice a piece of spam directed towards a URL that I own that nobody should know I own. It’s interesting because it actually includes my full name (along with the URL) in the body of the message. How the spammers got this is beyond me. (I intend to learn, though.)

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Whoa. I don’t know how I haven’t seen this yet. Google lets you target specific sections of your page as more or less relevant to AdSense. This should be required reading for all bloggers and — hell — should be part of the default WP install …

What is section targeting and how do I implement it?

US President George W. Bush has been Google bombed. A search for “miserable failure” on the popular search engine Google brings up, as the first link, the official biography of Bush provided by the White House.

This can be done because Google does not only search the contents of web pages, it also counts how often a site is linked to, and the words which are used.

Hence it possible for a group of net-savvy individuals to influence the result of a Google search - a process called “Google bombing” - by linking any number of sites to a chosen one.

“Google is beginning to have a subtle, but noticeable effect on research. More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format, which Google indexes as though they were traditional Web pages. But almost no one is publishing entire books online in PDF form. So, when you’re doing research online, Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books. Assuming this practice continues, and assuming that Google continues to grow in influence, we may find ourselves in a world where, if you want to get an idea into circulation, you’re better off publishing a PDF file on the Web than landing a book deal.

from Digging for Googleholes

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded.

Davidgagne.net has gone from a loose collection of random html files to a Blogger-powered site to a Greymatter-powered site to its current MovableType extravaganza-ness.

It only took me about a year to make the jump from MT2.1 to MT2.61. That works out to about two decades in internet time, so I’m a tad behind the times. I’m furius with myself for waiting so long. I’ve missed all the cool shenanigans Ben and Mena have been incorporating and so my blog is sort of an ‘82 Plymouth Laser surrounded by a world full of ‘03 Land Rovers.

I’ve really been completely out of touch with the blogging community for months like a year now. Sure, I’m still Google’s #1 for Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten and good suits, but there’s no TrackBack pinging going on here, no Really Simple Discovery happenin’, and, hell, I don’t even know what the fluck all these creative commons licenses are. I’ve been busy, ok? Gimme a couple of weeks and I’ll try to catch up. (Anyone want to help me get up to speed, feel free to drop me a line.)

I managed to catch both Igby Goes Down and Unfaithful this weekend. They are both excellent and I highly recommend them.