May be scoopless for the next few days

Since we are smack dab in the middle of holding a baby shower for my upcoming granddaughter, and preparing for the possibility of Hurricane Katrina slamming into us, I may not be able to make any posts for the next 2 or 3 days. If the hurricane does any major damage here, I will try to let you all know if we are ok or not. But of course, I may not have internet access, so I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Have a great SEO weekend, and don’t do anything to anger the search engine gods.

Out of the SEO loop today

So my Friday has been spent dealing with spammers. I have been inundated with learning more about ways spammers can use forms to send out old-fashioned spam email, as well as how to deal with blog spammers. In essence, the captcha system seems to be the best way to handle both types of spammers at this time, although there have been reports that even captcha systems cannot foil all spam attempts.

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Title changes can wreak havoc on rankings

A little more than a month ago, I posted about the unique situation that I find myself where I get to have a peek at what a large SEO firm is doing with a former (semi-current) client of mine. A summary of that post is:

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Yawn – another IM client – from Google

I hate when the biggest news of the day is boring to me. But the fact that Google has come out with just what the world needs (yet another Instant Messaging client) just makes me want to go back to bed and sleep for a while. IM has been around for how long? Why do we need another one? When did Google stop focusing on its core product and start branching out into a bunch of silly nonsense? If this was some new technology that would blow us all away, I might be able to forgive them for straying so far from their purpose, but it is not. I am so unimpressed I am not even going to discuss it further. You can read all about it nearly anywhere. Here is one place to get more info.

Yahoo version of sitemap

This may be old news, but it is new to me. Yahoo! has its own simplified version of being able to submit a sitemap to them for crawling and indexing. On their How to Submit help page at http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request, they say “You can also provide the location of a text file containing a list of URLs, one URL per line, say urllist.txt. We also recognize compressed versions of the file, say urllist.gz.” Cool.

Sample SEO Contract

Many times, when an SEO is just starting out, he or she faces the problem of how to write an SEO contract. I originally found an old sample SEO contract on a forum somewhere (sorry, do not remember where) and made a few minor changes to it. While I rarely have the need to resort to such a formal document, it is always handy to have around. Usually, I have an informal agreement with a client (consisting of a few emails back and forth), and that has always worked out fine for me. Still, there are some people that may require a much more formal agreement, so if you are need of one, you can download the one I use and adapt it to your needs. This is a MS Word document. All information that you absolutely should change is within parentheses. Make other changes as necessary to fit your situation. Download the Sample SEO Contract here.

Stuntdubl shows how to balance link equation

Stuntdubl does an excellent job of explaining how to evaluate your backlink situation and what to do solve any problems you may have with it. With the search engines (Google especially) focusing on being natural (I wonder if they came from a hippy granola background?), you want to have a nice spread of different types of links pointing to your site. So head on over to Balancing the Link Equation to find out how to get that right balance in your linkage life.

Google test – alternate query in top 10 results

So you aim for a page one, top 10 ranking for your targetted keyword phrase, right? Well, what if the top 10 shrunk down to the top 7? What if Google decided to throw in 3 results from a DIFFERENT KEYWORD PHRASE right smack in the middle of the top 10 results? What if? What is! Google is testing this out, and this definitely throws a curve ball at the SEOs of the world.

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DMOZ surprises me again

We all know what a struggle it can be to get a site listed in DMOZ. Some of the few sites I have listed there took up to a year to get in. One got listed within a month (a long time ago) and I was a very surprised SEO at that time. Well, once again, DMOZ has surprised me by listing a brand-new two-week old site in its directory. I just noticed it was in there today, when I was looking at my MSN backlinks for the site, but I don’t know when it first appeared. Obviously, it was sometime within two weeks of site launch.

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Google wants a second Public Offering

Just one year after its IPO, Google now is filing for a second round, wishing to sell up to 14 million more shares. What??? I admit I know absolutely nothing about the stock market, so anything I say about it is based on diddly-squat. Keep that in mind. Still, I can’t help but wonder what the heck Google needs that much more money for. Have they simply gotten greedy? Maybe not enough employees got rich the first time around? Ok, that’s probably not why, but it does irritate me a bit. So, what do they really “need” the money for? Total world domination? They don’t share much about their reasons for wanting the money – some gibberish about wanting working capital and to be able to buy out other companies… Oh, wait, maybe there is the key. I wonder how many lucky little companies out there are going to be hearing the sweet ring of a telephone.

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Some thoughts on Yahoo!

Yahoo! announced some really nice new Local features today in their blog. I played around with it and I really do love the direction they are taking on this. This is the web at its best – truly finding what you need to find on a local level. Read more about it at the Yahoo! blog and try it out for yourself at local.yahoo.com/.

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Contextual feeds?

A couple of weeks ago, I checked out a website (www.rssense.com) that promised to supply contextual RSS feeds as content for your site. At the moment, the site is down due to excessive bandwidth, so unfortunately you cannot go check it out. I have not used the service, so I do not have any firsthand info on how well it works, although I have read a few complaints about it. Whether or not this particular service works well, the concept is awesome. Imagine a service that senses what kind of feed is useful for the website, based on the site’s content and keywords and then provides topical feed content on the page. You would no longer have to go out and find appropriate feeds. The service supplies it for you. Very cool concept. Worth checking out if the site comes back, and if not, someone may want to capitalize on the idea.

Another SEO test to keep an eye on

JWWebdesign is running some SEO tests and is posting the results of those tests on his website. Some of the questions he hopes to answer are:

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