My list of links to articles on SEO seemed to go over well last week so why not try again. Here’s the second installment of ‘This Week In SEO.” Hope you like.
MyBlogLog: Exploits, Bans, and Boycotts
I wouldn’t call it the most important story of the week, but it was certainly entertaining. If you have a MyBlogLog account you probably woke up last weekend wondering who had added you as a co-author. I know I did and probably like most of you ignored the email for the spam it was. Shoemoney was the first I noticed mentioning the exploit, but others followed and a few days later MBL fixed the hole and apologized.
- Another Mybloglog Exploit – This One A Little More Harmful
- Latest MyBlogLog Spam — Adding Coauthors?
- MyBlogLog Co-Author Spamming
- Spammers Force MyBlogLog to Update Features
- Weekend spamtacular — what the heck happened and how we’re fixing it
If you’ve been following Shoemoney lately he’s been pointing out a few holes in MyBlogLog ever since Jeremy Zawodny publicly accused Andy Beal of spamming MBL. Until that point Shoe had been liking MBL and offering suggestions to improve the system. This week Shoemoney didn’t stop with the co-author exploit. He pointed out how you could surf the web as other MBL members and the next day MBL banned him.
- MyBlogLog Trick – How To Surf The Web As ShoeMoney
- Banned From MyBlogLog
- Shoemoney Banned from Yahoo’s MyBlogLog
Later that day Andy Beal struck back by removing all remnants of MBL from his site and declaring a boycott of MyBlogLog. A few other prominent bloggers joined in the boycott and I’m sure more will follow in the coming days.
Earlier today Shoemoney posted what were to be his last words about MyBlogLog, but a little later he couldn’t resist one more crack at them.
A few weeks ago it seemed like Shoe was a big supporter of MBL and then after the accusatory post toward Andy the relationship quickly soured. I have a hunch we may see some more about this next week, in the form of more bloggers boycotting and then something back from MBL and possibly an unbanning of Shoemoney.
Local Search, Mobile Search and Small Business
Greg Sterling starts us off with a review of MojoPages for Search Engine Land. MojoPages is a new local search engine and Greg calls it a combination “YellowPages, MySpace, and YouTube all rolled into one.” Business week had an article about the battle for mobile search and Greg was back again with an article about text messaging as part of marketing over mobile devices. Finally Matt McGhee debuted a new column for Search Engine Land called “Small is Beautiful,” which will focus on seo and sem for small businesses.
- MojoPages: Whole Lotta Yelp, A Little YouTube
- The Battle for Mobile Search
- Text Messaging: Where The Volume And The Dollars Are Today
- How (& Why) to Break into Mobile Marketing
- What’s So Different About Being Small?
Blogging
On Valentine’s Day Kevin Gibbons of SEOptimise reported about a problem he was seeing with blogger hosted blog pages disappearing from the Google index. On Tuesday Jordan McCollum added more information to the story. If you run a blog on blogspot you’ll want to read this if you want to make sure your pages stay in the index.
Yesterday FeedBurner released their view of the feed market. Later in the day saw Aaron Brazell, Marshall Kirpatrick, and Barry Schwartz posting their take on the market share of various feed readers and subscription mechanisms. Lot’s of good stats about rss feeds. Lastly Darren Rowse continues the discussion started at Daily Blog Tips about some of the necessary skills and abilities if you want to be a professional blogger. How many of the skills do you possess?
- Blogger < $BlogMetaData$> tag includes noindex meta tag!
- Blogger deleting blogs from Google’s index
- FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market
- The Happiest Moment in the RSS and Reader Marriage is in the Engagement
- FeedBurner Releases Major User Engagement Report
- The Numbers Behind Your Feeds
- 10 (+5) Requisites for Professional Bloggers
- 10 Requisites for Professional Bloggers
Social Media
Early in the week Matt Inman of SEOmoz wrote a post clearly designed to get Dugg. It did and as you might expect it first rose and then was buried and naturally there were all sorts of fun pro and anti seo comments on the story. Muhammed Saleem took Matt’s article along with a couple others and put them all together into an article question Digg’s efficiency.
Skitzzo tried to make peace between the Digg and SEO communities with an open letter to diggers. As an SEO I’m biased, but I think it’s a good article. You can see in the comments to Skizzo’s post that it’s falling on deaf ears with diggers. Micheal Gray in response to the SEOmoz article tells us all to just accept the fact the diggers hate SEOs. We’re not going to change them. Michael is back with a good idea that LinkedIn needs to allow members to block others when he realized he’s only a few people away from someone he was forced to fire a few years back who later displayed some behavior usually seen in stalkers.
- Dear Digg.com: I’m going to save you a million dollars with three lines of code
- The Scarlet Letters – an SEO’s Open Letter to Diggers
- How Efficient is Digg?
- Yes SEO’s Digg Hates You, They Really Really Hate You
- LinkedIn Needs a Blocking Feature
Rounding out social media this week, Neil and Muhammad have some Digg articles for us including a way for Digg to tighten up their algorithm, some information about where Digg is headed, and news that some banned domains are now back in.
Personalized Search
Michael Gray has made it clear he doesn’t like personalized search. He gives us more evidence in mentioning the latest Google patent for removing documents. RustyBrick also mentions the patent and points to a WebmasterWorld discussion of it. Part of the patent discusses document removal as possible through personalized search.
Today Gord Hotchkiss presents a great interview with Marissa Mayer of Google about personalized search. I warn you it’s long, but it’s informative. It calmed a few fears I had about personalized search and also gave me a few new things to think and worry about.
- Removing documents patent
- Matt Cutts Wants You To Help Fight Spam
- Just Behave: Google’s Marissa Mayer on Personalized Search
- Google Patent Application On Personalization & Removing Documents From Google.com
Search Engine News
I’ll leave you with some mostly Google related search engine news. First some articles about various Google products, including links to some lists of Google products. Between all the lists we should be able to find all the products Google currently has. Next up is some information about AdWords and what they’re doing with the Quality Score. Finally a couple of quick changes from Yahoo
Google Products
- Listing Of Lists Of Google Products
- Google Velocity: Froogle and Local are dying while Video and Blog are surging
- Google Custom Search Engine Gets Supplemental Results
AdWords Quality Score
- Low Quality Keywords CAN Lower Other Keyword’s Quality Scores
- Quality Score updates are live
- Google Not To Include Quality Score In AdWords API
- Google AdWords Quality Score Algorithm Update Now Live
Yahoo
- Yahoo To Redirect More Search Query Types Site Explorer
- Yahoo! Search Now Highlighting Keywords In Cache Results
Hard to believe, but I collected more links this week. Still I think that’s more than enough reading for the weekend. I guess starting the collection on Monday leaves me with a lot more articles to talk about on Friday. Just as with last week let me know what you think about posting a Friday roundup of some of the week’s events. Do you like it now that it’s in it’s second week here? Want me to continue? Or should I just call it an early weekend?
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It’s been a busy week for mybloglog. Though i do like thier service i don’t like the way Yahoo always have this “frightened startup” feel about them. A lot of people have been boycotting them sinse they banned shoemoney.
Bloggers NOINDEX “mistake” is a fairly big thing too. I’m surprised there hasn’t been too much fuss about it. It’s a pretty big “mistake” to make. But i guess it’s all a part of thier “let’s really mess blogger up” thing.
Nice links steve, Thanks.
Social Bookmarking sites have increased dramatically in the last year….a trend or a fade?j
Matt I see that MyBlogLog has apologized to Shoemoney and he’s accepted. I’m not seeing any MBL widgets on his site though and somehow doubt they’ll be back. The apology was nice, but that’s now two pr slips for MyBlogLog in a matter of weeks and I suspect they’ve lost a few influential members.
The sad thing about the blogger noindex mistake is all the bloggers who’ll never know. Hopefully Google fixes things.
Joe I think social bookmarking sites are here to stay. Will they always be looked at as far as marketing your site I can’t say, though I suspect they will always have a place. If anything I expect 2007 to see more of them showing up, perhaps in niche vertical markets. So far they’ve been mostly adopted by the tech savvy, but I expect more mainstream adoption in the future.