Category Archives: Blogs

Note Regarding Comments On This Blog

The readers of this blog know that links on comments do not have the nofollow tag. I’ve decided to do so because all comments are manually moderated, and Akismet does a good job of filtering spammy comments. So I find it fair to give credit to people who are adding valuable comments to my posts.

But the thing is, sometimes the comments are valuable, but people use keywords in the “Name” field, for example this guy. These comments will never be approved, sorry. It’s funny to see that the author of this comment is from a SEO company (didn’t even think of using an anonymous email address) whose owner is a writer at SEOmoz…

Funniest Spam Comment Ever

So I received this comment today:

Author : Anikrichard
E-mail : xxxxxxxx@xxxx.com
URI : wwww.com
Comment:
hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

Thanks for the good laugh Richard 🙂

Peggy Anne Salz No Longer at MoConews, Now Dedicates Herself to MSearchGroove Only

In my last post I pointed out that Peggy Anne Salz, a long-time blogger at MoCoNews who wrote some of the better analysis on the site, had launched her own site covering mobile search and content discovery.

This week I see she’s no longer listed at MoCoNews, so it appears she has decided to dedicate herself full-time to Msearchgroove.com . If you want to read the news coverage and insight that made her a voice in the mobile content space, then I suggest you check it out.

No more nofollow links

I’ve just installed the dofollow plugin that has disabled the “nofollow” attributes on the comments made on this blog. I’m pretty happy with Akismet, so I’m not worried about getting spam comments. So from now, all people who will comment on this blog will get some link love 🙂

No to nofollow

I stumbled upon a funny website today called no to rel”nofollow”. The site is in German, and  even if I did learn German at school, I’m unable to (or rather lazy trying to) understand what it says exactly but the site’s tagline is just what I need to understand the owner’s anger and to agree with him: “Fight Spam not Blogs”.

I’ve been enjoying Loren’s latest post 13 reasons why nofollow tags suck, and really agree with the whole idea against the use of nofollow. If comments are edited, I don’t see why anyone would not give any link love to his readers and commenters who, in a certain way, help websites get more content, more links, and more traffic. Moreover, plugins such as Akismet, which work extremely well, should be sufficient to prevent spammy comments.

For that reason, I will soon remove link condoms on this blog, but beware, people whose names are “seo software”, “free directory” or “cool company” will still not get a link. Just real names please 🙂

Switching Back To Bloglines

Ok, I’m definitely fed up with Google Reader. Because everyone was talking about it and saying it was sooooo cool, I decided to give it a try and added a few of my favourite Bloglines feeds. But I just realized that I hate Google Reader’s user interface.

Plus, their shiny colors are killing my eyes, since I spend almost 2 hours per day reading feeds, I just can’t bear it.

Bloglines is much more simpler to use and has a nice user interface. Now I understand why it’s still the most popular feed reader.

Bloglines also has a big advantage over Google Reader: Bloglines has a real customer service! Really, I’ve contacted them twice: once to know how to display posts that are marked as read, and then because a splog added itself in my feeds list (really)!
Here’s the nice response I got from them:

Discussion Thread
 Response (M.M.) 12/06/2006 06:47 PM
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Could you let us know if the erroneous feed replaced any of your subscriptions? We will forward your information to the appropriate technical department for further investigation, as we take these matters seriously, and want to prevent this type of activity. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused. Also, should you receive any other unwelcome blogs, please let us know.
 Customer 12/03/2006 06:56 PM
Hi,
I just checked out my feeds and realized that a feed was added to my list “by itself”. The url of that feed is http://blog-editor.blogspot.com/index.html , I tried to see what kind of website and it’s apparently just a site full of ads… Could you please explain me how that kind of thing can happen? If you don’t how to prevent that problem, please do let me know and I will choose a safer feed reader.
Regards,
Nadir

Good bye Google Reader, it’s good to see you again Bloglines!

Danny Sullivan To Launch New SEO Blog

I just heard that Danny Sullivan is about to launch his own SEO Blog called Search Engine Land. He’ll team up with his buddies Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz to provide information about the search marketing industry. The blog will officially launch december 11th and you can already know what you’ll get once it’s up and running:

  • Original content covering developments in the search space.
  • Daily blog posts covering search news from across the web.
  • SearchCap: A daily email newsletter recapping search news from Search Engine Land and across the web. Also available by feed.
  • SearchCap Monthly: A monthly email newsletter recapping search news over the past month. Also available by feed.
  • A fresh, clean look — complete with logo. What you see here is NOT how the site will look December 11!

I look forward to reading his new blog and I’m sure him, Barry, and Chris will keep us entertained.

New Blog on Successful Internet Start-Ups

Via Bill Slawski’s post, I came across a new blog called Startup Review that provides case studies about successful Internet Start-Ups. So far, the blog has profiled Home Gain, Rotten Tomatoes, Zappos, MySpace, Craigslist and many more successful online businesses.

The reviews are all very pedagogical and should make some good reading for people running an online business or those willing to start one.
Each case study seems to be divided in 7 parts:

Why the start up has been profiled on Startup Review: the blog owner, Nisan Gabay, explains what were the factors that made him choose to review each startup;
The Key Success Factors of the startup: in this part, the author outlines the key success factors that made the start-up business model unique;
Its Launch Strategy: how the start-up was launched;
An Exit Analysis: gives information on how the company was acquired;
Food For Thought
Reference Articles: links to useful articles about the start up;
Questions for Startup Review Readers: StartUp Review incites people to leave comments and to contribute to the review.

One of the case studies talks about RottenTomatoes and is titled: Rotten Tomatoes Case Study: SEO drives traffic growth . The author explains that the owners of RottenTomatoes focused mainly on SEO to drive traffic to the site. They basically rely their SEO strategy on creativity and website architecture in order to obtain a search engine friendly website and gain lots of good links.

Thankfully, RottenTomatoes inhouse SEO team stopped by Startup Review and left several comments. Here’s a summary of the comments that I stole from Bill’s post 🙂 :

1. Movie and review sites were happy to link to them because their focus was upon linking out to other sites. A partnership, and hosting of, the Online Film Critics Society (and other offline critics groups) brought them visibility and positive relationships with related sites.

2. They’ve been active from the start in sending out links to directories like DMOZ and others, especially for new or upcoming movies and actors.

3. Page titles, alt tags, and good URL structures were thought about carefully, and set up so that that would get indexed well in search engines.

4. They shared information freely and built relationships with other sites like Netflix, and provided information about their ratings to others to publish via RSS feeds. Fans of their site, like Google engineers, integrated their site into prominent places, like Google’s Desktop Search v1, Gmail RSS Feeds v1.

According to one commenter, SEO traffic comprised up to 70% of RottenTomatoe’s traffic. Wow, that’s what I called a successful SEO strategy. Hard work , dedication, and creativity are the main factors that helped them build a strong SEO strategy. Nice job guys.