Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Post-per-Page vs Daily Archive Page
Biz Stone in a Blogger.com release of today says “If you’re still only archiving by day, week, or month you are living in the past man. You’ve got to make sure you are publishing every post as its very own web page with Post Pages. That makes your entries way more link-able and more attractive to search engines.”
Since when is Google actively participating in the game of SEO?
Fair enough though to make this point – I just don’t believe the search engine part is true (the bit about easier linking is partly right, at least for those copying the URL straight from the browser address bar).
Using a post-per-page setting in your blog (along with fashionable hyphenated URLs) may make sense, but to me it depends on wether or not you like to intersperse essay-like postings with the quick-link kind of post. (And consequently often, you find bloggers setting up two different streams to serve each type; others, like me, put it all in one place.)
As for the game of SEO:
When you have little content in a single post, but a relatively big all-around template, your single post might count as duplicate content and in fact be removed from the index.
Google and others do not understand in-page anchors, so to them www.example.com/#abc is the same as www.example.com/#efg – in other words, you might be channeling more PageRank into a single page than when using posts-per-page.
Every post of multi-post-per-day bloggers is embedded in minimum context (say, their thoughts of the day) – this also serves to bring up synergetic keyword variations which otherwise would not mix (and thus not turn up in search engines if the user also decided to mix these words as well).
In the end, whatever approach you decide to use will never, ever be the main part of you getting backlinks or a high PageRank... let alone high traffic and enlightened readers. In the end it’s all about the content.
WikiAlong
WikiAlong is a Firefox extension which lets you maintain a Wiki page for every Web URL you visit. After installing, you need to close your Firefox browser, open it up again, and expand the sidebar (View -> Sidebar -> Wikialong).
If you want to test the Wiki features you may use this blog homepage as starting point (I already added an entry). All content you post can be seen (and edited) by others. Of course you can also go to any other URL, like Microsoft.com – which, quite naturally, has its first “This is evil!” message.
If you feel inspired by this, why don’t you write your own Firefox extension?
I believe the WikiAlong extension destroyed my history functionality in Firefox (the Back-button doesn’t work anymore). After uninstalling WikiAlong, everything is OK again. I guess these are growing up pains of WikiAlong and I’ll make sure to give it another try soon.
Blogger.com Order Bug
The latest unfortunate bug waiting for me in Blogger.com is that the order of posts gets randomly messed. Usually, when you create a new post, it will be added on top. Today, two different new posts I wrote (at the time of their creation) landed anywhere within today’s page, but not at the top. This never happened before, and hopefully will be fixed soon. I wonder where this post ends up? I wrote it after writing “German AdWords Book”, which I wrote after “WikiAlong”.
German AdWords Book
“Erfolgreich Werben mit Google AdWords” (Successful Advertising with Google AdWords) by Mari José Gallego Rodriguez is the most extensive German e-book I’ve seen on the subject (not that I’ve seen many). Instead of a quick get-rich scheme this is a solid help and strategy guide on using Google AdWords, along with a lot of tips and case studies. The PDF costs 70 Euro and you get a 14-days money-back guarantee.
Google Toolbar Browse By Name
The Google Toolbar has a new* “Browse by Name” feature which lets you type words in the Internet Explorer address bar, to then be taken to the appropriate site.
A special cursor 
will show you when Browse by Name is looking for a site.
Google informs you that if it doesn’t “know"** where you want to go based on your terms entered, it will perform a Google search for you (this last part is old news if you already made Google your default search engine in Internet Explorer). This is the official return of Internet Keywords (you might remember the hype of years ago), or Googlonyms, as many searchers call this by now.
Here are some quick examples of what works, and what doesn’t work as direct link with Google’s new toolbar:
- Grand Canyon - direct hit
- Nasa - direct hit
- Google Blogoscoped - no direct hit (opens Google search)
- Google Blog - direct hit (on Aaron Swartz’ Google Blog)
- Jerz Blog - no direct hit
- Microsoft - direct hit
- IBM - direct hit
- SCO Group - no direct hit
- Google - no direct hit
- W3C - direct hit
- Gadgetopia - no direct hit
*It’s included in an update from version 2.0.112 to version 2.0.114.
**Though we don’t know what makes Google sure which site you want, and just what will cause it to have doubts, it must be some sort of statistical relevancy measurement based on incoming links, PageRank, and other factors which matter in Google’s ranking algorithm.
Turns out this feature isn’t as new as I thought and has been around for some months – the real news for this Toolbar update is that Google changed the way it calculates the PageRank checksum (this might break some PR-based tools).
Farechase vs Firefox
You gotta love the irony of it when sites don’t support standards and break browsers like Firefox, especially when you read Tim Berners-Lee’s reasoning of why he started HTTP and the World Wide Web (it was to get rid of document inconsistencies & incompatibilities, and to find one truly universal format to carry information).a
Yahoo’s new Farechase (a travel search site for flights, hotels or rental cars) is yet another negative example. But the site is new, and it might be they are really building on delivering a platform independent tool – let’s give them the benefit of a doubt (especially regarding their comment in the Yahoo blog).
Gillmor, Graham, and Ferguson
After reading Dan Gillmor’s We the Media and Paul Graham’s Hackers & Painters (two excellent books – the former a little too little controversy, the latter a little too much), I’m now ordering High Stakes, No Prisoners by the inventor of FrontPage:
“Charles Ferguson’s hilarious, hard-boiled journey into the heart of high-tech darkness has become the signal book of the start-up generation. Ferguson took a good idea, started a company, and sold it to Microsoft for $133 million – all in less than two years. High Stakes, No Prisoners is both a blistering inside account of how he did it and a brilliant tour of the brutally competitive and utterly unique world of Silicon Valley.”
– Amazon book description
[Via Gadgetopia.]
Design Battle
This current design battle from Switzerland Germany (on a Switzerland server) lets you fill any square of the page with your own creation. Anyone can join, just make sure the square is not reserved yet, and that your creation continues the border of the other squares.
More Bush Googlebombs
At the moment, both “worst president” and “worst president ever” (no quotes) are showing the official George W. Bush biography on top of a Google search. [Thanks Nathan H.]
Gockle
Another Google imposter: Gockle. [Thanks Markus.]
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