The stuff o'stuff: December 2006

Sunday, December 31, 2006

LunaNi�a.com | Unconscious Mutterings

Resolution :: Counterpoint
Happy :: New year
Bubbly :: Laughing
Kiss :: Lips
Leather :: Belt
Fancy :: Dress
Pages :: Book
Stupid :: Acting
Apologize :: Speak
Secrets :: Lies

Friday, December 22, 2006

Dr. Imoto's water crystals

Pics of Dr. Imoto's water crystals

Fascinating series of photographs of how water molecules change when exposed to music, or even a thought.

Are you looking?

When you are not looking there are waves of possibility, when you are looking there are particles of experience.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Building link-based popularity

The recent post on building link-based popularity from the webmaster central blog has confused me no end.

It seems to say that link baiting (perhaps earned via http://digg.com) will be discounted, whilst it still references Matt Cutts January 2006 article linkbait and linkbaiting, which itself appeared to say that link baiting isn't a bad thing.

To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition away from paid or exchanged links towards earned organic links, there still seems to be some confusion within the market about what the most effective link strategy is. So when taking advice from your SEO consultant, keep in mind that nowadays search engines reward sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait natural links given by choice.

However, if you link bait, and get links in, isn't that by their choice? Or is the sudden frequency of those links an indicator that the links shouldn't be counted or the PR earned discounted. It doesn't include the idea that a linker could add rel=nofollow to their links to let search engines know not to pass on any PR.

So the question we face as "web masters" trying to work social networks and improve our PageRank and SEO is, will Google discount links in they feel are from link bait? One day will they punish the receiving site in any other way? I recently had a PR 4 site penalised 30 places (and more), and then a couple of weeks later dropped out of google completely. This was either for duplicate content or for having the content looking too close to the ads (and vice versa). Traffic is now minimal. If google punish you, then it hurts.

Personally, I think gain the links you want! Do what make sense, do what makes sense for your site, for your audience. If you get links in from sites in a similar "vertical" that's great, if you get a link in from sites outside your area, then that may not be counted by google, that's not a problem. Be aware if you have thousands of links in from link farms and bad areas, then you may get punished.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Inside AdSense: Ad and image placement: a policy clarification

Ad and image placement: a policy clarification We've recently received a number of emails from publishers asking how we feel about the placement of images near Google ad units. There's been some confusion on this issue, and so we turned to our policy team to set the record straight.

You can definitely place Google ads on pages containing images -- just make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors. For example, if you run a stock photography site with a catalog of thumbnail images, don't line the ads up with the thumbnails in a way that could be misleading. Consider using a full border around your ads or changing your ad colors, for example.

They also give some examples of bad usage:

Webmaster Help Center - What does it mean to opt-in to enhanced image search?

Opt in to the "enhanced image search" within Google Webmaster Tools and then people can use your images within Google Image Labeler, which will improve your site's images labels/tagging.

I expect Google will then begin to use the public opinion / zeitgeist in addition to your own keywords in the alt tags, which must be a win-win for most websites.

It will be interesting to see if more images searches begin to generate to web traffic on sites that opt in to the enhanced image search.