Blog Ryan

Some stories to follow on Valentine’s Day:

• Adwords is rolling out changes to the algorithm as well as showing the quality score more clearly.
• Technorati loses key developer to Google: This is a big loss to Technorati, and a further signal Google is serious about indexing blogs more comprehensively.
• No more invites for Gmail:  About dang time. I could understand this at first, but why did it take so long to open up such a great service to everyone?
• Sports Blog Sells to ESPN: This is a sign that old school media is paying attention to new school and I think a trend that we will see more of–bloggers landing journalist jobs with established media companies.
• Webmaster Central Leaves Beta: First Gmail and now Webmaster Central.  Kudos to the Webmaster Central team.  Really like some of the tools and I dig the hunger for customer feedback that the team has displayed.
• Cutt’s Keynote in London: Lots of coverage on this one around the web.  Some of the tidbits from his keynote.  Linkbaiting is “officially” considered white hat   greater need to focus on vertical search, make greater use of tools from Webmaster Central.
• Some good adCenter tips for dynamic link insertion from Brad Geddes aka eWhisper.
• I’m starting another blog, as much for me to keep track of the huge field of US Presidential contenders as anything.  I find myself wondering where I saw which article about who.  I’m going to try and update articles by candidate, show who has which endorsements, and show who is paying attention to new technologies, and how that is affecting their campaign.

Now I better go find a babysitter so I can take Mrs. McCoy out to dinner and a movie.

Banging my head against the wall over here.  I’ve had either zero internet connection or extremely slow internet connection for over a week now.  Makes it real hard to be motivated to blog or get any work done.  I’m talking speeds of 100k or less.  I’ve contacted my current provider, no response since Thursday and have contacted the competition and can’t get a response from them either.  My problem is I have to get internet via satellite or line of site methods as DSL/Cable options aren’t available in my rural area.  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Congratulations to Dave Bascom and co. over at Web Targeted.  They are a Utah SEO firm that was recently named one of the top SEO firms in the world (#11) by TOP SEOS.  Not sure the criteria used to determine rankings, but regardless, I know these guys are as good as anyone around.  Great job Dave!

Looks like Google is feeling the pressure of Yahoo Site Explorer.  Yesterday they announced they will have a new tab in the Webmaster Console that will allow you to see more (although not necessarily all) of the links that Google knows about that point to your site.  It was interesting to see how that applied to one of my sites, NBA Wire.  With just the link operator in Google I show 42 links.  Using the new backlink tool i show just shy of 3,000.  You can export this list, sort it, slice it, dice it…Just remember just because a link shows in the list, doesn’t mean it carries any weight.

More coverage at Search Engine Land, Search Trends, Search Banter, Webmaster World, and Wolf Howl.

• The big story that shouldn’t be overlooked is Google is ramping up personalized search. Google made the official announcement yesterday. This will surely spark the debate of whether or not SEO is dying or not. Make sure you read this post by Gord Hotchkiss and where he thinks this announcement us. Michael Gray has a couple of interesting posts on the topic as well.
• Want your site to a deeper crawl from Yahoo?  Use Search Builder.
• Yahoo Affiliate Program is removing performance incentives.
• National Pork Board gets called on the carpet by the blogging community and issues an apology after firing off a lawsuit threat to a blogger advocating breastfeeding.
• 100,000 Videos Removed from YouTube after threat of legal action from Viacom.  Can’t help but think this will be a regular occurance for Google and will keep a lot of employers busy for a long time.
• SEO Training Posts.  A great list of SEO posts that all should be read by all new comers and good information for some of us industry vets too.