Will iGoogle Change the Way We Search

Personalized search has been a concept floating around, with iGoogle (AKA Mockingbird) making its debut. Well, not really. It's been around for a little over a year, but it's taking on a whole new level of personalization besides a few widgets.

Google wants to compute PageRank for every single person, and thinks of personalization in 3 parts. There's Search Your own stuff (e.g. Google Desktop Search, Web History), Traditional (pull), and Push, like recommendations that might be part of iGoogle.

Google’s personalization efforts and features might allow for a nice homepage, but is it recent advances in search algorithms that have given Google the power to bring personalization to a new level, or would the agenda have anything to do with something else? Like new ways to obtain data on users? My tin foil hat says the latter.

SEO's new low

Did you know SEO has an anthem?
Neither did I. And this probably isn't it,
but this song about SEO is painfully the closest
this to it. Don't say I didn't warn ya.



Ya, the few seconds I endured I'd like back too.
Here's the lyrics for those interested...

I built this site for the world to see
Content and Links are found in plenty
Crawl my site everyday and night
Come on spider take a look at me

Bot Bot Bot (Let Me Show You What I Got)

There’s plenty of stuff for you to see
My nav is easy to follow
Just read the sitemap and you’ll see
Come on spider take at me


Bot Bot Bot (Let Me Show You What I Got)

Come and crawl my code oh yeah!
You’ll find my site’s easy to read
No errors found whatsoever
All my pages are validated

Bot Bot Bot (Let Me Show You What I Got)

No traps for you to get stuck
ISAPI paves the way
Text and links are served up rich
Don’t worry about flash there’s none to see

Bot Bot Bot (Let Me Show You What I Got)

So much I want you to read
No link farms or stuffing on me
What you see is what they see
Come on spider take at me

Bot Bot Bot (Let Me Show You What I Got)

Slurp, Googlebot, MSNbot, Webscooter, Teoma

Bot Bot Bot (Let Me Show You What I Got)
(song credit: Richard Chavez)

Is Link Building Dying?

All links are not created equal. Someone once referred to them as currency, with coins being worth less that a couple Benjamins. But as the playing field is in a constant state of flux, it becomes increasingly necessary to reinvent new ways to find quality.

Gone are the days when it was a numbers game. Blackhats will disagree, but then isn't that a different game altogether? It seems like directory submissions are dying out. There might be less than 20 good ones, but I'd say there are only 2 or 3 worth the time to submit to. Good ol' dmoz, and of course Yahoo.

Reciprocal has been in the crapper for some time, but seemed transparent and a bad idea from the get go. How long will hosted marketing pages last?

The Google police are on a new warpath, and its about to get ugly.

So, what's an seo to do?

Me thinks its time to build some genuine resources and work on my co-citation.

Some favorite pranks this April 1st

A few of my favorite pranks pulled this April 1st;

This one was nothing short of genius - the ultimate Firefox extension means the wait is over for many.

Then there was Gmail's "Paper", which for one small nanosecond seemed possible. In cases like this it would be better to pull something like this on any day other than April 1. Special mention to Google's TiSP as well.

Michael Arrington's announcement of a Techcrunch merger with FuckedCompany.com was another favorite. And it seems a lot of people bought into this one.


The new Googlewriter is a tool that helps you write blog posts. Sweet.

And of course, there let's not forget Matt Cutts site got hacked.