Dave Naffziger's Blog

I received this awesome voicemail on my BrandVerity Google Voice number:

The Google Voice transcription wasn’t usable, so I did a quick transcription myself. You do really have to listen it to appreciate it though:

Hi this is Roberts, Data Service Provider for Google. I wanted to give you guys a call, we’ve got a pretty good opportunity in your marketplace. We’ve got some positions that opened up on the search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing and wanted to see if there’s any interest as far as improving your ranking on the search engines. When you get a couple of minutes give me a call. Phone number here is 800 219 6018…

I’ve fielded plenty of snakeoil SEO pitches before, but this one receives particularly high marks.

Last night SEOMoz announced LinkScape, a link-based tool that maintains a self-generated index of 30 Billion pages. Yes, that’s B of Billion. It was only 3 years ago that Yahoo announced an index size of 20 Billion pages.

Almost equally impressive is that this service was built on $1.1 million in venture funding (yes they did have revenue, but that was still less than a million a year). Internet companies and products are being built for far less now than they have ever been.

The enormity of this accomplishment cannot be understated, and I’m certain it will revolutionize the typical approach to SEO. SEO has long been more of an art form than a science and I expect LinkScape will be the first of many tools that will decidedly shift the balance towards science. The search engines have always held their core algorithms close to the vest, but the impacts of links on those algorithms will shortly be a solved equation.

Update:
Well, I wrote too soon. It has since come to light that Linkscape does not operate its own crawlers and instead leverages the many crawler APIs. This intentional error of omission definitely lowers the magnitude of the accomplishment, but it doesn’t change the value of the service.

I spent most of last week at Pubcon. While I was mostly speaking with people about problems they’ve had with trademark abuse, I also walked away with several valuable blog-related tips:

• Import your RSS feed into Facebook as Notes
  While my RSS readers dwarf my Facebook friends, the additional visibility can’t hurt.

• Use SEO Title Tag. I’d made SEO friendly changes to my titles before, but the control this plugin gives you is very impressive. For example, I wrote the SEO unfriendly (but humorous to me at least) post title “I can has Elvii” and used the plugin to make the title tag “Running the 2007 Las Vegas Marathon as Elvis”

• List Related Posts. This helps drive increased pageviews per visit (mine went up by 11%) and increases your single-post to single-post links. I installed the WASABI Related Posts plugin, and then added this code to my index.php:
  

  < ?php if(function_exists('related_posts') && (is_single())) { ?>
    <h4 class="relposts">Related Posts</h4>
    <ul class="relposts">
    < ?php related_posts(); ?>
  </ul>
  < ?php } ?>
  

• Reduce Duplicate content . You want single post pages, not archive pages appearing in Google:
  • Write summaries for each post and display those summaries on your category and archive pages instead of the full text of each post. or
  • Noindex your archive and paged pages (maybe category and tag also). Joost deValk’s Meta Robots plugin provides functionality to address this.

• Disable your archive links . Make sure your page has a crawl path (category and tags). Noindexed pages retain pagerank. You don’t want to pass pagerank to noindexed pages. I chose to
  • Also consider nofollowing your category and tags links. I chose to nofollow category and archive links on my single post pages, while retaining follow on other pages. Joost’s plugin addresses these issues as well. One note, you need to update your theme to use the WordPress template tags wp_list_categories and wp_get_archives and not the deprecated list_cats, wp_list_cats or get_archives.

There was certainly a lot more related content, but these were a few tips that triggered me to make changes to my blog.