Monthly meta-post for May
Here's my round-up of the best of other peoples posts from the last month. This is all stuff from the web development and search communities that I've found useful, interesting or funny:
-
Matt Cutts summary update on BigDaddy.
Some interesting insight from Mr Cutts as to why Google's latest upgrade is causing so much upset amongst the darker quarters of the SEO industry.
-
Roger Johansson on making nice markup.
I like to make my markup look nice whenever possible, correctly indented code and semantically correct markup is so much more maintainable and, well, nice to look at! Sometimes when your working with PHP includes or .NET User Controls this can be more effort than its worth but I still try make my html flow nicely whenever possible.
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200605/writing_good_html_is_a_craft/
-
Aaron Wall on Rabid Loyalty
Aaron briefly discusses Rabid Loyalty, if you can get this amongst the followers of your site, you're on to a winner. The most rabidly loyal group of people I can think of are the Mac freaks that worship at the "one buttoned mouse" altar. Apple could remove all html text on their website and replace it all with graphics and they would still rank well in search results because of all the "Apple Advocates" that link to them.
-
Adam Lasnik joins Google working for Matt Cutts
Mutt Cutts this month got himself a deputy at Google. Adam Lasnik is now a "webmaster advocate" at Google doing much of the stuff that Matt Cutts does. Basically acting as a communications officer between angry webmasters who've been removed from Google's index and search engineers at Google who's job it is to rid the world of search spam. Good luck Adam.
-
Some great examples of Google Trends
This post by randfish at seomoz shows some great example of Googles new "trends" project. My particular favourite is number 2, Web2.0 vs. Common Sense - very funny and so true!
-
Matt Cutts audio interviews
Aaron Wall posted a couple of links to an audio interview with Matt Cutts. Having been a frequent visitor to Matts blog for some time, it was quite interesting to "hear" him talk about Google for once. The interviews give some good insights into how the Google algorithm currently works and some good ideas on where all things Google may be heading in the next few months and years. Well worth a listen.
I will be cross-publishing these monthly meta posts to my public Notebook on Google (in fact - I build these posts in Google Notebook throughout the month). If you havn't had chance to checkout Google Notebook yet, you probably should!