A Day in Paradise

I blogged about Shawn Andersen and the Roxy’s Pub discrimination case half an hour ago while on my way to work. 20 minutes later I go to add some hyperlinks to the post (the main problem with mobile blogging) and I decide google for shawn andersen roxys and find that my post is on the top of the search results.

Is that crazy or what?

This is in response to Cal’s post on SEO experts.

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It really depends on the framework… Zend Framework is very SEO framework. Others that rely on a lot of ajax or javascript POST callbacks to facilitate basic navigational tasks will stop a search engine dead in its tracks.

I have also seen frameworks which use strange http redirects as part as the controller, this has the habit of killing search engines as well.

Speed is also important in SEO, being able to output the correct http cache tags. You should have complete control over the output HTML, the ability to create descriptive css styles and have full control over the structure of your html output.

Clean URL support is good in ZF, but the default front controller still needs some modification to be truely SEO friendly.

When it comes to SEO experts I totally agree that they are the scum of the earth… but they are also just playing a game that Google set up for them to play.

The monetary value of being #1 on Google is just too much to pass up.

I posted a seo review on my Hedge Fund Website blog. For anyone who’s interested… digg it while you’re there

This is an extension to my latest comment on this blog entry.

If you search for just about any term in google, you will find that if a wikipedia entry exists it will be ranked among the top few entries.

This exposes a flaw in the concept of Google search algorithms, as despite the quality of the content of the page, simply because it exists on wikipedia and is well linked within the framework of the site, it gets shuffled to the top of the google search page results.

Creating a page which is within the first page of the biggest search engine freely editable by anyone with any agenda is just asking for abuse.

Del.icio.us has been pretty free of spam and spammy links. The reason for this is their very logical decision not to allow search engines to index the pages by adding the following metatag.

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,nofollow,noindex"/>

If wikipedia would do this it would solve a LOT of problems. The fact that wikipedia ranks so well not only means that objectionable content often floats to the top of the search engine rankings, but you also get a lot more random people who surf in through google (most likely looking for information) and end up editing the article and bringing the quality down.

So this is a callout to wikipedia, please get your pages out of google and work towards refining your content rather than being a nesting ground for link spammers, people with personal agendas and random vandals.

Annoyed with google using your ODP description for your site? Matt Cutts annouced that google now supports the noodp meta tag, which will mean that by adding the following meta tag to your page google will not use the odp description but rather make something up based on the actual content of the page.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>

I am personally fairly happy with my description… what I’m mildly confused about is the fact that google gives weight to the title of your odp listing even if that is nowhere on your page, as demonstrated when searching for my old blog title. None of the text that is displayed is anywhere on the page.