Link-Fest for Friday May 23rd 2008

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Thanks for visiting,
Ken

Woo-hoo! It’s Friday!

And this coming Monday is a Bank Holiday here in the UK, so double woo-hoo!

Now let’s get on with the linkage so I can go and enjoy the long weekend.

Free Tibet! *when you collect 8 tokens from specially marked cereal packets

Stephen Spencer has launched a campaign encouraging SEOs to use their powers for good by sending links to the Free Tibet website using “Olympics” as the anchor text in an effort to bring greater attention to the situation in Tibet by raising the site’s SERP rankings ahead of the Chinese Olympics. I can’t pretend to be an expert on the situation, but anything that helps promote a wider spread of information and discussion can only be a good thing. So…

Olympics

The Great HoaxBait Debate Continues - I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat

Following on from last week’s furore over what Lyndon did, Matt Cutts chummed the waters by making this commenton Sphinn. Suddenly there was loads of talk about Google penalizing sites for posting false stories. Except… how could Google tell? I mean, unless the content’s creator actually admits it in a blog post the way that Lyndon did. There’s certainly no way their algorithm could possibly automate the process of detecting made up stories. And manual reviews could only cover so much ground before the idea just stops being practical or scalable.
Some of the SEO world’s heavy hitters weighed in with their opinions on the matter this week, with posts from Lisa Barone on the Bruce Clay blog, Jane Copland on SEOmoz, Dan Horton on DaveN’s SEO Blog and Barry Schwatz at Seach Engine Land.
It seems that common sense is beginning to shine through here as more people point out that it’s not necessarily a matter of “ethics” or whether or not Google can (or should) penalize sites for gaining links in this way, what it comes down to is whether or not the content you create for a client’s site is appropriate for that client and if you’re prepared to deal with the consequences of a negative public reaction to some of your more “creative” work.

Incidentally, for the benefit of all those people out there who take everything Matt Cutts says as the absolute gospel opinion of Google as a whole, here’s a post from the Official Google Blog by Udi Manber which discusses Google’s Search Quality Team, along with Matt Cutt’s own follow-up post pointing out his role within that teamas the head of the group dealing with webspam.

Besides which, Matt was recently electrocuted by solar panels so he’ll probably be a lot quieter from now on.

Which is more relevant? A site called SEO Book or a site about an SEO Book?

This week saw Dan Thies release the 2008 update of his eBook SEO Fast Start. I bet you can guess what’s on my list of things to read this weekend, can’t you?
Dan isn’t a happy bunny though. Just check out this post from his blog. I seems some upstart call “Aaron Wall” (if that’s even his real name) is monopolizing the first page of search results for the term “SEO book” even though he doesn’t have a book about SEO on his site. Proof positive that Dan’s been slapped with a -12 penalty from the big G if ever there was one.
Meanwhile, this Wall-character even gets stories sphunn about what kind of ice cream he eats.

Hee-hee! Google said C-nt!

Great find here. Google’s sitelinks for the Urban Dictionarywebsite include a listing for their page on the word “cunt” which the more childishly inclined among us (myself included) think is absolutely f-ing hilarious!

Other Stuff That Made Me Laugh This Week

I’m trying really hard to resist the urge to fall back on my good old geek-comedy standby and just drop a couple of links to the Fake Steve Jobs blog this week (although there have been a few funny posts about the upcoming 3G iPhone launch and Steve Ballmer getting egged- Dammit! I linked to him didn’t I? Oh well, Namaste, Fake Steve. I honour the place where your rants and my Friday round-ups become one.)

Google Reader did me a big favour this week. In amongst all the rubbish that it regularly tries to recommend for me I discovered this gem of a blog called Put Things Off (it’s kind of like all those GTD sites, but with a better sense of humour).
I couldn’t decide on my favourite post from PTO, so here are the two that made the most milk come out of my nose:
Nomophobia and The Curse of The Mobile Phone
Moleskine Notebooks (the ultimate guide) and How to Rank Your Addiction (btw - I’m only at Level 3 on the scale, rapidly approaching level 4)

And there you have it. Another week down.

Enjoy your weekend folks. Especially if you get to have a long weekend as well.

If you digg what I've written, give me a sphinn (puns intended - sorry ;-) )