It’s (a couple of days after) that time of the week again kids, so here we go with another SEOpsCentre Friday Monday Link-Fest.  I know it’s a bit later than normal, but you’ll see why when you read through this week’s links (and it’s not just because I’ve been messing about on Plurk)…

Plurk Is The New Black

Yeah, I thought it was a silly name when I first heard it too.  But all the cool kids are doing it.  Heck, even I’m on there.
For the uninitiated, Plurk is kind of like Twitter, but with a few groovy new toys to play with:

• You’re still restricted to 140 characters per message, but it’s easier to add links with anchor text rather than having to use shrinkers for the URLs like you do on twitter.
• You can post replies to individual messages, making it easier to follow conversations (although it would be nice if they added a bookmarking feature so that you can follow up without having to scroll back through your timeline to find the original post).
• The whole timeline view just looks a lot nicer than twitter and (so far) it seems to be a great deal more stable (but we’ll have to wait and see what effect this week’s mass migration of SEO-types will have on that )
• You can also divide you friends list into “cliques” so that you can send messages just to particular groups of friends.  Very handy.
• They’ve built in this Karma system that builds up as you gain more friends and invite more people to join, rewarding you with new features like animated emoticons.  I’ve already seen more than one person get over-excited by the discovery that they can now post messages with dancing bananas in them (Dazzlin Donna, I’m looking at you).

So if you want to join in the fun on Plurk you can sign up through this link (just so you know, if you do sign up using that link, it’ll automatically add you to my friends and give me extra karma so then I can start using dancing bananas as well )

If you do decide to sign up you should check out this guide to using Plurk, it covers a lot of the basic and more advanced things you can do with Plurk and will have you plurking like a pro in no time.

Speaking of Karma

James Duthie’s back on the guest blogger circuit again this week, following up last week’s visit to help out theGypsy with a great guest post on Shana Albert’s Social Desire blog about how to improve your social media karma.  Which I’m sure will earn him a few extra karmic brownie points.

My Friend Robot(.txt)

The search engines banded together this week to provide us all with some handy tips on best practices for using robots.txt files and the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP for short).  You can read the various posts from either Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! or you can pop over to Matt Cutt’s blog for his round-up of all three which includes a few other tips to boot. 
Good to see them all singing off the same hymn sheet.  But with all that identical information on each page, it’ll be interesting to see who comes out on top when the duplicate content filters kick in

How Dark Is It In Seattle? 

Judging by the chatter from a lot of the folks on Twitter and Plurk who’ve been in Seattle for this week’s SMX Advanced conference, the weather there has been pretty awful, with lots more rain than you’d expect for this time of year.  I always thought it was supposed to be like that in Seattle, that’s why they produced so many depressed singers in the early 90’s.

And it sounds like the darkness this week extended beyond the meteorological as Lisa Barone expressed her disappointment on the Bruce Clay blog that a great deal of the talk at SMX Advanced covered strategies from the grey/black hat side of the SEO spectrum.  Danny Sullivan even turned up in the comments to say that he felt this year’s conference was a lot more black hat than he would have liked, which has left him concerned that the ”show may have pushed things backwards rather than forwards.”

Jane Copland posted her own round-up of SMX Advanced on the SEOmoz blog and also covered some of the chatter about the surprising amount of emphasis people were placing on the BH techniques that were discussed.

Now, I didn’t go to the conference so I’m not really in a position to comment (but when has that ever stopped me?)  The fact is that to judge from the abundance of coverage for the conference as a whole it covered a pretty thorough spectrum of SEO tactics, from white hat all the way through to black.  Obviously I don’t know what went on in the Give It Up session (and I won’t find out for another four weeks, when the embargo is lifted and I’m sure we’ll see a whole flurry of post come out detailing the strategies discussed in there).  It just sounds as though the black hat stuff is what stuck in people’s minds after the event finished, whether or not anyone chooses to use it for themselves or their clients comes down to the individual’s own fashion sense.  Personally, I’m sticking with my irritatingly noble preference for alabaster headwear, but that doesn’t mean to say that I’m not just as eager as everyone else to at least hear about what went on in the Give It Up session.  As Rand Fishkin pointed out in the comments on Jane’s post, “I’ve always felt that plugging your ears when black hat SEO comes up doesn’t make you a white hat, it makes you a worse SEO overall. ”

The Funniest Thing I Saw This Last Week

As well as SMX Advanced, Google had their own Google I/O Conference where they gave attendees some natty t-shirts which were supposed to spell out Google I/O in binary.
But, as Michael Arrington points out on the TechCrunch blog, they actually spell Google KO.
I guess the question is, was this a genuine mistake on Google’s part, or were they going for some super subtle uber-geek humour?
After all, there are 10 types of people in this world.  Those who understand binary and those who don’t.

Excuses Excuses

So that’s my belated link round-up for last week.  As you can see, the whole pissing about on Plurk thing slowed me down a bit, as did the firestorm that erupted around Lisa’s Darkness of SMX post (I decided to hold off posting until I could see some more of the reactions to it).
Plus I had to go to the hospital on Friday afternoon.  Don’t worry, I’m fine.  I’ve just been feeling under the weather for the last couple of weeks and my doctor wanted me to have a blood test to make sure everything’s okay.
I don’t know whether or not I should be worried.  When the nurse took my blood sample she didn’t use a needle, she just bit me.
Do you think I should have asked her for ID?