Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I am not sure why the local papers would include this information…

Even though the user-submitted reviews on Amazon.com are moderated and cannot contain HTML or links, spammers are not deterred. While shopping for a bluetooth mouse I came across the following:

This is a great product, and you can get it, along with any other products on Amazon up to $500 Free! Participate in this special promotion and get a free $500 Amazon Gift Card at this web site: stuffnocost.com/amazon

The reviewer only has a single review to his name. However, Google turns up 100,000 entries for the body of the spam. Now, when someone can get a hundred grand of their spam onto such a big name social ecomerce site as Amazon.com, you know spam’s becoming a giant, pervasive problem.

If this concerns you, go read what Om Malik has to say about spam on Reddit, or Steve Rubel’s suggestions on spamming social online media.

This article on Wordpress and SEO is somewhat useful, but its terseness hides the principles behind the SEO techniques it’s trying to teach, and as a result, some of them are not as effective as they could be. I’ll try and go throw the list and point out any improvements to the article which I can think of, or explain the ideas behind the techniques:

1) Permalinks

Thomas suggests /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ as a good permalink structure for ranking in search engines. The actual truth of the matter is that you want rich keywords to appear in your URL, as close to the root of the site as possible. That’s why something like /%postid%/%postname%/ is better, or even using the postname in your subdomain to set up http://%postname%.yourdomain.com to forward to the real permalink, is better.

2) Titles

Thomas’ suggestion is good. By placing the title of the post before the title of your blog, you are boosting rankings in the search engines. Wordpress defaults to putting the blog name first, like “Elliott Back: Wordpress SEO.” But tell me, if you’re looking for information about WP SEO on google, seeing my name first won’t incite you to click.

3) Tags

I’d suggest an autotagging solution, like Denis’ terms2tags. It automatically classifies your post using Yahoo’s term extraction adds Technorati tags. Why bother spending precious time tagging your own posts when all them can get great tagging coverage automatically?

The rest of it seems like generally good advice!