Here goes.

Hellen Domingue wrote to me a while back to say, “I must say that by and large I am really happy with this web site. After reading your post I can tell you are educated about your writing. Looking forward to future posts. Thanks!”

Why thank you, Hellen. I’m glad my website makes you really happy. It makes me happy, too. But I’ve posted lots since the post you commented on and you have not returned once. Is everything alright? Because I was looking forward to more of your pointlessly effusive, amazingly valuable comments.

Someone with the terribly unfortunate name of Viagra wrote: “Hello thanks for this tips viagra”

Um, Viagra, ever thought of changing your name to something less embarrassing? You must get teased about that a lot. Or is that a stage name – like Madonna or Beyonce? If so, you may want to rethink.

Or wait, are you calling me Viagra?

Another commenter, Best Registry Cleaner, said about SEO Successes in Recent Months: “thanks for this great post wow… it’s very wonderful”

Thank you, Best Registry Cleaner. However, I have to say that your comment was not all that wonderful.

There are so many more, and I really don’t have time to reply to everyone. Just a couple, though.

How to Get Pregnant wrote to say “Thank you for this useful information.I will share it with my friends.I have done bookmarked it.”

Thank you for writing, How to Get Pregnant. Since we are talking like yokels… I’ve done deleted your comment.

And by the way, How to get pregnant? Really? Don’t they teach that in elementary school now?

Finally, Cheap mbt shoes wrote to me a while back, to say, “I like that you think. Thank you for share very.”

Thanks for writing, Cheap! I like that you comment (Now go get lost very).

Comment spammers, please leave your stupid comments below. Since this post is about stupid comment spam…. i am going surely allow your comment idea is very good.and i will truly link to your very interesting blog post and to bookmark your nice website for good information future!

P.S. Legitimate comments are always welcome!

In any case, it’s fun to see that that page still ranks well and to see that canoe.ca or anyone else has not even thought of trying to come up with their own list. I get an email about once a month, on average. In some cases these are quite interesting. One of the most recent ones I got was from Sammy Kohn, drummer for the Watchmen, who wrote to lament that they were not included originally, which I admitted required correction. I just got another email from someone in Tampa Bay, in fact.

It’s a case in point that creating a unique web page and doing it properly can have rewards over many years. When you appear at or near the top of Google results, people believe you are authoritative… apparently whether you are or not. All this from simply throwing up a page that was simply optimized properly, even if it was highly self indulgent (and remains so).

Anyway, for anyone who wants to comment on the list (which I just updated) in the future, please comment below.

Cheers!

I should admit that not everything I work on has been a great success. In almost all cases where things have not worked out as well or have had middling results, there is a shortage of commitment from companies.

I can do some SEO that will keep your company afloat but you need to help me out. You need to update the design of your site, for example, especially as more pages are added and your site’s design falls farther behind the times and changes to search engine algorithms.

That being said, I am still pleased to be well ahead of the curve in some cases and doing stuff that still works, in other cases.

I should blog more – but I am just overbooked.

I was going to blog “a look back at 2009″ or ” a look ahead at 2010″ but there have been way too many of those and at this point, another one would be just sad. And no one knows where search will be by the end of 2010, I guarantee you that. Of all the posts I saw, I do like Rand Fishkin’s that criticized (rightly) Google’s real time search window (among other things).

So I won’t do that.

Instead, let’s have fun with some screen caps from Google suggest.

Starting with… what does Google suggest that Google is?

How about Twitter?

Go broader.

All of us in Web publishing are wondering what Google will do in the future. If you really want to know what Google will do in 2010, maybe Google can tell us!

Wait a minute, is that true, that Google will not search for Chuck Norris?

No, but it does have some interesting things to say about Chuck Norris. (Has Chuck Norris heard this?!)

Beyond fun, there is more to be learned from Google’s tool:

You can get existentialist (or, if Chuck Norris is a fag, what am I?):

Find some scary suggestions about the current President of the United States:

You can check out the latest in the zeitgeist perhaps… say, about the biggest movie right now.

You could probably have hours of fun with Google suggest. But then you wouldn’t be working.

Hey, kinda like Google suggest, apparently…..

And as that shows… Google suggest is not all that helpful. Come to think of it, I don’t think there are very many times I’ve actually used it practically.

Although it can be fun.

Belated Happy New Year!

Today on flippa.com, searchall.com is up for sale. For a mere six figures!

Bid on it now!

Any change to Google’s algorithm is of course big news, spawning reams of Internet chatter, a whole lot of speculation and probably some fear-mongering, along with some brand new websites (e.g. Compare Caffeine!)

What exactly Google Caffeine will do, though, is largely unknown even though some have reported that it will be a change to Google’s indexing methods and Matt Cutts (and webmasters who tried the beta version) note that there will be changes to rankings. One thing that will not change will be the look and feel of Google.

A big change noted by many (of us) who previewed Google Caffeine was the speed of results – it’s about twice as fast, if you can believe that.

Matt Cutts summarizes on his blog:

The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change.

While Google has very kindly (mercifully, for those who will inevitably move down) held off until after the Christmas season, that is largely because of flack they have received in the past. It does not seem to be because Caffeine will have as profound an effect on search results as have major updates of the past.

Lilengine.com provides a good overview of changes it found in a comparison of Caffeine to “Old Google” (i.e. the one we’re using today). Some changes they identified are as follows:

* Google Sitelinks disappearing from some results.
* Rich Snippets disappearing from some results.
* Caffeine has difficulties handling 301’s. ( This is a bug )
* Page 1 results mostly contain the same sites, however positioning is quiet different
* Page 3 and onwards seem generate completely different results.
* The index page on root domain now has more weight.
* Pages with heavy keyword stuffing are been penalised.
* Pagerank Sculpting is no longer effective. ( further confirming the rel=nofollow topic )
* Brand name / Domain trust further effecting SERP. ( a step further in the Google Vince Update? )
* Number of inbound links from external domains
* External links using targeted keywords as anchors carry more weight.

The last four points are nothing new by the way. It seems to me, then, that Caffeine will simply entail that SEOs continue to explore the long tail of relevant content, staying away from suicidal blackhat practices like keyword stuffing and over optimization and continuing to acquire legitimate organic links. So once again, Caffeine seems like no big news for SEO, although it might be relatively big news in Search.

What Caffeine actually looks like and how it will actually affect all us webmasters will, of course, have to wait to be seen. I suspect it will affect legitimate sites very little and it will only give webmasters and SEOs more work to do. In any case, we will all find out for sure, come 2010.

To learn more, see:
http://www.readwriteweb.com
http://blog.360i.com/
http://www.computerweekly.com

Google Caffeine
The buzz is that this is the biggest change to Google’s algorithm since late 2003 (aka the Florida update/dance). It has been in beta for some time and is going live right now. I didn’t like the beta version (now retired) because it was only available for google.com.

Social Search
Google rolled out social search, which integrates your results with listings from friends in your various social networks. It’s been met with some criticism and it even gives some people the creeps. But expect Google to keep tweaking things. Maybe it’ll be a good Google product in the end; maybe it’ll be useless to most of us.

There is smaller news of course, such as the way Google’s local business results have really taken off in the past few months, squeezing publishers of directories and other local marketing and inciting SEOs to get pissed off about Google hogging search results. Twitter’s real time search was old news from late in 2008 but Twitter has continued to improve its search and overall functionality. Most importantly, Twitter is an undeniable Force-to-be-Reckoned-With when anyone discusses Internet marketing (if not SEO) today. Finally, also, Google dropped PageRank in Webmaster Tools, possibly in favor of Trustrank, one might wonder.

For all that, there is very little news in mainstream search engine optimization (SEO), as should perhaps be expected at this point in the game. A list of top 50 SEO tips from this week’s pubcon confirms it: not much new in the world of actual day-to-day SEO. That may bode poorly for professional SEOs, only because people may think that all they need to do is pick up an SEO starter guide from Google or an SEO primer from a third party SEM company or any of the other hundreds of sources of basic SEO information and think that that is all they need. I say ‘I don’t really think so’ because not one of these tools will match the value of having a professional SEO in charge. From Google’s to every other guide I’ve seen I see mainly dodgy tips, teasers only and flat-out red herrings (people who even mention ‘meta tag keywords,’ I’m looking at you.)

Search engine optimization may get rocked by Google Caffeine but SEOs will still be the best qualified to handle this and any other news in Search. Bits of news and occasional flurries of news are best understood in the context of the last five to ten years of changes at Google and other search engines.

A funny thing for me is I found this by searching for Matt Cutts on my newly purchased social search engine.