June 12th, 2005 § § permalink
Jeremy spotted an article that shows that Financial Times is using the black arts to get higher rankings 
The hidden links can be found on pages such as ‘FT.com / Your money / Money guides’ . The hidden link is under the list of six partner sites that include The New York Times and Investors Chronicle in the bottom right hand side of the screen.
Tisk tisk tisk…..shame shame shame
The problem is that a smaller site would get banned from Google ASAP….but FT will say it’s not their fault and everything will be solved with an apology letter. Blah
P.S.
that is 1st grade link hidding BTW
June 6th, 2005 § § permalink
Barry has an article called Search Engine Guidelines Scare Webmasters that reffers to a thread at Search Engine Watch. I won’t discuss the thread here but the ideea behind.
Since when clean webmasters should fear “search engines” (read Google)? Between webmasters and search engines is a reciprocal relationship. They give us traffic and we give them content. It’s a win/win situation. But when search engines start making dictatorial rules (do this, do that, don’t dare to do that) webmasters should remember that one way or another, more or less, they have a public they can place their influence on and they could promote a much friendlier search engine.
No one has the right to tell webmasters with good “intent” what to do.
Google was promoted by webmasters and they should keep that in their minds
June 5th, 2005 § § permalink
Google Sitemap Generator v2 (hehehe already v2 
)
Features:
- Full WordPress Plugin Support (just copy it in your plugin directory and activate it)
- Administration UI (Customize setting like change frequency from your WordPress Admin Center)
- Creates a static xml file called sitemap.xml in your blog directory
- Gets automatic rebuilt if you edit/write/publish a post
- EDIT:Includes Homepage, Posts, Static Pages, Categories and Archives
A mix of existing ones
Features:
- include posts, pages and category pages
- be configured as to what is included, the frequency and the priority
- gzip everything automatically
- generate only if necessary: It uses a backup file if there are no recent changes, and otherwise generates a new backup.
No time to test now gtg to Alex. But I bet the the second is the best It includes static pages. Hmmmm Word Press community was pretty fast on this. Guess who’s blogs will score better
June 5th, 2005 § § permalink
A good article points out some good rules to make your fresh directory score better in Google
There are no big discoveries in it but a good roadmap for those who want to start one
June 3rd, 2005 § § permalink
On Social Patterns you have a detailed article on Google Sitemap Protocol and a plugin for Word Press
What is Google Sitemap?
Google Sitemap is an account based service that allows you to monitor and submit all your sitemaps
Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It’s a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages.
Why using it?
- Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages
- Fresher search results
- A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes
Edit:
Semiologic has a valid point on how this feature will be use by spammers:
With the new Google Sitemaps feature, you can now serve your spam pages to Google directly, and give them a low priority on top of that to lower their chances of ending up higher than your preferred landing pages. Sweet, isn’t it?
Yeah…very sweet indeed