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That being said, this talk essentially sums up a lot of SEO concepts, and really drives home a lot of concept.  People tend to be confused as to what SEO is.  People often ask me if they can easily shoot up in the results by using ______ SEO tactic (where the blank could be filled in by any number of spammy techniques).  If it were that easy, clearly the opportunity to exploit it would already have been exhausted by people trying to reach the top of the results, since a top position can be worth lots of money.  In reality, SEO is mostly going to be a set of best practices that allows the best interface between a search engine and your site.  Poorly optimized sites require search engines to make a lot of guesses as to your content and message.  Properly optimized sites present all relevant information to the search engine in a clear and concise fashion.

Of course there is the massive importance of links, but truly good content usually has no trouble attracting links, and attempts to artificially inflate your perceived popularity will fizzle out over time.  Either you will attract a larger competitor who can better emulate popularity, or Google/Bing/Yahoo will detect your subterfuge and appropriately discount your rankings.  Paid links, blog spam, and wiki spam are all regularly found by Google.  Matt Cutts recommendation to focus on content is the best chance you have at organically improving your rankings and viewership.

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Dating Economics Blog

I hope to update it more than I do this blog

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The song is “Tell Me” by the K-Pop group “The Wondergirls”.  It’s such a catchy song, and i’ve listened to it probably fifty times in the past day.  Singer Yubin’s voice is especially good, it’s kind of a deeper flinty voice.

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Fun lessons I learned about writing iGoogle Gadgets:

• Using the iGoogle editor allows you to quickly edit, preview and troubleshoot apps, BUT does not allow you to use anything but the legacy APIs
• You cannot develop with the new APIs by calling them from your server, as they are cached by Google every hour (along with any called XML files)
• iGoogle has a pretty intuitive setup for using Javascript and writing cross-browser apps, once you look past the (very) rough developer’s tools

Here’s the gadget as it exists currently:

My future plans are to put the links in a tab, and change the link loading scheme.  The images are just too big and take precious vertical space. I’ll use another tab to display an RSS feed.  iGoogle has an API to chew on feeds and convert them to JSON for you.

I think loading the App data from an external XML/JSON is a far superior solution to hard-coding it into an app.  It allows it to be edited much easier by an program/unskilled user. You can view the code by reading the XML file here.

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Google is trusted with an incredible amount of our data yet they continually wish to keep the data exchange one-sided.  They offer a multitude of “free” services, but their services are not exactly services per se, but rather interfaces between Google and the real world that suck in the world’s knowledge and keep it in proprietary data stores.  Your emails, web search history, site usage statistics, calendaring, etc are all kept and combed through by Google.  It’s an incredibly one-sided conversation, with Google taking in all information, and sharing only limited and sterilized morsels.

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From the “bad precedent” department, lawfirm Jones Day in Chicago filed an abusive lawsuit against startup BlockShopper.  Jones Day filed the suit in an attempt to control the anchor text of links to the firm.  A settlement has been reached out of court that prohibits Blockshopper from linking to the litigious bastards using anything but URL text and “Jones Day” The story at Ars Technica is here.  

Anchor text is what shows up for a link.  For instance, my “abusive lawsuit” link above links to jonesday.com, but the “abusive lawsuit” text is referred to as the anchor text.  Anchor text is an important factor in what Google and other search engines use to calculate keywords you rank for.  For instance, if there were a ton of links with the anchor text “abusive lawsuit” pointing at jonesday.com, then jonesday.com would likely come up as the first result for “abusive lawsuit”.  This can be done in a coordinated fashion called Google-Bombing.  Famous examples include the “Miserable Failure” googlebomb aimed at the biography of George W. Bush and a similar campaign against Al Gore.  

Googlebombs can be “defused” by Google, as they have a custom algorithm that is periodically run (according to a post at Matt Cutt’s blog, it’s when they feel like it’s needed).  However, this is the first time someone has successfully sued to affect their anchor tags.  It’s a bad precedent for the web and might be a part and parcel of the SEO efforts of future large corporations trying to manage ranked keywords.  For instance, suppose someone working on Ford Motor company’s SEO team noticed that Ford Motor company had been linked to unfavorably by a website, perhaps using anchor text “broken down car” or something similarly derogatory.   With the precedent that has been set, that SEO guy/gal could fire off an email to Ford’s legal team to harass that site and convince them to change/remove their links to better reflect the trademarks and brand of Ford.  Alternatively, they could issue linking guidelines through their legal team that would aid in SEO, such as requirements to include the title of the page (containing targetted keywords, of course).

Jones Day’s lawsuit specifies exactly how BlockShopper is supposed to link to Jones Day, and actually requires that they use the name of the lawyer they are linking to (the lawsuit was over linking to attorney profiles) and Jones Day.  This would have the effect of “pairing” a lawyer’s name with Jones Day in SERPs, making it harder for the lawyer to establish a private practice.  Additionally, it prevents negative anchor text from seeding keywords to specific lawyers or Jones Day in general.  Google’s pagerank counts each link as a vote, so in essence, Jones Day is deciding how you are allowed to vote for them.  It will remain to be seen how Google reacts to this and how their algorithms change to accomodate this censorship of information.  The engineers pride themselves on being able to algorithmically filter out misleading, irrelevant, or commercial influences from their SERPs, so this should be a good test.

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 I really enjoyed doing the demo.  The crowd was great, and really helped me push on.  My butterfly and cartwheel were dreadful, also my form is painful to watch.  On the upside, I liked my jump front slap kick.  After the demo, we went back to Dennis’ and had a few drinks.  I mixed up some lychee and Midori based drinks.  All in all a good night.

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What really inspired my pursuit of an open source life is when I was growing up and really immersed myself in open source software.  It was something I viewed as a complete 180 to how things are normally done.  Everyone shares their info, and together, everyone is better off.  This attitude is supported by my academic training as an economist.  When everyone contributes, more value gets created than the sum of the parts.  There is no “cost” to giving out my knowledge, and instead, everyone is made richer.  If someone asks for help with a problem they have, or asks for a piece of my knowledge, I give it to them.  I have increased the amount of knowledge that exists between the two people, or increased the total “wealth” of the system, making me a small amount richer.  Witholding information to gain a competitive edge only works for a very short time, and creates a large opportunity cost of lost knowledge (this cost is born both by you individually and by the system as a whole).  Being skilled is where the real differences should happen.  For instance, I could have Paul Krugman teach me everything he knows, but I wouldn’t have 1/10th the analytical power he has.  This is why giving information away will not put you out of a job.  All you have to do is “capture less value than you create” in the words of Aaron Wall.  

As far as actions and words aside from knowledge, similar to Tynan’s experiences, I feel that living an open life forces you to think about what you will say or do.  I don’t edit my life to satisfy everyone, but I do undergo a thought process identifying the benefits and costs of a particular action.   I generally try to act in the most ethical way as possible at all times.  I don’t steal, I don’t plagairize, I don’t lie (except some white lies, but those can be ethical) because I would not want to have to tell someone about stealing, plagairism, or lying.  When talking about someone, I will only talk about them if I have something nice to say, which according to psychological studies, will make me look good too.  Lastly, being open with people really opens up the amount of brains I can strategize with.  I can bounce my goals off of people and filter out the bad ones, and get greate advice on achieving my goals.  It generates an incredible amount of value while consuming almost none, and also makes for great happy hour conversation

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Why is it so important?

Many people don’t notice the heavy usage of URL rewrites in popular websites.  It is used on this websites to produce the friendly URLs used for permalinks.  It is used to erase something unfriendly like an article id “article.php?=132&source?=20″ and change it to /articles/myarticle/source/.  This has major benefits for search engine optimization.  I used a rewrite rule to change an incredibly unfriendly DNN url to “www.exampledomain.com/blog/”.  Having these keywords available in the link drastically helps optimize your inbound links.  It can be used for untold other uses as well, since the Apache implementation is fantastically powerful.  Rewrite rules are created using regular expressions.

Your Options

Your main two options for IIS are Ionics ISAPI Rewrite and Helicon Tech’s ISAPI Rewrite.  Ionic’s is an open source implementation of a rewrite engine, and has been progressing along nicely since when I first used it (started with the 0.8 beta).  It works as an ISAPI .DLL that is applied in IIS.  The rules are put into an INI file.  There are regrettably no  way to make separate sites have separate rules barring loading multiple copies of the DLL with multiple INI files.  Helicon’s IIS rewrite solution is a lot more mature, and closely follows the Apache implementation.  You use .htaccess files to manage rewrites.  Furthermore, almost all apache mod_rewrite rules work in Helicon’s solution.  The free version only supports one set of rules, but the premium version ($80 at the time of writing) supports .htaccess files in every web directory, with different rules.  Overall, I would recommend Helicon’s software, although it would definitely be worth looking at the Ionics project to monitor how well they are doing.  The free version of Helicon’s software only has modest restrictions, and is not expensive if you’ve already paid for Windows Server and some SQL server.

Update:

Bill Staples made a note that I neglected to include a link to the IIS7 URL rewrite, so here it is:
http://www.iis.net/extensions/URLRewrite 

I just got IIS7 installed on my Vista Ultimate box, so I should have some future posts about leveraging IIS7’s new capabilities for SEO and user friendly web applications!

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