SEO

Overheard: How redirects can kill your site’s traffic

Previously, www.business.com, an online resource that has been very popular for many years and that has over 600,000 web pages in its root index was banned and penalized in Google, simply because it was using the wrong kind of redirect method. Getting a site banned in a search engine because of the wrong class of redirect happens more often than some people think. Serge Thibodeau, The Rundown on 301 and 302 Redirects

Serge provides a good overview of the problems bad redirects can cause — and how to make sure your redirects are the kind Google tolerates.

Overheard: Cuil will soon be a verb that nobody knows how to pronounce

The search engine’s launch was such a spectacular flameout that it may well go down as a verb. “What happened to that Eddie Murphy movie that was supposed to win him an Oscar?” “It came and went — it got totally Cuiled.” David Berkowitz, Do We Need Another…

There was tons of buzz this week — both in the media and in the office — about Cuil. The new search engine promised to index more sites than Google and it had some big industry names behind it. Everyone got all excited, hoping that Google finally had a real competitor. So what went wrong after the big reveal?

The engine works — it’s just not Google. And remember, Google is the supreme ruler. We build out sites for Google. We live and die by changes in the Google algorithm. Competing with Google is serious business. Literally.

Here’s how I knew that Cuil had disappointed and was already being dismissed. It hasn’t even been a week and there are already Cuil jokes.

Think about it. Have you ever in your whole entire life heard a Google joke?

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P.S.

David Berkowitz’s quote made me laugh, but the thing I REALLY wondered when I heard about Cuil was this — what the heck were these brilliant people thinking when they named their engine Cuil?

NEW RULE: Never name your product something you need to tell people how to pronounce. For those of you new to the buzz-swarm, the word cuil is gaelic for knowledge and it’s pronounced “cool.”

Overheard: NFO is the new SEO? A tale of accidental optimization

“The next generation of optimization is taking shape. First it was search engine optimization SEO, next came social media optimization (SMO), and now we’ve got news feed optimization (NFO).” Chris Schultz, Jason Calacanis Crushes My Facebook News Feed

Chris Schultz’s blog post about Jason Calacanis’ using Facebook to brand his “human-powered search engine” by optimizing his newsfeed on Facebook hit home the idea that when it comes to optimization, we’re still living in the wild, wild west. Chris writes:

I’ve got 99 friends on Facebook but I hear from Jason Calacanis more than anyone. He has turned Facebook into a marketing platform for his human-powered search engine, Mahalo. And he doesn’t pay Facebook a dime for this primo branding opportunity.

The very best part of this post? The comment he got back from Jason.

The reason this all happened was because I was using our Mahalo Share tool (google it) and it puts my delicious bookmarks on Facebook. I didn’t think it would put so many of my bookmarks on other people’s pages. So, I’m going to limit it to my best 2-3 bookmarks a day.