The SEO community's buzzing over official word from Google that
selling text links can hurt your PR and rankings. It's truly sad that $600-a-share Google is willing to ruin its own search results because they can't figure out how to differentiate paid ads from useful links. They're not always different things, either, one of many reasons why penalizing a site for carrying a text link is just wrong.
The search giant's argument is that too many people are buying links on websites in order to artificially boost their PageRank, a factor in determining search result ranking.
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I really like
mint. Not the web stats app, the new personal finance app. It's extremely simple to use, automatically pulling in information from your bank and credit card accounts, updating itself when you're not even using it.
It's completely free and smartly monetized through mutually beneficial offers from the site's partners — telling you, based on your actual spending, how you can save money. For example, it'll tell you what banks offer higher interest rates for your spending. It'll tell you what credit cards have better rewards or lower interest than yours.
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What better endorsement can PHP as a language and symfony as an enterprise framework for that language get than Yahoo! building the new
delicious service with them. That's the news from the official
symfony blog, where they also note Yahoo! will be contributing their bug fixes and extensions back to the symfony community.
Campaign Monitor's released their 2007
Guide to CSS Support in Email, a comprehensive study of CSS support by both desktop and webmail clients. This guide is an essential for anyone sending HTML mails out, especially in wide distribution as part of a mailing list or e-mail marketing.
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It's been a week since I started working for Microsoft. So far, so good. The best part of this internship so far is the location. Washington is like one huge suburb. No matter how far I drive in any direction it's the same — beautiful homes spaced out among plenty of grass and trees, people riding bikes and jogging on sidewalks, cars all driving under the speed limits and stopping at crosswalks, and not even a cigarette butt littering the sides of the roads. Every few minutes you're skirting a big blue lake or staring at snow-topped mountains rising above the cloud line.
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Looks like I won't be packing up and moving out to California in April; Google turned me down for the job I applied to. Maybe
that second interviewer's questioning really did mean they wanted a C coder despite the job description listing C++.
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It began with Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company's founders, decided to build a search engine which didn't rank pages primarily by keyword density like their competition. Early search engines were easy to fool — fill your page with the same phrase over and over and you'd appear near the top of search results for that phrase. Google was different. It let the web itself tell their search engine what pages were about and which were most important. This process is what they called PageRank, and works by analyzing the incoming links to each page.
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The end of the year is the perfect time to stop and take a "big picture" look at just how much I've spent on search advertising, what that money has bought me, and what changes I should make in the new year. While I purchase advertising for my websites from many search engines, ad networks and individual websites, I decided to start by focusing on the top three search engines. MSN AdCenter didn't open until mid-2006, but what results I do have from them are interesting.
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