Haven't had a lot of time to update the blog in a while, but I am still keeping my SprayOnSalt page up to date with search engine news I find worth reading. This list of links also appears in the navigation column of the blog's homepage.
Other things that might be worth an update: I'm still fascinated by that issue I was having with del.icio.us pages getting first page rankings for what seemed like not entirely un-competitive words. Basically these pages were getting ranked based on off-page factors (i.e., inbound links) and possibly the URL (file name). But file names are not believed to be hugely important relative to the most focused-on factors like title tags, on-page copy, links, etc.
That leaves links. While there is a lot of cross-linking inside del.icio.us, all the pages use the "nofollow" robots meta tag, as well as "noindex" -- so the only links that should be counting are external links, with the pages not getting any boost in link popularity from internal links. Given that it seems unlikely that many people would link to a tag page inside del.icio.us, those few links must be pretty valuable. (A quick search using the "link:" operator confirms there aren't many links coming in.)
That's my hypothesis. So I'm playing around to see if I can significantly manipulate the ranking of these "URL only" listings by just pointing a couple of links to them (for example, to a page like http://del.icio.us/tag/technorati) but using entirely irrelevant anchor text. So far I've only tried it with del.icio.us pages that are already ranking, but early indication is that those links move up in the results based on only a couple of IBLs.
I'm also creating new tags that don't exist yet to see if I can get a new del.icio.us tag page ranking out of nothing. Shouldn't be hard, because if people aren't already tagging a word or phrase, it probably isn't a very competitive one... like, say, oh... http://del.icio.us/tag/melanie+phung.
So that's one of the things I'm playing around with. Will post an update if I turn anything up.
Posted by Melanie Phung
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An Unhealthy Fascination With del.icio.us
Haven't had a lot of time to update the blog in a while, but I am still keeping my SprayOnSalt page up to date with search engine news I find worth reading. This list of links also appears in the navigation column of the blog's homepage.
Other things that might be worth an update: I'm still fascinated by that issue I was having with del.icio.us pages getting first page rankings for what seemed like not entirely un-competitive words. Basically these pages were getting ranked based on off-page factors (i.e., inbound links) and possibly the URL (file name). But file names are not believed to be hugely important relative to the most focused-on factors like title tags, on-page copy, links, etc.
That leaves links. While there is a lot of cross-linking inside del.icio.us, all the pages use the "nofollow" robots meta tag, as well as "noindex" -- so the only links that should be counting are external links, with the pages not getting any boost in link popularity from internal links. Given that it seems unlikely that many people would link to a tag page inside del.icio.us, those few links must be pretty valuable. (A quick search using the "link:" operator confirms there aren't many links coming in.)
That's my hypothesis. So I'm playing around to see if I can significantly manipulate the ranking of these "URL only" listings by just pointing a couple of links to them (for example, to a page like http://del.icio.us/tag/technorati) but using entirely irrelevant anchor text. So far I've only tried it with del.icio.us pages that are already ranking, but early indication is that those links move up in the results based on only a couple of IBLs.
I'm also creating new tags that don't exist yet to see if I can get a new del.icio.us tag page ranking out of nothing. Shouldn't be hard, because if people aren't already tagging a word or phrase, it probably isn't a very competitive one... like, say, oh... http://del.icio.us/tag/melanie+phung.
So that's one of the things I'm playing around with. Will post an update if I turn anything up.
Posted by Melanie Phung