All About Content

I’m off to Las Vegas this week to attend the PubCon conference, where I look forward to learning new stuff, meeting some cool people, and enjoying warmer weather than DC is currently experiencing.

Hope to see some of you there!

Okay, I’ve moved the blog over to Blogger Beta. I’m hoping that a) nothing broke in the process and b) that this is a significant improvement over the previous platform. Blogger has always been far inferior to WordPress and MovableType, in my opinion, so I’m eager to see if the new functionality closes that gap.

Update: 2 Minutes Later
Sure ’nuff, something broke. It’s not archiving old posts correctly. Looks like it’s dropping the /archive/ subdirectory when it creates the links for the archives pages. (I also switched from weekly archives to monthly archives, but did this after I discovered the other error, so I’m sure that’s not the cause).

I’m cautiously hopeful this won’t be too hard to fix.

I should change the tagline of my blog to: I make mistakes so you don’t have to.

Update: Some Days Later
It wasn’t tough to fix in theory (just fixed the archive URL in Settings), but it’s still not fixed in practice. FTP keeps timing out before ALL of the pages are republished, so some of the links remain broken. I’ll keep trying, and once all the new (monthly) archive pages work, I’ll do redirects from the weekly archives to the new pages.

Update: Several Years Later

I moved to WordPress.

Just when it starts to seem like I haven’t learned anything interesting in a while, I come across a thread called “Cloaking for Religious Reasons.”

Is there ever a good reason to engage in cloaking for the purpose of fooling Google? Even if God insists?

Turns out no — the problem being discussed could better be solved a different way (The problem: having to take down an e-commerce site in observance of Sabbath but needing to avoid search engine spiders replacing the entire site in their indexes/indices with the store’s “we’re currently closed” page. The solution: returning 503 errors).

Now I finally understand why B&H Photo wouldn’t let me place orders on their site at various times in the past. Turns out it wasn’t random… it was Saturday!

Rand Fishkin, in another excellent example of link bait done right, just published a post guaranteed to generate links from people within the SEO industry: he outlines how much SEOs should expect to make a year. This kind of info oft searched and seldom found.

According to the post, in-house SEO practitioners can expect to make:

• VP/Director of Search Marketing: $100,000 – $350,000+
• Director/Manager of Organic Search: $75,000 – $150,000
• SEO Guru: $75,000 – $200,000
• Campaign Manager: $55,00 – $100,000
• SEO Specialist: $40,000 – $80,000

If you work at an agency and run SEO campaigns for clients, the pay scale Rand lays out is:

• SEO Director: $50,000 – $100,000
• Search Marketing Consultant: $60,000 – $200,000
• Link Builder: $35,000 – $100,000
• Content Writer: $35,000 – $75,000
• SEO Researcher: $30,000 – $60,000
• Client Relations Coordinator: $35,000 – $75,00

For details and descriptions for each of these job titles, visit SEOmoz: SEO Salaries – How Much Should You Make.

And, no, I don’t make nearly as much as you think I make. But I’m open to negotiations.

Update:
SEMPO released its own survey of in-house SEO salaries in January 2008.

When Google does an update you’d think the world was coming to an end based on the complaints of webmasters who lost their top 3 positions. And when Flickr changes its Interestingness algorithm (which determines the top 500 photos seen in Explore), the formerly-but-no-longer popular want to know what gives.

Well, three weeks ago, Flickr made a little change to its Interestingness algorithm. (The basics are well explained in this post on Flickr.com). And based on my analytics logs, people are searching for answers and stumbling upon this blog. So I’ll break my usual tradition of not providing answers to explain what happened.

If you’ve had lot of photos drop out of Interestingness, it’s because you participated in comment whoring groups.

A Flickr developer explains:

We’ve made some changes in interestingness algorithm last week to compensate inflation of activity metrics introduced by groups that force users to create comments and/or favorites before they allowed to post photos in the group.

Actually, they did more than “compensate.” They seem to have blackballed all the photos in those groups outright.

So how is a person supposed to get comments on a photo without submitting it to a bunch of groups? Not to worry, says Flickr’s SilentObserver,

Only groups that force people to comment/fave on certain photos with no choice, are affected by latest algorithm changes.

I, of course, participated in the comment whoring regularly, so all of my Explore photos (which wasn’t that many), save one, are out. Oh well. Sometimes it’s not about being popular. A few of the forced-comments groups provide really good feedback, so it’s worth belonging to some of them even if it no longer helps to achieve Interestingness.

And for the seriously obsessed, Bill Slawski, the web’s resident algo patent expert, uncovered some patent applications to help deconstruct the Interestingness methodology.