CogBlog

Interesting post on SEOMOZ on how the story of Michael Jackson passing spread online over time.

According to the article over the course of 3 hrs the story went from:

1. Entertainment Niche Site
   
2. Larger Entertainment Site
   
3. Wikipedia
   
4. CNN Twitter
   
5. first Bit.ly link (others tweeting)
   
6. Story hits Digg front page
   
7. massive RTing
   
8. MSNBC confirms
   
9. CNN confirms
   
10. Story on Google News
    

The story really took fire on social media, with the MSM and Google News following later. I don't think a 3 hr delay is too bad on Google News' part, but it is interesting to see how quickly stories like this can spread now.

Read the rest here

Great article here on SEOBook about how SEOs have been obsessing over Page Rank Sculpting with Nofollow tags, when it turns out Google disabled the functionality over one year ago!

http://www.seobook.com/worthless-hype

More than a few SEOs out there have claimed that their proprietary testing processes have shown huge benefits could come from manipulating Google's "link juice" with nofollow tags. I mean, they've tested it, and so they should know right? Well, turns out those SEOs may need to learn how to test.

Now, we do SEO, (and have since man walked on four legs), but we've always maintained that most of it is more common sense than secret sauce. But, we've seen the lure that SEO salesmen have on clients when they start talking about dark arts like page rank sculpting with nofollow tags.

The author, Aaron Wall--who I would love to buy a beer (or coke)--has a couple of theories why SEOs may have perpetuated this nofollow myth:

1. It makes them look cutting edge and allows them to sell more services.


2. Writing about things which are new, uncertain, and untested yields links.


3. For every person who is an SEO expert there are 1,000 ditto-heads linking to whatever sounds new or important.

You know, that sounds just about right to me.

We just made a simple Green Theme (Persona actually) for Firefox to show support for the people of Iran. You'll find it here:

http://www.getpersonas.com/persona/31913

To install:

Go here: http://www.getpersonas.com/
and click Get Personas for Firefox.

Then go here: http://www.getpersonas.com/persona/31913
and click "Wear this".

That's it.