At SEO by the Sea, there’s a very insightful article about the possible factors Google is using to ascertain the relative values of blogs.

Web developers who stick to the straight and narrow when page building may be likely to be rewarded with the institution of Google local and personalised search facilities.

Gord’s interview with Matt Cutts discusses at length some of the new directions Google is currently taking.

Matt: I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily the nail in the coffin, but it’s clearly a call to action, where there’s a fork in the road and people can think hard about whether they’re optimizing for users or whether they’re optimizing primarily for search engines. And the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion, those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward. At the same time, if you do choose to go to the other fork, towards the black hat side of things, you know you’re going to be working harder and the return is going to be a little less. And so over time, I think, the balance of what to work on does shift toward working for the user, taking these white hat techniques and looking for the sites and changes you can implement that will be to the most benefit to your user.

Bigdaddy seems to have sorted some wheat from the chaff, reducing the value of reciprocal links and most particularly from unrelated sites. Matt Cutts’ post on the results thus far of the earthquake that was Big Daddy is good value for search engine optimisers.

Good quality, useful content that attracts inbound links naturally rules from now on it seems, though to get the ball rolling reciprocals are still necessary.

It appears that Google has taken a negative view of phpBB Forums due to the prevalence of worm invasions and spammers using them. I noticed my forums posts had been designated as supplemental - in other words, penalised, despite my constant fumigation of pron merchants. As well, I found evidence for my theory at WebProWorld and phpBB community forums.

Thus I’ve moved the useful information gathered over the years from Sibagraphics Forums to Siblog, which is prominent with the search engines despite being round for less time than the forums. It’s much more convenient for me only having one venue to administrate as well!

Happily, WordPress has the ability to moderate all comments and posts and doesn’t have a member list available for the miserable spammers to infest with their puerile poker urls etc.

At Security Focus, revelations have been made of a serious, unfixed hole in the google tool bar.

Watch the google tango … these folks have their fingers on the pulse but they’re not talking about how.

For a fair estimate of links from major bots the free Uptimebot tool is useful.

Tried the Fagan Finder’s URLinfo tool to good effect and highly recommend it.

Found this tip at geek ramblings. Get your google rank by placing the code on your page. Beats installing the google bar.

There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few “A-List” blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don’t get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don’t have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let’s help the smaller blogs get more visibility!

This posting is GoMeme 4.0. It is part of an experiment to see if we can create a blog posting that helps 1000’s of blogs get higher rankings in Google. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0, spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog.

Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility in Google and other search engines. How does it work? Just follow the instructions below to re-post this meme in your blog and add your URL to the end of the Path List below. As the meme spreads onwards from your blog, so will your URL. Later, when your blog is indexed by search engines, they will see the links pointing to your blog from all the downstream blogs that got this via you, which will cause them to rank your blog higher in search results. Everyone in the Path List below benefits in a similar way as this meme spreads. Try it!

Instructions: Just copy this entire post and paste it into your blog. Then add your URL to the end of the path list below, and pass it on! (Make sure you add your URLs as live links or HTML code to the Path List below.)

Path List
1. Minding the Planet
2. Luke Hutteman’s public virtual MemoryStream
3. geek ramblings
4. Siblog
5. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy this line and move it down to the next line for the next person).

(NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List or use HTML code.)