There are lots of reasons why you may want to do this - to protect your admin area, hide some nasty scripts or to save on bandwidth (yeah, i’ve heard it done…). Of course, all people have to do is look at your robots.txt and find out a load of directories that you don’t want found… (Read more to see full post)

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The following black hat SEO techniques should always be avoided. Why should you avoid these techniques? Well because they can get you banned from all the major search engines, and because they are also very easy to detect (thus increasing chances of ban-age!) … (see them after the jump)
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Some very simple seo tips to maintain and keep your high search engine result rankings. #

• Keep getting backlinks - don’t stop just because you are in #1 position
• Make another page that targets the same keywords as your current listings, and try and get two results from your site on the first page. This will increase your hits by more than 2x.
• Update it every so often - keep it upto date
• Watch your competition - if another site is very quickly rising in rankings start working harder to make sure they don’t get past your rank…
• Get deep links - not all just to your home page
• Vary the anchor text for links to your site

Google released Challenges in Running a Commercial Search Engine, and it is quite an interesting read (if you are having a boring day, anyway). Here are the key points it raises:

• The basics behind search eninges - “The Pipeline”:
  Crawling, Indexing, Ranking, Displaying, Serving
• History of the web
• History of Information Retrieval (IR) & What the basic methods were
• Comparing early IR methods with new IR methods (ie those used by web search engines)
• Link Analysis - Hubs and Authorities, and Pagerank
• Search Engine User interfaces
• Uses of IR - IR is everywhere/Everone wants to do IR/Masses use what we do/etc
• Different types of ways to return results

• Stemming
• Clustering
• Image search
• Citation Analysis
• OCR
• Video search
• Content matching (Adwords and Adsense)

Of course, its not as handy as it would have been with the speach as well… But it covers some basics. Nice to get a view as if you were the seach engine…

Download the file: sigir-keynote.pdf

ReviewMe just officially launched (and hey - a sort of web2 [ok - not quite, but what the hell] site that ISN’T in beta!).

But its sad news…

“Sorry the blog you just submitted does not meet minimum acceptance criteria (traffic, other links to your site, etc) at this time. Please submit again in couple of months.” ;)

Yup - this blog isn’t good enough!

But anyway, have a look at them over at ReviewMe.com!

Incase you don’t know what ReviewMe is, its the first big online project to let people basically buy blog posts. So if you’ve got a product, service or website that you want someone to write a blog post about (to get a large audience, links, and just general advertising) its quite a good place to look for bloggers who will write about your service.

(But beware… they’ll be honest!)

PS - The site itself looks very very nice. Take a look - ReviewMe.com.

Edit- there are already some reviews related to ReviewMe. Here is one paid one, about ReviewMe! They’re paying (in total, over many, many reviews) $25k for bloggers to blog about ReviewMe. So they’ll get the bloggers… they’ve just got to also target advertisers…

Just got this email:

I am excited to announce that Text Link Ads Inc will be joining forces with MediaWhiz. This will bring some exciting changes to our platform. Here is how this will benefit you in the coming months…

Publishers: by leveraging MediaWhiz’s agency relationships and sales staff we will be able to sell more ad space on your website. We also will be adding the ability to monetize your website in new ways including: CPA offers and CPM display advertising.

Advertisers: TLA will be working with MediaWhiz to offer new ways to drive traffic and sales to your website including: email marketing, CPA offers, CPM display ads and more!

It is important to note that the people you will be dealing with tomorrow at TLA will be the same people you have always dealt with since our doors opened in 2003. Over the next few months we will be moving our office to New York City to join the MediaWhiz headquarters and look forward to meeting more of our clients and publishers in person! This is an exciting time for our team and our clients. We have found a great partner that will be able to help our publishers and advertisers earn more money. We are looking forward to delivering more great products and even better service in the coming months with this alliance!

Sorry, kinda had to be done…

1. Digg is your homepage - always there when you load up your browser
2. You subscribe to the RSS feed and get a notification every time a new story is on the front page
3. You submit every little page you ever go on
4. And because you’ve submitted so much crap, you’ve gotten banned before, and have more than one account
5. And one of these accounts is listed on the top users.
   

   (extra kudos if more that one of your accounts is there…)

6. Your website is full of “Digg this” buttons… ;)
7. Lastly, you are always trying to get on the front page of Digg…