I don’t make a habit out of “reblogging” or linkdumping, but since a lot of WordPress people seem to be finding their way to my blog, I wanted to write about this. I got an email regarding a new WordPress plugin called BlogPress SEO this morning. Normally, I would have considered reviewing it, but fortunately I’d already read Joost de Valk’s review-of-sorts. And so should you. BlogPress SEO is spam. It’s a link farm, and goes against every rule Google and other search engines have about linking. Read all about it on yoast.com.

Recently, I came across discussions on Twitter, and a blog post about ‘hidden links’ in my WP-Cumulus WordPress plugin. Quite frankly, I’m a little embarrassed by this, and I’d like to explain how the situation came to be, and what I plan to change in upcoming versions.
More About the ‘hidden’ links in WP-Cumulus

I don’t like ‘re-blogging’. I try and write original stuff and not point to other people’s posts. This video however is essential if you’re serious about SEO and WordPress, and you haven’t seen it already you really should. My fellow countryman Joost de Valk talks about SEO and shares some great tips. The video is after the break.
More Joost de Valk on WordPress SEO

We’re now three days into my little experiment, and it seem the three most important search engines have found the page I created. Here are the results I’ve been able to gather so far…

More Flash search engine experiment – the results – updated again

Triggered by a comment on my recent Flash SEO post I decided to set up my own experiment to find out if, and to what extent search engines index Flash content.
More Flash search engine experiment

This article pointed me toward Squidoo, a tool that lets users build their own personal homepage. Ideal for first-timers looking for an easy way to create an online presence, but because it’s really well implemented it’s fun for other users as well. As the article at SEOking points out, you can RSS feeds to your homepage. I wonder if the posts from those feeds are included in your outgoing Squidoo feed. That would enable Yahoo Pipes-like feed mashups…

There are plenty of other so-called “modules” that let you place all sorts of content on your Squidoo page. Cool stuff.

In my daytime job I’m a Flash developer. But when it comes to creating websites I don’t think Flash is the way to go. Not just because Flash has some serious accessibility issues, but mainly because Flash-only websites are very search engine unfriendly. They usually consist of only one HTML page, and most of those contain no readable content. So Google, MSN and Yahoo will have no clue as to what your site’s about. I’ve been pondering things you could do to fix or at least improve this. I’ve played around with a few of these ideas and techniques, others are still on my to-try list. Please let me know if you’ve come up with other solutions or have anything else to add.
More Making Flash websites search engine friendly

It sometimes seems like there’s a new Google SomethingSomething service out there every day, but this post over on Joe Whyte’s blog is not about Google’s next step towards world domination. It lists all known filters and penalties that Google’s good old search engine applies to websites that for some reason appear suspicious.

One or two of these filter might very well be in effect for this blog. For one, this site has only very recently been moved to it’s own domain, and the domain has only been registered for about 9 months. Both of these facts might trigger the “sandbox filter”. And it has 28.000+ incoming links, all with the same anchor text, thanks to the tiny little credit link in my WordPress themes. Talk about a “Google bomb”. I didn’t even realize this when I added those links, nor did I imagine hundreds of people downloading and using my themes. An accidental bombing, which has made this silly little 20-post blog appear in the Technorati top 2000.

Currently, the Firefox extension I use to check pagerank shows this site’s homepage as being 0/10. It was 5/10 last week, and most web-based pagerank lookup tools still report 5/10.

It had been a while since I last visited Google’s sitemaps page. My movie weblog has a sitemap plugin installed that generates a feed that Google uses to index the site. It turns out Sitemaps has grown into “Webmaster tools”, and it’s great. Not only does it offer lots of details about how your is indexed, they’ve just added a tab that displays exactly who’s linking to what page on your site.

I’m very new to SEO techniques, but this seems like the perfect starting point for optimizing your site for Google. You can see what keywords are recognized in your site and how you rank for them.