Thanks to everyone who commented about my latest blog design.
I’ve replied to everyone who commented by adding my own comments underneath theirs, but the last two comments raised critical issues so I think it’s best I blog about them — because they may affect you also, especially if you blog.
The first issue was one raised by Karin Hermans, who has quickly become my most prolific commentor on this blog.
As well as being an author of an excellent and highly original business book, which I will blog about soon, Karin also runs her own blog (or is that blogs).
So she knows a thing or two about blogging.
Which is why I took note when she mentioned she doesn’t like the fact my blog comments are moderated. (Which means they have to be privately ‘approved’ before they go public.)
Sometimes there can be quite a delay — more than a few hours — after people leave comments on this blog before they’re approved and appear. That can be frustrating for anyone who has taken time to comment.
However as Karin suspected, the main reason I choose to moderate is to ensure comment spam doesn’t automatically appear.
Anyone who has a blog will be all too aware of fake comments that are intended to promote certain ‘medical’ substances.
And then there are comments that say nothing more than “Nice site.” They don’t add any value to the topic being discussed, and are mostly submitted to get links back to the commentors own web site to help their search engine efforts. I get quite a few comments submitted like that, and they’re all filtered out and deleted.
Commenting on blogs to get back links is fine provided the comment adds something to the discussion.
I could simply allow comments to show immedaitely and then delete both kinds of spam later, but sometimes I don’t get to my blog for a few days or more — especially if auto-posting in advance — and the thought of torrents of spam appearing is not something I want on my mind.
To anyone who makes the effort to comment here — I do appreciate your comments and hope you accept my position on this.
The second comments about my blog was made by Cindy King, another top commentor and prolific blogger.
Cindy asked why my blog doesn’t have ‘URL friendly’ addresses. So instead of this blog post appearing as the following in the address bar at the top of the page…
http://www.edrivis.com/?p=320
It would instead appear as something like…
http://www.edrivis.com/spam-comments-SEA
The concept is that Google is more likely to favour my site if my URLs (web addresses) contain words rather than just numbers and codes — that it may rank me higher for those words.
Well the fact is this there was a time when this blog did use ‘search engine friendly’ urls.
However, a later became apparent Google changed their algorithm and no longer favoured keyword rich URLs — if my source was correct, then for a while they actually became a ‘negative ranking factor’ (meaning your hard won keyword rankings/search engine positions would start slipping if your site used search engine friendly URLs.)
So, I conformed, and changed my blog back to non-SEO friendly URLS.
And then… Google changed and once again started preferring search engine friendly URL’s like the ones Cindy suggests.
Confusing isn’t it! And that’s SEO for you!!
As an aside – I don’t think it’s ever clear cut which Google prefer at any one time — SEO friendly URLs or non-keyword rich style.. but check these guys out: Richard Lee and Fred Black. They both have first page Google.COM (USA) rankings on the keyword phrase ‘Internet Business’, which Google.com reports has more than 1 billion pages (or some crazy high number anyway).
And take have a look at what style of URL they use… interesting!
It seems the only reliable approach where SEO is concerned is… stick to the basics.
I mentioned some of the basic tenets of search engine optimisation in my book — like making sure your site has lots of regularly updated text that contains your chosen keywords, getting lots of other sites to link to yours and with links containing keyword phrases you want to be ranked for, and so on.
Beyond that… be prepared to chase your own tail if you start trying to ‘game’ Google.
-Ed.
P.S. And the real truth is I don’t much care for SEO (for my own web strategy – other businesses may differ its just a personal decision.) I allude to that in my book also. I find Pay Per Click, strategic alliances and print advertising a lot more predictable, and a lot less darn frustrating.
P.P.S. If you were wondering, S.E.A. = Search Engine Ambivalence.
