SEO Popular Posts

Google unveiled a major upgrade to their search engine today. Codenamed "Caffeine", the new search engine improves the index size, the speed of the queries and most importantly, changes the value of search engine rankings.

What happens when a mysterious Web firm wants to run ads on your blog? Things get funky fast. Here's what happened to me when I got such an offer from a company called Linkstar.

What's the harm in running a few spammy text links on your site? Plenty. And getting blacklisted by Google is just the beginning.

Based on what Google learned from user testing, the "faster, smarter" Google Instant brings you results on the fly, as you type. No longer do you need to feel lucky, apparently. The eponymous search engine launched its previously hinted-at search enhancement earlier this week. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers tell us what they think of it. Not to mention How not to code in C#...
(GOOG)

JCPenney faux pas could happen to you too. Beware of lying, cheating, black-hat SEO types. You can help protect naive marketers from the Google death penalty. Richi shows you how...
You may have seen the news over the weekend that the uber-retailer JCPenney was slapped on the wrist by Google. It would appear that the store's been boosting its position in search results, via some nefarious practices. Could this happen to your employer? Yes! How can IT people help protect their marketing department from making a similar mistake? Find out in The Long View...
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Specialized hackers known as "SEO gods" can use search-engine optimization techniques to get their malware-riddled Web sites on the first page of Google results, in order to lure the unwary.

Today, CIO means being more than a competent manager of IT. It should mean Lord of Process, and we should grasp that title and run with it.

[Updated with note of advertising network response and other discussion] 'This post is sponsored by Google Chrome' say a pile of spammy blog posts all around the Web. It would appear that it's one SEO rule for you and another for Google (GOOG). In IT Blogwatch, bloggers accuse Google of doing evil.

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Ancient HP OpenMail backup restore request presented a pretty poser. 
I've recently been helping a consulting client restore some ancient data. It struck me that there are lessons here for today's IT operations: lessons to be learned from the mistakes of the past. Mistakes we'll try not to repeat, in The Long View...

It's IT Blogwatch: in which we ponder the risks of downloading random shareware. Not to mention a spooky Japanese viral...

Dustin Brooks worries:

I was looking for a way to back up my gmail account to a local drive. I've accumulated a mass of important information that I would rather not lose. During my search I came across G-Archiver, I figured what the heck I'll give it a try ... What I came across was quite shocking ... I noticed that every time a user adds their account to the program to back up their data, it sends and email with their username and password to his personal email box! Having just entered my own information I became concerned...

You'd think Target.com must dislike blind people by the way it's fighting to keep its Web site inaccessible to the visually impaired

Takeaways from this week's Search Engine Strategies conference in New York

Remember "punch the monkey"?

It was kind of funny, at first. It was the year 2000, Internet advertising was just starting to move away from banners and other print-based concepts, and a silly, animated, flash-based game was a novel attraction for many people. I punched the stupid monkey, had a few yuks with my colleagues about the fact that I always "won" even if I missed, and then moved on.