I'm listening to an interview with Andy Jenkins and fellow Nebraskan Jeremy Shoemaker (a.k.a. Shoemoney) this morning, and just heard something funny I thought you might enjoy.

Jeremy is talking about how he uses controversy to get links. One key, he says, is to take a controversial position on things that other people have a...
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Google has announced their own rival to the Facebook "Like" button: +1.

Which is better? Let's give them a look.

Facebook "Like"

The Facebook "Like" button appears on a webpage. When a Facebook user clicks it, their name may be listed next to the button, and a note about it will appear on their Wall....
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When an original webpage is outranked by a page that copied its content, the author usually cries foul. At first glance, it seems they're right -- the original source should get the credit for the content. But when you look deeper, it's not nearly so clear cut a question as you might think.

Let's talk...
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Google caused another ruckus online a few days ago when they laid down the law against content mills. Some people are complaining, others are wondering what took 'em so long, and still others are getting nervous, wondering whether their favorite content generation method is going to get Slapped next.

While nobody knows for sure where...
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In the wake of Google's crack down on content farms, which hit EZineArticles hard, EZineArticles has announced that they'll be making all links from articles on the site "nofollow" links (meaning that the links will no longer give any Google SEO benefit to the sites they link to).

This includes links in the articles as...
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Over at Daily Blog Tips today, Daniel Scocco fielded a question today about whether to approve Pingbacks:

The purpose of having trackbacks and pingbacks is to foster conversations among bloggers. By inter-linking the posts that are referencing each other it becomes easier to follow the different opinions and takes on specific issues.

...

I think...
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I've spent plenty of time ragging on people who go follower crazy on Twitter, trying all sorts of tricks to amass as many "fauxlowers" as possible, not realizing that none of them are actually listening.

Maybe I was wrong.

A few days ago, Jerry West wrote:

Previously, if Google's algorithm deemed information from friends/family useful...
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You've heard the old philosophical question: "If a blogger posts in The Cloud and no birds are there to Tweet him, does he make a noise?"

Well, it goes something like that.

Bloggers are always looking for ways to make more noise and get more listeners -- more traffic. Blog Riffers was created to help....
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Over at the Official Google Blog today, Matt Cutts wrote a little about what they're focusing on in his neck of the woods:

...we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated...
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Once upon a time, there was a chicken. This chicken loved to win. As luck would have it, the pigs on the farm where he lived sponsored competitions of all sorts every week. He competed fiercely, and often won.

After a while, the chicken got cocky. :-) One day, a cow dropped by to tell...
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