Open Linked Data Discovery, Proof and Trust

February 14, 2011
Trust and Proof in Information Discovery for the Semantic Web

I have been giving more and more thought lately about the top two layers of the semantic web "layer cake" – "proof," and above it, "trust."  The lower layers receive a lot of attention – RDF (and other data structures), OWL (and ontologies in general), SPARQL, URIs, and so forth – but trust and proof [...]

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Blekko, Can I Please Have My Spam Back?

February 2, 2011
Blekko Can I Please Have My Spam Back?

Blekko has declared war on Google spam, and has grandiosely demonstrated this by banning 20 sites from its index. Leaving aside the sticky issue of what "spam" is, who determines if a site is worthy of the designation "spam?"   The crowd (through the collective wisdom of individuals that flag pages as "spam")?  The assessment [...]

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Spam 3.0, The Evolution of Search and the Future of SEO

January 27, 2011
Spam 3.0, The Evolution of Search and the Future of SEO

In many recent missives, users of Google have complained about the declining quality of their search results.  Numerous causes are cited for this decline – from increasingly successful underhanded marketing tactics, to Google deliberately propagating poor results for its financial benefit – but the unifying theme of the clamor is clear:  these days, there's more [...]

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Who's Canonical Now, Revisited: Rel=Canonical Use in 2011

January 19, 2011
Use of Rel Canonical by Major Websites - Updated

It's been just under two years since Google revealed support for the link rel="canonical" tag. In April of 2009, just a couple of months after the tag (or, to be precise, the "canonical" value for the rel attribute of the <link> tag) was announced, I surveyed 37 sites to see which of them were employing [...]

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Canonical Twitter Profile URLs

January 11, 2011

Twitter.com does not natively return canonical profile URLs.  That is, Twitter does not redirect any form of a Twitter URL that resolves successfully, nor does it employ the <link rel="canonical"> element on profile pages as a "hint" to the search engines. However, Google does seemingly index different URL forms of profile pages separately – the [...]

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SEO, the Semantic Web and Information Discovery

January 6, 2011

The following is a transcript of a talk presented at a dual meetup of Vancouver Search Engine Marketing Group and the The Vancouver Semantic Web Meetup Group on 6 January 2011. What is the Semantic Web? I'm not going to spend the next 45 minutes trying to define the semantic web – also called Web [...]

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The Inhouse Link Building Group Interview Project: 14 Answers

September 29, 2010

I've taken the unimproved SEO Skeptic temporarily out of hibernation to answer the 14 questions posed by Ontolo's Inhouse Link Building Group Interview Project.  I hope you find my answers informative, and I look forward to seeing the responses of other inhouse SEOs as they are produced.

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Pirate SEO Advice

September 18, 2009

In honour of International Talk Like a Pirate Day (19 Sept), today's SEO Skeptic post is brought to you by Cap'n Long John K'yword, a veteran of pillage, terror and search engine optimization on the high seas. The Cap'n is here to briefly offer some practical pirate solutions to a few common SEO problems, with [...]

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Tweets That Annoy Me

September 2, 2009

This slightly cranky post is geared toward people that have a Twitter account that they use chiefly for business or professional purposes. I personally think that the type of tweets enumerated below are bad form even for the most closely connected friends, but if you don't care about – or even have – an online [...]

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Yahoo Search Pad, Google Blog Search Changes: Yawn

July 10, 2009

For my sins, I'm a chocoholic, so I'm often cruisin' the candy aisles. And when I'm there I almost always see a new, derivative candy bar that I know is doomed to failure in a few months. Did the world really need or want a Smarties Bar, or a Terry's Raspberry Orange (though I kind [...]

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