I guess now is a good time as any to have some fun on this blog.  I was browsing other SEO-focused sites and ran across a very amusing cartoon on Jason Calacanis.  See for yourself:

If you do not know who Jason Calacanis is, here is a bit of information on him.  I got it from his site because to be honest, I didn’t know much about him either.

Jason McCabe Calacanis is CEO and co-founder of Weblogs Inc., a network of widely read blogs including Engadget – ranked # 1 by Technorati - Joystiq, Autoblog, and Blogging Baby. Founded in January of 2004, Weblogs, Inc. became a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL in November of 2005. Calacanis, who was appointed a senior vice president of AOL, maintains editorial supervision over Weblogs, Inc. In June of 2006, Calacanis and relaunched Netscape, the iconic browser owned by AOL and was named its general manager.

Prior to forming Weblogs Inc., Calacanis was CEO and founder of Rising Tide Studios, a media company that published print and online publications including the Silicon Alley Reporter, a must-read monthly that chronicled New York’s internet and new media industries. The company also produced of high-profile industry specific conferences in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. After the industry consolidated, the company’s flagship publication changed its focus and became Venture Reporter, which was purchased by Dow Jones.

I am sure you know all about Engadget – who doesn’t?  Suffice it to say that Jason is a well-known person in our world.

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Calm down – I know your heart is probably pounding like crazy right now, especially if you are working on your own blog which focuses on SEO. I felt the same way when I started reading Lee Odden’s post about Wordpress labeling SEO blogs as “banned .” Reading on, however, it was made clear that Wordpress is pertaining to blogs which are search engine optimized in a “bad” way and not blogs which talk about SEO – much like this blog.

These are the blogs which Wordpress specifically bans:

• Scraper blogs: Blogs that take content from other blogs and re-publish it without permission (this is sometimes called scraping). If a blog contains all or mostly stolen and unoriginal content, it’s gone!
• SEO blogs: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them highly. WordPress.com is not meant for this type of activity.
• Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs and get-rich-quick schemes (”Make six figures from home!!”, “20 easy steps to top profits!!”, etc). To be clear, examples like people writing original book or movie reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category.
• Warez blogs: Blogs that promote pirated copies of ebooks, software packages, music, movies, games, etc.

I suppose that Wordpress could word the classification tags in a more specific way so as to avoid confusion and reactions like I felt when I first read the post. Still, we should not overreact as we know very well that blogs such as this one do not fall under any of these categories.

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For many people, it used to be that Flickr was perfect for SEO purposes. However, when Flickr suddenly made use of nofollow tags to comments and picture captions, it seemed that the bomb dropped on these people. Naturally, negative reactions erupted all over the web because of this action – which took place around last week, by the way. If you have not heard of this, don’t get immediately swayed by the prevailing opinion – that Flickr is now useless for SEO. I ran across a post on this issue, which provided me with a better perspective of the whole she-bang. Will Paoletto at BigOak Blog shares:

1.) Flickr has not added nofollow to discussion boards. For those of you who liked to scout out high PageRank pages and just drop your link as a comment to the photo, which could be accomplished easily if you owned a link-laundering website, you can still do this in the Flickr group discussion boards. Flickr has not yet added nofollow tags to those, and given the preponderance of discussions that revolve around people sharing photos, you can just as easily drop relevant external links in the discussion and reap link juice benefits.

2.) Flickr has not added nofollow to personal profile pages. If you have a personal profile page, you can place targeted anchor text on it, point links at it, and receive full SEO benefit as it gains PageRank.

3.) Flickr has not added nofollow to group pages. If you own a Flickr group, you can still put as many links as you wish on the main group page without fear of them being turned into nofollow.

So there you go – you still have three areas wherein you can work your SEO magic. What do you think?

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And I thought that many SEO experts were leaning towards keeping silent about their expertise! (Remember my post on silence being the key?) Well, if I were to judge by the actions of Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, I would say that there are SEO experts out there who would like nothing more than to help people out in their quest to learn more about SEO techniques.

He came up with a plug-in for Wordpress that would display SEO tips. The whole idea stemmed from the default plug-in “Hello Dolly.” I am sure Wordpress users know about this – every time you log in to your Wordpress account, you will see random phrases from the lyrics of the song “Hello Dolly.” Van Zanten decided to play around with it and have it display SEO tips instead – much more useful, I should say.

So how did he come up with the SEO tips? He sent out an appeal to everyone to send in their SEO tips and, according to him, within 30 minutes, he was able to receive hundreds of SEO tips from other SEO experts! Talk about selfless sharing here, huh? These contributors even went as far as to help Van Zanten collect and fine tune the submitted tips. Now, with the plug-in anyone can view the tips anytime they want on their very own blog.

The best thing is that the plug-in is for free! You only have to download the plug-in from Van Zanten’s blog and you are good to go.

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This year, those of us interested in search marketing in general can look forward to several events sponsored by Third Door Media. The Search Marketing Expo will be held in different locations through out the year, the soonest of which is the Search Marketing Expo West which is to be held from the 26th to the 28th of February at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California.

An array of topics is going to be highlighted, including organic search optimization. Here are previews of the three keynotes that will be presented in the conference:

Program chair and SearchEngineLand Editor-In-Chief Danny Sullivan will kick off SMX West on February 26 with “Search 3.0, Search 4.0 and Beyond.” He’ll discuss the implications of blended search (Search 3.0), personalized and social search (Search 4.0), and what’s next for search and search marketing technologies.

Participants will also get some hints about new search technologies in the works at Cuill, a stealth search start-up with former Googlers as founders. During the February 27 keynote conversation, Cuill Vice president of products Louis Monier will describe efforts at Cuill to set new standards in search, in addition to providing perspective on developments in the field.

The day-three keynote will be “Generation Next: Search In The Coming Decade”, a panel discussion with luminaries from the major search engines predicting where they see search headed. This session will be moderated by SearchEngineLand’s Chris Sherman and SEMPO Chairperson Gord Hotchkiss.

For more particulars about the SMX West, visit their site. Alternatively, you can look at more information on the different SMX events in other places.

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I am thrilled that so many of you truly find Smart PageRank useful for your SEO work. Over the past week, the daily Alexa has been under 10k! While this is certainly a feat that excites me, it has also posed some interesting challenges.

First of all, Google and Yahoo are giving me fits! When I make a call to Google (and sometimes Yahoo), my code often received the following error:

“We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google. “

I am doing my best to remedy the situation so that you always receive the most useful information possible. If any of you have some ideas, please feel free to post a comment to help me out!

As the title of this post suggests, I have an update almost ready for the PageRank Backlink checker. This update will add the ability to know if there is a nofollow tag in the site that links to you. You can also see the anchor text that they use. This should be ready for live rollout in the next couple of days.

As always, feel free to give me new ideas or suggestions on ways that I can improve Smart PageRank. Many of you have sent me emails and I sincerely appreciate them. Many of your suggestions have greatly improved Smart PageRank.

As always, happy SEOing!

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Welcome to the Smart PageRank blog. I have done quite a bit of SEO work with my emphasis being on building PageRank and link-building strategies. I have always wanted to have a personal blog where I can share ideas with others and make comments on news affecting the webmaster’s world.

Feel free to say ‘hi’ and introduce yourself here as a reader. Please do not spam comments with URLs, however, as I will have to delete those.

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