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An interesting article on blogs

http://www.developershed.com/plugin/PIM_200501.pdf

See the last page of that PDF.

The author discusses an important topic about bloggers. Basically, bloggers can control the results that come back from search engines. For those who have no idea what I am talking about, I am referring to SEO. No, this isn't someone who has decided to shorten their long name to three letters, but rather stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Most programmers are aware of things like Googlebombs and sites like that and generally think there isn't much to search engine optimization. Technically, there isn't. You want people to link to your site and they want you to link to theirs. A never ending battle of trying to get high quality and high quantity links to a website - and get spidered properly. The trick comes in knowing how each search engine algorithm works and what to do if it changes. Some people try underhanded methods to raise rankings. A Googlebomb, for instance, will get you above your competitor temporarily and then your listing will drop off the end of the earth one day when your competitor complains to Google about it.

So, what does this have to do with bloggers? Basically, blogs flood search engines with unnecessary junk. Especially Google. What will happen is you will be off blogging one day and not realize that a zillion people have decided that your article in your blog is worth linking to. The Googlebot will then come through and index your blog. 30 days later someone will run a search and find your blog and go to it and see that you have already wandered onto puppies or some other random topic. Basically, blogging hoses a search engine.

Why am I blogging then? Quite simple really. This blog is still very much technology-oriented. It has a _theme_. That theme will likely never change. If I want a different theme, I start a different blog. Therefore, this blog will be indexed by Google as a technology-related set of pages and therefore I won't be messing up the Google database, generally speaking since this blog is SEO'd for a specific theme (search engines operate on site themes). There could be instances where I am oblivious to messing up Google, but those should be few and far between.

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