WebConnoisseur

I’ll be attending my first PubCon, starting today! Being trapped in-house doing SEO work, I always look forward to these conferences because they are my only chance to speak SEO with others. I find it valuable to speak to the wide range of people, from Google engineers to out-of-country black-hat search-spammers. Knowing what each is doing can help you build a strategy that will ensure the long-term success of your search placements because many of the algorithms are built in an effort to weed out spam, even at the cost of well-intentioned sites.

MSN Search, being the newest of the big engines, is still trying to get a handle on search spam and had been slowly chipping away at it, but the problems are now getting worse since the switch to MSN Live.

In particular, MSN’s duplicate content algorithm penalties are too sensitive and too severe, causing a simple hack to be an effective way to remove a competitor’s site from the rankings. Let’s hope MSN fixes this right away and even takes notes as to who threw up content hoping to exploit it once it became known.

Credit to ThreadWatch for the find.

If you are into web analytics, but haven’t visited Avinash’s website, I highly recommend it. Take a look at this post where he challenges analytic providers to tell him what makes them unique (turns out most of them say the same thing).

I experienced my 3rd 2.5 hour one-way commute in the last week. Two of the commutes from hell can be attributed to the worst flooding in my area in the last 50 years. One thing is for sure, wasting time just trying to get to work is a not-so-gentle reminder that I should be working from home.

A few years ago I thought most people with web-related jobs would work from home. But when I was looking for a job a year-and-a-half ago, I turned down two job offers because they wanted me in office 5 days a week. I took the job that allowed me to skip one commute day each week. The funny thing is that all three companies said “we want you in the office so you can participate in hallway discussions and hear what is going on around you.” Fast-forward a year-and-a-half, most communication (even with the person in the cube next to me) is via email and most employees have headphones on.

I’m surprised more companies haven’t taken advantage of brilliant people who want to work from home. People have different reasons for working from home (mine would save me 12 hours of commuting each week) and as long as they are productive, I don’t see any problems with it. My p/t job at About has a virtual workforce, but it is rare that I hear of a person who has a job (other than their own company) that lets them work out of their own home.

When will more companies start adopting a decentralized online workforce? When will more companies hire people they’ve never even met? I’m positive it will happen… I’m just surprised how long it is taking.