Since when does the world revolve around pleasing Google?

The fact of the matter is they are a publicly traded company and are in it to make money off your advertising dollars. So when Matt Cutts starts telling webmasters that they need to write code to please Google’s agenda, I say “please!” He recently wrote:

If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.

Since when is Google in the business of regulating disclosure for the types of links you have on your site? And why is Matt speaking like a representative of “search engines” as a whole? Matt is also encouraging snitching on those who are “selling links”. (Note to self: report every single commercial website to the Google link nazis.)

» Continue reading “Please Register Your Link Intent with the Google Borg”

Today I changed the RSS feed for this website from summary to full-text. Why did I switch to full text? After a few months of reading other people’s feeds I realized that I much prefer sites that offer a full feed rather than a summary and that I still visit the site in question often enough (so they aren’t necessarily losing traffic) - mostly to read comments or view the feed in its original format.

There are pros and cons of going full-feed vs. summary. I agree with John Chow that it’s usually a better way to go (see #7) - but there are some caveats - I’ll cover the pros and cons in a future post.

» Continue reading “Switching to Full Text Feeds”