A Blog by a career In-House SEO for all the SEO Pros and Wannabes…

Once again, my hands have been so tied up in the past couple of weeks that I found myself either too tired or too busy to touch this blog. One of the things that got me so engaged was the weird fluctuation in the ranking for one of my company’s sites. After doing some research on SEO forums and blogs, I’ve learned a brand new term coined for this unknown phenomenon - Google Yo-Yo effect.

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Google has just launched a new social network site similar to Second Life called Lively. This virtual world allows users to create their own avatar, customize their own rooms, invite their friends to visit and chat in the room, and even display their favourite Youtube videos on the plasma TV.

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Once again, I got to apologize to the few of you who follow this blog for the lack of updates and posts in recent weeks. My hands are so tied up with work, friends, family, watching EURO and more work these days, I’m starting to wonder how other in-house SEOs squeeze out time to blog at all. Aside from that, I also don’t feel like beating any dead horse by spilling my two cents on every SEO issue on the horizon, since I’m usually late to post my thoughts compared to other SEOs who have better time management skills than I do.

So what made me want to post today? Well, the wait is finally over, the Google announcement of their new-found ability to crawl and index flash files really is a big news and relief to me. I really couldn’t count the number of times that I have had to struggle with designers and editors and preach to them about how the gorgeous, fancy, creative and eye-catching flash content and navigation are not going to sit very well with the crawlers and myself from an SEO perspective.

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If you have been following the latest buzz in the SEM industry lately, you should have noticed, or even participated in the great black hat vs. white hat vs. your hat vs. my hat debate. If you still haven’t heard, you better start subscribing to a few of the top SEM blogs to enhance your knowledge for your own sake.

More on Knowing What Tricks Are In The Black Hat Is Good For You White Hats

Duplicated content - a common problem that makes publishers cry and SEO professionals shake their head. Amongst the SEO community, the general consensus of duplicated content is that Google would pick the original page (assuming it knows which one is the original page) to display in the SERP while banishing the duplicated pages to supplementary results or simply result pages where a normal searcher would never see.

But does that rule apply to all the sites out there? Maybe not.

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I have been super busy lately, thus the lack of posting on this blog. So, while I was about to retire to my soft bed for the night, I switched back to iGoogle once more out of habits, the Google Doodle caught my attention.

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Google is at it once again. The search engine giant has yet another Google doodle to celebrate the 125th birthday of Walter Gropius - a famous German architect who found the architecture school Bauhaus and was mostly regarded as the pioneer of modern architecture.

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How and why do you use Sphinn - the social news/networking site for online marketers? Do you think it’s a dysfunctional social media site compared to other big names like Digg and Reddit?

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Today is Mother’s Day, and like for many other special occasions, a few of the search engines have modified their logos or designs to celebrate the day dedicated to all hardworking and loving mothers out there. Let’s look at some of these wonderful designs.

Google

Interestingly, I only saw the Google Mother’s Day logo on google.ca but not the google.com. Maybe our American neighbours don’t celebrate Mother’s Day?

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This morning I routinely went on Sphinn to check out the hottest news and ideas in the search marketing industry, and was amazed to see no less than 4 most popular items on the homepage talking about Shoemaker’s “SEO has no future” comment and a similar statement from Marketing Pilgrim’s Greg Howlett. Am I surprised about the reaction? Not really, and I believe most SEOs would disagree with that the “no future” statement as well. So here’s my thoughts on this whole concept, as usual, with an in-house spin on it.

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