Sifry’s Alerts: The State of Technorati, April 2007: One of my favorite things to read are the "State of the Blogosphere" reports that Dave Sifry puts out. They provide a great overview of the overall popularity of blogging and are an excellent update on how fast this thing called blogging is still growing.

A statement made by Google recently bagged lots of critical feedbacks on a WebmasterWorld thread. In a Google update on spam reporting Google claimed that they will investigate all bad SERP reports.

One of the biggest mistakes really large publishers make today is doing SEO like it’s 1999. They throw up hundreds, thousands, and sometimes millions of pages, with the belief that more is better. This has grown exponentially with web 2.0 and blogging apps and cross-tagging, listing and publishing content in multiple spots. Here’s an example that’s pretty typical of a problem I see with alarming frequency.

A post on Google Webmaster Central blog increases users awareness regarding webmaster practices that do or do not conform to Google’s standards. This post was translated from their recently launched German blog.

On Monday I blogged about the Jason Calacanis challenge and how he received a 21% increase in traffic with only 10% of the changes being made so far. Many people have been wondering what the 10% of the changes were and some have even blogged that it could have been a fluke.

Just to give everyone a better understanding of how I calculated the 21% increase, I first took the 6 days before SEO was done and compared it to 6 other days roughly 20 days after SEO was implemented. The data before SEO was done was a bit biased because on one of the days his traffic doubled because he wrote on the Oscars and the following day his traffic returned to normal. On that Monday, if he had normal traffic and did not blog on the Oscars his search traffic due to SEO would have increased by over 40%.

Having previously discussed Performancing Metrics as being a little bit of a "Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing", I decided to sign up directly with Clicky. I also removed any Performancing affiliate links from the article.

Neil Patel has provided an update on his challenge to show Jason Calacanis that SEO is not “snake oil” and can in fact help a site increase its search engine traffic.

In my original post I mentioned that in order to help reduce my blog’s load time I often use Web Page Analyzer and Octagate SiteTimer.

Since that post I have received a couple more suggestions for tools to use in order to help reduce Web Page Load Times.

The Inside Adwords Crew have announced that the proposed quality score update has been rolled out today, expecting to last up to 3 or 4 days until complete. The article confirms –

On Wednesday the SE Round Table Blog noticed a thread on WebMasterWorld regarding a potential Google Update. Matt Cutts did comment saying he was sure that an update was not happening.

I’ve noticed my blog hit with a few changes in Google over this last week. I say hit because the changes were not positive. Here are my symptoms: