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Excerpt: If you log into your DMOZ editor account today, you'll see the following message:On October 20th, the DMOZ editor server experienced a serious failure. The technical issues have been resolved and the site is back up and working.You are now able to log in and edit just like before. However, despite the best efforts of our staff, not all of the data could be recovered. The public side is intact, but unfortunately, a significant amount of the editor-only data is lost. The programmers will continue working on the recovery process while we return to editing. DMOZ was down…

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Excerpt: Tag.  You're it.  SEOs are just like kids — but we do get paid a whole lot more.  So here's 5 things you probably didn't know about me (and probably also don't care):1. I'm Jewish just like Rand.  Probably a little more religious — I don't eat pork and I suffer through the torture of 10 hours of prayer on Yom Kippur somehow.  Let me tell you, Yom Kippur makes link-building look like vacation in Fiji.2. I'm doing this because I'm a link whore, and playing around like this only benefits everyone.  Besides, sending links around to everyone is a…

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Excerpt: A little more than a month ago, Aaron Wall, Lee Dodd, Jeremy Schoemaker, and Dave Taylor announced Elite Retreat.  There was a lot of buzz, a lot of linking from bloggers, and even I pondered whether I should go.  All of these guys rock.  What held me up was the price: $4850, not including airfare or hotel. That's steep.  Now I'm not one to say that Aaron, Lee, Jeremy, and Dave don't know their stuff.  They very well may know many things that I don't; but I do believe they've committed a cardinal sin:Thou shalt not price people out of…

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Excerpt: Yahoo recently announced that they are releasing a free enterprise search tool to the masses.  I would argue (and so have many others) that this cannibalizes the market for Google.  The software runs on both Linux and Windows.  Google has had one of these for years — but it costs money.  The equivalent product from Google costs $30,000.  Google does include hardware at that price, but the cost of hardware is negligible. "They're going to create a real headache for Google at that tier," notes Forrester Research analyst Matthew Brown.I agree.  Most of Google's IP is in seeing through the…

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Excerpt: I was all excited about the sitemaps standard when I first heard about it.  The catch is, it's not clear when everyone will support it.  This URL indicates that the following URL-template:<searchengine_URL>/ping?sitemap=sitemap_urlis used to ping the various search engines to let them know that a sitemap is present, or updated in the sitemaps standard.  I've attempted the following requests (Google's works — http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=www.domain.com/sitemap.xml):According to the spec, something like these should work for the other SEs: yahoo.com/ping?sitemap=sitemap_urlsiteexplorer.yahoo.com/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url (guess?)search.msn.com/ping?sitemap=sitemap_urlNone of them work.  I can't find a specification for what the URLs will be.  So when will it be implemented?  I sit here…

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Excerpt: Some of you may have noticed my appearance has been a bit spotty lately.  That's because I'm working feverishly on putting the final finishing touches on my book — chapters 9, 10, 11.  Some material has changed since the first drafts and I now must rewrite it.  This industry moves so quickly.Obviously, this takes time.  No, I haven't abandoned this blog.  But I am looking for guest bloggers.  The perk would be getting involved and getting visibility in an already lively well-trafficked blog.  You should be:1. Smart, preferably geeky2. Well-versed in SEO, but not necessarily a blogger3. Not looking to…

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Excerpt: Smart search engine marketers like you and me know to write rich content.  This helps to target the the oh-so-famous long tail of user searches.  But some people search for weird stuff; and sometimes Google just doesn't cut it on the relevancy.  In that case, we search engine marketers get a little tail we didn't expect upon analysis!Because I'm such a nice person, and my blog didn't answer the following fine queries adequately, I will quickly try to fulfill them in this post.  Here's the list:Note: Yes, they're all real — pulled from Google Analytics. 1. SEO is bullshit"After extensive…

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Excerpt: Most SEO is bullshit.  I'll be the first to agree with Jason.  Yes, I said it — and I'm an SEO.Jason Calacanis states on his blog: "I don't hate SEO folks, and I don't think it's all B.S. — just most of it."Now, let's get this straight.  I'm not an idiot; I don't think those black hat SEOs that rake in 20k+ per month are wooing search engines with "bullshit."  And I certainly don't agree with Jason Calacanis on every issue.On the other hand, like Jason, I don't agree with SEO firms that make you sign contracts that don't actually…