
I’m delighted to be part of this year’s Distilled / SEOmoz Pro Training Seminar at Imagination Gallery London, UK – October 19th & 20th 2009. It’s the first time ever this series is coming to London and according to Distilled’s head honcho Will Critchlow, they’re working on bringing the same level of actionable tips and tricks “across the pond”.
If you’re an SEO in the UK you should be seriously considering getting in on this 2 day training course. As SEOmoz puts it:
I recently registered on Kiva.org after being introduced to the site by a colleague at the office. Kiva is a “person-to-person” micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs around the globe. We’re talking $25 microloans, to people who need them. The money really makes a difference so, SEOgadget’s (very, very small) monthly advertising revenue now goes to Kiva.

What’s this got to do with SEO?
Kiva has a very strong, community driven ethos to lending. Groups of lenders form communities or “lending teams”. Here’s Intel’s Lending Team Page.
I’m not completely sure when this happened but it looks like Yahoo rolled out a small change to Site Explorer with the addition of a “Subdomains” button.

That “subdomains” button is pretty new – here’s what the the interface looked like according to this post on SEOptimise a while ago:

I don’t think it’s a big deal, though I’m not entirely convinced I know what the button is trying to do:

On Friday, Rand at SEOmoz asked: “Are 404 Pages Always Bad for SEO?”
Recently, though, Lindsay and I were faced with a tough call on a consulting project. The client has a site that receives a ton of search queries, many of which map to their category and subcategory level pages (which are more landing pages than search query pages, but also serve to address the search keywords). The client also has a number of search pages that have no content (either because they’re for mis-typed, nonsense or mis-spelled searches or because they simply don’t have content for those terms). Some of these pages earn links, some get a moderate amount of traffic and up until recently, they’ve essentially existed as error pages that resolve with a 200 code.
A few weeks ago I bought a 16gb Sandisk Micro USB drive, awesome for doing large installations from USB and carrying around heavy duty files. Though I found the drive itself to be excellent, I didn’t have any use for the installed “U3 Launchpad” application.
Formatting the drive didn’t remove the app, though eventually I discovered how to remove the U3 Launchpad software from my Sandisk USB drive. In case you don’t need the software either, here’s how:
1) Open the Launchpad menu, and click “Settings”. You need to select the “U3 Launchpad settings” option:

Flying back from Seattle this morning, KLM were having problems with our “in-flight entertainment” on our Airbus A330 and had to reboot the system that runs those little TV’s in the backs of passenger chairs. I couldn’t resist taking a picture with my iPhone when I saw the Linux logo… (click to enlarge)

Needless to say, the reboot didn’t get very far and we were without any visuals for the whole trip. It didn’t say what version they were running but those errors were complaining about the ext2 filesystem. We’re on ext4 now so quite an old setup. In the end, I settled for a very good book. If you have time, I recommend you read it: Belching Out The Devil by Mark Thomas.
After such a fun lunch talking about Battlestar Galactica with Michelle and Michael, time to get on with our next session: Flash & Search: “How’s It Going These Days?”
Our Speakers:
Damien Bianchi, Regional Director of Client Strategy, Global Strategies International
Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative
Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Inc.
Larry Sivitz, Founder/Editor/Search Strategist, Seattle24×7/SearchWrite.com
Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive
First up we have Larry Sivitz presenting “using your head about Flash SEO”.
We’re back for day 2 of SMX Advanced. My first session of the day: “Conducting An SEO Audit To Troubleshoot Problems & Tune-Up Performance” modertaed by Vanessa Fox. Speaking on the panel:
Adam Audette, Founder, Audettemedia, Inc.
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect, Microsoft
Here’s the overview of the panel:
Has something gone wrong with your organic search engine traffic? An SEO audit might be in order. This session covers how to conduct an efficient audit that troubleshoots real problems, rather than taking you down blind alleys. It also helps you reassess your current SEO efforts for areas that can be tweaked and improved.