SEO & GEO
26 Oct 2009
PDF indexing and ranking test
A controlled experiment on how search engines index and rank PDF files — thirteen documents on a fresh domain, the same text, small variations, and the daily SERP log.
Technical SEO, search intelligence, and the code behind it — notes from 20+ years of making websites work harder.
A controlled experiment on how search engines index and rank PDF files — thirteen documents on a fresh domain, the same text, small variations, and the daily SERP log.
Mail.app is a decent app, but contact management would be a pain without Smart Groups — the brilliant Address Book feature most people never notice. Here's how to set one up.
Underlined links, breadcrumbs, new snippets — Google keeps rearranging the visual furniture of the SERPs. How much does a few pixels of extra space really move the CTR?
Safari doesn't let you pick which Google to search from — choice, apparently, being a forgotten word in Apple's labs. Inquisitor is the small free extension that fixes it.
Hacking the QDR parameter in Google's URL lets you filter results by the last X minutes — or seconds. A small trick, possibly a sign of where real-time search is heading.
A recruiter's assignment: take a black-and-white mockup and propose a way to represent it. Here's the HTML I ended up with, and the reasoning behind every tag.
Authentication fine, file listing fine, writes failing silently — half a day chasing a Mac FTP client against a Windows server, until the passive mode gave it away.
Wiping all appointments and contacts from a Windows Mobile PDA is not as simple as it should be. The workaround — sync against a fake, empty Outlook profile.
Between the whitelist and the blacklist sits the greylist — a small trick at the SMTP layer that, in my experience, kills roughly 99% of spam before it reaches the inbox.