Ok, I’ve got a hypothetical situation that I need some additional thoughts on. Let’s say that I (hypothetically) worked for a company that decided in its infinite hypothetical wisdom that buying links would be a good way to achieve rankings for certain key terms. So, this link-buying company hypothetically signs a hypothetical contract with another company for something in the order of 1,500 links from blogs over a period of a few months.

So, a month or two passes, and my hypothetical link-buying company notices that not only has its rankings not improved, but they appear to have slid quite a bit. Also hypothetically distressing is the fact that most of the blog links are extremely worthless from a word of mouth perspective (but I suppose that’s what you get for hypothetically buying links).

Present day. Company (or at least hypothetical members of the company) have decided buying links from a blog spam farm was a bad idea (and some of them may have known from the beginning). They fear that Google has penalized them for such low quality links, but at the very least, they want the links that are already out there scrubbed clean from Google’s index. The hypothetical link seller company is suddenly and inexplicably not returning phone calls *gasp*, and I can’t contact each blog individually since it’s a very long list and they probably wouldn’t care. As was so eloquently put on News Radio, getting something off of the internet is like getting pee out of a pool.

So what does the company I hypothetically work for do?

One notion I was hypothetically batting around with some of my fellow colleagues was to contact Google through the Webmaster Tools’ contact form. We could tell Google that we bought a bunch of links, realized it was a dumb idea, but now we can’t undo it. We could ask Google if they will remove any of those links from affecting our site if we send them a full and complete list of the links we purchased. The benefit for Google is that they have some evidence of blogs which are simply spam.

Would this work or should my hypothetical company try something else? Hypothetically, of course.

Obviously a developer should have an eye for SEO so he knows how to code. I’ve also lumped content writing into development because that’s where it belongs historically. This person should also be aware of how search engines work so he can write accordingly.

The social media side is really just the kind of marketing that draws traffic to your sites and generates quality links. Essentially, the SEO part of social media is link bait.

I’m pretty sure that these positions, coder, writer, and social marketer, combine to form the heart of SEO. Sort of like Captain Planet. Thoughts?

Does this mean sponsored image ads are going to be infiltrating image search in the future? Or maybe just a beta test?

Update: Looks like this is fairly old news. Here’s the story at CNet.

So seeing who my top artist was last week is pretty cool and all, but I’ve noticed that the site overall lacks some really useful features.

1. First, I’d really like to see more realtime updating of top artists this week (instead of saying “this week” but showing last week’s numbers).

2. What about showing one artist’s weekly playcount over a 3 month time period? There’s just so much you can do with that much data, it’s astounding.
But really, all that data stuff is just kind of cool to look at, and it would be pretty difficult to implement. Last.fm would have to beef up their features with no direct monetization. Now you can argue that making the site better leads to more people using it more frequently which leads to more people buying music through the site, and I’ll agree. However, when you’re talking about development for web applications, there’s only so much you can do in the hopes of attracting new users. Sometimes you really need something that will directly help you make money.

Okay, Last.fm, are you listening? This is a doozie. It looks like to me that quite a bit of your revenue comes from affiliate links to Amazon and such, where people buy music they like and you get a cut. If that’s so, I’ve got a useful product feature for you that will boost the number of albums you sell.

It’s pretty simple, actually. You scan the top 100 artists of a user. Then you discover which albums the user owns from that artist, and which ones they don’t. Then you have an album suggestion page which shows the user which albums from their favorite artists they don’t own. I know I would really benefit from this, since it can be difficult to keep up with as many artists as there are these days.

So how about it? We get a useful feature, and you get an easy revenue stream. It’s not often you get something that works for both sides that well.

That’s all well and good, and many website owners use that method with great success, but what happens when you rank (or want to rank) for a variety of terms that are hard to fit together in the short amount of space you have for your page title and description?

Hello makes-sense, my name’s counterintuitive, and I’m here to kill you. Secret weapon of the webmaster? Get rid of your meta description.

Think I’m crazy? Think about this. When Google, Yahoo!, or Live Search (hereafter referred to as Goohoolive, and yes goohoolive.com is taken) doesn’t find a meta description, what do they do? They scan the rest of your page for relevant content and will often times display the portion of it that contains the terms being searched for. So if you’ve got a decent amount of content on your homepage (and you should) relating to all of those terms you want to rank for, then you should have enough info for Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, et al to find and display.

Okay, I know it sounds risky, so I’ll try some assurance. First, you don’t have to get rid of your description altogether. I found one very large retail site that shortened it enough to achieve the same effect. Since large retail = big money and therefore (hopefully) less crazy, I’ll use them to back up my point.

Crucial.com is by far the largest internet retailer of computer memory there is. That probably has something to do with the fact that they’re owned by Micron, one of the world’s largest memory manufacturers, but I digress. If you go to their homepage and view their source code, here’s what you’ll see for their meta description:

<meta name="description" content="Memory upgrades from Crucial.com" />

Pretty short, right? That should be absolutely killing them on the SERPs, but it’s not. Below are screenshots of the search engine results page from Google for the top three terms in their industry: memory, computer memory, and ram.

As you can see, each of the descriptions vary somewhat, according to the keyword. Now, while I don’t think the content on their homepage is ideal, it gets the point across. For each of these three searches, they have bolded terms in a description that might otherwise be without.

Now, I haven’t tried this yet with any of the sites I manage, but I am thinking about it. What I’d like to know is if anyone else out there will admit to trying it and let me know what the results were/are.

I saw Radiohead last night and it was amazing. The show was a presentation, not just a music rehearsal. Not only was the music incredible, but the lights and video helped propel this to my favorite concert. Ever. As you can see in this photo I grabbed off Flickr, they had cylinders of light hanging from the ceiling. These would change during songs as each song took on different shape musically. Such a well-coordinated show.

The highlights for me were “You and Whose Army” and of course, the finale, “Paranoid Android.” Justin Schmidt has a list of the whole Radiohead 2008 tour set on his blog.