This isn’t exactly SEO, but it does show that Google, the current champion search engine, has a sense of humor.

Follow those instructions and you’ll see what I mean:

Go to Google Maps
Click on Get Directions.
Input From New York, New York
To Paris, France.
And read line # 24.

Just a reminder, you no longer have to go to Google or Yahoo to submit your sitemap file location manually. The major engines have (mercifully) agreed to a common sitemap protocol that allows the spiders to find your sitemap file by way of your robots.txt file (for a change, robots.txt tells the spiders where to go instead of where NOT to go).

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Just a brief note about Matt Cutts’ recent statement regarding paid links on web sites. In a nutshell, he wants webmasters to do Google’s job and report links on web sites that are obviously paid and allow link juice to be passed (in other words, direct links). Here’s what he said:

“Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid links:

I think Google is getting too big for its britches. Google now wants US, the lowly webmasters, to police the web for them? Google, who is the empire of paid links now wants to keep the little guys from making any money off of paid links just because of the way they link?

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Well, Google might have fixed the Google Bomb that resulted in the George W. Bush White House page coming up for a search for “miserable failure” but it couldn’t do anything about the White House inadvertantly putting the president’s page back into the #1 position for a search for “failure” so look quick. The White House has already changed the content on the page so that “failure” is no longer included anywhere.

Besides, a search for “miserable failure” might not bring up the president’s page at the top anymore, but he’s still front and center in the results, like it or not.

See the related post Google’s “Miserable Failure” Fix Timing

My friend and respected colleague in the search marketing trenches Jaan Kanellis has tagged me for an ongoing “Why I Blog?” string going around our industry blogs lately. So, here I go:

1. As an SEO, I have to keep up with what’s going on. This business changes by the minute and even the top dogs can’t keep up with it all. If I find something that someone else might not have caught, I want to share it as quickly as I can. A blog and RSS feeds help me do that.

2. I’m an educator at heart and like to share what I know. I’ve done software training and taught college level courses. The blog acts as a repository of all the little nuggets of information that I come across that I share. I’m planning to expand beyond doing SEO for web sites to giving training seminars and workshops for businesses and web site owners, so my blog provides a great tool for educating.

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