Interesting article on the use (and need for) rel=nofollow links to prevent link spamming. Google appears to be penalizing sites that have what they perceive to be as link spam. One method to remove that risk is to have all user generated links be marked as rel=nofollow. That way, google won't use them in generating PageRank for other web sites.

The downside is that Google is missing out on a source of content quality - links created only by the motivation in identifying good web sites. If all user-generated content is deprecated, then we only have the "web site publishers" who are ranking the pages on the web. That seems lop-sided and wrong.

The problem is - when should a user be trusted to not abuse the link generating system. This article discusses various Karma-scoring systems that preferentially remove the nofollow attribute from trusted users.

SEO Diva (and builder of Google Webmaster) - Vanessa Fox is hosting the Faves widget on her blog. Awesome!

Quoted: what, you were expecting pictures?

Googlers lurk here and answer questions that webmasters have about their site ranking and indexing.

Faves dropped a point (still in the top 10) on the Seattle Startup index. The main cause is a much reduced amount of search engine traffic coming to our site. After changing our domain name from bluedot.us to faves.com, Google (and other search engines) take some time to build up the "credability" of the site and start directing people to the new domain.

Hopefully, it's a temporary glitch and our traffic will ramp up over the next couple of months.

External links to faves.com as reported by Yahoo's Site Explorer. Google still in not showing the inbound links.

click to play

This was an awesome SEO presentation I went to last week. Recommended for anyone who cares how much search engine traffic their web site gets.

Slides:
http://blog.rescuetime.com/2007/09/26/diy-web-marketing-16-resources-for-seo-social-media-marketing-viral-marketing/

Quoted: A presentation on optimizing your web site for search engine rankings. Covers basics of SEO, ranking factors, keyword research, spiderabilit.... Sep 27, 2007.

SEO Basics ("internal" SEO factors - like stuff you can do in your own pages to ensure you get ranked well by search engines).

Quoted: description

Theories about the 2003 "Florida" update of the Google Search engine. Some major ranking and filtering changes appeared to occur at that time; this post discusses some of the effects and theories.

It also points to two outside papers describing Hilltop and Topic Senstive Page Rank (TSPR).

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/%7Egeorgem/hilltop/
http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/seo-research-labs-google-report.pdf

Quoted: google florida update - what really happened