In case you haven’t heard, Adobe has provided tools to search engines to help them index Flash. The day may be near that Flash will be search engine friendly. Here are some links to relevant coverage:

A lot has happened in the SEM industry this past month. I was going to post some of these at the beginning of June, but amid a torrent of crazy events, including the “excitement” (**cough** stress **cough**) of the explosion and fire at the data center where some of our websites are hosted, things got a little pushed back. So, I’ve continued gathering these over the last few weeks, and there are some great links that you will want to check out.

If you’ve read my previous post on this topic, you’ll notice that this one is a bit more lighthearted, so enjoy.

Recently Lyndon Antcliff, often seen online as “Lyndoman”, shook things up a bit in the SEO industry by creating some brilliant fictional linkbait that received international news coverage, and garnered thousands of inbound links for one of his clients. There’s been plenty of coverage of the story, and if you’re not familiar, I suggest you read Search Engine Land’s coverage. Nick Wilsdon also has some excellent coverage of the story along with Google’s response.

KeywordSpy.com, a provider of competitive keyword data, has been caught spamming many blogs across the internet. This first came to our attention as blogs that we manage were repeatedly hit by manual spam. We also received similar reports from volunteers that help report spam data and test WP-SpamFree beta releases.

Many (if not all) of these seem to be manually submitted. All of the reported IP addresses originate from locations in India. Hmm…did KeywordSpy hire some spammy offshore link builders? I think so!

Every blogger at some point has to wrestle with his or her own philosophy on blog comments and moderation. Each blog has different goals and a unique target audience so there is no “one size fits all” answer. The particular solutions will have to be different for each blog.

I think about blog comments a lot. More so since developing the blog spam plugin, because now I’m always thinking about how to help improve the quality of blog conversations - that’s really what the comments are - part of the conversation. I’ll share some thoughts that may affect your particular strategy for handling blog comments.

Spam Steals Time and Money

Most of us are familiar with blog comment spam. For some who don’t have adequate protection, it can cost many hours of valuable time trying to clean up spam, or trying to wade through a spam queue. Those of you who are business owners are keenly aware that time is money, and this deluge of spam can have negative financial effects on your business.

Spam is an SEO Problem

Another problem with spam is its effect on your blog’s search engine optimization efforts. Search engines measure the quality of your outbound links, and if you aren’t moderating your comments, there could be comment links on your site to bad neighborhoods, which are spammy sites that search engines have identified. Sites that link to these will often be penalized.

E-commerce solutions come in all shapes and sizes, from single “Buy Now” links from PayPal or Amazon to large e-commerce content management system (CMS) software. Their methods of handling search engine optimization can vary just as much. Some are already search engine friendly, but unfortunately some aren’t. There are a lot of SEO issues involved when optimizing an e-commerce system or CMS for maximum search engine rankings. I’m not going to tackle all of these in this post, but specifically how to handle deleted products in a way that will give you the best rankings, and maximize the traffic to your e-commerce website.

Too Many Companies Just Don’t Get It

Marketing is about communicating with your target audience — it’s not about trying to push your products/services on consumers until they give in and make a purchase. I am blown away by how many companies and marketing teams still don’t get it. (Including large, well-established companies who should know better.) I see tons of email advertisements, online ads, offline ads, TV ads, billboards, etc. that are completely missing the mark (not to mention the sales pitches I get by phone and email). The companies marketing themselves don’t try to get inside my head as a consumer or potential client.

Due to popular demand, I’ve added a spam-free contact form feature to WP-SpamFree. Apparently you guys all like blogging without spam, and have requested quite a few times to have me create either a new plugin or add a feature that adds a drop-in contact form for your blog, and uses the WP-SpamFree secret sauce to keep spammers away. Well, your wish is now a reality.

This past week on Search Engine Guide, I blogged about how TV shows and movies can teach us a few things about link building, with specific examples from the TV show Friends.

Here’s a snippet:

Recently, I had an epiphany, and realized that there is a lot you can learn about link building from the TV show Friends. I’m sure you’re asking, “What exactly does a TV show have to do with search engine marketing?” Well, a lot more than you might think.

Read the full post if you like:
What We Can Learn About Link Building from the TV Show Friends