I have just come across a story which tells us of a feature that YouTube implemented after it was ‘joked’ about on the popular webcomic XKCD.

XKCD originally ‘joked’ about YouTube commenter’s realising they are morons after having the comments they type read back to them before they posts. It seems Google have noticed this and implemented it into YouTube as a sort of homage to the popular comic.

A snippet of the comic from http://xkcd.com/481/

Ok, so you probably knew/have seen that already? Maybe your a speed Digger though and didn’t realise that the Digg submission actually linked to Matt Cutt’s blog post about the subject, a nice bit of link juice passing through to your site right? Well the man at the head of spam… (team) decided to take his blog down and just leave a link to the original XKCD post.

It’s such a nice thing to do… whilst linkbaiters and viral marketers dream of getting links from the front page of Digg, Matt Cutts does the exact opposite and just stops short of 301’n his entire blog to the original story (we wouldn’t want to pass any authority now would we 🙂 ). He is probably the only person on this earth who would do such a thing.

I just thought it was a rare sight to see someone not take the juice, then again this is the emperor of spam fighting, and just goes to show that he seriously does practise what he preaches… or perhaps he just couldn’t handle the traffic? I’d like to think it is the first 🙂

Turns out he couldn’t handle the traffic, dammit.

I just read about the new Google mail labs ‘invention’ that aims to stop you sending emails that you will later regret, more than likely under the influence of our good friend alcohol.

The cleverly named ‘mail goggles’ becomes active at certain times during the weekend, of course you can set the times that you wish this to be active. Lets say your an alcoholic and you’ve just polished off that first bottle of Vodka on the way to work, you might want the mail Goggles to stop you sending that rant to your ex girlfriend after she left you for your brother last week. *I want my cd’s back by the way*

So as you can see from the image above, you have to answer a set of maths questions within a certain time limit or Gmail wont let you send it. I guess that they are also hoping that you’re too intoxicated to make your way to the settings page and disable the whole thing if you do get it wrong.

Anyway, its a nice little fun idea, lets get this developed for drunken text message’s and phone calls and we are onto a winner.

Whilst i am still working on my ‘other’ blog post i thought i would just throw something out there, this post is supposed to be a little in jest so please don’t take it to seriously ok? Good!

I have had the fortune of having a couple of articles from this blog submitted, and then subsequently ‘go hot’ on Sphinn. The stories have usually been submitted on the same day that i released them to the blog but generally take 2 days until they go hot.

Once the story has gone hot then i tend to get a couple of hundred referrals from Sphinn which is nice targeted traffic, so what’s the problem?

Well the problem is that even though I published the story on my blog first, the Sphinn article has less text, and the Sphinn article is linking to me as the source, i often rank below the Sphinn page in the Google SERPS 🙁

Lets look at exhibit A shall we?

As we can see from the image above, i wrote a post about the Pligg Auto Submitter which was actually published on the 29th July. However Google’s crawl date says 2nd of August, the same day as the Sphinn post. The titles are pretty much the same, and my URL is (arguably) better. Plus i have more content on my page.

Now if i could direct your attention to exhibit B

This one is even worse! I am 10th whilst the damn Sphinn post is 5th! Not only that, the sphinn post doesn’t even have a crawl date next to it. Oh Google you try my patience at times.

Now i am fully aware that the Sphinn domain has waaaaaay more authority than Chewie.co.uk, i am also aware that the Sphinn pages have more internal links pointing to them than my post. However in the world of relevant rankings, i do think that I should be ranking higher (who doesn’t :)) when Site B (Sphinn) is effectively republishing the work of Site A (Me) and also linking to the source… c’mon Google sort it out 😀

Don’t let this stop people submitting my stories to Sphinn though 🙂

Ok so this isn’t an SEO related post, but tonight i’ll be working on something good for tomorrow so thought i would just quickly let everyone know that the header on the site has changed and i have a new mascot/avatar/favicon/whatever who is now appearing in the spanky new header on this website.

The new header reflects the blog a little better and was designed by my friend Jay who owns Blooming Gorgeous flowers