Here’s my MyBlogLog account (awfully redundant…oh well). For those of you unfamiliar with MyBlogLog I’m not going to go into much detail, but all you need to know for this post is that it aggregates all of my feeds among many different web services. For example, the public page updates information from my Twitter accounts, LinkedIn, blogs, Flickr, etc. So anyone could stop by this page and find out what’s going on with me in seconds.

Where MyBlogLog Breaks Down

From a user’s perspective there may be SOME value to a page showing the updates from any particular individual. Honestly, I’m really not that interested in other people’s feeds of bookmarks, profile updates, etc. They could be focusing on what they could do best: SEO.

Take a look at a search result listing for a MyBlogLog account. The description of my listing is:

“MyBlogLog respects your privacy—we only aggregate publicly-available information . If you wish to edit your list of services, visit the ‘Services’ tab.”

That helps no one! Searches don’t need to see that. Instead, why can’t they populate the description with something about…ME?!

So all of those sites I spent the time entering into MyBlogLog are getting their updates displayed on my home page, but what they aren’t getting is crawled. The news feed containing all of the great information about me (which is the point of the page) isn’t being utilized as efficiently as possible because the content is generated via javascript, and therefore isn’t scannable.

I think it’d be amazing if they could switch that over from a javascript feed to a pure HTML feed.

In All Fairness

MyBlogLog may not have had SEO in mind when building this page. They may seem to think that people are actually interested in viewing all of the updates about myself. They may also want to prevent their site from becoming a spam monster. Understandable.

They do have some follow links on the page that go to all of my services; they’re just without all of the awesome anchor text that I’d like and instead use the name of the service and my username (i.e. Technorati: patrickdaly, etc.).

Conclusion

If MyBlogLog corrected these things it would be a powerhouse of link juice.

Does anyone know of a MyBlogLog alternative that meets these requirements:

• Public Pages
• Follow Links (preferably custom anchor text)
• Already performs well in search engines
• Free (preferably)

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I see this question alot:

Is .com better for SEO?

The short and sweet of it is NO. But of course there’s much more to learn!

Top-Level Domains

A Top-Level Domain (TLD) is the part of any URL that follows the domain name. For example, the common TLDs are com, net, org, gov, and edu. Every once in a while new TLDs are created to fulfill the need of creating more domain possibilies as well as creating TLDs specific to an industry, country, organization, or media type.

Why Do People Think .com Is Better for SEO?

We tend to think that because most people use .com it must be better, or at least it’s safe to use because it’s the norm. The fact is, though, that for SEO is doesn’t matter what your TLD is unless it’s a sponsored TLD like .gov or .edu. For those of us not maintaining websites for government agencies, there’s no need to debate about which TLD you choose because of SEO concerns.

However!

While the non-sponsored TLD you choose doesn’t matter one iota, the concern you should have is with branding. .com is the most trusted TLD you can get right now. Companies operating off of a .info domain name or a .biz domain name should be a bit concernced. It can come across as unprofessional. Your best bet, for branding’s sake, is to use a .com, .org, or .net.

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I haven’t used my blog as a platform for anything other than web design, SEO, and the such, but I think it’s important that our country elects the better candidate.

This Youtube clip (and the 5 other parts following the clip) are quite biased, a little over the top, and at some points irrelevant, there are still many facts that remain to shed light on the history of Barack Obama and his close ties to extremely controversial leaders.

“Obama & Friends - A History Of Radicalism”: Obama’s ties include Jeremiah Wright, Black Panthers, Bill Ayers, Louis Farrakhan, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Bernardine Dohrn, ACORN, and Weathermen Underground.

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I have no clue what happened, but two days ago Yahoo! and MSN started crawling my site like crazy. I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary but it seems like something clicked on my site. So its been like this for about two days; I’ll see how long it lasts…and hopefully Google will join in the Develop Daly craze!

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