Update: Late in June 2011, Google pulled third-party reviews from its Places pages in order to emphasize reviews from Google users. They did keep a small link to other sites around the web with reviews, however, so traffic generation is still possible. As I was checking the analytics for my sites the other day, I […]
Google’s Content Farm Algorithm Update: Can a Computer Judge “Quality?”
Google recently made a major change in its algorithms in order to improve the quality of search results. It affects about 12% of searches, making it much more significant than its frequent smaller tweaks. It’s a timely development for people who are claiming that Google is losing the war against spam. Google’s Amit Singhal and […]
Why Blogs are Peer Reviewed Sources
In academia, peer review is the process that is supposed to separate the trustworthy from the unreliable, the conclusive from the flawed, the groundbreaking from the mundane. Before a work can be published, a rigorous review by a carefully selected group of scholars in the same field is necessary in order to ensure a high […]
When Online Tutorials Hurt Rather Than Help
With blogs on every conceivable topic, countless online forums and major “how-to” websites, we now have great ways to share free tutorials that can teach people practically anything. Technology-related information is especially helpful: with a simple Google search you can learn how to use any software program, learn about mobile reading or how to start […]
How to Organize Your Blog for Better Navigation
For any website, your goal is to have visitors stick around and engage, not just scan the home page and leave. Navigation is not so difficult for a basic five page website, but when you have a blog with five posts published every single week, it’s much more difficult to guide readers to some of […]
Metadata: Uniting Baseball Fans and Librarians
Metadata is fundamental to the organization of all types of information: attributes such as title, creator and topic help us identify different works as well as locate and access them through information retrieval tools such as a search engine or library catalog. Although it’s commonly boiled down to a simple definition of “data about data,” […]