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I like Matt McGee’s summary of the NYT article on Google search.

Over at Google Blogoscoped they’ve been talking about Google results for the query “how to get a …” Seems the things people appear to want are a passport, a six pack, a girl (or guy), and a book published.

Well, I can’t help much with the six pack, the girl, or the passport. But “how to get a book published” yields 54,100,000 results. And guess who’s number 1?

Since getting back from the Yucatan I’ve been trying to catch up on my feeds. While I was gone a lot of SEO types were posting about nofollow again. The new twist is they’re trying all sorts of plugins and gadgets to selectively pass or bar following links from their blogs for PR.

People, this is getting really old. And really stupid. Just turn the damn thing off already.

Yahoo recently purchased MyBlogLog for $10 million. Some blogs I read have been touting the service. The idea, I guess, is to put a face to the sometimes invisible communities of blog readers. You could say it’s a kind of Facebook or MySpace service for blogs. For example, a MyBlogLog widget puts the images of subscribers on their blog posts, or enables the blog site to show visuals of the most recent visitors.

I have kind of mixed feelings about this. I can see its value if you’re really trying to develop a network. (And why spend time on a blog otherwise?) At the same time, I like to retain some degree of privacy. Well, I signed up, but that’s about it so far.

I know some of my readers use MyBlogLog. Are you happy with it? Should I be spending time on this? (I sure don’t want to work as hard at this as this guy does.) So, should I build a community? Install the widgets? What do you think?

The basics: The Complete Guide to MyBlogLog(ing)

UPDATE: I’m not a big user of such sites, and I should probably work harder at network building. But I dabble a bit in Technorati, MyBlogLog, and BUMPzee, and I’ve come to like MyBlogLog the best; recently I put a “recent readers” badge on this blog. The statistics MBL offers are a nice feature, and I prefer the interface.

Speaking of SEO, here is a list of the SEO-related sites that have feeds I subscribe to. (I’m just an amateur who got into this when my website got penalized.) Maybe I’ll actually use this someday. Am I missing any important ones?

• Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim
• Cartoon Barry Blog
• Daggle: Danny sullivan’s Blog
• Dan Zarrella
• David Naylor
• Gray Hat Search Engine News
• Graywolf’s SEO Blog
• Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Blog
• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO
• Micro Persuasion
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Search Engine Watch
• SEO Book.com
• SEO Buzz Box
• SEO by the SEA
• SEO Egghead by Jamie Sirovich
• SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
• Shoemoney – Skills to Pay the Bills
• Small Business SEM
• Stuntdubl Business Search Marketing Consulting
• Sugarrae AKA Rae Hoffman
• Threadwatch.org – Marketing and Technology Discussed

It’s beginning to seem that way. As soon as anyone says anyone negative about search engine optimizing, the SEO community (or, to be fair, one faction of it) jumps all over that person and tries to inflict punishment by driving down the offender’s pages in the SERPs.

First there was the unfortunate Kimberly Williams — a case more of scraping than SEO per se, but the response came from the SEOs when she tried to prevent her content from being scraped. Next came Ted Leonsis, whose mild comments about being his own SEO made him the object of an SEO contest with a $500 cash prize. Now Jason Calacanis is the latest to have offended the SEOs.

I find search engine optimization interesting. I subscribe to a number of SEO feeds, and several of the people in the industry are clever and creative. But some are starting to seem like bullies.

I think I might be rooting for Ted Leonsis to win the Ted Leonsis SEO contest.

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Link: Wikipedia on protection rackets