Link Sponges
As a new addition to the made-up world of SEO parlance, I’d like to propose the term “Link Sponge”. I may be wrong in thinking there isn’t a phrase for this already, but here’s the definition:
- Link Sponge - a URL that is used to prettify an otherwise ugly URL, then 302 redirected to a longer URL. The webmaster who does this probably doesn’t consider:
a) setting up a page at the location of the pretty URL
b) redirecting the pretty URL properly
c) setting up a URL rewrite so the user sees the pretty URL whilst the server is actually displaying the content from the ugly URL
Obviously (c) is the preferable option here.
So say a website sends out this “link sponge” URL (example.com/lovely) in a press release, gets a ton of backlinks for it, and resulting PageRank. Because they’ve 302′d the URL, the pretty URL soaks up all of the lovely link juice (see the sponge analogy here 
), and passes the user along to the ugly URL (example.com/1234xSkgd.aspx).
Then maybe a year later, this website decides to restructure their website. They forget about the pretty URL they set up because they assume that they’re getting traffic to the ugly URL because it’s a good page. So they set up a spangly new URL, say example.com/sooo-lovely.aspx, and 302 the old page to this page (just because that’s the default in IIS/Apache), or maybe just delete it.
So the search engines follow all these great links to example.com/lovely and get a 302 chain of redirects or a 404 error. The webmaster wonders where all their traffic went. The link sponge then solidifies and sinks like a stone…
Firefox 3 gets off to a bad start
It looks like Mozilla’s Firefox Download Day has got off to a bad start - this was the picture at 1800 UK time (the exact time of release):
I’m guessing they’ve hit unprecedented traffic volumes, as there were a lot of people waiting for this. Conspiracy theorists might say that Microsoft probably set up a well-timed DDoS attack on Mozilla’s servers - for the purposes of any Microsoft lawyers, I’m not a conspiracy nut
Now, at 45 minutes after the planned release, Mozilla appears to have rolled back to Firefox 2…
Google Pagerank update
Google has updated their Pagerank reporting today - looks like Netvibes gets a nice bump up to from PR8 to PR9, along with Facebook getting the same increase from PR8 to PR9. Haven’t seen any big losers as yet…
Google Safe Browsing API
Further to my previous post about Google flagging some Wordpress blogs as badware, the Google Operating System blog points to a Google API that allows webmasters to monitor their URLs for blacklist status with up to 10,000 ‘regular user’ requests (though it doesn’t say over what time period this takes place over).
Kudos to Google for assisting webmasters in this issue.
UK mortgage market slowdown
As the UK seemingly enters a period of uncertain economic growth, and and an almost certain fall in house prices (the IMF believes that the UK mortgage market is overvalued by around 25%), it’s interesting to look at a Google Trends report for searches on the words ‘mortgage’ and ‘recession’:
It’s interesting to see that at almost the exact same time that people started searching for the word ‘recession’, the volume of searches for the word ‘mortgage’ started to drop, and the third quarter dip seen in previous years around Christmas was slightly sharper and more pronounced.
What’s also interesting to see is the sharp rise in searches for ‘mortgage’ at the end of the first quarter of 2008; however perhaps at this time the intent of the search has switched from looking to buy a mortgage, to being informational searches on the condition of the mortgage market. It will be interesting to watch these trends in future months…
Great online regex tool
Just found a fantastic online regular expression tool which includes real-time regex evaluation for PHP (PCRE & POSIX), JavaScript, Perl and Python syntaxes.
Much credit to Lars Olav Torvik for writing and sharing it 
Gibson to sue Activision over “Guitar Hero”
As a real guitarist who enjoys playing real guitars, I have to say, rock on.