SEOmoz's Beginner's Guide was just Slashdotted. We'll see how the server holds up, but there's a lot of very big files to be accessed there...
Sorry for any lag. More to report soon.
UPDATE: The lag should be gone by now. We made some quick fixes and things appear to be working brilliantly. To date, the Slashdotting has sent us more than 3500 uniques in just under 2 hours. It's quite an honor to get written about there - hopefully some of the new visitors will stick around and become members. I'll try to write something comprehensive about the traffic levels and server load, etc. tomorrow along with the fringe benefits (other blogs picking us up, etc).
ANOTHER UPDATE: Up over 20,000 unique visitors for the day, and the site's running like a champ. Thanks again to the folks who contributed and helped out with this one (and the amazing SEO community that has made me feel welcome from day one).
I noticed that your list of speed bumps covers many points that can be accomplished simply by following popular standards and best practise methods in web development. And by web standards, I'm not only talking about your site validating. There are other more important point such as separation of content and presentation etc. Just so we are clear on that, I don't even thin validating is that important. Well it is but not that most important thing to consider.
I have to say, great work. I have a question for you. What are your views on web standards and best practise in web development and do you think web standards can serve as a foundations for successful SEO work?
The reason for my question is that a friend of mine who runs a small SEO business where I live does not seem to thin web standards are relevant in building a web site that is optimized for search engines. I think, on the other hand, that web standards are very relevant.
Thanks, Michael - I updated it. Email me if you find other problems, I'm trying to make it as accurate as possible.
And thanks to everyone for your kind words!
Andri - My experience has been that following standards like W3C or using CSS instead of nested tables, etc. has virtually no impact on search rankings.
It makes sense - the search engines want to display the most relevant content, not the most accessible or web standards conforming pages, so they give very little weight (if any) to these. MSN said so publically in my interview with them several months ago.
Web standards help you define and describe your content with the correct tags. Semantics are a big part of web standards. Does that not help search engines to get the most relevant content? I'm a bit puzzled by this.
Andri,
When a search engine measures the "on-page" factors of a document, it strips all tags and is left with the visible text on the page.
Thus, how you "mark up" your document is of very, very little relevance to the engines. This makes sense if you think about how few sites subscribe to "web standards" or proper "semantics". The search engines don't want to reward markup, but rather content quality and popularity. Perhaps, one day in the far future, this will change, but for now...
There are a few accessibility features that will help quite a bit with SEO. See Andy's guide here for more.
I feel like we are not talking that same language on this. This blog post describes my take on web standards pritty well:
The Meaning of Web Standards
Good to see you back up. I noticed the /. article 2 minutes after it was submitted and all I could say was
"Oh crap. There goes the server"
lol
Great job and keep up the good work.
-PK
Congratulations Rand! It is great to see someone who gives so much to the community get some recognition outside our industry.
Keep up the great work!
Yeah, sorry about that... I just felt that the guide was too good not to submit to slashdot.
(long-term reader, first-time poster. Keep up the great work)
Cheers,
Haje Jan Kamps (www.kamps.org)
Rand, well deserved. Outstanding job! Couldn't of happened to a better guy.
congratulations, Rand. you do great work. Keep it up.
Dave
Congrats Rand! you really deserverd it! thnx for sharing the wealth
Great work, now you should be better prepared for the next time.
Very well-deserved! Congratz...
ANOTHER UPDATE: Great work, Rand. Congratz again...
Congrats Rand... you really did a great work ... keep it up ...
Best wishes for you and your team ... :)
Things are running a bit slow, but I fixed it so no one should see those "too many connections" errors anymore.
Wh00p, go seomoz go