SEO

I just noticed something funny. Normally, the daily routine of a website owner is all about getting more visitors (preferably from search engines) and getting less spam.

Now, I made a mistake with this project, resulting in getting hit hard by a spambot. The project in question features a bugtracker module and I honestly thought, limiting posting bug reports to registered users and protecting the signup form with a math CAPTCHA would suffice to lock spammers out. I could not have been more wrong about it.

I just saw a video of a talk, Matt Cutts, head of Google's anti web spam team, gave at WordCamp San Francisco 2009. I can only recommend watching listening to it (sadly, audio only), since it's as entertaining as informative and covers a lot of topics potentially relevant to bloggers.
Among other things, Matt also addresses Google Page Rank and gives away one of it's applications.

My website is a fun project for me. I just love working on it and watching it grow day by day.
Speaking of watching it grow, I am also someone, who actually reads web server logs just to see, whats going on. One thing, I am particularly interested in are the HTTP referrers. After all, which website owner would not want to know, where his visitors are coming from? Curiously, some of mine seem to be coming from porn websites, "make money fast" blogs and other shady places.

Today, I found something in my inbox, sent to me by XXXX@gmail.com, which I shall quote here with the name removed.

Hi,

Thank you for reading this. I am XXXXX XXXX and I own a number of
websites. I came across your site http://www.onyxbits.de/ today. I found it
really enthralling.
I hope you will consider my proposition of buying text-links on your site.
Let me know if you would like to know more about this.
Best regards,

XXXX XXXXX

With Google knowing over a billion pages by now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become more important then ever in order for websites to be found by their target audience. Usually it's rather obvious from Google's webmaster quality guidelines what has to be done to get a good ranking, the tricky part however is not to forget a crucial component. So here is a checklist of things to do when using the Drupal CMS: