seo

Whoa! Google Using Drupal's Breadcrumbs?

It would seem Google has rolled out a new indexing/display feature that finds breadcrumbs and displays them instead of URLs for certain search results. Drupal's already game, it seems, judging by numerous searches I've taken a glance at today:

Drupal's Breadcrumb-enabled Search Results

I guess since Drupal's built towards this kind of data heirarchy, Google quickly and easily indexes the breadcrumbs... any other sites/CMSs already in the index in this manner?

Also, I wonder what this will do in terms of eye tracking and such - the first time I noticed it, my eye went to the URL immediately - of course, that could just be due to the novelty of the thing.

Blogging: Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Signal to Noise RSS Icon Ratio Image

I use an RSS news reader application to browse stories from blogs and websites that I am interested in following. To stay in my news reader for more than a few weeks, a website must do two things:

  1. Consistently offer 'meaty' and well-written posts.
  2. Not 'spam' me with posts (i.e. no more than 2 posts a day, unless the content is really good or really interesting).

If you'll notice, none of my criteria include "Have many, many posts a day." The reason for this is simple: My time is valuable, and I don't want to waste it browsing through mushy, meaningless content—even if that time is only a second or two. A lot of people think they should post early and post often, sometimes re-blogging what others have already said, but this is not a good strategy for retaining site subscribers and readers, even if it helps your search-engine rankings a little. Signal / Noise ratio is probably the single determining factor in whether a site will succeed in gaining loyal followers or not.