SEO conversations won’t be the same again. Everyone who knows about Alexa’s ranking system has an opinion about it. Most are not complimentary, because Alexa relied on traffic measurement based on people who had installed its toolbar, or others like me, who use a third-party tool such as the SearchStatus extension for Firefox, which sends usage data to Alexa. Toolbars tend to be installed by advanced computer users and the Alexa toolbar has a large North American following, so it might not show reliable traffic trends for a site with an Australian focus.

Alexa has just announced that it will now use a new measurement technique rather than rely entirely on the toolbar. Without giving anything away, it said, “We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.”

Until Alexa is ready to share details of those multiple sources, we can only speculate that some of it will come from major ISPs, either directly or through other services that already have such an arrangement and are permitted to share it with Alexa.

For the time being, you can only see six months’ worth of historic data. Alexa says that soon the older data will be available, with better normalisation of non-USA data.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Rich Ord of WebProNews has reported a bizarre lawsuit that could make us check if we have been transported back in time to 1999. Read it and contemplate what harm Associated Press (AP) could do to the Internet if it wins this lawsuit.

This post and millions of other blog posts are linked to and snippeted by syndication mechanisms every day. AP is suing because Moreover aggregates news and sells the aggregation to subscribers (I am not one of them); unfortunately, the case goes beyond AP’s need for recompense. A win could cause others to sue, for example, Google for crawling their website and reproducing snippets in search results. AP’s lawyers used this language:

6. Defendants are also trespassing on AP’s chattel by using search robots or “crawlers” to retrieve information from AP’s computer servers in order to display, archive, cache, store, and/or distribute AP’s proprietary works.

That sounds exactly like Google, Live Search, Yahoo and many other search engines.

View a copy of the lawsuit here.

I posted a comment below the WebProNews article suggesting that a passive boycott of all email domains owned and used by AP staff, as well as their IP address range might be an interesting thought.

Those destinations should be blocked by network administrators within their own network — not suggesting any illegal action here. It is like adding ap.com to one’s email spam filters. Such a boycott is not likely to happen, but if it did, it would take AP reporters back to the pre-Internet days when they had to dial directly into the office or use intermediary sites to file their stories. This wouldn’t stop them from working, but a daily inconvenience might be a lasting reminder.

What do you think?

Popularity: 32% [?]

A friend in the US and I have been trying separately to call each other to test Jaxtr, but we always get the message that all lines are busy. I have since managed to leave a voicemail, so that’s progress.

Popularity: 26% [?]

This post has been backed up at Blogspot in case it disappears. It is about the alleged work environment at Google (USA) versus Microsoft (USA). It covers topics such as:

• What is the culture really like? How many hours are people actually working? What are the least amount of hours you can work before you are looked down upon?
• 20% of your time on personal project. How many people actually get to use it? If so, how do they use it? Does Google own your personal project?
• What are the office arrangements like? Do you have an office or cube space?
• What is the management structure like (hierarchy)?
• Do they actually have plans for career development?
• Who would you recommend Google to? Is it for the college kid or family type, worker bee or innovator?
• Please provide any additional information that you believe will help in our battle for talent against Google?

I have worked for a San Jose company that offered some of the benefits such as free food and snacks and agree that it makes a lot of sense (for the company) to keep the employees anchored to the workplace. I have visited a few of the Redmond buildings at MSFT too and I agree that the latter does not resemble a sheltered workshop for college grads, as the Googleplex is made out to be.

Popularity: 58% [?]

I have no idea why, but yesterday I implemented P3P on my SEO training site. It validates, but I’m damned if I know why. The procedure was so convoluted and the instructions so tortuous that I had to read at least a dozen anguished posts in forums and trial-and-error to pass the validator. It is no wonder that the P3P page laments,

“Status: P3P Work suspended
After a successful Last Call, the P3P Working Group decided to publish the P3P 1.1 Specification as a Working Group Note to give P3P 1.1 a provisionally final state.
The P3P Specification Working Group took this step as there was insufficient support from current Browser implementers for the implementation of P3P 1.1.”

Is anyone in SEO circles bothering with P3P?

Popularity: 28% [?]