I also managed not to think about work for a while there. But suddenly - probably due to feeling a disturbance in the SEO force - I felt a sudden need to check how my servers were doing only to find out that one of them was down. I checked some Analytics stats and it had been out for 1½ day. I tried to restart the server using my cell phone but the control panel had implemented some fancy AJAX thing for that particular control and the Opera Mobile Browser couldn’t cope with that. And when abroad cell phone traffic is crazy expensive. It’s like 10$/Mb or something - hate the networks for that.

Finally I called the support to have them restart the server for me.

Alltogether a downtime of three days. That’s not good at all and the really sad thing is that my most important projects are on that server.

What can I learn from this?

• Monitor my servers better, ie send mail/sms
• Spread the risks, not having large servers but several smaller ones
• Have plans made out to deal with these sort of things

It shall not happen again, I promise.

I combined public lists of top blogs ordered by the amount of inlinks (Technorati), amount of community subscriptions (Bloglines), ability to start and follow trends (BlogPulse) and the ability to thrive in foreign markets (Wikio). I then weighed each individual blog against its all encompassing internet performance using SEOmoz’s Trifecta Tool.

I think it’s fair to say that people that spend a lot of their time online and the ones that run blogs themselves are more interested in technology than those who don’t. So it’s not surprising that 57 out of the 100 top blogs are about technology but it gives food for thought.

To master the arts of SEO one have to stay focussed a bit shorter, I would say.

Google likes the Olympics as well. They have new nice logo every day related to the Olympics which is linked to the search query ‘Beijing 2008‘.

Now, for any site that reports on the Olympics to get in that SERP would be the ultimate opportunity. Instead I get all sorts of not so related material. The world in general isn’t that aware of SEO one might think.

Or is it the search engines that haven’t adapted to the world?

This morning I phoned martin and discussed the rel=nofollow thing that he had been telling me about lately. I told him that we could set up a project to make the blogosphere become more generous with link cred for great comments on blog posts by removing the rel=nofollow.

“That’s a great idea, do it!” he said. I went looking for a suitable domain and one that could be suitable was yesfollow for example. .com, .net and .org were all taken and I checked what was on yesfollow.org and it was of course the exact same thing we were about to do.

Another idea already made. That happens a lot doesn’t it?

It is still a great idea however, so I reckon we’ll join that movement instead of creating our own.

Actually, I think we already have, since we already are using the Nofollow Free plugin from Michele Marcucci which removes the nofollow. More about that here as well.

Now I’m off to think up another great idea.

First, we needed a suitable domain name. We had a few good ideas but of course those domains were taken. One of the first okay domain name ideas we had(there was a few crazy ones) was available but “only” as .net. We decided that we have to have a .com if we’re doing a site on SEO. This is of course not true but it feels better. After not very long I tested drivingseo.com and it was available!

Now, it’s not very surprising to find any-random-word+seo.com but it felt like a jackpot. We didn’t have to look any further! It was good enough and relates to what we do. I don’t know how many hours I spend searching for domain names, do you know what I mean?

After the domain was bought the DNS was configured, WordPress downloaded and installed with a few plugins and a non-default theme and that was it, drivingseo.com was up and running, smooth!

“Unfortunately” I won’t be here to follow and contribute to the first two weeks of this site’s life because I’m going out on a bit of offline traveling. So, see you later!