Wanna see something cool?

Google indexes 2,850 pages for BloodhoundBlog. Out of those, 1,900 have been spidered and reindexed since last Saturday, when I added the scrolling panel of Odysseus Medal long-list nominees.

That’s two-thirds of everything spidered and reindexed in a span of seven days.

That little scrolling box is already the best link blog in the RE.net, documenting every post of moment anyone thinks to nominate.

I am not an SEO, and I am not even all that much in love with SEO as an audience-building strategy. But, even so, the structure of the thing — nearly-continuously varying content in what is pure HTML by the time a spider sees it — seems to be catnip to Google.

I think I know why this is happening, and I’ll know more soon. But in advance of certainty, I built a similar list for BloodhoundRealty.com, a scrolling catalog of my Arizona Republic columns.

I’m keeping those in date-order, so the list will only update once a week. But, obviously, that site gets spidered a lot less frequently, anyway.

As an interlinear note, if you are linked from BloodhoundBlog, your links were spidered a bunch of times this week.

If you write for BloodhoundBlog, your links were spidered a minimum of 3,800 times. Doesn’t mean the linked pages or sites were also spidered, necessarily, but it can’t hurt.

Here’s my thinking:

First, you should put the scrolling list of Odysseus Medal long-list nominees in your sidebar. It’s well-behaved and non-intrusive, fitting neatly into your design scheme. It’s a nice list of very good reading, updated frequently. It’s link-love back to the authors of the nominated posts. And, for now at least, it’s a potent search engine attractant.

Here is the code to paste into your sidebar:

<?php
include ("http://bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/TheLongList.php");
?>

Second, Cameron will build you something like this, if you want it. For example, you could have a randomized scrolling list of your flagship posts, the content you want to make sure your readers see. That would deep-link back into your own weblog, so it would benefit your audience now, and it should help your search engine performance over the long haul. Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll put him to work.

And, even though I hold SEO at arm’s length, I’ve been working on some interesting strategies for using long tail farming as a means of harvesting the short head. This will be covered in depth at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. If you miss it, you’ll miss out.

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