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The domination of WikiPedia is now complete. A search for the term SEO at Google today shows sub-pages from WikiPedia in both the first and the fifth position. If that isn’t a prime example of what actually “works” in Google these days, I don’t know what is.

WikiPedia has a ton of domain authority, followed by dense interlinked pages with lots of on-page elements. If any of these pages get internal links to them, it’s a closed casket funeral for competitors. Ever since WikiPedia nofollowed all of their links, they’re even more powerful than before. Google has finally gone completely overboard in their “trust” of WikiPedia, and it’s obvious that one website ranking for so many terms probably just can’t be a good thing.

I’m sure we’ll see more and more example of WikiPedia corruption as time marches on. You can’t really expect a resource to be human-edited and stay clean when the bias on commercial phrases is this obvious.

Okay, I have to admit I’m still cracking up about the “DoFollow” movement. I hadn’t paid any attention to the issue. As far as I was concerned, the nofollow tag, as it related to blog comments made complete success. People who comment in your blog should do so, not because they expect a reward in the form of Google Juice, but because they actually feel like contributing something.

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As a webmaster, there will be times you need to know the status of a header response. In particular, you may need to know if a certain page is 404 or a 301. Hell, if you know the difference between those two status codes you’re now doing better than 95% of the population.

So, without further ado, I bring you the Server Header Checker. You can get a nice glimpse into the status code of any web page. And the best part is, it operates in Ajax for your pleasure.

Checking web server headers just got a whole lot easier.

When you look at the primary maintenance you’ll have to do with most websites, it can be broken down into a few basic categories. One of the biggest chores you’ll find is keeping on top of your outgoing links. As the years pass, many of the websites you link to will change also, and not for good reasons in most of the cases.

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SMO is a fun buzzword that’s making the rounds, but the practice seems very limited in what it can actually accomplish. When I say that, keep in mind, I’m speaking specifically about the type of person who reads “Digg” and how they relate to your website. If you don’t have a technically savvy audience, it’s doubtful that SMO can help.

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Even careful webmasters make plenty of errors. I do my best to avoid errors, but I can’t. I find typos, mis-spellings and the like. All in all, it convinces me to try and be as thorough as I can the first time, because you may not revisit your work for awhile. If one of your errors is bad enough, it can really end up costing you in the long run. This is always the case with template driven sites.

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SEOs tend to be selfish louts. I say this after years of experience dealing with the crowd. They often try and hang on to their links, even though they’d be better off being generous. Why? Because outgoing links have a number of benefits, like these:

• Outgoing links help search engines determine what your page is about
• Outgoing links help create awareness about your website (the people you link to notice)
• Outgoing links are useful to your visitors – and they’re the ones who really matter

With this many advantages, you’d think everyone would be making sure to include outgoing links in their posts

That’s exactly what most people would probably think, but you might be surprised to find out that many bloggers and website owners don’t link out at all. If you find yourself doing this, you better really question why. Search engines are always looking for characteristics that mean a website is “naturally” popular. A website with no outgoing links is a “dead end”. Nothing could look more unnatural than that.

Do you link out often?

If you hang around certain online venues long enough, you’ll end up directly confronting a bunch of “common sense” wisdom concering SEO. Taken at surface value, it sometimes makes sense, but most of what you’ll hear is incomplete, and won’t be able to serve as an effective strategy for long term success.

Get links and add content. These two mantras remind me of the old “Tastes Great Less Filling” debate. Of course, you nimwit, it’s understood that you need to “get links” and everyone also knows that you have to “add content” to keep a website growing. The trouble is, this advice is so damn common it’s actually meaningless.

The next time you’re out and about in the internet marketing circles and you hear a catchphrase that someone has been repeating for a long time, then go ahead and ask the person exactly what the heck they’re talking about. If they have a detailed answer that really makes sense, perhaps they’re on to something after all.

Here’s a few SEO posts of note. There have been some decent posts this week that are worth pointing out, and giving a bit of “link love” to. Not surprisingly, a couple are my own.

First, check out SEO Theory by Michael Martinez. A number of his post were quite good this week. Let’s just say that the man reminds me of myself: he’s both reasonable and thorough. In Dear Google – Penalize this!, he speaks of the imaginary Minus 30 rule, which is being promoted heavily by a few morons. He also takes a look at footprints, the nasty things that tell Google everything about you, right down to the fact that you’re probably a “social link spammer” and maybe even a general malcontent. As Digg loses even more prominence over spam, a new way of looking at social network is probably overdue, but not forthcoming by most SEOs.

David Wallace makes a nice post about the insipid DMOZ which finally appears to be dottering on its’ tired, dare I say, antiquated legs.

Lastly, please check out two articles I’ve written about a very important issue. 301 Redirection – How To Part One – Why It Matters In Google, and the scintilating follow-up piece, 301 Redirection – Part Two – using .htaccess and mod_rewrite.

Here’s a tool that will help you calculate Deep Links to any website. The concept of “Deep Links” to SEO is that the more of them you have, the higher quality your website probably is.

It makes sense. Most links to content will go directly to the interior page. The link wouldn’t just point at the main website. So, the higher the percentage of Deeplinks, the more quality the website would be perceived by the search engines.

If you enter in some of the big websites, you’ll see nearly all of them have a very high percentage. This tool should give you some food for thought.