This notebook is the basis for the monthly round-up posts on my site highly-visible.

Highly-Visible features blog posts, articles and more on all areas relating to search optimisation and standards compliant web development.

The round-ups are published monthly and are a bunch of links to other sites that I've found useful or interesting during that month along with a few brief comments on each.

Matt Cutts summary update on BigDaddy.

Some interesting insight from Mr Cutts as to why Google latest upgrade is causing so much upset amongst the darker quarters of the SEO industry. 

Roger Johansson on making nice markup.

I like to make my markup look nice whenever possible, correctly indented code is so much more maintainable and, well, nice to look at! Sometimes when your working with PHP includes or .NET User Controls this can be more effort than its worth but I still try make my html flow nicely whenever possible.

Aaron Wall on Rabid Loyalty.

Aaron briefly discusses Rabid Loyalty, if you can get this amongst the followers of your site, you're on to a winner. The most rabidly loyal group of people I can think of are the Mac freaks that worship at the "one buttoned mouse" altar. Apple could remove all html text on their website and replace it all with graphics and they would still rank well in search results because of all "Apple Advocates" that link to them.

Adam Lasnik joins Google working for Matt Cutts

Mutt Cutts this month got himself a deputy at Google. Adam Lasnik is now a “webmaster advocate” at Google doing much of the stuff that Matt Cutts does. Basically acting as a communications officer between angry webmasters who’ve been removed from Google’s index and search engineers at Google who’s job it is to rid the world of search spam. Good luck Adam.

Some great examples of Google Trends

This post by randfish at seomoz shows some great example of Googles new “trends” project. My particular favourite is number 2, Web2.0 vs. Common Sense - very funny and so true!

Matt Cutts audio interviews

Aaron Wall posted a couple of links to an audio interview with Matt Cutts. Having been a frequent visitor to Matts blog for some time, it was quite interesting to “hear” him talk about Google for once. The interviews give some good insights into how the Google algorithm currently works and some good ideas on where all things Google may be heading in the next few months and years. Well worth a listen.

Signs You're a Crappy Programmer (and don't know it)

A great piece from Damien Katz. If you're a programmer or are unfortunate enough to work with programmers, at least one of the points he makes will resonate with you... 

Should links still be underlined and blue?

A good forum post debating whether hyperlinks should be rendered in the default blue underline style with purple for visited links as per Jakob Nielsons advice.

My own personal opinion is that you can have non-standard colours as long as they're consistent throughout your site and as long as the user can differentiate  between normal and visited links. Not being able to figure out which links I've already clicked on drives me mad!

Duplicate content

Originally linked at by Aaron Wall, this post by William Slawski discusses some of the problems encountered with duplicate content within Search Results. This can be a particular problem with e-commerce sites that use syndicated product information (ie; from the manufacturer or other content providor such as CNET). Duplicated content can also happen when similar versions of a page are indexed because of "paged" results within the page, so you end up with 4 or 5 copies of the page indexed where 80% of the content is similar.

 A nice article summing up some of the problems/issues surrounding html email creation. This articles also features a raft of comments, some useful and constructive, others not so! 

I really don't like Flash! Its analogous to all those touring caravans that block our roads every bank holiday - highly annoying, gets in the way and usually means you get to your destination much later than you anticipated. However, if you've ever had the misfortune of working with flash, this is very funny... 

Blake Ross Interview

Nice interview with Mr Firefox (Blake Ross) covering such topics as Firefox 2.0, Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox's relationship with Google - well worth a read.  

Also while we're on the topic of Firefox, check out my post on Firefox Quicksearch Bookmarks from earlier on this month. 

CSS vs. Tables

Yes - its an age old debate and yes its been covered a million times before, but this presentation is really succinct and gets all the major points across clearly and simply. 

The full project lifecycle illustrated beautifully...

(thanks to Oatmeal at SEOMoz for linking to this)

Real Small Business, Real Big Ideas

A great series of articles (this one is the first) following a single mum entrapeneur, Carrie D Mader, as she search optimises her own website - http://www.carriedmader.com/.

Jennifer Laycock at search engine guide is documenting the process as Carrie takes the advice of 4 leading experts in making significant changes to her e-business in order to bring in more natural search traffic.

Readers are also encouraged to make suggestions on ways the site can be improved/optimised via the search engine guide forums.

 Microsoft unleashes MS Firefox 2007 Professional.
As reported by the Register ;-)