Monday April 6th Roundup

This month I am instituting a new feature to the monday roundup: reader submissions! Tweet interesting articles you read to me @ordinarychap. They can be something you read, your own blog, you name it. I’ll then include the top two from each category in the roundup.

This week we’ve got changes to Google, follow-ups to bid to determine your cost-per-click, growing your Google authority, crating shapes in CSS, and Michael Gray on how to cheat with the Digg bar.

• Have you noticed changes in your google results? Search Engine Journal noticed that Google now includes a blue bar of subpages on a number of sites. They’re still not that frequent, so maybe its just a test. Or maybe they hope to better determine relevence of inner pages through clickthrough data. Who knows. Well, other than Google, that is.
• Clickequations follows up on the Hal Varian video with their article on howyour bid doesn’t determine your cost-per-click. Surprised people are talkign about this as much as they are, but it is worth reiterating.
• Finally—in a blog new to our roundup—ChrisG takes on how to grow your google authority. A great read, really, though nothing very novel. It reinforces the old notion of really trying to have good natural SEO.

• Nettuts, what would the dev section of the roundup be without nettuts? This week they’re covering some really neat ways to produce shapes with CSS. Very very neat stuff.

• Avinash Kaushik is going a little SEO with monetizing the longtail of search. Not quite analytics, not quite PPC, not quite SEO, but a fantastic read for anyone in any of those fields.

• Nielsen has a neat quiz about media consumption. Given how crucial a proper understanding of media consumption is to design and usability, I’d be interested in hearing what people scored on this, and what their backgrounds are. I am embarassed to say that I only scored 4/8.

• Michael Gray is always hilarious, insightful, and cranky but this post about abusing the DiggBar took the cake. From the article:
  So what’s the deal? Why am I publishing a blueprint on how to abuse digg … It’s quite simple really, I hate Kevin Rose, in fact very few things in life would make me happier than to see Digg die in fiery crash and meltdown, with nothing salvageable emerging from the wreckage and ashes. My cranky cynical old heart bursts with joy at the mere thought of Kevin Rose working the drive through window of McDonald’s asking people if they “want fries with that”. In fact I’m full prepared to strip down to a loincloth, dance and chant around a fire, and ritualistically sacrifice a live chicken if I honestly felt it would help … and believe me I’m not the only one.“

  The best part is that his abuse of it is brilliantly simple and his analysis is incredibly apt.

• To end on an even more hilarious note, infoworld published their sequel to the seven dirties jobs in the IT industry, titled Even dirtier IT jobs: The muck stops here. I thought I had had some bad IT jobs, but some of these take the cake.