WordPress wins the award for the first time in four years. Really, no surprise here.  With every new update WordPress excels above the rest. The ease-of-use and seamless integration is largely due to being Open Source. It seems like Plugin’s and addon’s are added daily. So much has improved with WordPress over the past year.

Named the Overall Best Open Source CMS in 2009, WordPress does very well at  the Open Source CMS Awards with over 12,000 nominations!

WordPress also climbed the ranks from not being in the top 5 last year to #2 this year for Best Open Source PHP Content Management System. I would be willing to bet that Drupal is not pleased to see the recent rise.

I would be willing to bet that WordPress will take home the gold in every category next year. The amount of support and development around WordPress puts it in a category of its own. Do you think that WordPress will beat out Drupal and Joomla (again) next year?

The proof is in the pudding. We don’t need an award to tell us what we are using is the best. The reason we use it is because it is extremely reliable, scalable, and fun. There are still a couple of our sites that don’t need the power of WordPress and the purpose of the site does not coincide well with WordPress. We are seeing the percentage of our non-WP sites dropping though and I believe that percentage will continue dropping.

Taking home the big “W” means they will be eligible to compete for the inaugural Hall of Fame Award next year.

Image via Wikipedia

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Matt Cutts has the SEO community buzzing once again. Undisputed as one of the most influential blogger today, Cutt’s announced on his blog that because of the positive feedback on Caffeine, the next stage, which is replacing the current Google search architecture with Caffeine. The rollout will be occurring sometime after the holidays.

He also states that Caffeine is now live on one of their data centers allowing them to properly test and tune the new version of google search. Caffeine was available to the public for a short time. Now visiting the website will just bring you a page with a message from Google.

Some believe that Caffeine works faster than its predecessor and  better at returning fresh-indexed results, more accurate for real-time searches.

Although I did try it when it was on www2.sandbox.google.com

I will need to delve into the SERPs before I can form an educated opinion.

Related articles,

• Google Caffeine Index Goes Live (seroundtable.com)
• Google to launch new search engine (thestar.com)
• Google Caffeine ready for roll out (telegraph.co.uk)
• Google’s Caffeine Gets a Data Center Roll Out (marketingpilgrim.com)

Image via Wikipedia

This is absolutely a frequent question.

“Well, that’s great! But what do they mean?” – it is simply a tag that can be added to the code. They are typically behind the scenes. You can of course see the code and determine if a site is using nofollow or not. Dofollow is definitley the default. DoFollow links are not really referred to, or call Dofollow, they are simply links.

NoFollow stops the search engine from crawling through the link. Your PageRank (if any) is equally distributed to each link, no matter which tag is used. Whether or not you know which one to use depends largely on your site. I always recommend using dofollow when possible and can recommend one over the other upon special request.

Related articles,

Wikipedia Rel=NoFollow
Linking To Affiliates? Better Nofollow Those Links or Google Will Penalize You
Best of 2009 (So Far): SEO Guidance, Part 1
CommentLuv Enanced Search Functionality

Google is now indexing websites using RSS/Atom feeds.

From Wikipedia

If you have ever used a RSS feed you know they are XML. Atom being the newer between the two. What the feeds do is deliver the ‘meat’ of the content with no frills. You can then subscribe to multiple feeds through feedburner or Google Reader and read multiple websites in one spot. If you use WordPress or Blogger (or most any type of blogging platform) you have a feed.

Google announced on the “Official Google Webmaster Central Blog” that they feeds are used to index sites. Every new site/page needs to be visited by a “spider” or “crawler” from Google. If not, they will never show up in the SERPs and your site will NEVER  have any search engine traffic.

Google also mentions RSS/Atom feeds will be indexed faster versus traditional crawling methods. Make sure your robots.txt file is not blocking indexing and you should see your new posts showing up a lot faster. It’s safe to say anyone using this technology has the undoubted title of fastest updating search results, coming closer to real time search results.