As a hobbyist search engine optimizer I do not feel like investing a lot of time into doing my own experiments to see what works and what does not, in terms of climbing the SERP.
Instead I rely on others, with way more SEO skills than me, to do the heavy lifting and hopefully impart some of their results through the blogs I follow.
Related, there is one resource I feel sticks out: Google’s own Webmaster Help. It is a YouTube vlog where Matt Cutts, the head of webspam at Google, shares his insights to the workings of the search engine.
I love its format! The videos are about 2 minutes long, which everyone with some interest can afford, and their structure is around answering one specific question each. It helps that the questions are exactly the newbie kind that I would ask myself and they are given really clear answers.
They way I follow Google Webmaster Help is by subscribing to the RSS feed. The feed does suffer from some bad accessibility, in that you can not play the videos from it, but you get enough information to decide whether to click through or not.
SEO news
While some of the questions and answers might not be news to the more seasoned search engine optimizer, I have learned a lot from following it. Last time today, which prompted this blog post.
In today’s Google Webmaster Help, Matt discusses the difference between using subdomains and subdirectories for the different parts of your website. I had long thought there was a great divide in how it affected your rankings and that subdomains should be avoided at all cost.
Sounds like I was wrong.