…and in it’s place is, well, another Googlebomb.

Stephen Colbert is no longer the top result for ‘Greatest living American‘. the intrepid folks at Google have made the appropriate tweaks to the algorithm and Colbert’s clever plot to manipulate their results has been foiled. Kinda.

Now that Colbert has been zapped, the new number one is Brandon Wirtz . Brandon decided that Colbert was “out to steal my thunder as Greatest Living American. So I’m actively going to try and Foil Him.” Brandon was undaunted by Colbert’s celebrity status and media reach, because as he observed, “I may not have his legions of people, but this is about SEO, and his followers don’t have my friends Google Rank.”

Unfortunately, for those of you who like to root for the underdog, Brandon was unable to unseat Colbert for the number one spot and could only manage second place. That is, until Google ‘fixed’ this particular Googlebomb by zapping Colbert - leaving Brandon the new undisputed Greatest Living American.

Congratulations Brandon. Good job Google. I guess everything’s cool now, right?

I was unfortunately unable to attend the one day SEW: Live show in Columbus, but we were able to send a crew up to cover the show (and they did a great job I think). As we progress with the video coverage of events, we are always trying to learn and come up with ideas about to how best to publish or present the coverage.

In the past, we’d released a video or two per day each day after the show. For this show though, we blitzed the coverage in a major way and decided to try releasing it in big chunks. Go check out our SEW: Live Columbus collection of coverage and be sure to let me know what you think.

For example, would you prefer a steady flow of one or two per day or, do you (like me) think it’s a lot better to blast out as many of them as you can as fast as you possibly can?

Just $1. That’s all I need. And this thermos. And my remote control… and these matches. But that’s all I need.

Yahoo’s Terry Semel made $1 last year. So did Larry, Sergei and Doc Schmidt. Just $1. Makes you feel kinda like a bigshot for a second doesn’t it? No? I mean, here are these massively powerful, influential, world shaking digital moguls and they only pull a buck a year? Heck I make 5 times that in like… an hour. So who’s the man? Next time any of you dollar menunaires hit the bluegrass, be sure you look me up - I’ll get lunch, you hang on to that dollar.

But the story doesn’t end there. Here’s the life lesson segment of today’s blog.. Terry Semel took his $1 salary - he didn’t get his head down though - oh no, he applied himself, he worked and just tried really really hard to do a good job. Yahoo recognized that and wanted to express their gratitude and appreciation for his diligence and dedication so much that they gave him an incentive bonus package.

It’s kinda like getting ‘Employee of the Month’ but instead of the better parking spot, he got $71.66 million. Now, that isn’t to say he didn’t also get the parking spot and/or the conventional placard on the wall… but nothing I read really mentioned anything about it.

No, they pretty much stuck with the thing about the $71.66 million.

But there you go. Just because you don’t make a lot of money, it doesn’t mean that with a little elbow grease and dedication that you too can’t be a success. I know it’s inspired me. Someday, somehow I am gonna get to that $1. Because I understand now that that’s really all I need… that and this paddleball game -but that’s all I need.

** UPDATE ** The good folks at Yahoo contacted us last night to let us know we were off on our original figure of $80 million. $80 Million was apparently misreported by the AP. The blog entry has thus been duly edited with the correct amount of $71.66 million.

You see, the $80 million figure included a 2006 bonus that was awarded in February 2007. It’s good that they keep track of these things.

I received no update on the parking spot though, so that’s still pure guesswork and speculation on my part.

Folks in SEO/SEM, webmaster-type circle have a tendency to get all fired up over ‘no follow’. There seems to be a prevalent misconception that a no followed link is worthless. The fact of the matter is, that simply isn’t the case. Loren Baker recently made a really cool and concise post that does a fantastic job of explaining what exactly ‘no follow’ means to the various search engines.

The basic conclusion drawn is that some value should be associated with ‘no follow’ links. Yahoo and Ask both handle a ‘no follow’ link quite differently compared to Google’s rather extreme policy of essentially ignoring the link completely. Ask, for example, evidently doesn’t give a whit about ‘no follow’ - they don’t even support ‘no follow’. So if Ask is your game… ‘no follow’ is a non issue. Yahoo is somewhere in between. Yahoo will follow a ‘no follow’ but no attribution will be given to the target. In other words, they will crawl the link but you won’t get any benefit from the anchor text/attribution etc.

So there you have it. Loren does a good job of explaining how and why ‘no follow’ shouldn’t be regarded as worthless. Technically speaking, he’s absolutely correct. Ask doesn’t support ‘no follow’, so you’re gold there… and Yahoo does, in fact, index the links at least - so that’s something, I guess.

In the end, I suppose all you folks making all your money and getting all your traffic from Ask and Yahoo really don’t have much of anything to worry about in terms of ‘no follow’. For the other 90% of the web businesses in world however, I think we can and should all still be a little irritated about the whole ‘no follow’ thing.

Personally, I think it’s a Draconian stopgap solution to a certain (I won’t name any names) search engine’s inflated value on links as a basis for their ranking algorithm. On Lauren’s post there is a comment to the effect that it was hoped that sites would develop ways to adopt “less-absolute” approaches to ‘no follow’ .

I’m glad they’re at least hoping everybody else will take care of this for them. How innovative.