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Ok so it's Monday and it's time to get back to work ... not that we didn't work over the weekend ... it's just that it's time to get back to some real work without taking time out to go walking on the beach, driving over to the next town for a burger or finding lots of other excuses not to do too much work.

I see that someone else has been really busy over the weekend; there seems to be a heck of a lot of spam around in the last few days and even Gmail's spam filters aren't blocking some of it. I guess that we can expect to see a whole lot more spam in the months ahead. As more and more people have less money to spend then the spammers are going to be pumping out more emails in an attempt to keep up their income levels.

Sometimes I think that Bill Gate's idea of introducing a charge for each email sent out might not have been such a crazy one after all.

Page layout and SEO
If you haven't been around the industry for very long then you may not have woken up to the fact that the way you lay out your web pages is important for SEO and just effective marketing as well.

In the past I've talked quite a bit about the parts of a web page that were important if you wanted people to actually see your marketing message and it's interesting that many of those same spots are just as important when it comes to optimizing those pages for the search engines.

As far as search engines are concerned what's at the top of pages is more important than what's at the bottom. Words at the start of a paragraph may perhaps have more importance than words found deeper into the paragraph and there are other things about page layout that we've known for some time.

Both Google and Microsoft have patents that relate search to page layout and now Yahoo does too. This new patent from Yahoo explores ways to identify the most important part of a page by looking at the page layout. But Yahoo's technology doesn't render the page in a way that you or I might see it if it were loaded in our favorite web browser.

Just how Yahoo might see the page is not clear ... at least not to me ... but the technology does allow Yahoo to see whether the structure of the page is highly structured as you might expect to see if a template was used or somewhat less structured. To do that it seems that Yahoo will be breaking the page down into parts in a similar way to what Google and Microsoft use.

Just how they do that or what parts they consider to be important is something I'll leave up to you to discover. Hey, it's Monday morning and I'm definitely not up to reading a patent to discover anything as technical as how a search engine identifies which part of a page is the most important on a Monday.

If you're not up to reading a patent regardless of what day of the week it might be then just perhaps ... and there really is no guarantees here ... what I mentioned about the tops of pages might have some relevance. But then again it might not so don't pin all of your hopes on anything I've said here.

One thing that we did do over the weekend was start to research my family's history. If you haven't thought of doing that before then you may find that it's a rather interesting exercise. Not only could you find that there are some ancestors in your past that you might prefer not to know about but it's also interesting to see just how much information is out there and accessible via the search engines.

In just a few days Steve and I have wandered down some dark alleys and seen a side of life back in the 1700s and 1800s that we never knew existed. I'm not sure that I'll ever think of the life that we lead today as tough or hard ever again. Some of yours and my ancestors certainly had it a heck of a lot tougher than we've ever dreamed of and for them it was just a normal existence.

Don't let the thought of finding some unsavory characters in your family tree put you off looking though because you'll not only learn about your family's past, you'll also learn things about how search engines work too.

And both of those topics are fascinating.