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I know I should be doing plenty of other things right now. There's some keyword research to do for a client and a site that's going live on Friday for another client that still needs some text written for it and this column isn't due till tomorrow but ...

But I've got a heap of things buzzing around in my head right now that I have to share with you and they've just got to come out. So let's get down to talking about a few things that should get you thinking and maybe even doing some research.

Reciprocal linking
There are major parts of the adult online industry that rely on reciprocal linking. In fact there are a lot of people in this industry who have built their entire business on reciprocal links and lots of affiliate webmasters who rely on reciprocal links for traffic.

If you're one of those guys then Yahoo's latest patent - Identifying Excessively Reciprocal Links Among Web Entities - is something you should read. While the patent is aimed at those who use reciprocal linking to boost their search engine rankings ... and there are people in this industry that do just that ... those of us who use reciprocal linking just for traffic do need to be worried.

While using reciprocal linking for traffic isn't considered a no-no under the new patent there's every chance that those of us who use it for that purpose will be collateral damage when Yahoo goes hunting for those who do use it for search engine placement. And when you think about it those who use reciprocal linking for search engine placement are just about ever link list and TGP out there.

What does your site look like?
Steve and I are still usually design our websites to a set width. Yes I know that you may consider that we're just Luddites and we should really get with the plan and go with a page width of 100% but if you're a 100% type of person there's one little point that you may have overlooked.

Designing for 100% was fine and dandy when screen resolutions were a fixed ratio. A site designed for a screen width of 100% tended to look ok on 800x600, 1024x768 and whatever the next setting is in that ratio ... but what if your site is being viewed on a monitor that doesn't follow the common ratios.

Now that we're getting into the era of wide-screen monitors we're getting into some very different ratios for screen sizes and you're page widths that are set for 100% are starting to look a little ... well ... strange?

Imagine what your 100% width site is going to look like in 1680x1050 and what is your very small text going to look like in those bigger screen resolutions?

Affective feedback
Did you know that the major search engines were beginning to think about affective feedback? Well actually they've been thinking about it for a while because there are some patent applications going back a few years now so Google and the others have had some time to work with it.

And what is affective feedback as far as the search engines are concerned? Affective feedback is assessing the emotional state of the person doing a search and displaying results that are in tune with that person's emotional state.

It seems that most people who are using a search engine are either happy or irritable but of course they can range through just about every one of the human emotions and all the various shades of those emotions.

So if you're trying to sell something to somebody via your website would you want to have Google show your website in the search engine results pages that they show to someone who is irritable ... I mean, how many irritable people actually buy something?

Want to get a new site indexed quickly?
This is something that seems to have suddenly become hot information in some parts of the Net but a few of us have known about it for over a year now and it is also something that will show you just how hungry Google is for information.

If you want to get a new site indexed quickly include a link to the site in emails sent via Gmail. I'm not sure if it works if you're sending it to someone who doesn't use Gmail - our research seems to suggest that it doesn't necessarily work then - but if it's to another person who uses Gmail then Google will almost certainly see it.

This technique is especially effective if you're working on the site with someone else and you're frequently exchanging emails (that include the link) about the work the two of you are doing.

Google is looking in other places for unlinked sites too so beware ... it also looks at IP addresses and will crawl the sites that it finds on each IP address and once they're crawled those sites are indexed.

Think I'm crazy? Do some testing of your own and see what happens for you.