I'd like to get a bit geeky on everyone - not the chicken biting geeky, but the other kind - and talk about architecting SEO tools for successful deployment. I'm going to skip by discussions of PC/Mac UI, Ajax/Ruby, vi/EMACS, etc, etc. I want to talk about basic system architecture.

Service with a Smile

The most commonly deployed form of system architecture for SEO tools is server-centric.

In this model you use a browser to make requests of some mysterious backoffice system that queries around the internet (in this example, Yahoo) and brings you back some results pretty on your screen.

Yawn.

As the service gets more popular it does what? Slows down.

But, here's the problem: as the service gets more popular, or does more stuff that gives you a competitive advantage, guess what happens? Exactly.

Server There is a Fly in my Soup

Happens all the time. So people do crazy stuff like anonymizing their server, hopping IP's, etc, etc.

But all that stuff is a bandaid. Once you're server centric, popular, and whacking the smack out of some other guys site, well, banning is going to occur. Or they'll help you experience "serial temporary outages" - anything to get you to go away.

There is an Easier Way

You just have to do a little work and have the actual grunt work happen on the user's side.

In this instance what we're showing is a lightweight AJAX app running in the browser. The actual mysterious query happens on the client side, XML is sent back to the server, which grinds the data up, and then it sends it back for display.

What a Load of Trouble!

Not really. Let's say Yahoo dislikes Cartoon Man's use of this service and blocks him.

Our intrepid cartoon man just gets a new IP. And goes on his merry way.

But that is even less likely to happen because instead of one server hitting Yahoo a zillion times a day (think the last guy working there will notice?) you have a few thousand users hitting Yahoo a few times a day each.

The other thing uses will notice is that it is much faster for almost any service - after all the client PC is really sitting around not doing much, most of the time, ain't it?

Conclusion

There is fair amount of work required up-front to get an advanced SEO friendly architecture like this working but it pays benefits because it is simply more robust in the wild.