The death of Michael Jackson nearly stalled the world wide web.

Unlike anything seen in recent memory, entertainment and social networking websites experienced near crashes and exploding servers as a result of millions of hits that congested web traffic to an unprecedented extent.

The mobile web in particular was tested like never before and came through shining on the other side.

Even before Michael Jackson’s death was confirmed, celebrities took to Twitter to comment on a day of celebrity death (first Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson). Throughout the evening, other celebrities tweeted to similarly express their reactions to the King of Pop’s death at the age of 50.

Several pranksters then released false stories on Twitter about Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum also dying today in freak accidents. None were true. But all caused such a flurry of mobile web searches that the internet as a whole had to fire on all cylinders to keep up. Read the rest

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A Bango study released this week, revealed that half of the Top 20 most trafficked PC websites (according to Nielsen Online) did not work well when visited from a mobile phone. The study noted that some of the sites that did not work well had a mobile version of their site, but when the study’s users went directly to the computer version of the site they were not directed to the mobile version.

If you have a mobile site then make sure your PC site detects a mobile device and presents the made-for mobile version.

That used to be easier said than done. Fortunately there is a free online file generator which enables webmasters to create a meta.txt file of their site. This file contains all the information necessary to help a visitor to your site get to the right version of your site. The meta.txt file is the brainchild of Visibility Mobile, a mobile search engine optimization firm offering services and tools to brands, search engines and mobile agencies. Read the rest

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If you’re interested Mobile Monday is coming to New York in a couple of weeks. A bunch of mobile geeks are gonna get together and grok mobile, seo style.

Their agenda sounds like it could turn out to be pretty interesting. I hope they’ll put the audio up on the Mobile Monday NY Blog (pretty please). Google will have a representative there. I wonder where Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask are? They should be there too, all three of these companies operate mobile sites and should be backing the mobile community.

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