Things Not to Do

Don’t Google Image search at work. Even if it’s for something harmless like Aeon Chair.. you never know what you’re going to find. Of course, turning safe search on might have fixed that… owell now I know.

Also.. don’t try playing hockey with a broken wrist.. it’s hard enough to type like this.. the cast randomly hits spacebar for me, and it hurts to type the letters m n y h p o and any numbers.

January 1st, 2005

Your Website Sucks

I really didn’t want this to turn into an SEO blog, but it’s fun to talk about, and people seem to like to discuss it.

Today I want to tell you a simple truth that many webmasters and business owners can’t grasp: Your Site Sucks

Well ok it doesn’t suck, but it’s not as good as you think it is. One of the hardest things to do in SEO is to look at your site from the perspective of a searcher. That’s why it’s a great idea to hire a 3rd party company, they’re not attached to your site in any way; they have no feelings to hurt.

I wanted to talk about a company who fired me after I said I couldn’t make their “contact us” page rank for a software related term, but I feel it’d be better if I use a fictional example.

John owns a chimney sweeping company, and he’s really frustrated that he can’t get on the front page of Google for “chimney sweeping”.

John’s done his SEO, he’s traded links, got listed in all the good directories, put out press releases, wrote articles, has a blog and a newsletter, updates his content frequently, and has a good pagerank, and even an affiliate program, but he just can’t crack the top page of Google.

Eventually John gives up and buys adwords, then swears it’s a Google conspiracy to force him into buying adwords. He even makes a post on Matt Cutts blog accusing Google of unfailry not raking his “useful” site.

The problem here is that while John’s site IS useful, it’s NOT useful to somebody searching for “chimney sweeping”.

Let’s look at the top results, and we see this: National association of, how to, training school, job profile, and how to find a chimney sweep.

These are useful sites. Why? the term “chimney sweeping” implies that the searcher is looking for information about the topic, NOT a chimney sweeping company. If they were, they’d have searched for “chimney sweep boston” or “chimney sweeping company” etc etc. These are the terms John should focus on if he wants to show up on page 1.

Since John never did his research, and couldn’t look at his site from the perspective of a searcher, he wasted months optimizing for terms that he really shouldn’t be a top result for.

That’s what SEO is about. It’s not about tricking the search engines or writing code to make your site better than others. It’s about anticipating what somebody is searching for, and then building a site that is relevant to that search – from the searcher’s perspective.

January 1st, 2005

The Future of Privacy

I was reading This Article and I realized that we as Americans just need to stop, forget about 9-11 and think back to the year 2000.

Got it? Remember it? Good. Now what do we want in the future? What type of world do we want to live in?

If I told you about a country in 2000 (before the sept 11 world trade center attacks) where the government monitored your phone calls, your internet access, your search history and library books, allowed people to go to jail without being charged, tortured prisoners of war, and started wars…

You’d be like “OMG, I’d hate to live there.” Right?

Well guess what, now you live there… and it’s only going to get worse in the future.

It’s serious America. Your dog died, you got over it. 9-11 happened, get over it. It’s time to move on and quit mourning. Lets decide what kind of country we want to live in.. I know nobody wanted this 6 years ago… why does 9-11 make it so much more different?

January 1st, 2005

A Google Bug

I’m still waiting for Matt Cutts to confirm if this is a real bug or not, but I can’t find any other causes..

I think it has to do with the latest BigDaddy update and cache sharing. Here’s how that works:

When adsense visits your site, it caches it. When the search spider needs to visit your site, it says “oh, adsense was just there.. I’ll use that.” This is a great feature, as it saves both Google and webmasters bandwith.

Note, that using adsense does NOT get you indexed faster, it just stops the bot from making an unnecessary visit. But, I do think this is causing me to get indexed slower. Here’s what happened:

In April I bought a domain and put up a “coming soon” type message on it. I then created a subdirectory and started developing the site there. Security by obscurity right?

Anyway, I made a test.html page in the root directory a few days before going live. This test.html page linked to www.mydomain.com, and had adsense included on it.

I noticed after a few visits to my test page (121 actually), that ads were starting to get relevant. I verified this because I saw Googlebot had visited twice (Yahoobot has visited once too, as my alternate ads are set to yahoo)

I thought nothing of it, and switched the site live.

It’s important to realize that at this time, there were a total of 0 in-links to the site (in google, msn, yahoo, ask, etc), and the site had not been previously owned, nor submitted to any search engine.

But it was listed on Google’s cache. Not the test page, just the main index page, and it’s “coming soon” message.

How did that happen? Is it possible that the adsense spider searched other pages it found (to determine relevance), then cached them too? So when I submitted the domain to Google the next day, it grabbed that old adsense cache even though it technically didn’t exist anymore?

Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a problem, but another BigDaddy improvement was to not revisit spam sites as often. I can see how Google wouldn’t want to revisit a 4 word website, and so it’s been almost a month since the last googlebot visit (despite some fresh in links and a manual submission)

It looks like putting adsense on my page here actually hurt me.

The good news is, it’s an easy fix for Google. Don’t let the adsense bot make the first cache of a webpage. Or, if you do.. don’t let the search engine spider use the adsense cache if it’s the first time it found the URL from a different site, or from manual submission.

January 1st, 2005

Playoff Time

Follow the Red Wings playoffs with me on my Red Wings Blog

January 1st, 2005

Comcast Internet

Imagine opening up your browser, typing in www.userfriendly.org to view your favorite comic, and getting this message:

We’re sorry, but this feature is only available to premium subscribers of Comcast Internet. Please click here to upgrade your subscription for only $9.95 / month.

You’d be pretty pissed off right? Well, this situation will become reality tomorrow.

Congress is expected to pass a bill tomorrow allowing the cable companies control over their networks.

You see, under the communications decency act of 1996, telephone companies couldn’t offer preferential treatment. They simply had to allow any bits on their networks to flow. That’s how the freedom of the internet came about, and it’s largely responsible for its rapid growth; not to mention allowing anybody with a laptop to start a website.

A recent ruling said that high speed lines don’t fall under this act, and that’s where the problems come in.

Cable companies already miss the point (see the old “google is using my pipes and not paying me” type articles), and you can expect them to miss the point even more so after the bill gets approved wednesday.

The internet as we know it is over. Expect the monopolistic cable companies to engage in any type of profiteering or anti-competitive practices they see fit. After wednesday, there’s nothing in place to stop them.

January 1st, 2005

Gas Prices around the world.

With gas hitting $3/gallon today in some parts of the US, I figured I’d let you in on what other countries are paying.

here’s some gas prices (converted to US dollars per gallon) from around the world:

UK: $5

Germany: $5

Italy: $4.86

Japan: $3.84

Australia: $2.63

China: $1.54

Russia: $1.45

Azerbaijan (no clue where this is) $1.15

And finally…

Venezuela: $0.14 No, that’s not a typo!

Anybody else wanna move?

January 1st, 2005

0.000001 % = a HUGE problem?

Reading Wired today I noticed an article titled “MySpace has a perp problem” where they run the database of sex offenders against a MySpace search.

Their results? 5 confirmed accounts of sex offenders on myspace.

5!! that’s not a problem… 5/500,000,000 = .000000001 That’s really really really small. that’s 0.000001 %

It’s not like looking for a needle in a haystack and finding a pincusion.. it’s like looking for a needle in 100,000,000 haystacks.

This seems like such small numbers that it’s not even statistically significant.

I just wish the media would quit inventing problems and deal with actual ones.

Besides, who cares if a sex offender uses myspace?

In this example.. none of them had children in their friends list. NONE!!

Guess what.. tons of sex offenders use AIM, Yahoo, Gmail, and (gasp) most of them have computers too!

While we’re playing the numbers game.. I can say that statistically more sex crimes are committed by people with no criminal history than sex offenders. (there’s more non offenders, and most offenders are in jail.. duh!)

so OMG, WTF.. we need to protect ourself from non offenders too….

I don’t see the media going crazy with that statistic though..

January 1st, 2005

Wacky Taxes

Think you’re getting bent over this tax season? It could be worse:

• Arkansas taxes tattoos and piercings.

• Tennessee taxes illegal drugs.. that’s right, you need to pay a tax to put a stamp on your pot..pothead.

• Don’t play poker in Alabama.. they tax playing cards

• Maine taxes blueberries.

• Utah taxes sexually explicit business.. (wonder if blogging in your underwear counts?)

It could be worse though.. the average US citizen pays 29% in taxes..

Compare that to france where they pay 50.1% and we have it sorta good.

January 1st, 2005

New Car Time

Ok, it’s new car time. Here’s the short list of what I’m considering. Basically.. if it doesn’t go topless, it’s not for me.

Which one would you get?

Mustang GT convertible

Solstice

Sky

Thunderbird convertible

Corvette

crossfire conv

I really really like the Sky, but there’s an 8 month waiting list..

I’m also limited to Ford, GM, Chrysler, and Toyota cars… otherwise I’d have already bought the nissan 350z

Somebody help me decide.

January 1st, 2005