Posts filed under 'Main'
When it comes to freshness of sites and indexing time, it appears to me that Google is the hands down winner – Especially when it comes to spidering deep links.
About 3 days ago I added another trap word to NoSlang.com, my Internet slang dictionary. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, a “trap word” is simply a word that doesn’t exist but is added to a dictionary for the sole purpose of seeing if anybody is copying your material. I’ve got about 5 or 6 in the whole dictionary, and they’ve been very useful for spotting copycats.
I always hate being that asshole, but I’ve actually had 2 or 3 sites shut down at the web host level after their owners repeatedly ignored my requests to stop copying my shit.
After 3 days of having this word up there (on a page about 3 clicks deep) I can say that only Google shows results for the search term. This particular word is http://preferredmode.com/aboutme/ istwfn – an abbrevation for “I stole this word from noslang.com.”
Check it out: Google shows results. Yahoo, Ask, Live, A9, and even Altavista don’t show anything yet.
Note: these searches will probably all soon show this post due to it’s regularly fast indexing, but they still don’t show the noslang.com page.
I know Google’s had some recent criticism lately about freshness, but it looks like they’re on the right track.
September 14th, 2007
I just posted this over on shoutwire, but I’m reposting it here too.
With their constant attempts to sue Google for sending them traffic or lock up their content, it’s pretty clear that most newspapers don’t understand the internet – and why should they?
The internet is basically the anti-newspaper. Where a newspaper is designed to be one source of news for people in a specific location. As sites like this prove, people want differing viewpoints in their news. We read the stories that interest us – and only those stories.
Call it “infosnacking” if you want, but that’s how today’s youth gets their news. Actually, I’m not even sure what infosnacking means, but I haven’t used it since it was declared word of the year.
Unfortunately, newspapers aren’t following the trends. Almost every day I see a new article popping up about somebody suing Google for having their articles in Google news while search engine marketers like myself are pulling out hairs trying to get our content listed there.
If you’re not familiar with Google news it’s basically an aggregator like Shoutwire. Instead of being user submitted though, Google scans the web for news stories, shows a snippet, and links to the original version. There are no ads on Google news.
The newspapers don’t like this. It doesn’t allow them total control of their content, and it really screws up their advertising demographics. Whereas before a Colorado newspaper could ensure most of it’s visitors lived in Colorado, Google news brings a whole slew of new visitors.
They’ve gone so far as to accuse Google of stealing their content where it’s clearly fair us, and they’ve even tried to sue over increased bandwith costs from the Google traffic.
I’m not even going to elaborate on the newspaper outrage over the recently released feature allowing involved parties to add comments or clarifications on news stories. (or in the case of Fox news, a non GOP spin on things.) Editors everywhere are crying foul – as if it’s not possible for a non journalist to have an educated opinion.
Well, earlier this month Google released a feature that my just give newspapers their wish.
After signing a deal with the AP, Google news will no longer link to AP syndicated stories. Instead, they’ll host them on their own servers.
This move not only reduces thousands of redundant links (as many AP stories show up in well over 50 newspapers) but ensures that readers view the original version credited to the original author. It’s helpful to the user while giving credit where credit is due.
It’s also very likely to cause huge traffic decreases for newspapers who only republish AP stories without adding any insight of their own.
Papers that “get it” and do actual reporting of their own stories however will most likely see more prominent listings and more traffic.
The question is: will the other papers notice the lack of traffic? If they do, will they care? I’m sure their advertisers will.
September 5th, 2007
A while ago I wrote a post about how magsforless.com ripped me off. Looking on the web, it appears I wasn’t the only one who complained. It also appears that the company has many unresolved complaints at the BBB.
After my post I’ve gotten tons of blog comments from them saying to email them and they’ll resolve the issue… however all my emails go unanswered. I actually think they have a PR bot running that automatically posts the same comment on any bad press they get. I’ve seen the same response in a lot of places
So it’s pretty clear that magsforless.com is nothing but a huge ripoff – but why hasn’t there been a class action lawsuit? The company is based in the US.
Luckily, I was only burned for a few bucks from this shady company – but I’m sure others have lost a ton of money. Money that magsforless doesn’t deserve.
If you ask me, Joel Simkhai is a thief and a con artist. Go ahead and post your “email me directly” drivel here but until you refund the thousands of dollars you’ve apparently stolen from people you’ll still be slime in my book.
September 5th, 2007
I haven’t gotten any sleep the past few days due to my cat being in heat. If you’ve never experienced the pleasantness of a cat in heat, do this: Take your bed to the busiest intersection you can find and put it right in the middle. You’ll get more sleep than I did.
They say it lasts 5-10 days, and this is day 6 so hopefully it won’t be that much longer. I have to think my neighbors are getting a bit fed up, because I can actually hear her from outside – through a shut door – while in the car – with the windows up – the air on – the motor running – and the music playing.
I’ll be posting an update soon – after the screaming stops and the cat gets fixed.
September 4th, 2007
Using a nice little keyword tool I stumbled upon a keyword that gets a few hundred searches but nobody is bidding on. Things like this are rare and I quickly placed my adwords ad for such keyword.
I got a Great quality score, and it returned a minimum bid of $0.04. I copied another ad campaign, so I left my max bid at 35 cents.
A quick search for the keyword showed ONLY my ad – no others.
The problem is, I received 2 clicks on it today totaling 46 cents in cost. That’s 23 cents/click!!
If the minimum bid is 4 cents, and I’m the only person bidding on this keyword… why wasn’t I only charged 4 cents?
August 29th, 2007
In a story that’s surprisingly not showing up on any of the major news sites, online betting site Bodog.com has lost it’s domain name. I’d have linked to the site here, but there’s no site there to link to.
It seems that Bodog failed to show up in court to answer an infringement claim filed by 1st Technology. As a result, the judge gave a default judgment against Bodog for the amount of 48.6 million. Unable to seize any assets, 1st Technology took the Bodog.com domain name.
Bodog quickly moved their site to newbodog.com, however the loss of the domain name will be a major problem for their business. The fact that this story isn’t seeing major news means that many players will be left in the dark not knowing about the new website.
Even worse, is the affect on their traffic from the domain loss. Bodog enjoyed very favorable search engine results – including being #1 in Google for the term “betting.” Having lost control of the domain, they will be unable to do a 301 redirect to their new site or anything similiar. In the eyes of Google, Bodog went from being an authority site to being a brand new gambling related domain that has 0 inlinks – and lots of duplicate content.
Basically, they’re fucked.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
August 29th, 2007
In his recent book, fark.com founder Drew Curtis talks about seasonal news stories. You know, the news stories that seem to pop up every year around the same time.
That’s why most journalists love the first week of September. We can just sit back and let the stories write themselves. Open up word, change the date, submit, drink beer.
We love this time in particular because many seasonal articles overlap.
With school starting, the backpacks are too heavy stories are starting to show up now, and any day your local newspaper should be running the “traffic will be heavy this weekend as Americans travel for labor day” articles they love to print.
It’s also about the time parents are getting their first college tuition bills, so you’ll soon be hearing about tuition increases as well.
After our vacation we’ll all hurriedly write articles about celebrities and finally air those feel good humanity stories we’ve been saving up before diving headfirst into a 4 month long political frenzy. (which seems to come earlier and earlier every year)
This week though, we don’t have to do anything but serve up the same tired old articles we did last year (and probably wrote 5 years ago).
I’m writing this one so that next year all I have to do is change the hyper links before heading up to the lake for the week.
Speaking of the lake, I’m taking the rest of the week off to go play disc golf and drink beer. I’ll see you guys Tuesday.
August 28th, 2007
If you were one of the first to get an iPhone, you may have experienced a little bit of shock when opening your first phone bill since switching. Personally, my bill was 20 some pages long – compared to the 3 pages Cingular used to send me before becoming AT&T.
The reason for killing an extra tree? It seems that AT&T itemized all my data usage. Since I constantly checked out websites on my phone at work, in the car, on the toilet, in bed, etc, I had LOTS of data line items with a charge of 0.
I laughed when I got my first bill, and thought “wow, I wonder how many trees the iPhone is killing” before dropping it all in my shredder.
The good news is, it’s going to stop! I just got a text message from AT&T saying that they’re going to remove item detail on my next bill, and if I’d like it to get it online or call 611. That’s a change in the right direction. Now if only they’d actually offer that $5 unlimited texting they talk about on TV instead of hiding the required “data plan purchase” away in the small text.
August 22nd, 2007
UPDATE: The shoutwire post is no longer available, so I’m re posting it here in its entirety.
If you’ve ever sat down and talked to your grandparents you’ve probably heard countless tales of what life was like back in the day. You might hear them talk about long forgotten technologies like rotary phones, black and white televisions that had 6 channels, an antennae and no remote, or (depending on your age) items like punch cards and the telegraph. Today’s generation would be hard pressed to remember records, reel to reel recordings, or dialing the operator to make a call. If you kept listening to old Grandad he’d regale you with stories about 10 cent gas and 5 cent stores before going off on a rant about Hitler and those damn Japs as he slowly drifts off to sleep in his chair. I myself even remember complaining about gas going up to 89 cents. Ah, those were the days.
You may be laughing and calling me an old man, but we’ll all be there one day. We’ll be able to tell our kids about long gone technologies
too – when we’re not busy yelling at them to get off of our lawn or ranting about Saddam Hussein.
So before I drift off into a rant about those damn terrorists, let me present my top 10 endangered items / ideas list. I predict that most (if not all) of these things will be extinct long before our grand kids send us off to the old folks home.
1. The Newspaper. Just last night I was having dinner with my grandparents and we were discussing my cousin’s inability to find a job after college (side note: Don’t list beer pong on your resume.) My mom chimed in with “it’s not like he’s trying, he’s only been looking online.” As somebody who’s currently looking to hire both programming and graphic design interns (seriously if you’re in the Detroit area drop me a line) I had to chime in with “well, where else should he look?” Should I get help from a PrincePerelson professional job recruiter to make sure I get a good hire?
Have you looked at the want ads lately? Compared to sites like monster.com or indeed.com the newspapers can’t compete – and it shows. Nobody’s advertising there. All 3 jobs I’ve had since college have all been found online – and I certainly wouldn’t think of even posting a job somewhere else.
The same is true for news. I don’t know anybody under 30 who gets a regular newspaper subscription. We all go online for our news. As far as the paper is concerned, it’s old news. Not only that, it’s 100% objective. As proven by all of today’s social sites and news aggregators (like this one) today’s youth wants insight and opinion. Above all, they want to be able to discuss the news with others. The newspaper industry is dying a quick death and most of them don’t even realize it. Instead of embracing technology they’re still fighting it by locking up content and trying to sue Google for sending them traffic. Of all the technologies I’m about to list, this one will crash and burn the hardest.
2. Land Line Phones. I could have said pay phones, but they’re just a symptom of a greater cause. Land line phones are all but dead. If the cell phone didn’t kill them, services likeSkype and SIPphone certainly will (provided it’s not windows update day.) With cell phone long distance being cheaper than most land lines, there’s really no reason to have another phone at home. T-Mobile seems to have spotted this trend and is offering a cell phone that also works on a wireless router, but even that is a dying model. As cell phone competition is increasing it’s only a matter of time before rate plans are reduced to flat monthly fees. We saw it happen with regular long distance, and there’s no reason to prevent it from happening with cell phones. Hang on to that old corded phone in your parents kitchen – it may just be worth something in a few years.
3. Phone Books. Sticking with the phone motif, printed phone books will have to be #3 on the list. I personally throw them right in the recycle bin when the arrive, and you’d be hard pressed to find a 20-something who isn’t using theirs to prop up a table, tear in half, or for shooting practice. You don’t have to be a strongman to tear one in half. There’s a trick to it. Catch me in the bar and bet $20 and I’ll show you how. This is another area where online services are stepping in and doing a better job than print media (we’ll see a few more of those a little lower down.) EvenYellowpages.com can’t do as good of a job as Google, Yahoo, MSN , and Ask are doing. Looking at daily traffic reports for my 20 or so clients, Google local is delivering about 70-80 times the visitors asyellowpages.com and bluebook.com. The situation is so bad that Yellowpages .com has even resorted to offering “paid inclusion” programs, and advertising programs where you can pay them to place your ad on Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. That’s not a sign that things are going good for them. The same arguments here can also be applied toward dictionaries, thesauruses, and eventually even bibles.
4. The Music Album. Technically, this concept is already on life support. There was a time when people would buy an album and listen to it from start to end. There was also a time when the order of the songs added to the overall music listening experience. Unfortunately, that time coincided with the popularity of the phonograph. In today’s ultra compressed post-Napster music industry nobody buys albums; they buy songs – for $0.99 each. Of course, most of you probably favor the free but illegal downloading option. Even then, I’m willing to bet you download more individual songs than complete albums. Buyers aren’t thinking of music in terms of albums anymore. Perhaps it’s a good thing though, as very few artists think of music that way either. In a way, I could have listed the “CD” here instead, but I’m not 100% convinced that the death of the CD wasn’t caused by the death of the album.
5. Record Stores. Here’s another one currently pricing iron lungs. It’s only natural that when the album dies it takes the record store with it. The album may have gone quietly, but the record store is making it a slow agonizing process. Thanks toiTunes , and all of the post-Napster clones, today’s youth aren’t going out and buying records. Sure equal blame can be given to the high price ofCDs or the fact that most CDs only contain 2 or 3 decent songs, but that’s an economics argument better left for another time. Record stores are dead. Ask Tower or Harmony House. Next.
6. Video Stores. Video may have killed the radio star, but it’s going to suffer the same fate as its audio counterpart. We’re already seeing services likeNetflix replace the mom and pop video stores all over the country. With a simple business model and ease of use, the internet is killing yet another once flourishing business sector. As a child I’d spend hours walking the aisles looking for new movies. Now, I simply spend minutes looking at myNetflix recommendations.
7. TV Channels. Cable TV may be in it’s prime now, but it’s days are numbered. Expect to see great numbers from the cable companies in 2009 when the analog stations suddenly go silent, but after that it’s going to be a sharp decline. WhenTIVO came out the general TV viewing philosophy changed from that of a channel to that of a program. The decline here will be slow as the big companies cling to their outdated business models, but eventually we’ll see the A-La-Carte channel plans we all so desperately desire. After that, services like Joost, YouTube, and iTunes will take over selling by the program. Eventually, you’ll be able to enjoy the features of the IPTV Extreme on the Firestick to watch your favorite shows like House, American Idol, or Survivor Moon.
8. The 9-5 Workday. If you work in the tech or programming industry you’re probably laughing and pointing out that it’s been dead for some time now. You’re right, it has – and it’s going to get worse. At my last job it was the norm for programmers to come in between 8 and 8:30, eat a 15 minute lunch at their desk, and pack up sometime around 6:30 or 7 – only to check their work email again as soon as they got home. With outsourcing the job now picks up in India before the US developer even gets his coat on. In Japan it’s common for employees to wait each other out at the end of the day, as they’re all afraid of being seen as the first person to leave the office. Unfortunately that trend is coming stateside. Long gone are the days where we could make $100,000 salaries simply for knowing HTML. Bubble2.0 is different.
9. Unions. It naturally follows that as we start embracing the eastern working philosophies we’ll start shedding some fat. THe biggest area of bulk plaguing the American economy now is unions. They may have worked for dear old granddad, but they just don’t make sense anymore. Unions don’t promote work, and they consume resources. Today’s economy rewards hard work. With a union, most employees are promoted and rewarded based on time logged. Not only is it not best for business, but it actually demotivates employees. There’s no reason to work harder than the guy next to you if he’s going to get the same pay increase right? With GM spending millions on Viagra for retirees it’s no wonder they can’t compete with the Toyota’s of the world.
10. Film. Technology is rapidly replacing film in both still and moving pictures. With digital cameras being ubiquitously installed in pretty much anything that plugs in, there won’t be a need for film. It used to be one could only achieve certain photographic effects in a darkroom, but programs likePhotoshop and the GIMP are quickly replacing skilled dark room technicians
. Camcorders are also going digital, and movie studios are starting to follow suit. It’s a gradual transition, but we’re transitioning nonetheless. We’ll still have to solve the problems associated with storing all of these pictures and videos, but companies like Google (YouTube) and Yahoo (Flickr) are doing a pretty good job in the interim. Then there’s the digital degradation issue too, but most photos should easily last 10 years or so. By then they’ve probably either been copied to new media, or long since forgotten about. You didn’t really want to save that picture of you hitting the bong in your underwear did you?
So there you have it. 10 items you’ll be able to tell your grand kids about while they’re changing diapers and trying to think of an excuse to leave the room. It’s not that they won’t care what you’re talking about, it’s just that you’ll have told it to them at least 70 times by then. Of course that won’t stop you – and it also won’t stop them from listening either. Trust me on this one. Go talk to your grandparents. Ask them about their childhood. Not only will you learn something, but you might even gain an even better story to tell your kids. At the very worst, it’ll at least get granddad to change the subject away from kicking Hitler’s ass.
Oh, and hey…. get off my lawn…. damned kids.
I just did a post over on shoutwire called 10 endangered ideas. Basically, it’s a look at 10 things that exist today that our grandkids (or kids) won’t be familiar with. In other words, dying technologies. Go Check it Out. It’s a good read.
If you’d like to see some of my other shoutwire feeds, you can subscribe to their RSS feed below:
RSS URL
Or you can view them all at this link:
www.dotcult.com/shoutwire.php
Depending on how long I decide to stay at Shoutwire (their advertising is pissing me off) I may or may not integrate that with this blog.
I’m just posting here because I feel a little guilty. Most of my better posts have been going over on Shoutwire, but I know some (or all 3 even) of my readers would enjoy reading it.
August 20th, 2007
Update: Google added the word excessive in front of the passage I mentioned today (8-16-07). It clarifies a little bit, but still begs the question: what’s excessive?
Google recently updated it’s webmaster guidelines with some information that’s causing a big stir on the internet. If you look under the examples of “link schemes” you’ll see this little tidbit:
Link exchange and reciprocal links schemes (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
Am I to understand that one can now be banned from Google for having reciprocal links? If so, there’s some serious implications that come to mind:
- What about all of the sites that pre-date Google? Reciprocal linking happened way before Google was around. You can’t expect all these websites to suddenly change.
- What about sister sites? Example: On Noslang.com I link to my drug translator, and on the drug translator I link to my slang translator. I don’t do this for pagerank, I do it because my visitors may be looking for a slang term that the other dictionary includes. It’s proven useful. Am I to get banned because both sites are relevant to each other and helpful to the user?
- What about press mentions? It’s very common for a website to link back to a news article that mentions them. You want your visitors to see your press accolades. Are these seen as reciprocal links and bad for my website?
- What about blogrolls or blog networks? Even Matt Cutts had a blogroll at one time, and many of these people linked back in their blogrolls. It’s helpful to users because they can read similiar content. Is this a penalty? Backlink Doctor has the best guides on fixing your site if a Google penalty has hit you.
There’s got to be a better method than “banning” that the guidelines mention. If Google can detect reciprocal links, they can just as easily not give them any weight in the algorithm. This way, users still benefit and the search engines aren’t “gamed.” Maybe it’s just a clarification issue on the webmaster guidelines page, or I’m reading it wrong.
Either way,I think we still need some clarification on this new update from Matt and Adam – because as it’s written I’d venture to say that about 90% of sites are in violation of the new guidelines. Of course, banning everybody who uses reciprocal links would certainly save on bandwith and allow Google to index the remaining web with near real-time updates. Isn’t that what we’ve all been pushing for?
August 14th, 2007
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