Thursday, August 31, 2006
I am completely disillusioned with Craig’s List these days. I am seeing so much censorship I almost feel like it’s time to analyze just how much influence CL might have on the American public’s perception of their communities. Check out the RANTS & RAVES section of your local CraigsList. What do you see? Well, if […]
The news of the day: Danny Sullivan is a free agent. One of the biggest names in search, he started SearchEngineWatch back in the late 90’s around the time I first started focusing on search penetration as a competitive venue. I was used to BoardWatch (no longer around), the defining website of the BBS world, […]
With all the current chatter about LSI and LSA I decided to re-emphasize something I dropped in a forum years ago : GO words. Not the Go Words defined here, but the ones I defined for myself when first analyzing Google’s love of semantic analysis. Sorry for re-using what appears to be already defined in […]
You don’t need a web site any more These days, everybody needs SEO. Why? Because they need traffic, and the only traffic many business web sites get these days is the traffic that the search engines send to them. And of the search engines sending that traffic, Google sends the most by far. So the […]
I think I have discovered the Holy Grail of SEO this time. A javascript redirect that Google can’t detect. Do you know what that means? It means you can put up almost 10,000 pages of keyword spam nonsense, interlink it on keyword anchor tags, and add this javascript redirect on every one of those pages […]
Saturday, August 26, 2006
Copyblogger is reporting that a Telegraph post attributed to telegraph writer Melissa Whitworth was actually copied exactly from the mediabistro blog, where it was published days ago. That’s wholesale copy of the entire first-person blogging, with no attribution, and beneath the byline of a telegraph reporter. Why was it discovered so fast? She must have […]
Saturday, August 26, 2006
Most readers know I loathe giving away free advice. That is just one way that I protect my clients. I often wonder where the beef is in many SEO blogs for that very reason. WHY talk about fight club, if you are a successful member? It doesn’t make sense to me. What is Latent Semantic […]
Saturday, August 26, 2006
I just read an older post by incrediBill, that revealed he once programmed IBM 360 assembler. Wow. It’s clear now where all that anger comes from, and the hyberbolic distortions of justice and righteousness that pervade his blog. Not only did I manage to survive my 360 assembler days without nearly as much personality damage, […]
Once again I’m trying out some Web 2.0 applications, and once again I am struck by the style. A few observations: I am going to have to extend my name. Two names are not enough in Web 2 land. Problem is, I only have two so I’llhave tomake up the rest. Something like John Brandon […]
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Out of the “unbelievable” department comes a report that AOL (the company that accidentally-on-purpose released all that private search data) plans to bulldoze the yard of some folks in Massachusettes, looking for gold and platinum bars that an AOL spammer may have buried there. What?? Yes, they prosecuted one of the Spam Kings for spamming, […]
On Monday morning we saw signals of Google’s knobs turned too high on nearby word associations. I suggested that you : Go ahead and talk about keyword one and keyword two today and tomorrow. The anchor text doesn’t matter as much as the distance to the nearest neighbors today. Today the SERPs are all full […]
Try it for yourself. Put this adsense pub-id onto a porn page, and damned if you don’t get racy porn banner ads from Google. The full Google AdSense script is : Thanks to my favorite adult webmaster incrediBill for the tip. PS: Hey Google: Why do you let scrapers put AdSense ads onto illegal copies […]
When clients and associates talk about SEO they sounds so deterministic, causal, and definitive. They often make statements like “much of the SEO advice on the web is untrue” and “very few SEOs realy know what they are talking about”. It’s easy to get defensive but there is no reason to: the client’s are venting. […]
Saturday, August 12, 2006
The thing about CSS is, you start with plain content and style it until you’re happy. But humans don’t do that. They start with styled content, and modify the style until they are happy. So the perfect solution should be a basic style that can be infinitley modified, one little bit of CSS at a […]
Note to self: don’t bother with further research into MSN search. It is what it is. That’s the competitive intel decision after reading this blog. The guy started there in April, and you know the only way Microsoft could hire this guy from technorati was by presenting opportunity. That means RESOURCES, of the financial and […]
Thursday, August 10, 2006
“It’s time to get ready for Oprah”, I said to the client. “We have much to do, and everything we can do to get ready for Oprah will pay off handsomely afterwards. We don’t want to be regretting later that we were not prepared.” And so, we are now getting ready for Oprah. Are you […]
Wednesday, August 9, 2006
WANTED: Junior level Scammers and Spammers as apprentice Craig’s List Manipulators Background: Craig’s List is a community classifieds web site with city-specific sections for most major United States cities. Within each city are sections for free classified ads in everything from real estate to computer jobs to pet adoption. Craig’s List has replaced the local […]
A few years ago someone handed me a document describing the Department of Veteran’s Affairs IT organization. It was an impressive print from a nicely-done PDF file. It would have surely been all glossy if it had been one of the hard copy editions I imagined were passed around the higher circles of Washington. I […]
AOL released 1.9 million queries, from 650,000 AOL subscribers 10 days ago on an AOL research web page. Visitors could download the searches and “play with it”. AOL pulled the data today, admitting it was a privacy violation and something it never should have done. Also according to the AP report, The data file included […]
I have a one hour seminar called “On Your Mark!, Get Set! Falsify WHOIS! where I discuss the public WHOIS database, and how competitive webmasters might best approach that issue. I submitted that talk for the New York PHP Conference this past summer, but my schedule didn’t allow me to follow through. Maybe I will […]
One of the more interesting aspects of my work is competitive intelligence. Who is competing in the market, using what tactics, and with what success? When limited to online activities, CI shows you what they *have been* doing, not what they may be doing now. However, as I learned quite well during my 10 years […]
Hard to believe any industry could be worse at adopting innovation than the US auto industry. But, as usual, the RIAA member companies surpirse us once again. Ford and GM are externalizing the costs of changing the music industry, by pausing adoption of sattellite radio and moving forward with iPod integration. You, the pirate consumer, […]
Yes, it’s “Hack a Mac in 60 seconds” and “Macbook easily hacked” and all about the Mac being susceptible to a remote wireless hack that gives the hacker complete access to the local machine. Is it true? Well, not really. The hack attacks a device driver that is used by some companies wireless cards, and […]
Wednesday, August 2, 2006
There is no room for cynics in Web2.0 I was in a board room at the start of the first dot com boom, watching Price Waterhouse Coopers put on a Web1.0 face with a few ragged-headed , brash, linguistically-challenged yoots that “got” the Internet. The truth I determined during that meeting, is that the only […]
Over at MightyHitter we see how Google’s predictive advertising causes Chinese language ads to show up on (his?) English language blog. I am willing to bet that Chinese character ads perform better than English character ads on an English website with a Chinese audience. Go Google. That Google is serving ads based on the context […]
I just read one of the many “Top Ten” lists telling people how to make money with AdSense, and how to avoid getting banned by Google. I was inspired to make my own “Top Eight AdSense Mistakes Webmasters Make”. 1. Don’t do anything that won’t make Google richer. Google is greedy. It’s all about the […]
I think the US Track and Field Association have executed an excellent “modern day SEO” opportunity on their web site at USATF.org. As many of you engage is “SEO” for your web sites, and we touch upon the numerous aspects of Competitive Webmastering and some of the opportunities for your particular web sites, it is […]