Archive for September, 2005

I just found an old Google Friends Newsletter from May 1998 where it mentions:

To get the forward links of a page use "flink: < url >".

Wonder what happened to that command? We built our own tool to check forward links, if you haven’t seen it, check out our forward link tool.

I see Google stock is up 10.65 points today to 309.74 (it’s been bouncing around 300 for a few months now) It was more of a bargain than most of us thought back at 85 per share opening. I bought a few shares, but like all of us, wish I bought more….you too? Tool of the day: Check your Bandwith thanks to CNET

Here’s a search in eBay of the category "Websites & Businesses for Sale" ordered by price from highest to lowest. Lots of pipe dreams out there.

I wonder when everyone will have a blog or at least a website. Natural disasters like 911 or Hurricane Katrina which leave so many people missing, and spur new websites for lost people like Katrinalost.org and Katrinaslost.com (forum) and www.KatrinaSOS.org (hum…wonder how these sites excaped the sandbox)..anyways…wouldn’t it just be easier if everyone had their own blog space and if anyone was wondering where someone was they could just go to that persons blog space and check? This worked for fellow SEO Dazzlindonna when Katrina hit. It’s be cool if when you get your social security number, they’d also give you your web space. Even my baby has his own site www.samboykin.com.

I’ll be going to see Anthony Robbins in NYC Sept 16-19. I’m going partly to see "how he does his presentations" as well as maybe I can pick up some knowledge to better myself. Now that I’m speaking at Search Engine Strategies Conferences and Webmasterworld conferences, I’m seeking to better my presentations. I can see myself jumping around and screaming like Matthew Lesko, with the charisma of Anthony/Tony Robbins, with the confidence and entertaining value of Mike Grehan. - Yea right, all that in the 10-15 minutes we get to speak. Speaking of Lesko, I used to be a reseller for him, even had a quote from him on We Build Pages, allow me to share it with you: "Once you start doing something you love, you want to do it no matter how much money you are making. And you are going to do it better than most people around you because you are thinking about it all the time. You are going to take it home at night. You see it as a challenging puzzle. That is how I see my work. I do not think about it just nine to five. It is running through my mind all the time. So, if my competitor is only thinking about it nine to five, I am outworking them and out thinking them because I am doing it all the time. And when you live what you are doing that means it probably comes naturally to you, and it comes more naturally to you than others. You will not be forcing your body or your mind to do something that is unnatural. When you are born to do a task, you are going to do it better than other people." Matthew Lesko. I’m that way with internet marketing. I don’t stop thinking about it. Even my wife knows that much of the time she’s speaking to me, my mind is off in SEO Land. I wonder if others of you are that way too?

Earlier today I was showing someone a bunch of new sites (1 week to 3 months old) and we were analyzing backlinks using Yahoo’s Linkdomain, and found the usual. Each site showed a few "real" backlinks .. as well as each site was showing a handful of pages with Yahoo Cache’s that were "Search Engine Results Scraper Sites" (with Big Ole Adsense on top(and side, and bottom)). None of these scraper pages had Google Cache. (I realize google has issues too, but ya gotta say they do much better than Yahoo. Yahoo has a heftier amount of dmoz scraper shit, and regirgated search results shit.

It’s so ironic that Google buys and sells advertising space on the shittiest of pages….and it’s part at the expense of Yahoo because Yahoo doesn’t do a very good job at filtering tons of this regergitated shit... These pages which Google allows adsense on, but won’t allow them into their index?? I can just see the engineers at Google laughing at Yahoo, "Let them find our advertising on your indexed pages of crap! We’ll even pay people to spam your results".

I guess though that it’s not Google’s fault if Yahoo’s eating these pages up and serving them….after all, Yahoo want the "biggest index" (20 billion pages??) which includes a few billion of adsense spam pages.

Like I said earlier, wouldn’t an easy filter of "kill any page with 3 dots at the end of each main paragraph"? (not that that’s going to solve all problems, but it would clean a lot at the moment).

Actually the reason for starting this post was that I just finished editing one of the sites we work which has a page of Testamonials for that company. Several of the paragraphs in the testamonials had been shortened with the use of "…" and I just changed them all to 2 dots instead of 3 in case any filters do come this way

—– Tool of the day: We Build Pages Cool Cache Tool ——

I’m Feeling Lucky

Matt Cutts made big news last week with his blog post about "Text Links and Pagerank" where he asks advertisors to use the "rel=nofollow" tag when selling text links. The post itself as spawned a big list of comments that are worth reading. There’s another post by Tim at O’Reilly called "Search Engine Spam?" which has some great comments also worth reading, including comments by Matt as well. Including:

I’ve known about these O’Reilly links since at least 9/3/2003, and parts of perl.com, xml.com, etc. have not been trusted in terms of linkage for months and months. Remember that just because a site shows up for a "link:" command on Google does not mean that it passes PageRank, reputation, or anchortext.

I wonder how many people there are at Google just wacking sites with the ole "Block PageRank, Block Reputation, and block Anchortext" penalties. (anyone remember the old "BlockerPR" site?) You’d think some type of "block level analysis" could wipe out about 95% of ads (only counting links within content) (eh Google?)