Are you vacationing this spring? Lots of folks take a trip over Memorial Day weekend, which is coming up soon. I’m planning to enjoy some time off for the holiday while I reflect on the sacrifice of fallen U.S. soldiers. But… I can’t remember the exact date. It’s usually on a Monday, I recall. Oh wait, I’ll do a quick Google search for: “memorial day 2011.”

I just thought it was kind of funny that someone reserved the .org domain for the exact keyword phrase I was looking for, down to the very year of 2011. It will be interesting to see how well the exact match domain SEO tactic works next year at this time. Have a great Memorial Day!

Have you ever found yourself reading an article and realized that a word or two just seemed insanely out of place? And that if another more obvious word were substituted, the sentence would make perfect sense? Why didn’t the author use the correct wording? You may have been the victim of an article spin fail:

a SEO tactic whereby numerous unique versions of an original article are automatically generated by searching and replacing keywords and phrases, but that does not make sense to the human eye.

If you’re like me, you probably don’t read as much as you’d like. Call me prejudiced, but when I read, I like to read works that are written by humans. I won’t call out the source, but I stumbled the above phrase while strolling through a neighbor’s content farm. Do you think the above was written by a human? Someone or something totally missed the point.

Notice the first sentence in the bullet point. Note the capitalization. How should the sentence have read?

All a man wants to do is use the site operator in Google, but noooo…  If you type “site:” in the search field, before you get a chance to type in the domain, Google Instant suggests the most popular search results and look what you get, a bunch of 15 year old girls taking pictures of themselves. I didn’t even know what a ”site model” was. Take my word, I’ve been educated by Google.

With all the Charlie Sheen eruptions in the news of late, I thought I’d look at the state of the most valuable rendition of Charlie’s name in Internet terms: CharlieSheen.com. It turned out to be a far gnarlier situation than imagined. CharlieSheen.com is on drugs. Here are five reasons why the domain in its current state, is far from winning:

1. CharlieSheen.com is Down

Celebrity status aside, one of the most important aspects of a winning website starts with, well, being able to view it. CharlieSheen.com displays the  default ”404 page not found” page in any browser that requests the page. 404 is the http status code that occurs when a website is aka losing, aka not winning. 100% down time means no train wreck to watch. Listen and hear it crying out for web hosting. More of this blog post »

Hey SEO’s, what’s wrong with this Google AdSense advertisement? Don’t you love the way that two businesses have to co-exist on the same Google AdSense ad? One way to avoid SEO malpractice is to restrain yourself from the practice of guaranteed SEO:

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google.

Perhaps the above quote from the Google Search Engine Optimization Guidelines should read No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google except a Google advertiser.

I’m heading out to buy my copy of Call of Duty Black Ops and have a few thoughts before go. Multiplayer online games have been part of my life since the mid-1990′s. It was lonely in those days, firing up the old 28k modem and a bit of hope to connect with friends. I remember wanting to play certain games like flight sims and there just not being enough opponents around. The graphics were quite bad so I had to use the imagination to sufficiently suspend reality. Yes, I remember literally stalking the truck that delivered some of the 3DFX Voodoo 2 graphics cards to my neighborhood. If you were a gamer, you were a geek in those days. More of this blog post »

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So this is how web designers get all those of links. This might work for most folks, but not me. Recently I asked for an estimate from several web design firms for a new project. One of the web design firms replied with a rather lengthy questionairre for to fill out and return. When I saw number 5, I stopped cold, yelled loudly, then closed the questionairre. One thing I am not going to do is pay a web designer 20% of the project price to keep his link off of my site.

How could you, my fellow and former diggers, think there was so little to love about the latest version of the social media news site, Digg 4? There is plenty. Not seeing the ground for the dirt? I’m going to open your eyes, then and call a shovel a shovel. What’s there to love about Digg 4? More of this blog post »

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