PubCon in Vegas
I’m heading out in the morning to attend PubCon in Vegas. It should be an exciting couple of days. It will be the first time in a very long time that I’ve attended a search conference without being a speaker. That means I can go out and party without having the thought of my unfinished PowerPoint presentation hanging over my head. In a town like Vegas, that could mean some serious trouble.
And now that I am a blogger, I will also be taking my camera along with me. Hopefully, I’ll be able to capture some of the drunken foolishness that tends to take place at these special events.
Google The Punisher
Both Aaron and Danny have posted great follow-up pieces about the Wordpress spamming case. For those of you who don’t know about it, here’s a quick recap:
Last February, Wordpress developer Matt Mullenweg signed a deal with a notorious search engine spammer named Chad Jones. (aka HotNacho). In exchange for cash, Matt agreed to host several thousand "articles" on his site that had nothing to do with blogging (or even software development for that matter). He then put up some hidden links to the off-topic content on the homepage of wordpress.org.
The theory behind the little experiment was simple; the combination of high TrustRank and PageRank of wordpress.org should propel all the HotNacho articles to the top of Google SERPS.
Free at Last!!
I’m pleased to announce that it is finally safe for women and children to once again return to their computers and resume their normal web searching activities. Thanks to Gordon Hotchkiss, and his fellow righteous SEO brethren, we can all navigate the web without ever having to encounter the life-threatening debris known as search engine spam.
While all of us were locked away, impatiently waiting for the big three to finally hire competent engineers, Gordon and his friends were out teaching corporate America how to write title tags.
As it turns out, that’s all that we really needed. Now, all the big brands have assumed their god-given right at the top of the SERPS. The shear magnatude of quality sites now rocketing to the top has caused a mass exodus of black-hat spammers.
We are now safe.
Thank you Gordon.
Disrespectful SEO
Matt Cutts recently posted a comment about how disrespectful it was to auto-generate doorway domains named after fatal hurricanes.
his specific comments:
If you’re going to autogenerate spammy doorway domains, here’s a tip: don’t name them after fatal hurricanes like Katrina:
It’s not only a bad idea, it’s disrespectful.
So my question for Matt is this:
Is it more or less disrespectful when the domain spammer is a Google business partner??
Yahoo Dumps Minimum Spend
To be honest, I didn’t even realize that Yahoo had a minimum spend. Turns out, the reason I was unaware is because it was only $20.00!
The most amazing thing about the announcement is the fact that so many people seem thrilled that they will finally have the opportunity to test out Yahoo’s paid search.
What a joke. If you honestly can’t afford $20.00 a month to promote your website, you shouldn’t even be on the web.
Oh my God, I’ve Become a Blogger
So how is it that someone who has gone on record dozens of times as absolutely despising everything involved with blogging end up sitting in front of a computer monitor hacking away on a stock copy of Wordpress?