Brett Loses His Mind Part 2
Well it didn’t take long for some people to realize that BT could use some help getting all of those 2,050,000 pages out of Google.
And Danny also brings up a good point about how long it should really take for WebmasterWorld to go missing from SERPS.
If search engines are hitting that robots.txt ban repeatedly, they ought to be dropping those pages in short order, or they aren’t very good search engines.
Of course, Danny is correct. If an average mom & pop site excluded all bots, it certainly wouldn’t take 60 days for the pages to disappear. But what about a site like WebmasterWorld? Over 2 million pages of content that is served to searchers thousands of times a day. Will the engines give WebmasterWorld preferential treatment because they don’t want to lose all that valuable content?
Only time will tell. The clock is now ticking………
Brett Tabke Loses His Mind
Brett’s decided to finally deal with that nasty ingrown toenail by amputating his entire foot.
I’m certainly not going to question the problem of rogue bots crawling WebmasterWorld. I know it’s something he spends alot of time on. (I think he’s even banned me a couple of times). But banning all bots just to get rid of the rogue ones that happen to obey robots.txt?
And banning Google when you know that everyone relies on Google to find things at WebmasterWorld? The internal search function at WebmasterWorld has been a broken piece of crap for the last 5 years. How is it he is going to replace it in 60 days?
I understand wanting to test a a full robots.txt ban, but it really wouldn’t be very hard to simply cloak the robots.txt file to Google so they can continue to index the site while BT finds a search solution.
The Truth About Reciprocal Link Networks
Shortly after stage 2 of the recent Google algo update began, I received an email from a panic stricken ex-client. He woke up on a Monday morning to find all of the recent gains we had made Google were gone.
I was a bit shocked to hear this because this particular project was as "white hat" as they come. And from a keyword standpoint, it wasn’t even close to being a space that any competent SEO would consider competitive.
Back from Vegas
OK, I made it back from Vegas in one piece. I’d love to give everyone a rundown of all the great sessions, but I can’t because I only managed to make it to two of them. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any good scoop to report.
Some of the highlights:
1. Hearing that Anne Kennedy has recently become a grandmother of twins. (And in doing so, quickly earned the nickname Granny Anny. )
2. Hearing that Heather Lloyd Martin had finally come to her senses and parted ways with the largest SEO firm in the Universe! (Welcome back Heather).
3. Hearing Eytan Seidman from MSN Search admit that their first release was "quite possibly the worst search engine ever built."
4. Watching Todd pull the old "I can’t remember the name of the study off the top of my head, but I’ll gladly send it to you if you give me your email address" trick while he was moderating the organic search panel. (Misty, you should give that guy a raise!)
5. Dax making it through the entire trip without any encounters with hotel security.
Of course, there were also some lower moments like:
1. Dax getting us kicked out of the coolest club in Vegas for having shitty shoes.
2. Everything about the Sahara. (If Dana Todd ever gives you a recommendation on hotels in Vegas, don’t take it)
3. Finding out that Matt doesn’t believe I do my own graphics.
4. Promising Matt not to blog any of the cool stuff he told me.
5. Having Tedster tell me he couldn’t find my site feed. (It’s at the bottom of the page. http://www.webguerrilla.com/feed/ )
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?