I’m Not Dead Yet
I’m still alive. It’s just been a real busy summer. A lot of family travel as well as work travel has kept me away from the blog. I’m out of the country at the momment, and then off to SES San Jose next week. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get back to the blog after I get back.
In the meantime, we are going to do our best to do a live Rockstar show tomorrow. Feel free to post any show suggestions.
The Captain’s Back….
It’s Dax vs. eBay, round 2.
Last week, Dax’s moustache auction was on fire. The auction page had received more than 14,000 visitors, and the bid price was up to $400.00. But then the whole thing came crashing down. eBay pulled the auction because Dax had included a link to his blog. Apparently, that’s against the rules.
I’m happy to report the auction is now back. (minus the offending link). It also has some new great features. If you are interested in testing the moustache out, you can send Dax your photo and he’ll add the Captain and publish it for all to see.
WebGuerrilla 2.0
I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past few months that I was looking for some quality people interested in joining team Guerrilla. When we made the initial decision to expand the team, I thought the process would be relatively painless and fairly quick.
Man was I wrong.
The first hurdle was deciding what type of skill set was initially the most important for us to acquire. On the surface, one might think that adding a couple of people with strong SEO backgrounds would have been the best way to go. After all, if you have more SEO talent, you can take on more clients. But then I realized that no two SEO consultants approach a project in exactly the same way. And that means that in order to grow efficiently, I would need to spend time teaching new people my methodology.
Unfortunately, 99% of my methodology resides in my head. I’ve never bothered to document the way I do things because I’ve never really needed to. That’s one of the perks of being a solo consultant. But it is also a great obstacle when it comes to efficient growth.
So I decided what I needed most was a kick ass Biz Dev guy. Someone with the skill set necessary to suck 10 years of SEO experience out of my brain and then help me mold that information into a scalable business model that would provide the foundation necessary to build WebGuerrilla 2.0.
It sure sounded easy enough. And I certainly looked at a lot of great resumes. But I quickly discovered that the tough part was finding someone with the right chemistry. I mean, let’s face it—when you’ve spent the last three years working with someone who’s idea of entertainment is selling his porn moustache on eBay, your concept of the ideal work environment gets a bit distorted. For better or for worse, working in “the world according to Dax” has become something I truly value. We work hard, and we play hard. And that isn’t something I’m willing to give up in order to grow.
So all I needed to do was find someone with a ton of real-world experience who was genuinely interested in working in our weird little world….
Well, I’m happy to report we finally found the right guy. His name is Adam Sussman. (aka ShandyKing). Choosing Adam wasn’t a quick decision by any stretch of the imagination. He had to go through a rigorous multi-interview process that included a couple of Beer Friday’s and an evening of Sushi and Sake with me and Mrs. Guerrilla. But in the end, we all felt he was the right guy for the job. And I can say without hesitation based on what he’s already accomplished in the two weeks he’s been here that we made a great choice.
Welcome aboard Adam
Contest Payment Complete
We were able to complete the contest verification process earlier today. In case you missed Todd’s post, here is the list of top 5 sites we found at the end of the contest:
- 1. http://www.v7ndotcomelursebmem.net
2. http://www.jimwestergren.com/v7ndotcom-elursrebmem/
3. http://www.v7ndotcomelursebmem.com
4. http://www.watching-paint-dry.com/v7ndotcom-elursrebmem/
5. http://www.web-marketing.pl
Of those four sites, #1 and #4 were compliant with our rules. The respective owners both asked me to donate the prize money to the Center for Celiac Research. Before the end of the contest, Todd and I decided that any prize money that was not paid to a top 5 site due to lack of compliance with our rules would be donated to the highest ranking charity site. That turned out to be site #4. so in the end, the Center for Celiac Research ended up receiving the entire $4,600.00 that Todd, Mike and I had agreed to contribute.
Contest Update
Just a quick note to let everyone know about how Todd and I will be handling the contest ending today. I’m traveling today, so Todd will be in charge of capturing a screen shot of Google at 12:00 pm PST. Once we have that, we’ll sit down and go through the list to check which sites are compliant, and then we’ll get started on sending the money out.
Because we will both be traveling this week, it might take us a couple of days get it all worked out, but I’m confident we’ll get everyone paid by the end of the week.
iPowerWeb, Inc. – Search Engine Spammers?
I never thought the day would come when a hosting company might be able to give GoDaddy a run for their money when it comes to being the shittiest hosting company on the web, but today might be that day.
A couple of weeks ago we started tripping over all kinds of JavaScript redirected doorway pages coming from the domain pixiesmusic.com. The pages were coming from several different subdomains and covered dozens of different keyword topics. (Here’s some examples)
At first glance it just looks like a webmaster decided to try and make some quick cash, but Threadwatch is now reporting that the individual webmasters might not be responsible after all. From the comments in that thread, it looks like iPowerWeb is responsible for the cloaked content being served to Google.
Now think about that for just a moment…..
You register a domain and signup with a hosting company. That hosting company decides to make a quick buck off of all of its customers and begins cloaking content associated with your domain. The searches engines find the content and starting banning it. What are the odds that they ban the main domain along with the subdomains? I doubt it will happen in this particular case, but it certainly isn’t uncommon for search engines to do that when they find a large volume of subdomain spam.
If I had sites hosted at iPowerWeb, I’d be spending the rest of the day moving them somewhere else.
Spammin’ & Jammin’ With Craig’s List
Have you run out of great ideas when it comes to clever ways to get some link love from super trusted .org sites? If you have, here’s a tip. Surf on over to Craig’s List and browse the resume section. Copy the content of the oldest resumes you can find. Then repost those resumes with an off-topic title and text links embeded in the bottom of the page.
Just don’t pick a title that would draw the attention of the only people on the web who have a clue about the purpose of the text links you added. 
Looking For a Few Good People Part 2
Back in February I posted that we were moving into a new office in March, and that we were looking to hire a few new people. Unfortunately, we ran into a few delays regarding the office space, so we put off the hiring until we got things worked out.
I’m happy to report that the new office will be operational by the end of the week, so we are now ready to do some hiring.
We need to fill the following positions asap:
Junior Level LAMP Programmer
You will be developing custom open source web applications for both client and company owned projects. C++, CSS/XHTML experience is a big plus.
CSS/XHTML Guru
You will be in charge of standards-compliant front-end development for both client and company owned projects. Many projects will be brand new start-ups, so strong corporate identity skills is a must.
Senior Level SEO
You will be working directly with me on client consulting projects. You will also oversee the implementation of all search marketing initiatives for company owned properties. Experience with PPC management and ROI tracking is a must.
Junior Level SEO
You will work directly with the Senior SEO and you will be responsible for competitive research, data collection, and general link development related activities.
These are full-time, in-house positions. We are located in Valencia, CA.
If you think you might be a fit, send your resume to:
jobs at webguerrilla.com
Turning Registration Back On
When I originally started this blog, I required users to register in order to comment. However, there seemed to be a bug in WordPress that caused the registration function to fail for some people. Rather than track the problem down, I just switched to running everything in pre-mod mode.
Unfortunately, the level of comment spam has grown to the point that using pre-mod alone has become a serious pain in the ass. So I’m going to go ahead and turn registration back on. If you have a problem registering, drop me an email through the contact form and we’ll try and track down the problem and get it fixed.
Google’s Crawl Caching Proxy
Just incase you missed it, Matt is back from Boston and has posted an indepth explanation of Google’s new crawl caching proxy. (The system that is responsible for Mediabot fetching pages).
Matt’s diagram pretty much matches what we’ve been seeing, although I still think there might be some issues regarding robots.txt, but we’re still collecting some data on that, so I’m going to wait until that’s done before commenting on it.
Another question that has popped up is whether or not Mediabot has been crawling pages that don’t have AdSense. Anyone else seeing that?