Michael VanDeMar

Pulled Post…

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Today I posted a piece that made fun of online romances, something that I generally always take with a grain of salt due to having observed them in all of their forms over the many years I have been online. The one thing that they all have in common is drama, and an abundance of it at that. So from my point of view I regard them as digital Dr. Phil episodes at their best, and Geraldo Rivera exposes at their worst… and open to commentary and examination when publicly conducted.

With this particular post, however, I named names

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Official Sphinn Standpoint: Infomercials Are *Not* Spam

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Traditional Insomniac Entertainment Last Friday, poking around, I came across an article that had been submitted to Sphinn at the beginning of the week entitled “1:1 Interview With Search Marketing Authority and Visionary Hamlet Batista”. In the description it is billed as “a great interview where Hamlet discusses his introduction to SEO/SEM, touching on his immensely successful projects”, so I click through to see what he has to say. There I am greeted, no doubt whatsoever, with…

… an infomercial. That’s right, this “great interview”

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Google Senior Vice Pres Dumps $8.9 Million Of GOOG Stock

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Panic Button! Last month Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Senior Vice President, David Drummond, made a public statement about Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo, in which he characterized the move as one that rose “troubling questions”. A couple of weeks later, Google co-founder Sergey Brin echoed that sentiment, stating that he found elements of the potential union between Microsoft and Yahoo as “unnerving”. Less than 1 week after that, comScore (Nasdaq: SCOR) released its January 2008 qSearch paid click report, which demonstrated that from December 07 to January 08 Google had suffered a 7% drop in paid clicks, which are the bread and butter of the Google machine.

Later that same day, in what as far as I can tell was a widely unreported move, David Drummond dumped what amounted to at least $8,960,000 of his stock in the company.

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Spammer? Or Budding Creative Marketer?

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Before I went to bed last night it looked like the nightly spam attack was in full swing at Sphinn again. This morning when I looked, I could see that it was still going on, although it seemed as if the mods had at least deleted most of it. One submission that did catch my eye was by someone whose submissions I had seen before, that I had thought were questionable back then as well, entitled “What is a keylogger good for?”:


(click to enlarge)

I started to write a comment

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Banned From Sphinn? No Worries, Your Vote Counts Either Way

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I was perusing Sphinn today, and noticed a submission in the Top 10 list entitled “Google University Bulgaria turns into a PR disaster“. Disaster? Wow, I thought, I had better read that!

Turns out it had to do with a bunch of people registering for an invite only Google event, and then Google rejecting a bunch of those registrations. Yes, a few people who were invited were rejected as well, but to be fair it was billed as first come first serve. To me, not that interesting a story. I didn’t Sphinn it myself, but

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Google Reconsideration Request Language Modified Again

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Kudos goes out to Matt Cutts, again. 😀

The changes to the language in the Google Reconsideration Request (formerly known as the Reinclusion Request), that were discussed on SEO Scoop back on December 3rd and here on Smackdown again on the 18th, have finally gone through. Essentially, the changes have to do with

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Matt Cutts: Industry Leaders Are Incapable Of Performing Editorial Discretion

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For those of you who have missed the stories behind Google making Donna Fontenot jump through hoops and taking her prisoner of war, where’s a brief rundown. At one time Donna accepted money for advertising (fully disclaimed as such), and some forms of those adverts involved the client getting a link back. Google pimp slapped Donna back in October. She went through and changed everything she could find that might be the problem, and filed a reinclusion request back in December. As of yesterday

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Hey, Donna… Your Lips Tired Yet From Puckering That Long?

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Donna, I admire you. You sure do have some stamina, the way you’ve had them Louisiana lips of yours puckered so firmly to Google’s evil ass this long.

I dumped text link ads. I nofollowed paid links. I javascripted links that might be mistaken for paid links. I canceled my sponsored review accounts. I switched to a different method of monetization (Scratchback) that serves Google-friendly, nofollowed links. (And btw, Google, that put a huge dent in my revenue, just so you know). – Donna Fontenot of SEO-Scoop.com

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