How To Block The Bots SEOmoz *Isn’t* Telling You About

I swear to tell the... wait, what did you say..? Ok, so, looks like Rand and gang finally decided to reveal their top-secret recipe about how they gathered all that information on everybody’s websites without anyone noticing what they were doing. There was quite a bit of hoopla over the fact that when they announced their new index of 30 billion web pages (and the new tool powered by that index), due to the fact that they never gave webmasters the chance to block them from gathering this data. In fact, they never even

Read more

Google Allows Ads Mocking Suicide

Google jumper During the Great Depression, the suicide rate jumped over 21.4%. It was a sad time for all, and the unemployment rate skyrocketed. Many people lost their homes and farms. The shame of not being able to provide for their families was simply too much for some. Last June, “Good Morning America” did a segment titled “Recession Depression”, where reporter Chris Cuomo drew analogies between the events back then and our current financial crisis, warning that we could possibly see similar psychological impacts with todays economy:

Read more

Google Fundamentally Changes The Way They Handle 302 Redirects (Welcome Back 302 Hijack!)

Officer not-so-friendly 302 Redirect For years now, on an on-again/off-again basis, Google has had issues with the way that they treat 302 Temporary Redirects. Going back at least as far as 2004, you can find discussions about websites getting hijacked in the serps, all due to problems arising from the way that 302’s were treated. The issue was that if one site redirected to another using a 302 Temporary Redirect (as opposed to a 301 Permanent Redirect, which has come to be known as a “search engine friendly” redirect), often times

Read more

Google Lowers The Bar On Customer Service Yet Again

Can Google customer service get with the times? For the second year running Fortune magazine has named Google (GOOG) as the #1 place to work for in America. Their article last year states that Google “sets the standard for Silicon Valley: free meals, swimming spa, and free doctors onsite. Engineers can spend 20% of time on independent projects. No wonder Google gets 1,300 résumés a day.” Now, I don’t know about you, but to me numbers like that mean Google doesn’t have to simply settle when hiring employees… they literally can pick and choose from the cream of the crop who does and who does not work for them.

In fact, according to Google themselves,

Read more

Write A Bad Check: Bond $1,500… Possession Of Cocaine: Bond $5 Bucks. Wtf?

Ok, so, thats $2,000 for illegally parking. Oh, and another $5 for the 3 kilos of cocaine in your trunk. Have a nice day. I live in Largo, FL, which is located in Pinellas County. People and the way things work aren’t always what you would call “normal” around here. Not sure if it’s the incessant heat, or something they put in the water, or the fact that we live within shouting distance of Scientology Central (which is located in Clearwater). Either way, for whatever the reason, sometimes things just aren’t right around these parts.

I swear, you can only find this stuff in the St. Petersburg, FL area. Someone showed me this recently on the Pinellas County Jail Inmate search:

Read more

Why The Google Keyword Tool Is Useless For SEO, Even With Exact Numbers

Not quite on target... Recently there was a bit of a hubbub surrounding Google’s Keyword Tool External (the keyword suggestion portion of AdWords that was made public a couple of years back). It started when a few people, like Barry Schwartz from SERoundtable, noticed that the tool was showing specific numbers for search terms instead of just green bars. Even though at first

Read more

If Googleplex Employees Don’t Understand The Webmaster Guidelines, How Can They Expect Webmasters To Adhere To Them?

Nancy Drew, we need you! Last month, in one of my posts, I had decided to include a few images to see how well they might rank for their keyphrases. I had never targeted any of the image searches, and due to one of the topics of the post it seemed like a good opportunity to do so. When I went to check later to see if the images happened to be indexed yet, they weren’t. It had only been a couple of days, and I really didn’t expect them to be there yet, so that was really no surprise. What did surprise me, however,

Read more