Smackdown!
Danny Sullivan is actually off the hook cause I’m sick tonight, and have no energy to speak of… I was going to do a deeply involved detailed post having to do with cojones growing and owning up to events as they really happened…
Instead, I’ll just ask…
Sometimes, as geeks, we forget how the non-geek mind works. Things we take for granted as being obvious aren’t always so to the untrained eye. Yes, when most of us who live on the Internet perform a search on Google, we know without even thinking what is sponsored and what is not. Most of us probably won’t even see the ads in front of us, aside form the habitual scan for competitors when performing queries that might relate to our own sites.
As many of you know, Andy Beard has been out of the posting loop lately, due to being preoccupied with moving. Luckily he did manage to get in a much needed review of Matt Cutts post on paid links.
I stumbled across the post last night, and I saw a quote by Matt Cutts that caught my attention a bit:
One of the sites I own happens to involve electronic poetry. On that site, on the bottom of the pages, I incorporated a news feed. Nothing fancy, just shows a few stories, their headlines, links, and brief snippets. Occasionally, for news stories with very few results, someone will stumble across my site when researching the topic. The site doesn’t have a ton of ranking power, and it is in no way optimized around the content of the news stories. They are just there to give the readers access to more sites to browse through, should they want to.
Occasionally, I will get an email from someone relatively new to the internet, wondering why my site shows on a search for the title of a poem they wrote, or a speaking engagement they performed at, but they do not see anything about it on the page. I will write these people back, explaining that they need to look at the cache of the page, since the news feed is of course dynamic, and the stories indexed when Google went there are usually not the same ones that are there days later. Most say thank you, and wind up understanding just a wee bit more about the internet.
All of them are for the most part just curious, knowing that they don’t know that much about the internet, and all of them are generally speaking quite polite. Until, that is, this peach involved with some obscure work, “Teesway One Nine Nine”.
A quick update to the Microsoft Rogue Bot Fiasco. It looks like now they have correctly DNS’d the IP range that they are sending these bogus requests from. Previously, all of the IP’s (which I first mentioned were all coming from the 65.55.165.* block) reverse DNS’d to names such as bl2sch1081901.phx.gbl. They have apparently changed this, so the IP’s are more readily identifiable as coming from Microsoft, reverse DNS’ing to the Live.com domain, eg. livebot-65-55-165-99.search.live.com.
A few months back I discovered that I was being hit with massive amounts of referrer spam. It was a little odd, because the phrases weren’t made to look like I had links coming from some sleazy little viagra or porn site… no, these were made to look like I was ranking for all kinds of spammy phrases on MSN Search. This confused me, since historically referrer search only benefits the site that is made to look like the traffic is coming from. I couldn’t understand why someone would want to make it look like MSN was spamming my logs.
What never occurred to me, of course, was that my logs were actually being spammed by Microsoft itself. As it turns out, they were.
So, in the wake of Rand screwing up yet again, a bright shining ray of hope has at last emerged. No more must we webmasters huddle in fear of Google spanking us for doing what we have full right to do anyways. No more will people like Michael Gray, Rae Hoffman, or Andy Beard need to worry their little ole heads about the issue of Google trying to dictate how we can or cannot monetize our websites. Finally, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief, and stop worrying about it once and for all!
Oh, golly gee whillikers! It looks like I stepped on a toe or two! My bad. Time out! Take backs (sorta)!
For those whose delicate sensitivities interfered with seeing what I was saying, here it is again, without the commentary.
Note to all the more delicate members of my audience: you might want to consider reading this instead: “Why Rand Is Wrong About The ‘Twelve Attributes’, Part 2 – The Touchy-Feely Version“. All others, please feel free to continue here.
Some people have mentioned to me that they think at times I might be a little harsh in my posts. This may be somewhat true on occasion. What I try very hard not to be, however, is sloppy or nonfactual. Yes, sometimes I can be wrong… but at least I do try to thoroughly research my material. I cite sources. I do careful evaluations. Maybe terribly busy CEO’s don’t have time for such nit-picky crap as fact checking, or thinking about what they write, or making sure they don’t say one thing in one place and imply the opposite in another. If that is the case, then maybe they just shouldn’t blog.
The fraudulent mediums act (1951) states:
Maybe it was just denial that made me reject the reality of Google buying Feedburner, but as of today I guess I can no longer do this. It was real, it wasn’t a dream, the proof is in the pudding, as they say.
It looks like a large number of people today lost all Feedburner subscribers, in all of their blogs:
