slimster.net

Some things I just can’t make up.

I was sitting and enjoying a nice dinner tonight in Santa Clara when a somewhat geeky guy sits down next to me and begins to shovel his food like a starved man. He had a unique outfit, a European accent and the eyes of a mad scientist. He wasn’t wearing a badge. He was a Google engineer and I knew it.

When he asked me about my work I told him that I dabbled in programming but that I also did SEO consulting. We chatted a bit about C++, Java, Fortran and other mundane things before I asked him, “so, do you work for Google?”. He replied that he did, confirming my suspicions. He said he was an engineer.

I decided to have a little fun and pretend to enlist his help. “So, I want to rank #1 on Google for all queries” I said. “Can you do that for me?”

He looked at me, puzzled. But he seemed to want to give me a real answer. He said, “I can’t do that. Besides, it would crash your servers.”

“Not my servers”, I told him. “I have 2 servers and they’re really big.”

He insisted that it was a bad idea. So I gave in a little. “Ok, how about ranking #1 for most queries?” He still insisted that I wouldn’t get qualified traffic and that my servers would blow. I assured him that both of my servers were top notch.

I handed him my business card and told him that he could think about it and, if he changed his mind, I could take all the traffic from ranking #1 on “the Google”. He looked at me with an uncomfortable grin. And he said, “ok, but I really can’t do that”.

It was fairly obvious, hopefully, that I was joking. At any rate, I saw the engineer later and asked him if he was going to delete me from “the Google” for asking for his help. He assured me, “No, we won’t do that. Google is not evil, really.”

Thank goodness. I’m relieved.

Do you have a website and you’re sick and tired of getting hits and traffic? Are your servers over-worked? Do you have the need to be removed from Google and other imposing search engines? Don’t fret. I have the perfect 2-step solution that is guaranteed to satisfy your need for peace and tranquility.

Step 1: Go to notepad and create a file and name it robots.txt. Put 2 lines of code in that file:
line 1: User-agent: *
line 2: Disallow: /
It should look like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Be sure and use the “/” in your disallow statement or this won’t work! Diligence, my friends.

Step 2: Even though Step 1 should be quite effective, redundancy ensures that you will succeed in protecting your servers from intruding requests. In step two, include the following meta tag in each of your web pages:

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”

This is your “backup plan”. Don’t confuse yourself and use “index, follow” as that might tell search crawlers to access your content which could cause unnecessary computations on your server due to unwanted site visitors.

Now, sit back and relax. Hear that? Yes, my friends, that’s silence. Sweet sweet silence. You might say that’s just deja-vu all over again.

OH MY!

A couple of weeks ago, I had some fraudulent charges to my credit card so I had to get a new card issued. In the meantime, my XM radio auto-renewal failed because my old credit card no longer worked. They politely sent me an email and I went to update my information. That’s when the trouble began.

After spinning around their site (they require different logins for different activities), I simply could not get to the portion of their site that allows me to update my credit card information. Apparently they have a bug in their system and they are trying to fix it. Fine. So I called customer service….and waited….and waited….

After about 10 minutes, I hung up. I got tired of hearing the happy message telling me that I could not be helped because they were so busy helping new customers.

So this is how I got immediate help - and this works for just about any corporate organization. I went to their corporate website here. I found their corporate phone number and when I was prompted for someone’s extension, I just dialed a random, 4-digit extension. This technique will land you at the desk of someone important 9 times out of 10. This was one of those 9 times.

Within seconds I was placed in the hands of Joan (who even gave me her last name). Joan was so kind and helpful, it was amazing. She even gave me her personal phone number should I have trouble again.

So the next time you’re sitting on hold waiting for an outsourced phone operator to finally get to your call, go look up the corporate number and get an executive on the line. Works every time!

I know I’m making a big claim here, but this is the Ad that finally made me quit using Weather.com. Have you ever tried to read something of value only to be distracted by an invasive flash animation? This Lowermybills ad comes in dancing Presidents, Aliens and Womenish characters. (Dear Weather.com - you have a 5 billion dollar business, why go and suck so bad?)

One of these days, the Internets will grow up and people will quit cannibalizing their traffic for third party ad dollars. Either you have a good product, or you don’t.