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.

Paul Simon has a song, “Negotiations and Lovesongs”, I believe, where he says, “everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance, everybody knows it’s true.” Very sentimental. I’m a big Paul Simon fan. Whoever decided on the location of the new Hyatt Recency Hotel in downtown Dallas must have been very sentimental about the sound of trains. The front door to the hotel is a mere 60 feet from a sizable train track.

The key to Paul’s song was, “sound of a train in the distance“. Otherwise, trains are noisy. FYI.

I had no idea that the World Series game I was watching Sunday night would be the clincher for the Red Sox. Otherwise, I would have paid closer attention. Instead, I was sipping wine while having conversations about the dynamics of Google Local and taking a tour of the Apple iPhone.

I gave a presentation at the NMHC Technology Conference on Monday afternoon. I presented alongside Lee Blankenship of Search Discovery, an Atlanta based SEM agency, and Craig Hordlow of Red Bricks Media. Lee discussed some interesting research and trends and showed some innovative strategies for PPC management. Craig captured my attention with his diagnostic approach to monitoring PPC alongside SEO in order help understand how and where to focus effort and spending.

My presentation was mainly an overview of SEO, the Local space and the fundamentals of website optimization.

Many people seemed to be getting their first introduction to some of the technology and ideas being presented - and that was actually refreshing.

I just had the pleasure of helping a friend change their domain name. From the outside, it looked as if I could write some simple rewrite rules, capture all the link juice and pass it via a 301 redirect to their new domain. But then I learned that the site was being hosted on Microsoft servers and that I would have to use IIS for the rewrite.

IIS is crap. On the other hand, UNIX is a mature, superior operating system with a proven track record for oh-so-important qualities such as reliability, performance and security. Web 2.0 is nothing new - collaborative creation started with the Unix operating system years ago. It continues to get better as more people contribute.

Ok maybe I’m showing some bias here. I’ll explain. IIS is crap in this instance because it is impossible to make a full page-to-page site redirect unless the web pages are dynamic. In other words, if you have a flat, html site, you have to redirect all pages to the home page of the new domain. That is sub-optimal at best.

So I moved the hosting to a Unix environment. I wrote 6 lines of code in the .htaccess file and redirected the entire old domain to the corresponding pages on the new domain within minutes. Sweet sweetness indeed. I passed all link juice and all rankings were maintained. Google didn’t miss a beat.

Just because a couple of people couldn’t get through my Pay Per Post (PPP) rant in one sitting…

1. Pay Per Post is a dodgy SEO strategy and I would never recommend using it. PPP dilutes the relevance of SERPs. Likewise, Link Bait dilutes the relevance of SERPs.

2. PPP as a non-SEO strategy (i.e., Marketing and Branding), should not be wholly viewed as an attempt to game the system (Blackhat SEO).

3. But because Google does punish sites for using PPP, they should either find a way to reduce the impact of minimally relevant blogs (PPP blogs) on their SERPs algorithmically OR they should clearly communicate with Marketing departments (the ones who buy their Adwords) that PPP could negatively impact their site’s organic rankings. Marketing Departments, unlike SEOs, don’t read Matt Cutts’ blog, nor do they traditionally consider SEO in their efforts.

And as Forrest Gump would say, “That’s all I have to say about that”. Moving on….