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Well it's that time of day again when I sit down and do a brain dump for everyone to read. If you read yesterday's column you may remember that I wasn't in much of a mood to be friendly and it only got worse later in the day when some idiot wanted to take me to task for using tables on one of my site instead of CSS.

Now that has to be one of the most pointless arguments you can ever get lured into because those who have been drinking the CSS koolaid will never admit that a site built on tables is just as effective as a site built on CSS in the search engines ... and can display on a surfer's monitor just as effectively ... as a site built with CSS. Ah well at least it broke up an otherwise fairly mundane sort of day.

Links
Linking seems to be back on the minds of lots of people at the moment so I'm sure that I'm not the only one who is getting requests for reciprocal links. Of course getting good back links is only part of the equation when it comes to achieving good rankings in the search engines but it certainly seems to be the part of the equation that most people concentrate on.

Perhaps they're incapable ... or too lazy ... to try to provide good optimized content on their websites so they take what they think is the easy option and email a bazillion other webmasters and pester them for reciprocal links. Of course most of them want you to link to them from your front page while they only have to link to you from some shitty links page that no one will see.

Yeah I'm sure I'm going to agree to a link exchange like that! Perhaps you might see some value in it but I certainly don't so usually those emails go straight into the trash without being read. However I did stop to read one link request the other day.

It was like all the others and wanted a good placement for their link but a shitty placement for my link. But what really made me laugh was the fact that it was from a competitor and they wanted their link on our website that advertises our services in the same vertical. Of course I'm blonde but I'm not that dumb that I'll send potential clients off to a competitor's site.

If you are seriously interested in getting good back links then it really isn't as easy as emailing all those other webmasters and it really does come back to building a site that people want to link to. Hell even Matt Cutts says exactly that in a recent post on his blog and if he's saying it then the chances are that Google is starting to look at the value of some links.

Now if that's the case there's going to be a heck of a lot of pain in the near future for some webmasters who have wasted their time building backlinks by begging for them. Of course I'm only speculating here and there may be nothing in the near future for those who try to achieve search engine placement by links alone but I sure hope there is. Just think of a future free of crappy link requests from idiots who can't even spell the name of your site correctly.

Life is so fragile
Over the Easter weekend we headed south to visit kids and grandkids and despite being on the road for about 26 hours in total we had a pretty good time. We also missed the birth of one of our grandsons by a couple of days ... but then my daughter's timing always was rather poor.

Two days after we got home she gave birth to another son. He is 2.5 months premature and weighs in at just a little over 2 pounds and is a whole 11 inches long. Find a ruler and see just how small that is - heck it's so small that Steve could hold him in the palm of his hand!

The baby's going to spend the next month in intensive care being watched day and night but he's already breathing all by himself and there's little doubt that he's going to make it. But imagine being able to hold another human being in the palm of your hand ... that's just amazing and I think it shows just how fragile life can be.

So be sure to spend some time enjoying your life ... and the lives of your family too because life is way too fragile to waste it by spending every waking moment stuck in front of your computer.