This and That on a Friday

Posted On: 2007-06-22

Yes it's Friday and sadly this weekend is shaping up to be one that's going to be spent working. That's not quite as bad as it sounds because at the moment we're experiencing the coldest winter temperatures this part of Australia has had for 90 year.

Even Steve has lost his shorts and tshirt in favor of something a little warmer. So it's obviously not a great time to be outdoors.

How desperate can you be?
Last night I was adding some content to a blog we run for a mainstream client. This blog is run strictly for promotional and search engine purposes and the client doesn't want to have to deal with comments so we switched the comments off right from the start.

But the sign that comments are closed doesn't seem to deter some desperate porn spammers because there was a comment awaiting moderation that offered free porn movies. I didn't realize that some spammers could be that desperate that they'd even spam blogs that have their comments closed.

Just how desperate this spammer really was to try and get his message out there is the fact that the blog is really very new and doesn't appear anywhere any where near the top of the search engine results pages for any term. So this guy really did have to waste his time searching hard to find it.

Oh well, Spam Karma is now installed on that blog and our desperate little spammer will have to waste his time somewhere else.

Sometimes I speak too soon
Earlier in the week I talked about websites and Web 2.0. I mentioned a post on a SEO blog that complained that many sites had still not embraced Web 2.0 and noted that the person who wrote that entry singled out fishing sites as a prime example of sites that were still locked in the old world of Web 1.0

In my column I suggested that there are plenty of sites out there that really didn't need to add Web 2.0 features to their site because their users really didn't want or need those things.

Well yesterday an old quote that we gave to a mainstream client was resurrected and now it looks as though we're going to be going ahead and building a fishing site. Of course the client just happens to want us to include some Web 2.0 features. Yep sometimes I really do speak too soon.

Are you setting aside some time for research?
Yes I know lots of people find research to be a total pain in the ass. I know that you'd rather be making money or having fun but trust me, spending time developing your knowledge base is vital if you're really serious about making money.

I know you've probably seen me talk about it before and now you're thinking that I'm stick in a groove but it really is important. Search engines are changing the way they rank pages all the time and if you're not keeping up with them then you're going to be left behind.

Relying on what others are doing can be just as bad as doing nothing because other people can get wrong, other people can set out to mislead you. It's far better that you learn the lessons for yourself than relying on others. So if you really want to survive you do need to set aside time every week for your own research and study.

Washable keyboards
If you haven't read the story about dirty keyboards that's been zipping around the Net for the last few days let me enlighten you. It seems that scientific tests have proved that most keyboards and mice are infested with more bacteria than your average toilet seat. Now isn't that great news for all of us who eat our meals while we work?

But never fear, help is at hand. There is a company out there that produces keyboards and mice that are dishwasher safe. They even have a website and of course I just had to go and have a look at it. It's quite an interesting website too but ... well ... sometimes I just spend too much time locked in the weird world of search engine optimisation.

Instead of looking at the pictures and reading the blurb on these dishwasher safe keyboards the first thing I noticed was the page title. All it showed was 'mainpage'; now that's very sad that a company has paid a lot of money for a professional to design a website and all the page title shows is 'mainpage'.

But what does it say about me? The first thing I notice is a major SEO blunder, how sad is that?

And what will I be doing this weekend? You guessed it ... more SEO work.