Doug Heil bans me from the ihelpyou forum – for life

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While going through my unopened email from last month, the following text caught my eye:

You have received an infraction at SEO Best Practices Search Engine Forums.

Reason: Multiple Spammer

This infraction is worth 50 point(s) and may result in restricted access until it expires.  Serious infractions will never expire.

All the best,

SEO Best Practices Search Engine Forums

Again, please do not reply to this email. You must go to the following page to reply to this private message:

http://www.ihelpyou.com/forums/private.php

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Foursquare Support responds seven months later

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Early last August I wrote to Foursquare support:

Recently, I spent two weeks in Orlando and its environs. At Cape Canaveral, while standing in front of a tour bus at the bus stand, I was told that I was too far from @Tour Bus @Kennedy Space Center. I took a photo of this message with a parked bus behind it. The bus tour covers a few miles and I tried to check in at a few places. I was finally accepted when the bus was about to enter the main visitor complex, i.e. a few hundred feet from the stop. It seems that whoever created the venue started typing once the bus was under way. Perhaps these moving venues should not be allowed. Continue reading

Now Google demotes overstock.com

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Recently, I wrote about Google demoting JC Penney for getting links from dubious places. Now it has demoted Overstock.com for getting links from very prestigious websites – .edu to be precise.

Amir Efrati writes in The Wall Street Journal:

Google Inc. is penalizing Overstock.com Inc. in its search results after the retailer ran afoul of Google policies that prohibit companies from artificially boosting their ranking in the Internet giant’s search engine.

and Continue reading

Will Experts Exchange become a victim of the new Chrome extension?

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Google just released a new extension for its Chrome browser. Initially I wasn’t sure what it is called, as it seemed to be “block sites from Google’s web search results”. On closer inspection, it is “Personal Blocklist” and here is the official description:

The personal blocklist extension will transmit to Google the patterns that you choose to block. When you choose to block or unblock a pattern, the extension will also transmit to Google the URL of the web page on which the blocked or unblocked search results are displayed. You agree that Google may freely use this information to improve our products and services.

The underlining is my emphasis. Continue reading

JC Penney followup: Doug Pierce’s research for the NYT expose

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A few blogs have picked up the story about the paid links allegedly obtained by JC Penney’s former SEO company SearchDex. Vanessa Fox’s detailed article in SearchEngineLand led me to Doug Unplugged, the blog of Doug Pierce, of Blue Fountain Media.

An interesting find by Doug was SearchDex’s client list, which has now been taken offline but might still be in the (Google cache). If you have a paid account at OpenSiteExplorer or MajesticSEO, it might be worth checking out the backlinks.

The discussion at Webmasterworld: Paid Links at JC Penney – Google Takes Manual Action.

Google demotes JC Penney; JC Penney fires SEO company

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The New York Times has published a well-informed account of how a major US retailer was using alleged paid links from dubious websites. Entitled The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, writer David Segal outlines the process of searching for household items and then is surprised that:

in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term:

J. C. Penney.

The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

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Develop, developer, development

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This is a commonly mispronounced set of words among the IT community in India.

Table of Contents

Develop

Incorrect: डेवलप डेवलोप (emphasis in bold)
Correct: डिवेलप (all syllables with equal emphasis)

Developer

Incorrect: डेवलपर डेवलोपर (emphasis in bold)
Correct: डिवेलपर (all syllables with equal emphasis)

Development:

Incorrect: डेवलपमेंट डेवलोपमेंट (emphasis in bold)
Correct: डिवेलपमेंट (all syllables with equal emphasis)

Upgradation – there is no such word

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Finextra reported on a Reserve Bank of India document that says in part,:

The working group further goes on to recommend that the RBI “consider moving over to chip based cards along with requiring upgradation of necessary infrastructure like ATMs/POS terminals in this regard in a phased manner”.

The RBI is not by any means the first Indian entity to use this clumsy word. It isn’t in any English dictionary. The correct word is “upgrade” (noun). Of course, the document is full of other errors. The above paragraph can be written as follows:

“consider moving over to chipbased cards, along with an upgrade to the related infrastructure such as ATMs/POS terminals in a phased manner”.

Generally, most Times of India posts attributed to “TNN” show signs of poor English. Here are some posts that persist in using “upgradation”

Did the Wayback Machine die and nobody noticed?

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The Wayback Machine or archive.org served a good purpose. In its early years it tried to keep a copy of many pages from websites great and small. People who inadvertently deleted their website were able to recover some of the content through it. More recently (five years ago, not five weeks), it couldn’t cope with the quantity of pages and people complained when it hadn’t indexed their pages. Many SEOs blocked its spider from their sites.

When I checked some well-known sites, I was surprised that they hadn’t been archived for some years:

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Travel sites fail to rank

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When I am searching for a good air fare or want to make a hotel booking, I don’t use Google. I go directly to sites such as Expedia, Travelocity, Hotels.com, Kayak and their Australian counterparts. That’s because I have found good bargains in the past and have bookmarked them. What chance does a travel portal have these days of ranking high in Google, given that many SEOs are saying that brand is important for ranking?

Let’s fire up the Google Keyword tool and get some of the most searched travel terms in the US:

  • adventure travel
  • air travel
  • all inclusive vacations
  • antigua travel
  • bahamas vacation
  • business travel
  • cancun vacation
  • car rentals
  • caribbean cruises
  • cheap plane tickets
  • cheap travel
  • cruise deals
  • discount travel
  • disney cruise
  • disney tickets
  • disney vacation
  • disney world vacation
  • disneyland vacation
  • hawaii vacation
  • honeymoon destinations
  • las vegas deals
  • las vegas hotels
  • las vegas shows
  • plane tickets
  • st lucia travel
  • student travel
  • travel advisor
  • Travel Deals
  • travel guide
  • travel insurance
  • travel to europe
  • turks and caicos travel
  • vacation ideas
  • vacation packages
  • weekend getaways
  • world travel

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