Congratulations, Rand…
So, if you were like my wife and I, you anxiously awaited the “Superbowl Proposal Commercial” which an unnamed individual was raising money for over the last few weeks. Well, the cat is out of the bag and it is one of our own! Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz, one of the most talented, vocal, and well respected SEO’s in the industry, has proposed to “Mystery Guest”. (She said yes) A big congratulations from the Virante team, Rand. No tags for this post.
Ways Registerfly Could Make Their Service Worse.
Skip Directly to List Some of you may be familiar with my recent debacle regarding Registerfly. Quick recap: they won’t either register my domains or refund my money. Suffice to say, I was pretty angry about the whole series of events and requested a full refund several weeks ago. In my initial post, I ranted about how they refused to respond to the refund support ticket and would be unwilling to refund it because the first time they screwed up, I let them give me a credit rather than directly refund my credit card. (I am disputing it now through my CC, by the way) Lo and behold, when I thought that customer service could not get any worse, Registerfly did the unbelievable. Instead of just ignoring my support ticket, they deleted it. Now, that might seem a...
Yahoo Helps the Rich Get Richer
Like most good application service providers, Yahoo Search Marketing sends out tips from time-to-time to help you learn how to best utilize their product. Some of you may have received an email yesterday from YSM entitled… 3 Key Steps to Take Advantage of the New Ranking Model On the other hand, you may have received an email entitled… 5 Key Steps to Take Advantage of the New Ranking Model Or, if you are like Virante, and manage several accounts for clients, you may have received both… While I cannot say that the steps provided were of really any value, and certainly would not be “new” to anyone who had spent any time doing CPC, it is interesting that Yahoo is taking the time/energy/budget to separate its clients into low-spenders...
Wikipedia: Shortsighted Cowardice and Alternatives to Nofollow
In what is receiving positive and negative attention, Wikipedia is nofollowing all of their external links. There is legitimate reason for the community frowning upon this choice. Essentially, the death of the link is coming more rapidly that we thought. In the eyes of webmasters, the net impact of losing valuable link structures is far less tangible than the immediate impact of averting link spam. However, the link is the most key element to content relationships and search engine algorithms. Without it, our most important online application – the search engine – fails. Perhaps most disheartening is the death of community authority linking. Wikipedia has cowered out of the community and chosen a cheap fix over innovation. If Wikipedia cannot create a...
Doing Google AdWords’ Homework
So an interesting thing happened the other day on the way to cornering the market on a keyword in Google AdWords. The situation began like this: I had been watching the sponsored scene for a product keyword for one of our clients for about 3 months. All of my search queries for the term during that time resulted in perhaps 3-4 sponsored results appearing along side the organic results. It was the prefect opportunity to take advantage of a very low competitive market on a high profit margin item which our client sells. I convinced the client that the time was right to enter into this particular keyword market and they agreed. So I set off to do my keyword discovery; In addition to utilizing our own research methodologies I also incorporated the tools that Google...
We Can’t Fill Your Order or Give You A Refund
It is rare (actually, this is tied into the only 1 other time I have ever issued a warning about a vendor on this site) that I actually take the time to point out an online vendor whose errors are grave enough to warrant boycott. Some of this is the fear of reprisal, but the majority of this comes from working at a web-based company and knowing how common it is for customers to just get confused when really no problem exists at all. With Registerfly, this is not the case. My ordeal began over a month and a half ago when I sought to register 10 domains on my own behalf. The registrations were for 2 years each and the order came to about $140. Registerfly had always been slower than the other registrars I normally used, but the price was right, so I was not...
Recent Comments