I stumbled upon this url in my travels:
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en, bookmark that url, drag it onto your browser’s bookmark toolbar and use it all the time…you’ll never have to use Google Instant again…it’s so beautiful it makes me want to cry!!

Anyway, enjoy your now liberated online experience without having Google shove what they think you want down your throat!! I actually think Google instant is their way of directing you to sites they want you to visit…it’s another possible revenue stream for them…kind of like when Yahoo started there Search Submission Pro program.

In case you’ve never heard of that, here’s what it is: Yahoo allows you to pay for what used to be organic positioning in their "search engine" results…but now you can pay to get higher listings…I shouldn’t say "now", because it’s been going on since around 2006…I think Google is trying the same thing, but in an underhanded way! Just a conspiracy theory.

In their continuous effort to bring you personalized results, I think Google’s +1 button is there for that exact reason…so they can see what you like and then deliver more of that to you. Facebook does the same thing, but their like button allows marketers to use this information and also allows users to get their friend’s recommendations on products, music or whatever.

Bing is trying to bring this to their results, which I think will clutter the results with junk…If I wanted my friend’s opinions on anything, I would ask them…I don’t need Bing, Google or any other website to help me decide what I want…but the World needs ditch diggers too!

I know that this site produces original expert content on Hawaii because they’re friends of mine and I wanted to help them figure it out.

Here’s my take on the Panda update: I believe this updated has tied everything that Google has been preaching and trying to get across to webmasters for years…Panda is the culmination of all the basic rules that you’ve seen in Google’s guidelines…these things being site structure, content, usability…the basic rules of SEO haven’t changed since the beginning, since before SEO even had a name.

While looking at my friend’s site, I noticed a lot of things that were going on that shouldn’t be going on…all of the things are unintentional as they are not trying to game the index like so many people do. For all you site owners that have legitimate businesses online and that caught in the wake of Panda…STOP asking why big well known corporate sites weren’t affected. Those "big sites" get treated much differently than the "mom and pop" sites…they can and do get away with a lot of things that you can’t. Why??? Because they have trust and authority in their fields…it’s well known that they are not fly by night sites…"mine isn’t either" you say? While that may be true, you’re not as well known as Amazon or Expedia or any other well known sites like that! It does you absolutely no good to compare yourselves to those sites so stop it!

Here’s what you can do though:

• Look At Your Site Structure – Do you have everything thrown in the root or is the site organized in a logical manner that the user will understand easily and also that the search engines will easily understand how to classify each section or page. Or will they have to wade through a bunch of information that they don’t need while trying to find what they’re looking for!
• Navigation – Is your navigation easy to use and easily found?
• Look At The Files On Your Server – When you log into your FTP, do you see a bunch of old files and test pages that your “web developer” was too lazy to remove when they were done testing? I’ve found that a lot of developers are lazy and sloppy…all those test pages and old pages that are left on the server, are most likely being deemed as duplicate content. Start cleaning up the server, but don’t just delete, you may have other sites linking to those pages and they may still be indexed in search engines. Always 301 redirect old pages to their most relevant new page…if they have no relevant new page, just 301 redirect to the homepage.
• Website Content – Do all your pages have unique content on them, or are they blank with images only? At the bare minimum, there should be at least 250 words on each page that you want to get indexed and maybe rank for. The content should be unique and relevant to the page…I’m bashing the word unique into your skulls because it’s important!
• Back To Website Structure – Some people call it Siloing, some call it SEO Site Structure, or SEO Directory Structure, they all mean the same thing and it’s how your sites should be set up. Don’t just throw all your pages in the root…especially if you have a lot of content that can be put into a proper directory structure. You can see an image I created that represents a proper SEO directory structure. An example that is used quite often is that of a Marble Company. Say you have a big bin full of all kinds of marbles, different colors and stripes and every other type of marble you can think of. A person enters the store and asks for blue marbles…you or the customer (Search Engine or User) has to dig through all those marbles just to find blue marbles…there are thousands of marbles in that bin, so the customer (user) may just give up and go somewhere else to find their blue marbles. It’s the same thing with search engines and users on your site…if search engines have to crawl through a bunch of garbage like java scripts that should be externalized and styles that should be on a style sheet, or if they have to crawl through a bunch of pages and other content just to find the blue marbles, they’re going to split because it’s too hard to find the content (blue marbles). You would have had a conversion if your blue marbles were in their own bin and the same goes for the red marbles, green marbles, cat eye marbles and so on. That way the customer comes in, gets what they want right away, you get the conversion, they get their marbles and everyone is happy. All the marbles on your website would be under the main category marbles…maybe you also sell yo-yos, all the different types of yo-yos would be categorized the same way. Entiendes Mendez?

The moral of this story is, Clean up your websites, create a proper SEO Directory Structure, make sure you have original relevant content on each page of your website and add unique and relevant titles and meta tags on each page…don’t let anyone tell you that the meta description tag or meta keywords tag are useless so don’t add them…while the meta keywords tag may not be used by search engines like Google, it is used by a lot of smaller engines and it doesn’t hurt to have it, so use it. I’m not sure what idiot said the meta description tag is useless, but remove all of them from your website and see what happens!! ‘Nuf Ced ’bout that one!

Really the Panda update or Farmer update whatever you want to call it, is about site maintenance…don’t be lazy!

Google Instant has a huge ego, here’s an example: I searched El Copo Volcano, and Google instant, like a kid who has ADHD, starts throwing all kinds of queries at you, then when you hit the search button, it gives you this bullshit: "Showing results for el popo volcano. Search instead for el copo volcano".

I did search for el copo volcano bitch! Thanks for thinking that it may have been a typo on my part, but the friggin "C" isn’t even close to the "P" on the keyboard!

Start taking your Ritalin Google and take the ego down a few notches…it started with "Did You Mean", now it’s, "Screw You, This Is What You Were Looking For"
Here’s a screenshot:

So, I noticed a few weeks ago that I had slipped down to page 3 for one of my main keywords…this has been a gradual thing…I was on page 1, then 2 and now 3…this is over the last 8 months or so. Right about now, you may be asking yourself, What does this have to do with Danny Sullivan’s Blog…I subscribe to Danny’s blog, so I get his posts by email…once in a while, I’ll make a comment if I have something relevant to add…well, the first time my rank slipped was shortly after the first time I posted a comment on Mr Sullivan’s blog…I thought nothing of it because it’s Danny Sullivan…no need to say anything else about that…but then it happened a second time…I still didn’t "really" think anything of it…using the word really here is like when a friend of mine cornered Matt Cutts at Pubcon a few years back and asked him "if duplicate content hurts a site", to which Matt replied: "It doesn’t really…", to me, that tells me it does…it’s a read between the lines thing…sorry, I was typing out loud…

So it happened a second time and now recently a third…I’m checking my site, going over things and finding little things that really shouldn’t affect it like this…so now I’m thinking: "wait, I have a common denominator here…it’s Danny Sullivan’s Blog! The Google doesn’t like Danny Sullivan, and I’m being punished because if it!"

Why don’t you like Danny Sullivan Google?? Did he spurn you at some point and now you punish people for liking his blog? All I did was read a few posts and then comment on them because I could relate to them and thought I had something to add to the story…isn’t that what you want Google, for us to add relevancy to the web?

Well, I’m sticking to my principles on this one, and will figure out how to get back on page one of your silly index!

I feel I must add this disclaimer, because undoubtedly, there will be people who believe this post to be true and that Google actually doesn’t like Danny Sullivan: Danny Sullivan’s Blog DOES NOT taint (get your head out of the gutter…at least for a few minutes) your rank. I’ve been ignoring my site, so I’m sure that is the reason for the slippage; thus, the need for continual SEO Updates!!

I’ve been working on two Joomla sites lately; one of the first things I’ll do is add Google Analytics to a site if it doesn’t already have it installed. The two Joomla sites I’ve been working on have different files to add the Google Analytics code to. I think it mainly depends on the designer and how they name the files and where they put them…they should be in the templates directory in the root…which file though, is another story.

The first site had a file that sat in the templates directory and the other site had the file I needed in a sub-directory of the templates directory…pain in the arse trying to figure that stuff out…it’s not hard, just a waste of time!

The Joomla Help files and forums were telling me to go to (this taken from the Joomla Help Forum):
* Log on to: http://www.yoursite.com/administrator/
* In the top menu select: “Extensions” > “Template Manager”
* Now select the template which is marked as default and click "Edit"
* In the template edit page click "Edit HTML"

The only thing they got right is the first line! There is no "Template Manager", not that I could see anyway…on either site!! I knew the file in question had to be in the templates directory, so I started testing pages, by adding the code to the bottom, saving and purging and then refreshing the page in a browser and looking at the source code…that’s not the most efficient or safest way to do things, but when the company that makes the CMS you’re trying to add Google Analytics to, doesn’t even know their own product…what’s a boy to do!!??

I found the page by going to Components in the top nav =>> eXtplorer =>> templates =>> sub-directory =>> index.php
The sub-directory in that path was the name of the site.

If you’re working on a Joomla site, I suggest you get the name, number and email of the person who designed it…this might save you some time!

I’ve come to dis-like Joomla…it’s not very user friendly…I recommend Magento…it’s much more search engine friendly and you don’t have to save, then purge…Joomla makes it sound like your casting demons out of the site!!

So be patient, keep smiling and you’ll find what you’re looking for! Oh, by the way, one of the Joomla sites just recently switched over to Magento…yaaayy!!!

So it seems that now it’s more important than ever to be in the number one and two spots if you are running a PPC campaign. The Google Places map that used to be on the left is now pushing paid ads down below the fold. Before they moved the Google Places map over to the right you would see around 6 paid ads…now you only see the first and the top half of the second.

This could create a bidding war for the top two spots, because who wants to be at the bottom of the pile…it could also create an unfair advantage for those with the means to keep those top two spots…tough break for the small business that needs to be able to compete.

Check out the image below; I took a screen shot of my entire monitor and as you can see, The Google Places map is taking up some premium real estate.

Is The Google Places Map Pushing Paid Ads Down Below The Fold On Purpose? Pretty Sneaky Google!

But I digress, I clicked on the unsubscribe link to see where it would take me or if indeed there were some ethical spammers out there and it would prevent spam from that particular spammer from coming to my inbox…how silly, the words ethical and spammer have never been uttered together! It took me to their drug page where I could buy Viagra, Cialis and a few other boner pills, but nowhere did it mention anything about unsubscribing me from their spam list.

Here’s the deal, when you click on an unsubscribe link, all it does is tell the spammer that the email address is a valid one. What happens then is, they start sending out spam with your email address in the from field, so anyone who gets one of them will think it’s coming from you…kind of like a how an email virus sends out emails to everyone in your address book so they think it’s coming from you. Not only that, now they can add you to their valid email list and sell that spam list to other spammers, who then start sending you more spam and then if you click their unsubscribe link, the whole thing starts all over again.

You can add them to your blocked senders list or create rules in your email program so when these emails come in, they trigger the rules and get deleted hopefully…but most of the spammers have gotten smart and put any text that would trigger one of these spam rules, in an image along with pics of all the pills.


Any actual text in the body of the email is legitimate text, like the unsubscribe text in the example below:

"************TO UNSUBSCRIBE************
You are receiving this email at x...@emailaddress.com. We hope that you find these updates helpful, but if you would rather not receive them, click here. You will be immediately unsubscribed from our database."

The moral of the story, DO NOT CLICK THE UNSUBSCRIBE LINK, just delete the email and this will help prevent spam from hitting your inbox. It’s not going to fully prevent spam, but it will prevent it from getting worse.

Another way to prevent spam is to NEVER use your everyday email address when filling out ANYTHING online…this most definitely includes sending evites…you’re actually screwing all your friends by sending them evites. Because you’re adding their email addresses to Yahoo’s database or whichever evite site you’re using. Yahoo then in turn sells those email addresses and spammers find those evites online and harvest the email addresses within them.

Always use a throw away email address that you don’t care about or don’t check that often, like a Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN or any other of the myriad free email addresses out there. This is also why some sites don’t accept email addresses like that when you register on their site, because they know people use them for spamming purposes.

So good luck with preventing spam, I hope this will help a little.

State Farm is having a contest where they call a person that has auditioned for this contest called Ready Set Dance and when they get a call, they have to start dancing wherever they are.

My point is, Yahoo has it on their homepage and presents it like it’s some sort of "News", when it’s actually a paid ad, or at least it appears to be.

That’s not the first time I’ve seen this…Yahoo does this site wide…I was in Yahoo health a while back reading an article that caught my eye…it appears to be a "real article" about some new "scientific study" about cold medicine or something like; that they had links to a product page so you could buy this new miracle cure and then at the very bottom in a small faded font that almost matched the background color it said: "Paid Advertisement".

Yahoo is hurtin’ for certain, if they’re posting misleading headlines and articles…but it has been going for years with their Search Submit Pro. For those of you who don’t know what that is, Search Submit Pro or SSP, is when you have paid ads that show up organic results, they look like regular results that show up…sort of…you can usually tell which are paid by the length of the titles.

So beware, if you use Yahoo for your news…you’ll probably be reading a paid ad! It’s not surprising though…the media is evil and greedy and it’s all about their bottom line. They don’t care what happens to the people who believe what they’re reading and take it as real news, as long as they get the money!!

This is good news for website owners…you want to make the headlines? Do it with Yahoo, you won’t even have to make a sex tape! Since Yahoo is now in bed with Bing, I wonder if the same applies to them?