A while ago Christoph Cemper shot me an email about his post about ______.

Personal experience and a wide variety of friends have helped me conclude that most hosts are garbage, so a bad host in and of itself is not a big story. ________, on the other hand allegedly sent out an email offering affiliates a $100 bonus for knocking Cemper's site out of the top 10 rankings.

They could have contacted Christoph directly and tried to fix their problems, or they also could have reranked the search results a bit more discretely. What is even worse about how they sent out that email is that one of their affiliates posted it to the page which talks negatively about their service, which shows how they aim to slience it. Talk about not breeding trust in a service!

Christopher could also build a ton of links from almost anyone burned by a bad __________ hosting experiece by creating an image button and asking them to use it to link to his page about them.

Any time you use shady techiques to manipulate the search results (which most all SEOs - including me - are guilty of), and also use mass communication tools to do so (most smart SEOs do not do that unless they are creating crash and burn sites) you raise your risk profile and the chances that your technique will backfire.

Update: ServerPronto has been harrassing me with phone calls, likely about this post. After weeks of waking me up on the phone they still call and call. For doing that I think they are _________. I took their name out of this post, so hopefully that will be enough for them to leave me alone.

So Avril Lavigne is getting married. Why should I care? hehehe

While it is sad that I search for said information, it is interesting to note that Garbage.com is the top ranked site for both Avril and Avril Lavigne. Where is the relevancy on that one Google? Is Google trying to say she is a Stupid Girl?

Steve Balmer says they will catch Google on relevancy in 6 months, although Google continues to increase their marketshare, and today launched Google Earth and a truely personalized search service.

Screenshot images of Avril search results below

Google to launch an in browser video player, which will likely be compatible with their upcomming payment program.

The recent issue of Business 2.0 had an article about the resurgance of Akamai, and you have to wonder how far Google will span their business model with how cheap they store and serve data.

If Google is willing to store and stream unlimited free data just to have access to it that is going to be a hard for others to compete with.

If Google gets first mover advantage in multimedia search (due to hosting content free and setting up the first viable micropayment network) then they further solidify their market dominating position in general web search while bringing in another revenue stream.

Danny Sullivan posted a brief comparison between the new Google video offering to some of the other video products on the market. Danny said:

The key difference in what Google Video will offer compared to other services is inline playback. Rather than having to depend on having a particular plug-in for a particular video format -- which your browser will often annoyingly opens in a separate window -- Google Video will provide its own lightweight plug-in to display video right within the results.

A friend of mine emailed me about a campaign aimed at erradicating debt, poverty, and hunger in many of the poorest nations. Official sites:

• US

• UK
• WorldWide

Some musicians are also supporting the campaign with free concerts. In a week, during the G8 meeting, there are going to be 5 free concerts around the globe. Another friend said Pink Floyd is getting back together for the concert in Hyde Park London.

Jill recently posted about Google's new patent:

Basically, if you have a brand new domain/website, it will automatically land in the sandbox regardless of anything that you do with it. Your new website will be stuck there for an unspecified period of time (averaging around 9 months these days) and it will not rank highly in Google for any keyword phrases that might bring it any decent traffic. ... But new domains will not show up in Google’s natural results for even slightly competitive keyword phrases until they are removed from the sandbox.

A friend recently had a 3 month old site ranking number 29 for a $15 per click single word keyword that got great search volume. Jill continues:

If you have a real company that is looking to establish a real brand and a long-term customer base, then you’ll want to stick with the basic SEO techniques which have been proven to work time and again.

In other words, the stuff I’ve been teaching and doing for years.

Things do change quickly. I know from personal experience some of the stuff I was doing a few years ago might not be good stuff today. She then makes any SEO shortfall sound as though it is the engines fault:

It is true that even for those who do practice what I preach, there have been occasions when some search engines mistakenly throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is, you may do everything by the book, but something somewhere trips a spam filter and your site may mistakenly get sandboxed, penalized or banned.

Kinda funny to view all of one's own SEO shortfalls as the search engines making a mistake and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The SEO space is constantly changing. When a person is new to SEO and dirt poor (me 2 years ago) they may be willing to work on sketchy sites and rank them from scratch. They will make errors (as I did), accepting bad clients and wasting time using ineffective techniques, but they will not be as quick to discount some techniques.

As you become more popular, people follow what you say and push you along to where you can do well even if you are dead wrong. So long as enough people think you are right then you are.

After you are established large companies want to hire you. The SEO techniques that work for large established brands which might be whitelisted are not the same techniques that work for Joe-average-webmaster.

I think it is important to frequently start new sites in a variety of industries to set up various flags to see how the algorithms change. Even if your results have proven effective on your own site it does not mean that everyone should practice what you preach.

This post is not a post stating how right I may be (as I frequently learn new stuff I should have known), but a post to reference the fact that each of us has a limited data set, and:

• there is no one right way to do SEO

• when bad things happen sometimes it is the fault of the algorithms, but sometimes it is a fault of our own