Archive for May, 2007
I’m leaving for Toronto in about 12 hours, but I just wanted to write a quick update to say that I’ve accepted a new job.
I’m now the lead SEO/SEM specialist at Brand Labs.
If you’ve read “the four hour work week” you’ll know that the book advocates outsourcing all aspects of your business so that you can free up time. In a sense, I’m doing the opposite.
See, Brand Labs is the company you’d call to handle running your business for you. From warehousing, to fulfillment, to e-commerce site development, PR, and SEO… we do it all!
It’s a neat idea. Instead of hiring a development company, SEO company, marketing company, PR firm, and fulfillment company you can just hire us and we’ll do it all for you.
We let the creative people free up their time to come up with more products.
It’s a pretty big switch from me. I don’t write code anymore (and if I do, it’s in ASP - a language I don’t really know yet) While it’s different, I like that I’m not getting burned out in LAMP development. I might just finish some of my personal sites now that I’m not doing PHP and MySQL all day long.
On top of that, I’ve finally got dual screens, a corner desk with a window, and a flat screen TV to watch while I work. I even ended up with more vacation time than the last job. It’s a neat environment.
Speaking of vacation, I won’t be reachable until sometime Monday. I’ll be in Toronto all weekend for a hockey tournament. After that though, I don’t think I’m going anywhere else for the month of June. July is another story….
May 31st, 2007
Over on SEOmoz, rand fishkin asks If You Could Ask the Search Engines Any Question and Get An Honest, Complete Answer… What Would it Be?
He then goes on to list about 14 questions he’d like answers to.
While I’m sure that the search engines will never answer his questions, I thought it would be interesting to guess at what the actual answers are.
So, here’s my guesses. (Important: These are just guesses, in no way can I verify if any of these answers are correct or not. They’re just what I think the answers are. I’m only a computer scientist, I do NOT work at any of the search engines or have inside information)
What role do search quality raters play in determining rankings? I don’t think that the quality raters affect rankings in any way. I think that quality raters are used to determine a valid result set in which various algorithm changes can be tested against each other. Another possibility is that they’re used to view the “reported” sites - however I doubt this.
How much impact do the other domains owned by / registered by a site owner have on the way a site is viewed/treated algorithmically? This depends. If the owner isn’t doing anything shady then they shouldn’t matter. I, for example, own several unrelated sites all on the same server. They don’t cross link and they don’t have problems. If the “other” sites I own are part of a network of spammy sites then it can have an effect. The last company I worked for had a network of hundreds of sites (all of which were thin affiliates for the same site) that just targeted different keywords. I can see this type of setup hurting your sites. If it’s a normal relationship though, I wouldn’t worry.
What is the purpose/motivation behind obfuscating accurate, precise link data? The most likely answer is that it’s probably easier and quicker to do it the way they’re doing it. Another possibility is that they don’t want people to try to reverse engineer the algorithm. There’s 2 main things that make a search engine unique: The sites it has indexed, and it’s algorithm. Everything that goes into making a ranking decision is public; that is to say that there’s nothing Google has access to that you can’t get. If they made the links public, it’d be possible (for a small subset of sites…. say 1 query 30 sites) to try to reverse engineer an algorithm and guess what’s getting more weight.
Additionally, I don’t think it would be a good idea. When they released PageRank, webmasters went crazy trying to raise it. If they give total number of links, I’m sure there will be a huge race to achieve more links than your competitors - whether relevant or not.
In less than 100 words, describe why you choose to rank Wikipedia above accurate sources? I think this answer is simple too. Google’s main factor is links. Since wikipedia is so broad, it has links from TONS of places. Since PageRank carries on across the domain, links to one article can help boost the PR of other articles.
Another reason is that Wikipedia is peer edited. It’s not the view of one person (when you look at any more credible site, it’s only edited by 1 person.) I think though, that it’s all to do with links.
Do companies/sites that spend a lot with your engine receive any SEO benefits (free consulting time, a few tricks from an engineer, etc) This one I can honestly answer: No! My old company maxed out 2 credit cards / month on Google Adwords. We got cool things like pens, a shirt, and a USB key in the mail, and a phone number to call in regards to our adwords account - but we still had sites banned from the index and get penalized.
I don’t think that Google plays preferences to people who spend more.
Does your engine ever use the predictive abilities of search keyword demands to profit outside the world of search? This one is interesting. I don’t think they do it directly, but I’m sure it has something to do with what types of companies they acquire. For example: If you looked at a trend for job search site queries, I’d bet that they’re up. Why? Because MS, Yahoo, and Google are all buying job search sites right now. Either they’re predicting a big down turn in the market, or they’re noticing that a lot of people are looking for and using those sites.
I think that’s enough for now. For the full list of questions please see Rand’s site (linked above). There’s some more good questions in his comments. Feel free to leave some possible answers to some of the questions in my comments if you like.
May 20th, 2007
It’s going to be a busy next few weeks.
I’ve got an interview in the Troy area this Friday, then Monday I (95% chance here) leave for Buffalo for another job interview.
Then, next weekend I’m up north Thursday - Tuesday.
The weekend after that (June 1-3) I’ll be in Toronto for a hockey tournament. It’s our “league championships” Check out these stats. Not bad for a fat guy eh?
Looking at my weight on that page though, I realize I’ve lost almost 10 lbs since the season began!
On top of all this I’ve got my first (and second) ever softball game today. In about 3 hours actually. I’m a little bit nervous. Other than practicing with my friends for the last 3 weeks, I haven’t played baseball since I was 12. That’s a long time.
I’ve gotten a lot better though. I still can’t hit a home run to save my life, but I manage to drop it down right between 2nd base and center field… so at least I’ll have a good on base percentage.
Hmm, haven’t been to Texas in a while… maybe I should squeeze that in somewhere too. Either way, if you’re trying to get in touch with me over the next few weeks and I’m hard to get a hold of - this is why.
May 16th, 2007
What is the opposite of love? Most of you are probably saying “Hate”, but you’re wrong.
The opposite of love is indifference - not giving a damn about the person either way. If I love you, I care. If I hate you, I care. If I’m indifferent, I don’t give a shit.
See love and hate are 2 sides of the same coin, but they’re not opposites. Either way you’re still obsessively thinking about the person.
In fact, if we measure your brain activity and body chemicals etc during times when you’re feeling love and hate they’ll be identical.
Chemically, love and hate are the same.
So what’s the opposite of happiness? You can probably gather that sadness is wrong, and you’re right. Happy and Sad are just like Love and Hate.
The opposite of happiness is boredom. Think about what would make you happy. Many of you might say something like winning the lottery, or having lots of money.
But is the money what makes you happy? Or is it the ability to have free time to do what you want when you want? I’ll bet a lot of it has to do with quitting that boring job of yours.
It’s just an interesting thought I came across today while reading some books. What do you think?
May 14th, 2007
I came across a job description today that I wanted to apply to, but I couldn’t. It seems that it requires resumes be sent in only by fax.
How many people own fax machines at home? EFax is a subscription (that I’m not about to pay for to send 1 fax) so that’s out.
I found some free software that came with my all in one printer that sends faxes, but sadly it requires that I plug it into a phone jack.
That’s my next question… how many people actually have land line phones? I don’t! There’s no need for it.
Is this company far behind the times, or am I just crazy to expect companies to have at least one newer way of receiving information?
May 14th, 2007
I’ve been reading The 4 hour workweek by Timothy Ferriss and although I’m only through about 3 chapters I think I could do about 20 blog posts on some of the ideas he presents.
Right now I want to talk about a fallacy that many Americans hold. That is that income determines richness.
Let’s look at an example out of my life: In one of the first jobs I took out of college I made $36,000 / year but left my house at 8:30 and was home by 5:30. I worked from 9-5 Monday through Friday and took a 30 minute lunch.
A later job paid me $50,000 but I left my house at 7:50 and got home at 7:00. I worked from 8:30 until 6, and took a 30-45 minute lunch often at my desk.
Which me was richer? the $36,000 me made about $17/hour…. while the $50,000 me….also made about $17/hour.
At the end of the year, I had more money in the bank working the $50,000 job but I also gave up a lot more of my time.
Sure, money is good - but what good is money if you can’t spend it?
Think about why you want to make more money and you’ll probably list many things you want to do.
What if you could work less AND get those things done? That’s what this book is about. Check it out, it’s certainly been very interesting so far. I’m sure it’ll inspire me to write more in the future.
May 11th, 2007
I haven’t gone grocery shopping in a while, so today’s lunch was more of a “this is what I have in the fridge, how can I turn that in to a meal?”
I have to say that I came up with some really awesome chicken burritos.
Here’s what you’ll need:
- 2-3 cans of canned chicken meat (I usually buy this stuff for the cat, but it’s made for humans)
- 1 package Lawry’s taco seasoning
- 1 package of flour tortillas
- a little bit of parsley
- white rice
- Colby and Monterey jack cheese - shredded (Kraft sells this in a bag)
First cook up some rice. Then add a little bit of parsley to the rice. This just adds some texture to the overall burrito (I stole this idea from Qdoba).
Next, grill up the chicken until it’s all stringy and falling apart. Then mix in water and the taco seasoning (I know this is for beef but trust me it tastes awesome on chicken… I stole this idea from that old Wendys southwest chicken salad) Let it boil until most of the water is gone. (you may want these to be a little juicy - your call)
I grilled the tortilla shells on my George Foreman grill, but you can just put them in the microwave too. The key here is to get them nice and hot so the shell sticks to itself when you fold it into a burrito.
Insert chicken, cheese, rice into burrito and fold it over. Enjoy!
That was my lunch today. It tasted good so I thought I’d share it.
May 10th, 2007
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