I know I said the blog would be back on track but you can clearly see it’s not, and there’s no chance it will get there anytime soon. Thing is, I’m busy right now, I have finished my Bachelors but there’s so much I need to do this summer, while I still have the time. I struck a deal with a local training center to finally get my diploma in Photography, and I revamp their website and they take me in no charge. I’m going for various jobs in branding, which has always been a passion of mine, but which doesn’t mean I don’t do the usual SEO consulting and so on.

All in all, I’m busy as busy can be. So I must put this project on hold, which means it’ll probably die out eventually, traffic is quite significantly taking a dive, it’s been perhaps a month or so since I’ve last posted. (The SEO in me is taking notes as to what effects this is having in Google) and I won’t lie to you guys.

I think the site will get redesigned a bit, and the blog will be reedited into one nice pdf ebook so that everyone can read it when they want without my confusing navigation

I’ll also post my Bachelors paper, many thanks to Dan (I didn’t know your last name so I called you Smith in a quote, please tell me so I can change that) and JJ who helped me with some content and all the people who voted

So don’t delete this bookmark yet, but don’t expect much out of it soon. I’m supposed to leave the city for a couple of weeks and then who knows…

Thanks to all the readers and remember, if you need some SEO advice ship an email to business@eydryan.com and we’ll help you with our grade-A service. And no, money is not what we’re after, but we’re not a charity either. We give you knowledge, and that is hard to come by.

Enjoy, and stay subscribed, or subscribe now for the future ebook.

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This is a quick post since I’m in a busy period right now, with projects and all that, so I don’t have the energy or the time to write as much as I’d like here. However, I’ll try to post at least twice a week.

In other news, I am now a certified Project Manager. Visit my Linkedin page for more details. (under education)

Click here to go to the article about Google.

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This is another of my posts targeted at small businesses and basically dispenses marketing rather than SEO tips, but I figure it’s a nice read for all you SEOs reading this as well.

I personally felt, when the MacBook Air appeared, that it was the most awesome thing ever. It was slim (I love slim), it was powerful, it had the newest high-tech, and it fit in a Manilla envelope (which is really an awesome way to present its thickness). Also, Steve Jobs has that charisma that allows him to present even the most banal of items in an incredible way. Which is why Apple will lose immensely when he steps away from the scene. But enough about that, point is when I bought my laptop earlier this year the Air had just been showcased and I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I loved the little Caps Lock LED on the key and I loved many things about it.

Slowly though, I got more and more disappointed with it. Firstly, it came to my country at a price of 2000 euros (over 3000$) and only the model without the SSD drive. Secondly, I found out about its many limitations and I chose to get an HP laptop, with a decent configuration and a decent cost-to-features ratio. Also, it’s cool too, and to my amazement had a Caps Lock LED.

However, time passed and CERF 2008 happened (which is a computer fair here) where Orange brought a bunch of MacBook Air models for you to play with, testing out the new 3G. And I was wholesomely unimpressed. Firstly, it didn’t really look like much, just a smaller laptop, the size wasn’t that shocking. Sure, it was slim, but… not impressively slim. Secondly, the oh so awesome Caps Lock LED was a small thingy which wasn’t even visible in daylight. Mine is a bigger one and highly visible in direct sunlight but as I have noticed myself, the whole idea of the LED there is insanely stupid (although it’s still cool). That is because when you’re typing your hands tend to move over the caps key blocking your line of sight to the key thus the LED itself. HP chose to put it to the side of the key where it is visible while keeping your hands on the keys, but still becomes invisible when you start moving the hands on the keys. Which is why a simple indicator above the keyword is way better.

Also, the whole gestures thing… Not the most useful thing… I mean it’s cool to be able to rotate an image quickly, but you can do that with one click. And when you try for example to pinch the image and you fingers slide and you end up rotating the image instead, that’s annoying. But otherwise it’s all so pointless. The scroll gesture is substituted on most new laptops with the scrollpad next to the touchpad, and that only needs one finger, and the pinch thing is pretty hard to do, my friend had to try a few times before getting it right and I only could do it with the thumb and a finger.

It’s so like Apple to promise a lot and then, when you get to look at the actual product, you start to see the flaws, and you start to notice that most features are in other products out there and they’re actually better thought out and with more value than the Mac. It’s so like Apple to overcharge by hyping their products and then acting like it’s the coolest thing out there.

As Seth Godin said, you must promise a lot, and then overdeliver. This wasn’t it with the Air and it’s not with most Apple products.

Try not to disappoint your customers and think of how hyping will affect you: it’ll bring you instant sales but will hurt you in the long run. There’s bound to be an application here for SEO but unfortunately I have no time to go into more detail.

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Late last April I read an article on Cnet about “Google’s pointers on countering web spam” and I felt there were some issues that were correct and some that were… off. I mean I’m down with Matt Cutts and how he’s like a rockstar nowadays but I feel that all this “the Google way is the best way” is to much fanboyism. I mean, that’s how Google got big, by questioning stuff and doing one better.

So, on to the article, the first part was about spammers. Matt Cutts said: “Spammers are human. You have the power to raise their blood pressure. Make them spend more time and effort…If spammer gets frustrated, he’s more likely to look for someone easier.”. And he’s almost right, I mean, hackers are people too and if you piss them off… no, wait, you don’t want to piss hackers off. I mean, a decent enough hacker will be able to break anything if motivated enough, and in a way, it’s like burglars do: if you have a shiny metal door with “burglarproof” written on it, it’s a downright invitation, whereas if you keep cool, you’ll get some spam, but nothing big. It depends on whether you want to annoy the little guys or attract the attention of the big guys. Think this through before you complicate things.

“Use captcha systems to make sure real people, not bots, are commenting on your site. He uses a simple math puzzle–what’s 2 + 2?–but he also likes KittenAuth, which makes people identify kitten photos.”

This is perhaps one of the things that annoys me most about the internet: captchas. Small, awkward texts, illegible to machines (i doubt anyone actually uses machines to read captchas) and pretty much illegible to people. They’re annoying and the really are pointless. They put captchas once on stumbleupon, I almost stopped submitting stuff, that’s how much they annoyed me. As for their reputation of being unbreakable… Slim chance. There was an actual case where a porn site asked people to enter captchas to view some pics and the robot could thus bypass any captcha out there. So captchas are very easily breakable. Not to speak of math captchas (i think i can rustle up a script to detect the + sign or the key words and then do the math), or that kittenauth, which although fun (and highly unaesthetical) can be broken with a script that matches the photos to google searches. All in all captchas are nothing more than an imperfect way to stop spambots. A much better way would be to actually challenge people in something fun, like a flash game or puzzle. Or heck, just trust people and moderate yourself later, you need people to join and comment. And akismet and bad behaviour do a neat job of keeping spam comments out… Why complicate things?

“Reconfigure software settings after you’ve installed it. A little modification of various settings will throw bots off the scent. “If you can off the beaten path, away from default software installations, you’ll save yourself a ton of grief,” he said.”

This is a blur of advice but what this means is the simple stuff, like changing the default username for wordpress (admin) to some strange intergalactic hail, like @>FE{@342dasA. Guess that, spammer. Also, some changes as to permitted post behaviours give you a buffer against spam. That means make all commenters need to be trusted (have at least one approved comment) and you’ll escape a lot of spam…

“Employ systems that rank people by trust and reputation. For example, eBay shows how long a person has been a member and how satisfied others are with transactions with that person.”

This is a way of tracking how much a person has contributed and thus how likely he is of compromising your blog. For example, someone who comments a lot is less likely to spam and lose his status than someone who’s new. Reward people for being there. Wordpress usually does this via number of comments, but feel free to expand on that.

“Don’t be afraid of legitimate purveyors of search-engine optimization services. “SEO is not spam. Google does not hate SEO,” Cutts said. “There are plenty of white-hat SEO (companies) who can help you out.”

I’m not really sure what this has to do with spam, but it seems in some places people view SEO as a bad thing, like they’re cheating Google, which is really not true. I know hackers who do white-hat SEO (the good kind) because they feel spamming and all that should not be used.

Anyway, enjoy this lightweight article, I found it refreshing.

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