Random babble by Paulh

Lets make the magic happen!

More vegas weddings! Evilgreenmonkey to marry Lisa Ditlefsen in vegas and broadcast the wedding night live and unedited!

Cheers Mike

Working my notice period!

Been a slow 11 months, doesn’t really feel like I achieved anything. Shame really, was very hyped up about coming to work in the casino industry for one of the best domains around. Was an exciting challenge, had a ton of ideas and was very enthusiastic. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get on with my job, and spent most of my time planning the new site and working on other ideas. Wont go into details of why so lets just blame the corporate world.

Was going to wait a few months before resigning, wanted to see if things changed for the better, and I like being in Spain. Also wanted to be around for the new site launch, with the amazing CMS we were having developed. I can hand edit a page quicker than I can use them CMS - a great example of what happens when software developers don’t consult end users and just concentrate on functionality.

Anyway, I am off to head up the SEO for Car Rentals who I had a brief spell with last year. They are very big in the travel sector, with new sites such as their travel comparator. They also recently bought fly.co.uk – if anyone has any cool ideas for this domain then let me know Best of all I work very closely with owners who have great understanding of online marketing and SEO - and i get to spend January in OZ , then back to sunny Lichfield in england.

Interesting article in the Guardian, at first I thought they were going to complain about auto generated MFA sites, but turns out they just don’t like the rest of us having ago a publishing - and worst still making money from it.

The growing number of websites that mix and match low-quality articles produced by amateurs in order to generate traffic is causing concern

Amusing to see Googles standard response, “its not our fault, its our pesky computers and their algorithms”

Google responds that it is constantly tweaking its algorithms and reviewing websites to keep up the quality of Adsense participants

What annoys me in this article is this.,. “There were spelling mistakes, ridiculous bits of grammar, words missing from sentences and so forth.” oh no! shock horror! speeling mistakes and bad grammar on internet, call the fucking police. Pretentious arseholes, most of the people i know and blogs i read are written by dyslexic monkeys like Dave and Earl I am interested in what these people write(or what they are pimping next) not how well its written.
The Guradian then goes on to slate the cheap labour used to produce some of this “low-quality” content - never heard of the global economy? - most UK firms use India for call centres(i am pretty sure some of these people write better English than they speak), but web entrepreneurs are ruining the web by using India to outsource writing. Worried about their jobs.

Some of the best and biggest websites on the web thrive off low standard content written by non professional writers. Academics and journalists plagiarise content all the time, but simply get round it by citing their reference material. I really don’t mind if i land on badly written site, or end up reading rewritten content as long as its informative, or entertaining. News papers are one of worst mediums for publishing shite- ive managed to get several stories published almost word for word - Newspaper editors are even more desperate to fill their advertising sheets with content than weblogsinc. Online news sites are flooded with syndicated news, all quoting the same source, and sometimes not bothering to change a single word.

ok. i admit i am bored and needed to post somat.

Well I still haven’t fully recovered from this weekends in SEO meeting in Manchester.

Arrived in Manchester, from Malaga on Friday afternoon with Faye from casino.com, was her first SEO event and I have a sneaky feeling she was expecting it to be quite boring and full of geeks, although she denies this

Arrived at the Britannia hotel in the centre of Manchester around 5ish, bumped into 4eyes, DaveN, Serious, and NFFC in the reception. Was looking like this would be good event!

Came down to the hotel bar after checking a few emails, and started to introduce Faye to people and enjoy the cheap beer prices in happy hour. Then made our way to the restaurant. Managed to squeeze a seat between the 2 ex-party gaming guys, Mike and Rob, while Faye squeezed herself between JasonD and BroadProspect. Food was great, and much wine and beer was drunk. Was really good to meet mike and rob, very funny sound guys. Got back to the hotel, had a few more drinks and staggered to bed about 1am – shockingly early but I had an hours jet lag and had been traveling all day.

Saturday, I stayed in bed for as long as I could, until Faye phoned wanting to go for breakfast, so off we trotted to the nearest pub and had a few beers(shandies) with an English breakfast. Met up with some others, who soon started spilling food down themselves so me and faye decided to escape to the Manchester wheel, and then another pub.

Met up for lunch with everyone else at yet another pub. Then back to the hotel, quick nap, and then off to another restaurant for more beer and food. By the time I got back to the hotel I was knackerd, could not drink anymore so sneaked off to my room at 12ish.

Was great to meet with friends, and meet so many new faces. Just wish I was better at getting round to chatting with everyone. Made some new contacts, met some very bright people, took some incriminating photos for future blackmail, and also met the competition and stole their ideas.

Some photos

Guess I missed this one.

The online casino bodog has lost most of its domains, bodog.com is now owned by 1^st technologies.

1st Technology sued Bodog in a federal court, alleging the online gaming company was illegally using a “method and system for interactively transmitting multimedia information over a network which requires a reduced bandwidth” - sounds vague?

So what went wrong for bodog? They failed to attend the court hearing so a default judgement was made in favour of 1^st technologies.  Judge Roger L. Hunt ordered Bodog to pay (including interest) $48,937,456 to 1st Technology in March for patent infringement.

Bodog failed to pay the fine so on August  21st, Judge John Erlick ordered all registrars to transfer Bodog related domains to the control of 1st Technology.

The US really hates online gaming don’t they.

Very scary that a US court can make such a ruling against a company that operates outside of the US.  Why didn’t bodog see this coming? Could they of?

Bodog have reacted by having a new domain, newbodog.com J bodog.co.uk is obviously unaffected. Will they buy them back, how much for?

Just read the The In-House SEO Life Cycle on searchengineland.

Working in-house sure is different from working solo or for a dedicated SEO agency.

The company realize they need search engine optimisation but are not really sure what that means. They know they need to increase traffic but have no idea how its done. In boardroom meetings you hear phrases like “SEO magic” and “SEO vodoo”.   Just smile. 

Believe me sometimes it’s best not to talk SEO to some people. They pick up on fractions of what’s been said, and a little knowldge is a dangerous thing, next thing you know some well intentioned monkey is spamming google with JavaScript redirecting content. With no idea of the risks involved.

I can cope with good intentioned colleagues who email you articles from 4 years ago about some gooogle patent. Or pass on link exchange requests that your learned to ignore even before you knew what “link farm” meant. They are only helping, and its not thier job to know if its crap or not. Occasionally even my mom emails me some shite search story she found on the web.(sorry mom).

It’s even ok when your boss asks why we don’t rank for certain terms that aren’t worth targeting, or will using AdWords increase our PageRank.  All valid questions from people who’s job isn’t SEO.

But the the most frustrating part of corporate SEO is being asked for your expert opinion only to get looked at like you just asked to shag your bosses wife. Worse is when your bosses look at each other then laugh - still not made better when 3 months later your biggest competitor does exactly what they thought was so amusing - yeah not so fucking funny now! And that domain we said you could buy for $10k 4 months ago just sold for 10 times that, and now you wnat to buy it.. argghh!

The next most frustraing thing is how damn slow corporates move. But i expected that! Didn’t expect the go back to your corner and tweak some meta tags atitude. But its nice and hot in Spain and corporates pay good money

The very talented SEOIdiot has created a cartoon of me….

Question is, does this look like me???

EarlGay says its not very realistic because I’m smiling.

Girl at work says it makes me look like someone’s dad

First blog post on my own site and I haven’t a clue what to post. I’ve previously posted under different names on sites like Threadwatch.org, syndk8, webmasterworld, cre8asite and lots of other places.

This site is a quick and dirty install of wordpress. Needs a lot of work, but I’m a busy man, fortunately I love playing about with wordpress so at least Google will be pleased – more time I spend here less time I spend screwing with search algos.

Time for a drink.