Sebastian’s Pamphlets

… I just have to link to North South Media’s neat collection of Search Action Figures.

Paul pretty much dislikes folks who don’t link to him, so Danny Sullivan and Rand Fishkin are well advised to drop a link every now and then, and David Naylor better gives him an interview slot asap.

Google’s numbered “penalties”, esp. #6

As for numeric penalties in general … repeat("Sigh", ∞) … enjoy this brains trust moderated by Marty Weintraub (unauthorized):

Marty: Folks, please welcome Aaron Wall, who recently got his #6 penalty removed!

Audience: clap(26) sphinn(26)

The Gypsy: Sorry Marty but come on… this is complete BS and there is NO freakin #6 filter just like the magical minus 90…900 bla bla bla. These anomalies NEVER have any real consensus on a large enough data set to even be considered a viable theory.

A Red Crab: As long as Bill can’t find a plus|minus-n-raise|penalty patent, or at least a white paper or so leaked out from Google, or for all I care a study that provides proof instead of weird assumptions based on claims of webmasters jumping on todays popular WMW band wagon that aren’t plausible nor verifiable, such beasts don’t exist. There are unexplained effects that might look like a pattern, but in most cases it makes no sense to gather a few examples coming with similarities because we’ll never reach the critical mass of anomalies to discuss a theory worth more than a thumbs-down click.

Marty: Maybe Aaron is joking. Maybe he thinks he has invented the next light bulb.

Gamermk: Aaron is grasping at straws on this one.

Barry Welford: I would like this topic to be seen by many.

Audience: clap(29) sphinn(29)

The Gypsy: It is just some people that have DECIDED on an end result and trying to make various hypothesis fit the situation (you know, like tobacco lobby scientists)… this is simply bad form IMO.

Danny Sullivan: Well, I’ve personally seen this weirdness. Pages that I absolutely thought “what on earth is that doing at six” rather than at the top of the page. Not four, not seven — six. It was freaking weird for several different searches. Nothing competitive, either.

I don’t know that sixth was actually some magic number. Personally, I’ve felt like there’s some glitch or problem with Google’s ranking that has prevented the most authorative page in some instances from being at the top. But something was going on.

Remember, there’s no sandbox, either. We got that for months and months, until eventually it was acknowledge that there were a range of filters that might produce a “sandbox like” effect.

The biggest problem I find with these types of theories is they often start with a specific example, sometimes that can be replicated, then they become a catch-all. Not ranking. Oh, it’s the sandbox. Well no — not if you were an established site, it wasn’t. The sandbox was typicaly something that hit brand new sites. But it became a common excuse for anything, producing confusion.

Jim Boykin: I’ll jump in and say I truely believe in the 6 filter. I’ve seen it. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it happen to a few sites.

Audience: clap(31) sphinn(31)

A Red Crab: Such terms tend to become a life of their own, IOW an excuse for nearly every way a Webmaster can fuck up rankings. Of course Google’s query engine has thresholds (yellow cards or whatever they call them) that don’t allow some sites to rank above a particular position, but that’s a symtom that doesn’t allow back-references to a particular cause, or causes. It’s speculation as long as we don’t know more.

IncrediBill: I definitely believe it’s some sort of filter or algo tweak but it’s certainly not a penalty which is why I scoff at calling it such. One morning you wake up and Matt has turned all the dials to the left and suddenly some criteria bumps you UP or DOWN. Sites have been going up and down in Google SERPs for years, nothing new or shocking about that and this too will have some obvious cause and effect that could probably be identified if people weren’t using the shotgun approach at changing their site

G1smd: By the time anyone works anything out with Google, they will already be in the process of moving the goalposts to another country.

Slightly Shady SEO: The #6 filter is a fallacy.

Old School: It certainly occured but only affected certain sites.

Danny Sullivan: Perhaps it would have been better called a -5 penalty. Consider. Say Google for some reason sees a domain but decides good, but not sure if I trust it. Assign a -5 to it, and that might knock some things off the first page of results, right?

Look — it could all be coincidence, and it certainly might not necessarily be a penalty. But it was weird to see pages that for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t be at 1, showing up at 6.

Slightly Shady SEO: That seems like a completely bizarre penalty. Not Google’s style. When they’ve penalized anything in the past, it hasn’t been a “well, I guess you can stay on the frontpage” penalty. It’s been a smackdown to prove a point.

Matt Cutts: Hmm. I’m not aware of anything that would exhibit that sort of behavior.

Audience: Ugh … oohhhh … you weren’t aware of the sandbox, either!

Danny Sullivan: Remember, there’s no sandbox, either. We got that for months and months, until eventually it was acknowledge that there were a range of filters that might produce a “sandbox like” effect.

Audience: Bah, humbug! We so want to believe in our lame excuses …

Tedster: I’m not happy with the current level of analysis, however, and definitely looking for more ideas.

Audience: clap(40) sphinn(40)

Of course the panel above is fictional, respectively assembled from snippets which in some cases change the message when you read them in their context. So please follow the links.

I wouldn’t go that far to say there’s no such thing as a fair amount of Web pages that deserve a #1 spot on Google’s SERPs, but rank #6 for unknown reasons (perhaps link monkey business, staleness, PageRank flow in disarray, anchor text repetitions, …). There’s something worth investigating.

However, I think that labelling a discussion of glitches or maybe filters that don’t behave based on a way too tiny dataset “#6 penalty” leads to the lame excuse for literally anything phenomenon.

Folks who don’t follow the various threads closely enough to spot the highly speculative character of the beast, will take it as fact and switch to winter sleep mode instead of enhancing their stuff like Aaron did. I can’t wait for the first “How to escape the Google -5 penalty” SEO tutorial telling the great unwashed that a “+5″ revisit-after meta tag will heal it.

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Recently Matt Cutts said that Google doesn’t index password protected content. I wasn’t sure whether or not that goes for all search engines. I thought that they might index at least references to protected URLs, like they all do with other uncrawlable content that has strong inbound links.

Well, SEO tests are dull and boring, so I thought I could have some fun with this one.

I’ve joked that I should use someone’s favorite smut collection to test it. Unfortunately, nobody was willing to trade porn passwords for link love or so. I’m not a hacker, hence I’ve created my own tiny collection of password protected SEO porn (this link is not exactly considered safe at work) as test case.

I was quite astonished that according to this post about SEO porn next to nobody in the SEOsphere optimizes adult sites (of course that’s not true). From the comments I figured that some folks at least surf for SEO porn evaluate the optimization techniques applied by adult Webmasters.

Ok, lets extend that. Out yourself as SEO porn savvy Internet marketer. Leave your email addy in the comments (dont forget to tell me why I should believe that you’re over 18), and I’ll email you the super secret password for my SEO porn members area (!SAW). Trust me, it’s worth it, and perfectly legit due to the strictly scientific character of this experiment. If you’re somewhat shy, use a funny pseudonym.

I’d very much appreciate a little help with linkage too. Feel free to link to http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/porn/ with an adequate anchor text of your choice, and of course without condom.

Get the finest SEO porn available on this planet!

I’ve got the password, now let me in!

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I’m truly excited. Two of my pamphlets made it in The Rubber Chicken Award’s Top 10! That’s 50% success (2/4 nominated pamphlets), so please help me to make that 100%: vote for #3 and #4!

Just in case you, dear reader, are not a hardcore SEM addict who reads search blogs even during the holiday season, let me explain why a Rubber Chicken Award Top 10 nomination is a honor.

The Rubber Chicken Award honors the year’s most serious SEO research. Extra brownie points are given to the dullest draft and the most tedious wording.

Rumors are swirling that Google’s search quality spam task force has developed the complex RCAFHITSI^©™ algo^{patent pending®} which compiles and ranks search blog posts presented to Mike Blumenthals’s Rubber Chicken Award Jury:

• Bill Slawski
• Greg Sterling
• Rand Fishkin
• Danny Sullivan
• Matt Cutts (suspected final arbiter and extremely busy, so we don’t know whether he’ll show up or not)

Here is the cream of the crop of the search world, the 2007 Top 10 search blog posts nominated in the Rubber Chicken Award for the dullest and most boring/serious SEO/SEM article:

1. Want traffic? Rank for High Traffic Keywords…
2. We Add Words to AdWords… Google Subtracts them
3. Why eBay and Wikipedia rule Google’s SERPs
4. SEOs home alone - Google’s nightmare
5. 13 Things to Do When Your Loved One is Away at Conferences
6. SEO High School Confidential - Premiere Edition!
7. The Sphinn Awards - Part I & -Part II.
8. Top 21 Signs You Need a Break From SEO (2007 version)
9. 10 Signs That You May Be a Blog Addict
10. The SEO’s Guide to Beginners
11. The Internet Marketer’s Nightmare
12. Mission Accomplished—Top Ranking in Google
13. Google Interiors - the day my house became searchable

I’ve selfishly marked the two posts you want to vote for. Because all nominations are truly awesome, just vote for everything but make sure to check “5” for #3 and #4:

Thank You, Dear Reader!

Update: I can’t post another voting whore call to action today, but of course I’d very much appreciate your vote in the Best SEO Blog of 2007 category at SEJ’s 2007 Search Blog Awards.

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Today Loren asked for selfish nominations, thus everybody posts a call for action.
So did I:

• Best search related pamphlets
I hereby selfishly submit my blog.

To no avail:

Sebastian, we’re not going to have a category for Best Pamphlets, but good try

There’s no such thing as a Best Crabby Search Pamphlets category just because my blog would be the sole candidate? Ok, I understand that. Really. I didn’t even swear. Yet.

So here’s my call for action. Nominate your favorite blog (that’s mine of course!) in any of the following categories that match:

• Best SEO Blog
  You’d expect more marketing stuff from an SEO blog.
• Best SEM Blog
  You’d expect even more marketing stuff, as well as PPC and whatnot. I suck on both.
• Best SEO Plugin for Wordpress
  I never wrote a WordPress plugin. Actually, this year I hate WordPress because they messed up the database structure in version 2.3 without providing any documentation or at least a reasonable migration procedure. Also their coding standards suck ass and make me puke whenever I see WordPress code.
• Best Search Agency Resource Blog
  My employers don’t blog.
• Best Link Building Blog
  Link building pamphlets are rare nowadays.
• Best Social Media Marketing or Optimization Blog
  I don’t game social media.
• Best Local Search Blog
  I’m happy when I find my shoes before I leave the house, hence I can’t give any advice on local search.
• Best Video Search Blog
  I watch x-rated videos only. Probably posting geeky clips doesn’t qualify me.
• Best Mobile Search Blog
  When I’m on the road I usually search until I give up and ask a cabby for an escort. Cheating this way makes sure I’m not always too late, but doesn’t qualify me for mobile search consultancy.
• Best Google Blog Not Owned by Google
  I’m not in Google news.
• Best Search Engine Corporate Blog (owned by the search engines)
  Although I’ve developed a tiny search engine years ago, I fear that smutty results don’t count.
• Best Contextual Advertising Blog
  My organic traffic is cheaper, and probably as reliable as PPC campaigns.
• Best Affiliate Marketing Blog
  I sold two Seobook subscriptions recently, does that count?
• Best Search Engine Community/Forum
  I visit Sphinn and the Google Webmaster forum and never will launch a new forum again.
• Best New Search Engine of 2007
  See above.
• Best Search Engine Research Blog
  I revealed that Microsoft plans to relaunch Live Search as porn affiliate program, why eBay and Wikipedia rule Google’s SERPs, and more SEO research like that.
• Best Search Linkbait of 2007
  When I try it, folks bury it.
• Breakout Blog of 2007
  I’m blogging since 2005 but moved my blog away from blogspot this year.
• Best Search Conference Coverage of 2007
  I don’t even attend conferences.
• Best Search Conference Coverage in Photos
  See above.
• Best Search Marketing Facebook Group
  Facebook killed my account for spamming or so.
• Most Giving Search Blogger
  I can’t give away a fraction of Bill Slawski’s great insights.
• Best Independent Search Blog (not owned by media company or marketing agency)
  What does that mean? Ok, I’m in.
• Best Search Blog Post of 2007
  I wrote a dull book on redirects, and more.

Oh well. Instead of nominating my stuff better convince Search Engine Journal that they really need a Crabby Pamphlets Category. Or try Category #16 at Performancing.

Update December/28/2007: YAY! Thank you all! Now you can vote for my pamphlets in the “Best SEO Blog of 2007″ category at the SEJ Search Blog Award 2007 contest. Here are the candidates:

• SEOmoz Blog
• Sebastian’s Pamphlets
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Graywolf’s Wolf-Howl
• Tropical SEO
• PageTrafficBlog
• SugarRae
• SEO Scoop
• Search Rank Blog
• SEO by the SEA
• Search Marketing Gurus
• SEO Book

It truly is an honor just to be nominated together with these great SEO bloggers.

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Blogging should be fun every now and then. Today I don’t tell you anything new about Google’s secret experiments with the robots exclusion protocol. I ask you instead, because I’m sure you know your stuff. Unfortunately, the Q&A on undocumented robots.txt syntax from Google’s labs utilizes JavaScript, so perhaps it looks somewhat weird in your feed reader.

Q: Please look at this robots.txt file and figure out why it’s worth a Q&A with you, my dear reader:


User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
Noindex: /

Ok, click here to show the first hint. A: This robots.txt is remarkable because it protects Google’s text link ads from crawling and indexing: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/robots.txt

I know, this one was a breeze, so here comes your challenge.
Q: Which crawler directive used in the robots.txt above was introduced 1996 in the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), but was not defined in its very first version from 1994?

Ok, click here to show the second hint. A: “Noindex” of course. By the way, someone should fix the robotstxt.org server because the 503-errors make it somewhat hard to research the answers.

Congrats, you are smart. I’m sure you don’t need to lookup the next answers.
Q: Which major search engine has a team permanently working on REP extensions and releases those quite frequently, and who is the engineer in charge?

Ok, click here to show the third hint. A: The search engine is Google, and the REP team’s head is Dan Crow. Lurking on their servers and reading their HTTP headers sometimes reveals exiting stuff they’re working on.

Exactly. Now we’ve gathered all the pieces of this robots.txt puzzle.
Q: Could you please summarize your cognitions and conclusions?

Ok, click here to show the fourth hint. A: The “noindex” value is a crawler directive valid in robots meta tags as well as X-Robots-Tags, not (yet) in robots.txt. Maybe Google has something cooking, or the “Noindex: /” statement is just an experiment.

Thank you, dear reader! Now lets see what we can dig out. If the appearance of a “Noindex:” directive in robots.txt is an experiment, it would make sense that Ms. Googlebot understands and obeys it. Unfortunetely, I sold all the source code I’ve stolen from Google and didn’t keep a copy for myself, so I need to speculate a little.

Last time I looked, Google’s cool robots.txt validator emulated crawler behavior, that means that the crawlers understood syntax the validator didn’t handle correctly. Maybe this was changed in the meantime, perhaps the validator pulls its code from the “real thing” now, or at least the “Noindex:” experiment may have found its way into the validator’s portfolio. So I thought that testing the newish robots.txt statement “Noindex:” in the Webmaster Console is worth a try. And yes, it told me that Googlebot understands this command, and interprets it as “Disallow:”.

Since validation is no proof of crawler behavior, I’ve set up a page “blocked” with a “Noindex:” directive in robots.txt and linked it in my sidebar. The noindex statement was in place long enough before I’ve uploaded and linked the spider trap, so that the engines shouldn’t use a cached robots.txt when they follow my links. My test is public, feel free to check out my robots.txt as well as the crawler log.

While I’m waiting for the expected growth of my noindex crawler log, I’m speculating. Why the heck would Google use a new robots.txt directive which behaves like the good old Disallow: statement? Makes no sense to me.

Lets not forget that this mysterious noindex statement was discovered in the robots.txt of Google’s ad server, not in the better known and closely watched robots.txt of google.com. Google is not the only search engine trying to better understand client sided code. None of the major engines should be interested in crawling ads for ranking purposes. The MSN/LiveSearch referrer spam fiasco demonstrates that search engine bots can fetch and render Google ads outputted in iFrames on pagead2.googlesyndication.com.

Since nobody supports Google’s X-Robots-Tag (sending “noindex” and other REP directives in the HTTP header) until today, maybe the engines have a silent deal that content marked with “Noindex:” in robots.txt shouldn’t be indexed. Microsoft’s bogus spam bot which doesn’t bother with robots.txt because it somewhat hapless tries to emulate a human surfer is not considered a crawler, it’s existence just proves that “software shop” is not a valid label for M$.

This theory has a few weak points, but it could point to something. If noindex in robots.txt really prevents from indexing of contents crawled by accident, or non-HTML contents that can’t supply robots meta tags, that would be a very useful addition to the robots exclusion protocol. Of course we’d then need Noarchive:, Nofollow: and Nopreview: too, probably more but I’m not really in a greedy mood today.

Back to my crawler trap. Refreshing the log reveals that 30 minutes after spreading links pointing to it, Googlebot has fetched the page. That seems to prove that the Noindex: statement doesn’t prevent from crawling, regardless the false (?) information handed out by Google’s robots.txt validator.

(Or didn’t I give Ms. Googlebot enough time to refetch my robots.txt? Dunno. The robots.txt copy in my Google Webmaster Console still doesn’t show the Noindex: statement, but I doubt that’s the version Googlebot uses because according to the last-downloaded timestamp in GWC the robots.txt has been changed at the time of the download. Never mind. If I was way too impatient, I still can test whether a newly discovered noindex directive in robots.txt actually deindexes stuff or not.)

On with the show. The next interesting question is: Will the crawler trap page make it in Google’s search index? Without the possibly non-effective noindex directive a few hundred links should be able to accomplish that. Alas, a quoted search query delivers zilch so far.

Of course I’ve asked Google for more information, but didn’t receive a conclusive answer so far. While waiting for an official statement, I take a break from live blogging this quick research in favor of terrorizing a few folks with respectless blog comments. Stay tuned. Be right back.

Well, meanwhile I had dinner, the kids fell asleep –hopefully until tomorrow morning–, but nothing else happened. A very nice and friendly Googler tries to find out what the noindex in robots.txt fuss is all about, thanks and I can’t wait! However, I suspect the info is either forgotten or deeply buried in some well secured top secret code libraries, hence I’ll push the red button soon.

Thanks to Google’s great Webmaster Central team, especially Susan, I learned that I was flogging a dead horse. Here is Google’s take on Noindex in robots.txt:

As stated in my previous note, I wasn’t aware that we recognized any directives other than Allow/Disallow/Sitemap, so I did some asking around.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer that I can currently give you. […] I can’t contribute any clarifications right now.

Thank you Susan!

Update: John Müller from Google has just confirmed that their crawler understands the Noindex: syntax, but it’s not yet set in stone.

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Why the fuck do we dumb and clueless Internet marketers care about Google’s Toolbar PageRank when the Internet faces real issues? Well, both the toolbar slider as well as IPv4 are somewhat finite.

I can hear the IM crowd singing “The day green pixels died” … whilst Matt’s gang in building 43 intones “No mercy, smack paid links, no place to hide for TLA links” … Enjoy this video, it’s friggin’ hilarious:

Since Gary Feldman’s song “The Day The Routers Died” will become an evergreen soon, I thought you might be interested in a transcript:

A long long time ago
I can still remember
When my laptop could connect elsewhere.

And I tell you all there was a day
The network card I threw away
Had a purpose and it worked for you and me.

But 18 years completely wasted
With each address we’ve aggregated
The tables overflowing
The traffic just stopped flowing.

And now we’re bearing all the scars
And all my traceroutes showing stars
The packets would travel faster in cars
The day the routers died.

So bye bye, folks at RIPE:55
Be persuaded to upgrade it or your network will die
IPv6 makes me let out a sigh
But I spose we’d better give it a try
I suppose we’d better give it a try!

Now did you write an RFC
That dictated how we all should be
Did we listen like we should that day?

Now were you back at RIPE fifty-four
Where we heard the same things months before
And the people knew they’d have to change their ways.

And we knew that all the ISPs
Could be future proof for centuries.

But that was then not now
Spent too much time playing WoW.

Ooh there was time we sat on IRC
Making jokes on how this day would be
Now there’s no more use for TCP
The day the routers died.

So bye bye, folks at RIPE:55
Be persuaded to upgrade it or your network will die
IPv6 just makes me let out a sigh
But I spose we’d better give it a try
I suppose we’d better give it a try!

I remember those old days I mourn
Sitting in my room, downloading porn
Yeah that’s how it used to be.

When the packets flowed from A to B
Via routers that could talk IP
There was data [that] could be exchanged between you and me.

Oh but I could see you all ignore
The fact we’d fill up IPv4!

But we all lost the nerve
And we got what we deserved!

And while we threw our network kit away
And wished we’d heard the things they say
Put all our lives in disarray
The day the routers died.

So bye bye, folks at RIPE:55
Be persuaded to upgrade it or your network will die
IPv6 just makes me let out a sigh
But I spose we’d better give it a try
I suppose we’d better give it a try!

Saw a man with whom I used to peer
Asked him to rescue my career
He just sighed and turned away.

I went down to the ‘net cafe
That I used to visit everyday
But the man there said I might as well just leave.

[And] now we’ve all lost our purpose
My cisco shares completely worthless
No future meetings for me
At the Hotel Krasnapolsky.

And the men that make us push and push
Like Geoff Huston and Randy Bush
Should’ve listened to what they told us
The day the routers died.

So bye bye, folks at RIPE:55
Be persuaded to upgrade it or your network will die
IPv6 just makes me let out a sigh
But I spose we’d better give it a try
[I suppose we’d better give it a try!]

Recorded at the RIPE:55 meeting in Amsterdam (NL) at the Krasnapolsky Hotel between 22 and 26 October 2007.

Just in case the video doesn’t load, here is another recording.

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Are you wondering why Gray Hat Search Engine News (GHN) is so quiet recently?

One reason may be that I’ve borrowed their Google savvy spy. I’ve sent him to Mountain View again to learn more about Google’s nofollow strategy.

He returned with a copy of Google’s recently revised mission statement, discovered in the wastebasket of a conference room near office 211 in building 43. Read the shocking and unbelievable head note printed in bold letters:

Google’s mission is to condomize the world’s information and make it universally uncrawlable and useless.

Read and reread it, then some weird facts begin to make sense. Now you’ll understand why:

1. The rel-nofollow plague was designed to maximize collateral damage by devaluing all hyperlinked votes by honest users of nearly all platforms you’re using everyday, for example Twitter, Wikipedia, corporate blogs, GoogleGroups … ostensibly to nullify the efforts of a few spammers.
2. Nobody bothers to comment on your nofollow’ed blog.
3. Google invented the supplemental index (to store scraped resources suffering from too many condomized links) and why it grows faster than the main index.
4. Google installed the Bigdaddy infrastructure (to prevent Ms. Googlebot from following nofollow’ed links).
5. Google switched to BlitzCrawling (to list timely contents for a moment whilst fat resources from large archives get buried in the supplemental index). RIP deep crawler and freshbot.

Seriously, the deep crawler isn’t defunct, it’s called supplemental crawler nowadays, and the freshbot is still alive as Feedfetcher.

Disclaimer: All these hard facts were gathered by torturing sources close to Google, robbery and other unfair methods. If anyone bothers to debunk all that as bad joke, one question still remains: Why does Google next to nothing to stop the nofollow plague? I mean, ongoing mass abuse of rel-nofollow is obviously counterproductive with regard to their real mission.

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:sdıʇ ɹǝpısuı sʞ1oɟ ɹǝɥʇo ʇdʎɹɔuǝ oʇ unɟ s,ʇı ʇnq .sdɐɥɹǝd ¿uoɹoɯʎxo uɐ ʇɐɥʇ sı .ʎ1ɟʎɐp ɐ ǝʞı1 ʇsnظ ‘ǝɹnʇnɟ ɐ sɐɥ ɔıɟɟɐɹʇ 1ıɐʇ buo1 ǝsɹǝʌǝɹ buı11nd oǝs uʍopǝpısdn

If you’re bored, give it a try. Mark did it.

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Being a single parent of three monsters at the moment brings me newish insights. I now deeply understand the pain of father Google dealing with us, and what doing the chores all day long means to Matt’s gang in building 43, Dublin, and whereever. What a nightmare of a household.

If you don’t suffer from an offspring plague you won’t believe what sneaky and highly intelligent monsters having too much time on their tiny greedy hands will do to gain control over their environment. Outsmarting daddy is not a hobby, it’s their mission, and everything in perfect order is attackable. Each of them tries to get as much attention as possible, and if nothing helps, negative attention is fine too. There’s no such thing as bad traffic, err … mindfulness.

Every rule is breakable, and there’s no way to argue seriously with a cute 5 yo gal burying her 3 yo brother in the mud whilst honestly telling me that she has nothing to do with the dirty laundry because she never would touch anything hanging on the clothesline. Then my little son speaks out telling me that’s all her fault, so she promises to do it never, never, never again in her whole life and even afterwards. In such a situation I’ve not that much options: I archive my son’s paid links report, accept her reconsideration request but throttle her rankings for a while, recrawl and remove the unpurified stuff from the … Oups … I clear the scene with a pat on her muddy fingers, forgive all blackhatted kids involved in the scandal and just do the laundry again, writing a note to myself to improve the laundry algo in a way that muddy monsters can’t touch laundered bed sheets again.

Anything not on the explicit don’ts list goes, so while I’m still stuffing the washer with muddy bed sheets I hear a weird row in the living room. Running upstairs I spot my 10 yo son and his friend playing soccer with a ball I had to fish out of a heap of broken crockery and uprooted indoor plants to confiscate it just two hours ago. Yelling that’s against our well known rules and why the heck is that […] ball in the game again I get stopped immediately by the boys. First, they just played soccer and the recent catastrophe was the result of a strictly forbidden basketball joust. I’ve to admit that I said they must not play basketball in the house. Second, it’s my fault when I don’t hide the key to the closet where I locked the confiscated ball away. Ok, enough is enough. I banned my son’s friend and grounded himself for a week, took away the ball, and ran to the backyard to rescue two bitterly crying muddy dwarfs from the shed’s roof. Later on, while two little monsters play games in the bath tub which I really don’t want to watch too closely currently, I read a thread titled “Daddy is soooo unfair” in the house arrest forum where my son and his buddy tell the world that they didn’t do anything wrong, just sheer whitehatted stuff, but I stole their toy and banned them from the playground. Sigh.

I’m exhausted. I’m supposed to deliver a script to merge a few feeds giving fresh contents, a crawlability review, and whatnot tonight, but I just wonder what else will happen when I leave the monsters alone in their beds after supper and story hour, provided I get them into their beds without a medium-size flame war. Now I understand why another daddy supplemented the family with a mom.

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Since Google can’t manage to clean up [Buy cheap viagra] let’s do it ourselves. Go seek a somewhat trusted search blog mentioning “buy cheap viagra” somewhere in the archives and link to the post with a slightly diversified anchor text like “how to buy cheap viagra online“. Matt deserves a #1 spot by the way so spread many links …

Then when Matt is annoyed enough and Google has kicked out the unrelated stuff from this search hopefully my viagra spam will rank as deserved again

Update a few hours later: Matt ranks #1 for [buy cheap viagra algorithmically]:

His ranking for [buy cheap viagra] fell about 10 positions to #17 but for [buy cheap viagra online] he’s still on the first SERP, now at position #10 (#3 yesterday). Interesting. It seems that Google’s newish turbo-blog-indexing influences the rankings of pages linked from blog posts relatively short dated but not exactly long lasting.

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