Sebastian’s Pamphlets

Define Ego Food : Healthy, organic food for Sebastian’s ego, so it can grow up big and strong.

 

I’m not yet sure whether the old year ended with an asc(33) or the new year started with an U+0021. However, I want to shout out a loud Thank You! to you, my dear readers. Thanks to you my pamphlets prosper.

I’m not only talking about your very much appreciated kind mentions¹ on your blogs. What gets my lazy butt out of my bed to write more pamphlets is another highlight of my day: checking this blog’s MBL and Feedburner stats. In other words: I write because you read, sphinn and stumble my articles.

The 2007 Search Blog Awards

Despite my attempt to cheat my way to a search blog award with a single-candidate-category, Loren over at SEJ decided to accept a nomination of my pamphlets in the Best SEO Blog category. It was a honor to play in that league, and it means a lot to me.

Congrats to Barry, and thanks to the 150 people who voted for me!

Yep, I’ve counted even the 1/2/3-votes, in fact as constructive criticism. I’ve no clue whether the folks who gave me low ratings just didn’t know me or considerd my blog that worthless. Anyway, I take that very seriously and will try to polish up Sebastian’s Pamphlets for the next round.

The 2007 Rubber Chicken Awards (SEM version)

In related good news, I, Google’s nightmare, have almost won the 2007 Rubber Chicken Award for the dullest most bizarre SEO blog post.

Ranked in row two I’m in good company with Geraldine, Jeff and David. Another post of mine made it in row three.

Congrats to Matt and Sandra who won the most wanted award on the Web!

More Ego Food

While inserting my daily load of blatant comment-author-link spam on several blogs, last night I stumbled upon a neat piece of linkbait from Shaun and couldn’t resist to slap and discredit him. Eventually he banned me, but I can spam via email too. Read the result more ego food tonight: Sebastian’s sauced idiot version of robots.txt pulled by Shaun from the UK’s Scotland’s great Hobo SEO Blog.

What can I improve?

I’m really proud of such a great readership. What do you want to see here this year? I’m blogging in my spare time, but I’ll try to fulfill as many wishes as possible. Please don’t hesitate to post your requests here. Consider the comments my to-do list for 2008. Thank you again, and have a great year!

---

¹  It seems I’m suffering from an inbound link penalty: Technorati recently discoverd my new URL but refuses to update my reputation, despite all my pings, so I’m stuck with a daily link count.

Share/bookmark this: del.icio.us • Google • ma.gnolia • Mixx • Netscape • reddit • Sphinn • Squidoo • StumbleUpon • Yahoo MyWeb Subscribe to Entries Comments All Comments

OMFG, yet another post on Sphinn? Yup. I tell you why gaming Sphinn is counter productive, because I just don’t want to read another whiny rant in the lines of “why do you ignore my stuff whilst A listers [whatever this undefined term means] get their crap sphunn hot in no time”. Also, discussions assuming that success equals bad behavior like this or this one aren’t exactly funny nor useful. As for the whiners: Grow the fuck up and produce outstanding content, then network politely but not obtrusive to promote it. As for the gamers: Think before you ruin your reputation!

What motivates a wannabe Internet marketer to game Sphinn?

Traffic of course, but that’s a myth. Sphinn sends very targeted traffic but also very few visitors (see my stats below).

Free uncondomized links. Ok, that works, one can gain enough link love to get a page indexed by the search engines, but for this purpose it’s not necessary to push the submission to the home page.

Attention is up next. Yep, Sphinn is an eldorado for attention whores, but not everybody is an experienced high-class call girl. Most are amateurs giving it a (first) try, or wrecked hookers pushing too hard to attract positive attention.

The keyword is positive attention. Sphinners are smart, they know every trick in the book. Many of them make a living with gaming creative use of social media. Cheating professional gamblers is a waste of time, and will not produce positive attention. Even worse, the shit sticks at the handle of the unsuccessful cheater (and in many cases the real name). So if you want to burn your reputation, go found a voting club to feed your crap.

Fortunately, getting caught for artificial voting at Sphinn comes with devalued links too. The submitted stories are taken off the list, that means no single link at Sphinn (besides profile pages) feeds them any more, hence search engines forget them. Instead of a good link from an unpopular submission you get zilch when you try to cheat your way to the popular links pages.

Although Sphinn doesn’t send shitloads of traffic, this traffic is extremely valuable. Many spinners operate or control blogs and tend to link to outstanding articles they found at Sphinn. Many sphinners have accounts on other SM sites too, and bookmark/cross-submit good content. It’s not unusual that 10 visits from Sphinn result in hundreds or even thousands of hits from StumbleUpon & Co. — but spinners don’t bookmark/blog/cross-submit/stumble crap.

So either write great content and play by the rules, or get nowhere with your crappy submission. The first “10 reasons why 10 tricks posts about 10 great tips to write 10 numbered lists” submission was fun. The 10,000 plagiarisms following were just boring noise. Nobody except your buddies or vote bots sphinn crap like that, so don’t bother to provide the community with footprints of your lousy gaming.

If you’re playing number games, here is why ruining a reputation by gaming Sphinn is not worth it. Look at my visitor stats from July to today. I got 3.6k referrers in 4 months from Sphinn because a few of my posts went hot. When a post sticks with 1-5 votes, you won’t attract much more click throughs than from those 1-5 folks who sphunn it (that would give 100-200 hits or so with the same amount of submissions). When you cheat, the story gets buried and you get nothing but flames. Think about that. Thanks.

Share/bookmark this: del.icio.us • Google • ma.gnolia • Mixx • Netscape • reddit • Sphinn • Squidoo • StumbleUpon • Yahoo MyWeb Subscribe to Entries Comments All Comments

Donna started a meme with a very much appreciated compliment - Thanks Donna! Like me she discovered a lot of “new” folks at Sphinn and enjoyed their interesting blogs.

Savoring Sphinn comes with a duty Donna thinks, so she appeals to share the love. She’s right. All of us benefit from Sphinn love, it’s only fair to spread it a little. However, picking only three people I’d never have come accross without Danny’s newest donation to the Internet marketing community is a tough task. Hence I wrote a long numbered list and diced. Alea iacta est. Here are three of the many nice people I met at Sphinn:

Hamlet Batista	Tadeusz Szewczyk	Tinu Abayomi-Paul
Blog	Blog	Blog
Feed	Feed	Feed
A post I like	A post I like	A post I like

To those who didn’t make it on this list: That’s just kismet, not bad karma! I bet you’ll appear in someone’s share the sphinn love post in no time.

To you three: Get out your sphinn love post and choose three sphinners writing a feed-worthy blog, preferably people not yet featured elsewhere. I’ve subscribed to a couple feeds of blogs discovered at Sphinn, and so did you. There’s so much great stuff at Sphinn that you’re spoilt for choice.

Share/bookmark this: del.icio.us • Google • ma.gnolia • Mixx • Netscape • reddit • Sphinn • Squidoo • StumbleUpon • Yahoo MyWeb Subscribe to Entries Comments All Comments

Do not click BlogRush affiliate links before you’re fully awake. Oh no, you did it … now praise me because I’ve sneakily disabled the link and read on.

My BlogRush Summary:
1. You won’t get free targeted traffic to your niche blog.
2. You’ll make other people rich.
3. You’ll piss off your readers.
4. You’ll promote BlogRush and get nothing in return.
5. You shouldn’t trust a site fucking up the very first HTTP request.
6. Pyramid schemes just don’t work for you.

You won’t get free targeted traffic to your niche blog

The niches you can choose from are way too broad. When you operate a niche blog like mine, you can choose “Marketing” or “Computers & Internet”. Guess what great traffic you gain with headlines about elegant click tracking or debunking meta refresh myths from blogs selling MySpace templates to teens or RFID chips to wholesalers? In reality you get hits via blogs selling diet pills to desperate housewives (from my referrer stats!) or viagra to old age pensioners, if you see a single BlogRush referrer in your stats at all. (I’ve read a fair amount of the hype about actually targeted headline delivery in BlogRush widgets. I just don’t buy it from what I see on blogs I visit.)

You’ll make other people rich

Look at the BlogRush widget in your or my sidebar, then visit lots of other niche blogs which are focused more or less on marketing related topics. All these widgets carry ads for generic marketing blogs pitching just another make me rich on the Internet while I sleep scheme or their very own affiliate programs. These blogs, all early adopters, will hoard BlogRush’s traffic potentials. Even if you can sign up at the root to place you at the top of the pyramid referral structure, you can’t avoid that the big boys with gazillions of owed impressions in BlogRush’s “marketing” queue dominate all widgets out there, your’s included. (I heard that John Reese will try to throw a few impressions on tiny blogs before niche bloggers get upset. I doubt that will be enough to keep his widgets up.)

You’ll piss off your readers

Even if some of your readers recognize your BlogRush widget, they’ll wonder why you recommend totally unrelated generic marketing gibberish on your nicely focused blog. Yes, every link you put on your site is a recommendation. You vouch for this stuff when you link out, even when you don’t control the widget’s content. Read Tamar’s Why the Fuss about BlogRush? to learn why this clutter is useless for your visitors. Finally, the widget slows your site down and your visitors hate long loading times.

You’ll promote BlogRush and get nothing in return

When you follow the advice handed out by BlogRush and pitch their service with posts and promotional links on your blog, then you help BlogRush to skyrocket at the search engines. That will bring them a lot of buzz, but you get absolute nothing for your promotional efforts because your referrer link doesn’t land on the SERPs.

You shouldn’t trust a site fucking up the very first HTTP request

Ok, that’s a geeky issue and you don’t need to take it very seriously. Request your BlogRush affiliate link with a plain user agent not accepting cookies or executing client sided scripting, then read the headers. BlogRush does a 302 redirect to their home page rescuing your affiliate ID in an unclosed base href directive. Chances are you’ll never get the promised credits from upsold visitors using uncommon user agents respectively browser settings, because they don’t manage their affiliate traffic properly.

Pyramid schemes just don’t work for you

Unfortunately, common sense is not as common as you might think. I’m guilty of that too, but I’ll leave my widget up for a while to monitor what it brings in. The promise of free traffic is just too alluring, and in fact you can’t lose much. If you want, experiment with it and waste some ad space, but pull it once you’ve realized that it’s not worth it.

Disclaimer

This post was inspired by common sense, experience of life, and a shitload of hyped crap posts on Sphinn’s upcoming list where folks even created multiple accounts to vote their BlogRush sales pitches to the home page. If anything I’ve said here is not accurate or at least plausible, please submit a comment to set the records straight.

Share/bookmark this: del.icio.us • Google • ma.gnolia • Mixx • Netscape • reddit • Sphinn • Squidoo • StumbleUpon • Yahoo MyWeb Subscribe to Entries Comments All Comments

It’s evil, it sucks even more than the crappy tinyurl nonsense obfuscating link destinations, nobody outside some SEO cliques really cares about or noticed it, I’m not sure it’s newsworthy because it’s perfectly in line with rel-nofollow semantics, but it annoys me and others so here is the news of late last week: Twitter drank the nofollow kool-aid.

Folks, remove Twitter from your list of PageRank sources and drop links for fun and traffic only. I wonder whether particular people change their linking behavior on Twitter or not. I won’t.

Following Nofollow’s questionably tradition of maximizing collateral damage Twitter nofollows even links leading to Matt’s mom’s charity site. More PageRank power to you, Betty Cutts! Your son deserves a bold nofollow for inventing the beast

Twitter should hire a SEO consultant because they totally fuck up on search engine friendliness.

Share/bookmark this: del.icio.us • Google • ma.gnolia • Mixx • Netscape • reddit • Sphinn • Squidoo • StumbleUpon • Yahoo MyWeb Subscribe to Entries Comments All Comments

What a brilliant marketing stunt. Click here! Err… click: Brilliant. Marketing. Stunt.

Best of luck John

Share/bookmark this: del.icio.us • Google • ma.gnolia • Mixx • Netscape • reddit • Sphinn • Squidoo • StumbleUpon • Yahoo MyWeb Subscribe to Entries Comments All Comments

Thanks to Danny’s crew we’ve got a promising search geek community site. Since I’ve recently started to deal with invites, here is the top secret link where you get your free Sphinn invite. Click it now and join today, as Gorbachev said ‘those who are late will be punished by life itself’

Previous experiments revealed that my pamphlets aren’t diggworthy, despite the presence of OL/UL lists. Because I mention search and stuff like that every once in a while, I decided to submit a horror story to Sphinn to test the waters over there.

Adding Sphinn-it! widgets to my posts hopefully helps promoting Sphinn, but with Blogger that turned into kinda nightmare. To prevent you from jumping through infinite try-and-error hoops, here is how it works:

Classic templates:

Search for $BlogItemBody$ and below the </div> put

<script type='text/javascript'>submit_url='<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>';</script>
<script src=’http://sphinn.com/evb/button.php’ type=’text/javascript’/></script>

(Blogger freaks out when you omit the non-standard ;</script> after the self-closing second tag, hence stick with the intentional syntax error.)

Newish templates:

Check “Expand Widget Templates”

Search for data:post.body/ and below the </p> put

<b:if cond='data:post.url'>
<p><script type=’text/javascript’>submit_url=’<data:post.url/>’;</script>
<script src=’http://sphinn.com/evb/button.php’ type=’text/javascript’/></p>
</b:if>

(After saving the changes Blogger replaces some single quotes with HTML entities, but it works though. Most probably one could do that in a more elegant way, but once I saw the badges pointing to the correct URL –both in the posts and on the main page– I gave up.)

Have fun sphinning my posts!

Share/bookmark this: del.icio.us • Google • ma.gnolia • Mixx • Netscape • reddit • Sphinn • Squidoo • StumbleUpon • Yahoo MyWeb Subscribe to Entries Comments All Comments

Inspired by all the twits about pownce I submitted my email addy too. What a useless procedure. From inside there’s no list of submitted email addresses to pick friends from. Or I’m too blind to find that page.

Probably the best procedure to get rid of the 6 invites is to sell them at eBay. Perhaps Pownce releases 6 new invites then and I get rich quick. Wait … I’ve a better idea. Submit your honest review of this blog in the comments and send me the email addy for your invite. If your piece is funny or honest or vilifying enough to make me laugh I might invite you

Ok, so what separates Pounce from Twitter and WS_FTP? Here are my first impressions.

Unfortunately, I will not see the ads, never. Hectic clicking on all links signed me up as a pro-member by accident. Now Pownce blemishes my cute red crab with a “pro” label. I guess I got what I paid for. Paid? Yep, that’s the first difference, Pownce is not completely free. Spamming friends in 100 meg portions costs an annual fee of 20 bucks.

Next difference. There is no 140 bytes per message limit. Nice. And the “Send to” combo box is way more comfortable than the corresponding functionality at Twitter. I miss Twitter’s “command line options” like “d username” and “@username”. Sounds schizophrenic perhaps, but I’m just greedy.

I figured out how to follow someone without friending. Just add somebody as friend and (you don’t need to) wait for the decline, this makes you a fan of other users. You get their messages but not the other way round. Twitter’s “add as friend” and “follow user” is clearer I think.

Searching for the IM setup I learned there’s none. Pownce expert John said I’ve to try the desktop thingy but it looks like AIM 1999, so I refuse the download and stick with the Web interface until Pownce interacts with GTalk. The personal pounce page has a refresh link at least, but no auto-refresh like Twitter.

There’s no way to bookmark messages or threads yet, and the link to the particular messages is somewhat obfuscated. The “email a bug report” is a good replacement for a “beta” label. I guess I’ll use it to tell Pownce that I hate their link manipulation applying rel-nofollow crap. I’ll play with the other stuff later on, the daddy-cab is due at the kindergarden. Hopefully, when I return, there will be a Pownce badge available for this blog, I’ve plenty of white space left on my sidebar.

---

Back, still no badge, but I realized that I forgot to mention the FTP similarities. And there is no need to complete this post, since I found Tamar’s brilliant Twitter vs. Pownce article.

Update: How to post to Twitter and Pownce at the same time (a Twitterfeed work around, I didn’t test this configuration)

Share/bookmark this: del.icio.us • Google • ma.gnolia • Mixx • Netscape • reddit • Sphinn • Squidoo • StumbleUpon • Yahoo MyWeb Subscribe to Entries Comments All Comments

With various social tools and gadgets there are tons of opportunities to publically or privately show that you follow your friends. I can digg my friends’ articles, or bookmark them at delicious, I can link to their posts via sharing in Google Reader, or after reading their posts in my preferred feed reader, I can click the link too just to push my red crab image to the top of their MBL and BUMPzee widgets.

All that comes with common hassles. I want to use these social gadgets and services without jumps thru unintended hoops, that is I consider all the above mentioned methods to tell friends that I still love them diverting those services from their intended use. Also, not every friend of mine makes use of all these geeky tools, so I need to digg posts of A., to delicious articles by B., to share posts of C., and to visit the blogs of D., E. and F. just to show that I’ve read their stuff in my feed reader.

I can’t do that, at least not in a reliable manner, especially not when I’m swamped and just try to catch up after 12 or more hours of dealing with legacy applications or other painful tasks like meetings with wannabe-geeks (unexperienced controllers or chiefs of whichever-useless-service-center) respectively anti-geeks (know-it-all but utterly-clueless and dangerous-to-the-company’s-safety IT managers). Doh!

So when I’m not able to send my friends a twitter-great-job-message or IM, and don’t have the time to link to their stuff, should I feel bad? Probably. Penalties are well deserved. Actually, the consequence is that nice guys like Nick Wilson @Metaversed unfriend me (among other well-meaning followers) at Twitter coz “I didn’t provide useful input for a while”, not knowing that I follow them with interest, read their posts and all that, but just can’t contribute at the moment because their actual field of interest doesn’t match my time schedule respectively my todays-hot-topic-list, nor my current centre of gravity, so to say. That does not mean I’m not interested in whatever they do and output, I just can’t process it ATM but I know that’ll change at some point in the future. Hey, geeks usually hop from today’s hot thing to tomorrow’s hot thing, and flashbacks are rather natural, so why expect continuousness?

Bugger, I wrote four paragraphs and didn’t come to the point expectable from the post’s title. And I bored you dear readers with lots of title bait recently. Sorry, but I did enjoy it. Ok, here’s the message:

Everybody monitors referrer stats. Don’t say you don’t do it because that’s first a lie and second a natural thing to do. That applies to ego searches too by the way. So why don’t we make use of referrer spoofing to send a signal to our friends? It’s that easy. Just add the referrer-spoofing widget to your PrefBar, enter your URL, and surf on. Well, technically that’s referrer spamming, so if you wear a tinfoil hat use a non-indexable server like example.com. I’m currently surfing with the HTTP_REFERER “http://www.example.com/gofuckyourself” but I’m going to change that to this blog’s URL. Funny folks visiting my blog provide bogus referrers like “http://spamteam.google.com/” and “http://corp.google.com:8080/webspam/watchlist.py”, so why the fuck shouldn’t I use my actual address? This will tell my friends that I still love them. And real geeks shouldn’t expect unforged referrer stats, since many nice guys surf without spamming the server logs with a referrer.

What do you think?

Share/bookmark this: del.icio.us • Google • ma.gnolia • Mixx • Netscape • reddit • Sphinn • Squidoo • StumbleUpon • Yahoo MyWeb Subscribe to Entries Comments All Comments