Google picked a heck of a time to decide to “fix” the Google Bombed search for “miserable failure” which has been bringing up the bio of George W. Bush in the #1 spot. SEO s have long known that using keyword rich text in hyper links has an effect on rankings for those keywords and that’s exactly how the “miserable failure” bomb was launched a few years ago. Thousands of web sites used the phrase “miserable failure” as a hyperlink to the Bush page.

Google’s “fix” attempts to prevent these “bombs” from happening.

Regardless of your political persuasion, I think this sucks. Tampering with keyword-rich algos blows away the concept of keyword rich links as being reliable in any way. Google can do what they want, of course, but I really think the timing of this blows.

After all, considering the recent polls, we’re now getting inaccurate results for a search for “miserable failure” dontcha think?

OK, this post is pretty much a personal bookmark type of post. I love WebmasterRadio.fm and listen to Danny Sullivan’s Daily Searchcast on my iPod whenever I get a chance. There are other shows at WebmasterRadio.fm that I would listen to as well, but finding the iTunes links was too much of a hassle.

Not anymore. Check them out here - >http://www.joostdevalk.nl/blog/webmasterradio-and-itunes/ .

Thanks, Joost!

I’m putting some of my unused domains on the market. I’ve got a whole variety of accessmasters.* domains. Back in the old days, I’d have a .net for Internet services, .org for free stuff, .ws for a weather and travel site and the .com for a great big doorway page for the whole family. Of course, we know about doorway pages these days.

Anyway, the oldest of the bunch is accessmasters.com, which I bought in 1998 when I thought I wanted to open an ISP. I never could quite bring myself to putting money into a local ISP (thank God!) and wound up using the domain as the base for a consulting business before I became The WebOptimist and later as an affiliate page.

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OK, now we’ve got an SEO rock song. I think someone needs to get out more…

[youtube]RrJtogxfvO8[/youtube]

Something interesting I noticed last night. If I sign into Google with my user name and password and then search for “eyeglasses” in the Google search box, my employer, FramesDirect.com, comes up #1. If I log out and run the same search, we’re back behind a competitor. I tried this numerous times on different PCs and browsers and every time I ran the search signed in, we were #1. As soon as I logged out, the results reverted.Of course, I had initially hoped that Google was going through an algo shift or update and that we would stay in the #1 position. I even went to to the old Google Dance page at http://www.seochat.com/googledance/ to see where we were on the www, www2 and www3 servers. Same thing. We showed at #1. Then I opened Firefox and got totally different results from what I was seeing in Internet Explorer 7. In Firefox, we were still behind the competitor. I moved to several different computers in the house (doesn’t everyone have several?) and could not repeat our #1 ranking on any of them.It was then that I happened to look up at the open Internet Explorer window that showed the #1 rank. I was logged into my Google account without realizing it. I went around and logged into the account of the other PCs and, voila, we were #1.