Posted by tigertom on Aug 15, 2007 in
General I’m not talking about the current sub-prime mortgage problem. This is a long overdue correction to some very silly lending practices.
I’m talking about Gordon Brown, and what he’s got planned for UK PLC.
He talks the business talk, but he’s a hardcore Social Democrat. Forget what comes out of his mouth, watch what he does.
He’s on a personal mission to bring the poor of the UK (and Africa) up to middle class standards of living. He hopes to do this by giving them money taxed from the current middle classes.
He’s doesn’t realise that if you give a man money, you make him a beggar. If you educate him, you make him an entrepreneur.
Too many people in Britain are either on benefits or in public service. Contrast this with the cheese-paring attitude shown towards the Armed Forces here, and you get the measure of the current regime: Handouts for Jack The Chav, and Eff All Fer Ye, Tommy.
Rich people can leave whenever they want, so he can’t touch them. The ‘poor’ have nothing worth taking; that leaves Mrs. Adegoje, who cleans a manky NHS hospital for a grinding sub-contractor, on £15K a year, paying 60% of her wages in various taxes before she’s even put a crust in her mouth.
And people wonder why they can’t afford a house?
The NHS and Housing Benefit were set up so that the miserable poor wouldn’t die in the gutter on a cold winter’s night; not so Darren from Dartford could sit on the sofa drinking Red Bull and w*nking his Sony PlayStation at 2.30 in the afternoon, ‘cos he’s on ‘Disability’.
Watch as Britain’s income fails to keep pace with its social outgoings. Wouldn’t take a whole lot to kick it into recession. We’ve already had the flooding crisis, a small blip in agriculture, the ongoing Middle East adventures, the winding down of North Sea Oil, Russia flexing its energy card and a City of London cheesed off at the heavy-handed pursuit of offshore account holders.
Interesting times ahead.
PS: Was watching TV over the weekend with The Girlfriend when I had a revelation: Why is Gordon going after offshore and dormant bank accounts?
Answer: Because everything worth selling off already has been.
No one wants to buy old nuclear power stations. That leaves reaching down behind the sofa for loose change. Ha ha!
Posted by tigertom on Aug 5, 2007 in
General Google is a very good search engine. It supports thousands of struggling webmasters with Google Adsense. It’s much more responsive to webmasters than Yahoo or MSN.
However, I propose that its influence on the internet is not entirely benign. Webmasters are victims of its great success. How? Read on, and find out.
1. Google Knows Your Business (Better Than You Do).
• You use Google Search: Google knows roughly where you live. It knows what you like.
• You use the Google Toolbar, unmodified: Google knows all the sites you visit.
• You use Google Adwords: Google knows what niches you’re targeting. And which ad copy works.
• You use Google Adsense: Google knows which of your pages are most successful in getting clicks.
• You use Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools: Why not give them your business while you’re at it?
Use two or more of the above and Google knows more about your business than you do. Would you be happy if a competitor had access to that data? Or your government? But you trust Google. Because it’s a nice company.
2. Google PageRank Defeats Its Purpose.
Google PageRank (PR) has led to sites linking out to unrelated and substandard sites, for money. Why is this a problem? Well, Google itself rates a site according to the ‘link popularity’ of the sites linking to it. If your site has links from high PR sites, your site appears higher in Google searches.
Thus, Google created a problem for itself. Webmasters take payments to link out to sites that are unrelated and/or mediocre. This skews Google’s own rating system. It can also screw the site selling links, as linking out to ‘bad neighbourhoods’ can earn it a penalty.
Sites selling or abusing PR may retain the magic green bar, but cannot pass it on to sites they link to; another penalty. Naive webmasters then buy expensive links which don’t work as they wished.
More perverse still is that a whole industry has sprung up around selling and manipulating links based on PR. This distracts webmasters away from what should be their true goal; making great sites that can thrive purely by ‘word of mouth’.
I used to wonder why some webmasters would fret in forums, asking when the next PR update would occur. Now I realise that for some it was because they could charge more for their links.
3. Google Is Stuck In An Adsense-Spam Loop.
Google Adsense A.K.A ‘The Webmaster’s Dole’. This is a major source of income for semi-pro webmasters.
It’s given rise to the phenomenon of MFA (Made For Adsense) websites. Previously webmasters did it for the love (mostly). Now they’re putting up pages about subjects they’re not interested in, purely to get clicks on these ads. Result: low-quality websites which disappoint naive surfers.
The irony is, Google Search is constantly having to tweak its algorithm, to filter out sites like these. The ‘black hat’ webmaster’s response? Churn out a hundred more. Not so much fun for the ‘white hat’ webmaster ‘though; he may find that his one-and-only website, the labour of years, falls foul of a Google penalty. Why? Because it accidentally matches the ‘footprint’ of a spammy site.
Thus, Google is stuck in a recursive loop of its own making:
• Google Adsense encourages spam, which …
• Google Search tries to filter out, which …
• Collaterally penalises legit webmasters, who …
• Buy more links from high-PageRank sites to boost their perceived popularity and/or
• Make more sub-substandard web pages to keep their revenues up, which …
• Google Search tries to filter out.
Prior to Adsense, a webmaster had to sell his own stuff, establish good affiliate relations with other companies, or get three million visitors so some would click on his crude ‘pay-per-click’ banners.
Now all he has to do is insert Adsense and make money immediately. Even if it’s not enough to live on, it encourages him to make more websites, plus more pages, equalling more money.
4. Google Penalties Cause Webmaster Neurosis.
No one, including the ‘black hat’ webmaster, is too bothered when a penalty happens to a spam site. However, they can easily happen to a ‘white hat’ site too. A webmaster reads the latest tricks on a webmaster forum, goes a little too far with ’search engine optimisation’ then BAM! He wakes up one morning, checks his stats, and gets a nasty surprise. Or he does nothing at all, and still gets a penalty; his site inadvertently ‘fits the profile’.
Result: Many profitless hours spent researching the cause, and fixing it. If he has employees, he may have to ‘let them go’: "Happy Christmas, don’t come back in the New Year".
5. If You Ain’t Ranking On Google, You’re Invisible.
Google has a near-monopoly on search. Because Google is a benevolent company, unlike the ‘Beast of Redmond’, webmasters don’t mind this. In fact, many _love_ Google. Visit any webmaster forum, and see how often Google features in them as a topic.
The problem for the webmaster is when his site doesn’t appear on Google. Not too bad if he’s just starting out, but catastrophic if he has one website he’s monetised nicely, and it drops out of the index.
6. Conclusion.
• Spam goes up;
• Quality content goes down;
• Google techs run ever-finer tweaks on their algorithm;
• More borderline websites get booted;
• Webmasters are driven cracked in pursuit of Adsense gold, PageRank or avoiding penalties;
• Google amasses huge amounts of extremely valuable consumer data.
The average surfer never sees this. He may wonder why the same search a day later doesn’t throw up the same sites. But he won’t change search engines; there’s no real competition.
Lest you think I’m a Google-hater, I’m not. I like Google, a lot. I’ve used Adwords and Adsense, and Search, of course. I’ve put up pages spurred by thoughts of Adsense riches. I know what Google has to fight to clear the cr*p out of its index.
I just wish fewer webmasters were Google-twitchers, and that Google Search had more competition. Webmaster discussions are dominated by one search engine. Yahoo and MSN are a very poor second and third. Naive webmasters will find that a near-monopoly is never good for business, even with a company whose laudable motto is ‘Do No Evil’.
Posted by tigertom on Aug 5, 2007 in
General My main site got hammered by another penalty in April 2007: The Google -950 Penalty.
This means that pages on your website go to beyond page 950 in the SERPs, but only for certain keywords.
In practice it means you’re nowhere for the keywords you’re targetting, but can be found for unique or low-competition phrases on your site.
It’s got some prominent webmasters at Webmasterworld.com foxed. It seems an erratic penalty; some pages suffer, or most pages suffer, and some don’t.
Some clever people over there eventually figured it out: It’s an over-optimsation penalty, especially in regard to internal navigation.
If you have lots of links, with keyworded anchor text, on lots of pages on your site, and your keywords are not supported by related external backlinks, then you may suffer this penalty.
In my case I had to write Perl scripts to completely deoptimise my sites automatically, and remove heavy SEO i.e. got rid of H1, H2, title and alt tags, keyword image names, and the like. In effect, turn seven years of tweaking off. Seems to be working at the time of writing.
My site had also, unnoticed by me, gone into Supplemental Hell (some pages ranked, most pages on related keywords don’t), so this was a wake-up call big time.
As ever, the cure to all Google penalties is relevant links with diverse, but on-topic anchor text, from related, high PR/authority websites.
Point one of these at a penalised page and ta-daaa, you’re ranking again.
Backlinks are the key to how Google operates; all else is secondary.