Some of you might have noticed my recent domain dance: blog.forret.com to peter.smoothouse.com to peter.forret.com and back. You might ask yourself the questions: why was that necessary, couldn’t he have done it in a smoother way and why did it take so long? Those would be three relevant questions. I am used to managing DNS and blogs for other people, so my pride got hurt in the process too.
PROLOGUE: WHY BOTHER?
I have been blogging since 2004 and have built blog.forret.com up to Google Pagerank 6 and Technorati rank 8000. For the non-bloggers amongst you: it’s an ego thing. I don’t want to start again from a PageRank 0, Technorati rank ∞. So that’s why I didn’t stop until I got it back.
Continue reading ‘Migration to Wordpress: me vs Murphy’
One of the reasons why I have been posting less the last couple of days, is because I was working on a migration from Blogger to Wordpress. I was still working out some DNS stuff (don’t let me get into that, it’s complicated stuff , to do with how Bluehost’s -my hosting provider- DNS management works).
So I was just writing a piece on how Google bought Writely with my w.bloggar local client, and when I publish I get an error: “Post was saved as draft, please log in to http://www.blogger.com/ to publish it“. Weird, never have that normally. Anyway, I log in, get the Blogger CAPTCHA ‘word verification’ box and I publish. But I see no changes on blog.forret.com. I publish again. Nothing. Then I click the ‘View Blog’ tab in my Blogger interface. This is what I see:

Apparently:
- my blog is now published to some new awkward blogspot location.
- my template is gone
- the new template advises me to discover wordpress.org
Continue reading ‘Blogger snafu: emergency migration to Wordpress’

He probably also first thought it was an April’s Fool joke:
Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress was discovered to have used his PageRank 8 site (Wordpress is a popular open-source blogging software) for hosting lots of irrelevant content, with the purpose to get high scores in Google rankings and (let a customer of his) make money on Google Adsense.
The content in articles is essentially advertising by a third party that we host for a flat fee. I’m not sure if we’re going to continue it much longer, but we’re committed to this month at least, it was basically an experiment. However around the beginning of Feburary donations were going down as expenses were ramping up, so it seemed like a good way to cover everything. The adsense on those pages is not ours and I have no idea what they get on it, we just get a flat fee. The money is used just like donations but more specifically it’s been going to the business/trademark expenses so it’s not entirely out of my pocket anymore.
(from wordpress.org)
Andy Baio (Waxy) broke the news on March 30th, at a moment when Matt was on holiday (and off-line), so he only replied on April 1st, about a thousand angry emails later. His defense is that it was a interesting idea, badly implemented, not followed up and never evaluated. Since Matt does not have the profile of a cash-hungry opportunist, and he’s explaining this to an audience of people that understand these reasons (reads like an IT project management what-not-to-do list), the storm will probably blow over.
Normally this is the kind of situation where one would say: “SEO? Leave that to the professionals!”. But the fact is that here in Belgium, some of the companies that claim to be SEO specialists, use dirty tricks all over. Hidden links, bot cloaking, keyword spamming, <noscript> tricks, the whole shebang. It’s like they read the Google SEO warning page as a guideline. “Hey look! We could put ourselves and other customers on every client’s doorway pages. Neat!”.
Joris just posted another example (Immoweb.be) on his SEO blog. And again the so-called “SEO professional” fooling around is Extenseo, just as it was for Automagazine and Actel. As one can see on their unprotected Javascript hosting site, they recently add VW/MyWay to their customers, so we can expect those homepages to be featured in the Hoe Het Niet Moet (What Not To Do) series soon!
Technorati: SEO – Google
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