OzWebMasters

I have at times been very impressed with the efforts some Microsoft departments have made to be hip & cool. But in so many ways they are stil idiots!

Hotmail - bulk delete of spam, no “are you sure”
Microsoft Partner Program UK - unable to enrol using FireFox. No respect for the possibility that FireFox is the best browser, but SilverLight rules as well.
IE7 - hit the close button, no “are you sure, close ALL tabs”

These are simple things. Being cool won’t cost them. But there seems to be some evil little accountant overlord misguidedly pulling the strings. Fire the prick!

(oh yeah, and Vista - some aspects of it are so bad it should never have been released. A disclosure as to why would be cool)

Not happy with having a tidy little monopoly on aspects of the domain name business, they’ve now begun a very sneeky, dirty tactic. Basically, if you use NS for hosting, and someone visits a page on your site that doesn’t exist, they serve ads and keep the profits. Not only is this unethical, it can damage the reputation of your site.

Yes, they mention it in their T&C (amongst 59,000 other words), and yes it is possible to turn it off, but the default is on.

Read more here, and if you are a Network Solutions customer, consider voting with your feet.

A subscription flyer dated 8 Feb 2008 lists numerous reasons why I should subscribe. One of those is the opening sentence, which says:

“…but for less than $5 a week, BRW really is your best investment.”

At the bottom of the page the price for a 50 issue subscription is $199, incl. GST.

$199 divided by 50 is…. $3.98.

• perhaps they decided that less than $5 sounds more appealing than less than $4
• perhaps they can’t count
• perhaps they didn’t update the whole flier when they reduced the price

I’ve emailed them to ask. Their marketing email address (as listed on their site) doesn’t work! So I tried one of the others…

Late last year was this announcement:

auDA, the .au Domain Administrator, today announced the 1 millionth .au domain name had been registered.

‘We are pleased to announce that the 1 millionth .au domain registration is elite-finance.com.au’ said Chris Disspain, auDA’s CEO. ‘We congratulate the Registrant of elite-finance.com.au for being part of this momentous occasion.’

And it is “under construction”. I’d be interested to know how manyare actually being used. I know I have more in the “to do” pile than what I am actually using.

How’s that for a feel good news item:

 Almost one in three web users in the Oceania region – 31 per cent – were using Firefox, compared to 28 per cent in Europe and 21 per cent in the US, XiTi said.

 And I’m guessing many people are like me, still use IE occasionally for when I am forced to. Add that into the equation, and the real figure might be higher still.

Yet another site has lost its lofty PageRank, and for good reason. phpBB is great (I use it), but the obligatory link from any installation of their forum is not a vote for their site. Yes, using their software could be seen as a vote for the quality and usefulness of the product - but that’s the product, not the site.

The question remains - was this adjustment done manually, or is it part of a new and improved algorithm for spotting links that are part’n'parcel of installing free software?

SEM expert Andy Beal provides this list of tips:

1. Only buy links from sites that are highly relevant to your web site content.
2. If the site you are buying links from already has more than 5 paid links on the page, walk away.
3. If the site labels the links as “sponsored” or “paid links” or anything like that, walk away.
4. Be selective in your targeting. Don’t buy footer or sidebar links if you can help it. Buy a single link from a relevant page.
5. Vary your anchor text. Try to make your anchor text look natural. If you buy links on 100 pages, and they all use the same text, you’re asking for trouble.
6. Avoid any paid link where the seller is also an affiliate for the broker.
7. Check that the page ranks well for its targeted keywords. If it doesn’t rank well for its own keywords, it will likely not help you.
8. Point the links at different pages. Don’t buy lots of links for your homepage.
9. Try to get the links in a contextual format. A link that is part of a highly relevant paragraph will be more valuable.
10. I guess I should round this out to ten. Don’t worry about PageRank. A brand new page may be highly relevant to your industry and rank well, yet the PR shows 0/10. Ignore that, PR takes forever to catch up.

And I agree with every one of them!

I can add:

11. Check back a few weeks later and make sure they haven’t added a “nofollow” to your link
12. Use the keyword suggestion tool at Google Adwords to find related keywords for the keyword you wish to found for - and use a related keyword in your link text

According to Wikipeida:

Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”^[3] Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.

Here’s a brilliant example - a funny parody of one of the most talked-about sites on the web. Creating it was not expensive, but thinking of it is pure gold. I’m linking to the source because they deserve it:

(yep, it’s too wide for this site - full image here)

(it’s English, so folk from other countries might not get all the jokes…)

According to Entrepeneur magazine “in 2006, 42 percent of [US] employers offered email training”.

I need it. I’ve never been offered it. Does it exist in Australia? It should.

I spend 2-3 hours a day on email. If I could spend half that time on improving my business, it would be much more successful.

Because 99% of all web hosts and domain registrars are just normal, it’s easy to neglect to read the T&C when making a $10 transaction.

Unfortunately, you can lose out big-time…

As it turned out, neither of these clients owned the domain names that they had purchased through Homestead.com. Unless the client was willing to use Homestead’s templates or Homestead’s ‘professional’ designers, they were not allowed to use the domain and hosting they had purchased.

EasySpace in the UK used to be similar.

Miriam Ellis suggests that when buying a you can build a professional website in just minutes service, check the T&Cs very carefully.