Category — democracy

Before I kick things off, I want to thank all of you who have been posting your comments. They are great and help me discover new things every day.

Anyway I build websites both for fun and as a way to experiment with SEO. Recently I have been working on monetizing these projects just to see what the “make money online” hoopla is all about. I don’t make enough to retire, but its fun non the less.

One website I threw up had to do with DRM Free Movies. It was one of my early projects and I have not had the time to really build a valuable website. It did receive about 20 to 30 unique visitors, so I decided to throw up some AdSense, Amazon, and AdBrite to the site to see if I can monetize the traffic. I made about 50 cents to a dollar a day which was nice.

A few days ago I checked my analytics, and lo and behold I was receiving 0 traffic. I investigated to see if the site was still ranking for the keywords, and of course it was not. What was interesting is that the “brand name” still ranked the website, but all of the keywords I was targeting do not.

I believe it was due to human review that my site was removed. Thanks to Rose who posted a comment on Google Human Review and sent a link to SPAM Guidelines.

Lets use this opportunity to learn what NOT to do and how to avoid a Google penalty.

[Read more →]

I am thinking maybe we need to create a “neighborhood watch” of sorts for the online space. Every day I learn of something shady, hypocritical, or downright monopolistic that they do. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to site and write down every time I hear of them doing something “evil.” For example, just today I saw two posts from some of my favorite bloggers that showed what Google has been up to.

First up is Aaron Wall on Hypocritical Nature of AdSense

Next up was Slightly Shady on Google Creating Its Own Internet

Seoker.com on Google Toolbar Steals 401 Messages

Here are my two cents on both issues:

UPDATE: The fine Folks of Google Horror Stories  sent me a note letting me know that they are designed to serve as a Google Watch Dog. Feel free to post your horror story there.

[Read more →]

What the hell is going on in the search world. Microsoft is trying to take over Yahoo! At first I had the same reaction as everyone else, Microsoft the kind of Monopolies making a bid on the number two player in the US search share OH NO. Well the more I thought about it and the more I read, the more I realized that this would not be such a bad thing.

This move by Microsoft will help create a valid competitor to Google. If you do not believe me explain why their stock dropped to a four year low? Google is scared it finally realized that it can’t keep up with the facade of being your friend while slowly creeping into every aspect of your online use, not to mention offline.

Google is getting scared so they released this official statement on Google’s position on Microsoft and Yahoo

Lets read this official statement and see how hypocritical it is.

[Read more →]

Google failed the citizenship test. Let me explain how I found this out.

The past few night I have been helping my girlfriend study for her citizenship test. She has been here for over 8 years, but with the political landscape we decided its best to make it official. (ironically enough it turned out that she technically is already a citizen due to a law change).

I used the booklet that they distribute to study for the exam to quiz her to see what things she did not know and ran the same questions through Google.
I used the Google and “I’m Feeling Lucky” to see what answers would come up.

Here is how Google did on naturalization test;

[Read more →]

When I say the algorithm, I am not just referring to the Google. In our society we have evolved to create algorithms in order to help us make decisions and choices. Some examples are when you check out Gotcha Capitalism on Amazon you will notice that on the bottom not only does an algorithm pair another book to compliment it, the algorithm even recommends books based on other’s shopping behavior. Another example is Pandora where based on your musical taste other music is recommended.

[Read more →]