Friday, June 22, 2007
A day or two ago I was pinged by a co-worker from my previous job. He wanted to know why, during its recent redesign, I didn’t include keywords in the URLs of the pages on a site I originally built a long, long time ago. I told him that there was no concrete evidence anywhere to support the theory that search engines give any weight to keywords in URLs. He then pointed me to an article at Search Engine Land that begins by stating that, “Keywords in the URL can help rankings,” and, “Hyphens are better than underscores when separating multiple words.”
Google hates underscores?!
First I noted that I don’t include keywords on this site, either, and it’s been doing just fine. Then I argued that I find it very, very hard to believe that Google (or any other search engine) has some sort of negative bias against the underscore character but that hyphens are just fine. So basically I completely disagree with the single piece of actual “advice” in the article.
Am I saying that it is wrong to include keywords in your URLs? No. I don’t think that at all. I just don’t think you should be stuffing keywords into your URLs in an effort to boost your pages’ rankings in search engine result pages. It makes great sense to use words in your URLs if you’re doing it to improve the usability of your site or to make it easier for people to link to your site. Unfortunately most site designers and blog engines — WordPress included — fail to effectively do this.
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Wednesday, February 14, 2007
If you get an email with the subject line “Valentine’s Day eCard !” that looks like it came from AmericanGreetings <services@americangreetings.com>, it’s most likely a virus. I’m not even going to take a chance by clicking the link. The link appears to be to the americangreetings.com domain, but if you hover your mouse over it you’ll see that it’s really going to a different URL. Trickery!
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
When I got to the office today there was a package sitting on my desk. I received my sixth copy of Gregg Easterbrook’s “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse” — I keep giving them away! — via Amazon’s used book marketplace. The book is in near-perfect condition, perhaps because it seems to have been stolen from the Naperville, Illinois Public Library. Either someone stole the book from the library and then sold it on Amazon, a Naperville Public Library employee is stealing books and selling them on Amazon, or the administrators of the Naperville Public Library are knowingly reselling their library books on Amazon. I don’t think that stealing library books is a crime that any police department seriously enforces, so people could presumably make quite a bit of money stealing library books and posting them for sale on Amazon. How odd.
Tuesday, November 7, 2006
Where do I go to complain about grocery store shenanigans? I’m at the end of my rope with Ralph’s, the local supermarket here in Los Angeles. There are two things they are doing to blatantly defraud customers and it’s driving me crazy.
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Monday, March 4, 2002
We all know that Critical IP sucks. I’d also like to make it known that money4opinions sucks. There are dozens of comments at that link about how these cretins are running an on-line scam. Please feel free to spread the word. Here’s the HTML:
< a title=”read about bad experiences with this company” href=”http://www.davidgagne.net/?p=4800″ >money4opinions</a> sucks.
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Friday, November 30, 2001
I can’t possibly be the only one that’s received the ridiculous-but-oh-so-earnest spam from the alleged Dr. Sule Ibrahim, Director of Project Implementation for Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. Let me know if you got it, too! We could start a little club! It would be ultra-secret, and you can only be a member if you received this piece of spam. We’ll have secret handshakes and a treehouse and oh boy!
Wednesday, November 14, 2001
I can’t remember how I happened upon Money4Opinions.Com, but I’m interested. They want $19.95 to join their little community, so that makes me wary - I tend to be skeptical. I’m not about to plunk down twenty bucks unless I can find some objective review. I searched Google and Yahoo and couldn’t find anything about this place, although I did learn that they advertise in just about every college newspaper’s on-line classified section. I couldn’t find any reviews or disparaging comments about them, though. Has anyone seen this site? Is anyone a member? Is it a scam? Do tell.
[Update: I have gotten quite a few comments here and dozens of readers have written me to say that m4o.com is, in fact, a scam. Stay away from that site!]
[Update 2: PaidOpinions.com is a sister scam. Stay away from them, too!]
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Wednesday, January 31, 2001
When you get an eMail petition, think DELETE!
