The homepage of the Dutch Embassy has a PR of 6, it lives on a .org domain and could be seen as highly trustworthy by Google. This is the official site of the Dutch government!

While I was looking to get the link to the Netherlands Consulate in San Francisco, I came across a link on a page of the Dutch Embassy. I saw the following address and link of the California Council for International Trade:

Clicking on the link, brings you to a spam blog using wordpress default theme and a lot of keyword spam in the tags, build on the url www.ccit.net.

Probably the domain name ccit.net expired, which was picked up by a spammer.

First think I will do is inform the Dutch Embassy website administrator. I don’t want my country to look bad like this…

I quickly said: No, I won’t.

Reasons are:

• Too basic level
• I think the conference is too large
• Too expensive for what I get out of it
• Lost their soul; Danny S.

Last year when I attended the SES conference in San Jose, I had a lot of fun. Especially at the Paid Link session… But fun is not enough to be three days out of the office, and spend a good amount of money on the conference.

What are your thoughts…?

7.29 am. The news on Facebook breaks on the BBC website, here is the link. Where it first said in the title that they were having trouble, title= ”Facebook site hit by outage”, a few minutes later this title was changed to: “Facebook website outage resolved”. 

More updates to come…

Update 7.42 am:

More tweets are coming in on the outage

Facebook is back, did anyone even notice?

The Popular social networking site Facebook has been hit by an outage

Update 7.45 am:

The News on the Facebook outage goes round on Twitter now…

Facebook had an outage? I wonder if it caught a social (networking) disease from Twitter?

Update 7.48 am:

Wondering why Facebook isn’t working and thinking about topics for my new blog - or should I just update my old blog?

Update your old…

Since a long time I tried to login to Facebook. I have not been using the service for weeks. But I could not reach the different parts of my profile after my first login. Overall the site seems slow or even down.

I have always been a heavy user of social networking sites. Years ago I signed up for Hyves.nl, where all my buddies are.. When I moved to the US, my former colleague, who now works for Facebook, introduced me to Facebook. Myspace was way to cluttered for me, and the clean page layout of Facebook was really nice.

However, after a couple of month, my interest died. I only had friends from my work on Facebook, all my ‘real’ friends were still at Hyves.nl. I always tried to keep these two groups seperate…for good reasons

Now that I have lost the interest in Facebook, and all other social network sites, I don’t really care that much anymore. But when I was tagged on 9 pictures over the weekend by somebody, I became interested again.

The bad experience not being able to access these pictures has made me realize I don’t really need to see these pictures, I can spend my time better at a long rant…

Here are my thoughts: If Facebook is down, or if they have serious scalability issues, why is nobody talking about it…???

Usually a story like this would break out in the blogosphere and would be on the first page of Techmeme in no-time! What is happening here…?

At a valuation of $15 billion, and the big prize in the battle between Microsoft and Google, you would expect that this would be news!

Now imagine you are a top SEO, and also speak at conferences like SMX advanced. You sit in a panel about link building. You can do two things…

1. Share all your best knowledge and hope there are potential clients in the audience
2. Or you can preach all gray & black hat tricks out of the book, and tell the audience that these still work

The first will get you some potential clients dropping their business card after the session, and you probably have given away all your tricks.

The second could have a more competitive effect, where you could find yourself in a pretty good position if it all works out.

Let me explain; In the panel, Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques, were a couple of people who have been, or it seems, experimented with buying links for competitors sites. The intention was really to burn those sites in the ground or messing up the link profile so they could buy some good links as well, and have their site better ranked. Smoothening the level playing field. Now if you do that a couple of times, this might cost you quite a lot of money.

Divide & conquer

If you are a A-list SEO link builder, speaking in a panel, you might be able to influence the audience opinion on controversial tactics like link buying.

You tell everybody that it works, and you definitely should buy as many links as you can, because it works.

By convincing the audience that they have to spend more on buying links, you can wipe out your competition through just one conference speech. (remember, Matt is in the room!)

This is why I thought the panel was pretty smart, at least if this were their intentions… The smartest SEO expert is the one that makes all the others believe something, and then benefits the most of all the following behavior of the sheep. As lambs to the slaughter…

Take this article today: Is the Main Character Missing? Maybe Not.

The whole story is about a blogger using Garfield comics, strips out the main character, and gives the comic a new meaning.

Halfway of the article, the writer is describing how a fan of the site is writing about it on his own blog.

So here is my problem with the article: there is NO link to the blog where the comics are displayed, which is the main subject of the whole story. Where the writer is mentioning the fan of the blog, she DOES link, but to the homepage, no deeplink.

When are traditional journalists going to learn how they can give their readers more information through better linking in their articles? Better linking will give the reader more value, which could result in more readers in the long run.

Newspapers are dealing with falling readership. I wonder why…

Right now, all goods, camera’s, stage furniture and lights of the Dutch home shopping network Liveshop are being sold in a public auction including the right to use the brand Liveshop.

Overall the hardware is getting a couple of bids in, but the brand is not having any bid. Why? Because the selling party has priced it way too high: 500K Euro!

What would you bid on a brand name, brand rights of a failure…???

The brand will always be associated with the failure of the former brand.

I would put in 1000 Euro, just for the usage of the brand name with the url!

The url liveshop.nl has only 23 incoming links to it, but still has a pagerank of: 5

On their blog they have the example where they analyze the Inlinks to SEOBook. It is an in depth analytics tool which gives you a lot of information of the link profile of any site you would like to analyze.

Within a day the tool has generated 11 backlinks.

Let’s just track the link building over time of this site to see how the inlinks will have an effect on PageRank and rankings.

From the Pop-up:

Access your bookmarks from any computer

Just click the star to create bookmarks, then access them from the bookmarks menu on any computer that has the latest version of theGoogle Toolbar.

As it looks from the pop-up, Google is trying to get more users accepting their bookmarking product.

Determining Relevance

It would be interesting to hear if you think the bookmarkings are being used to determine relevance. For the personal websearch Google is slowly building the assets to fully understand their users profile of Internet surfing habits.

• Webhistory, which sites did you visit
• Search history, with click through rates on both Paid & Natural Search results
• Bookmarks, which sites are important enough for you to bookmark, and how much do you visit these
• Feeds in Google reader, what feeds do you read and how many of their posts

Combining all this data, with the data they might collect with Google-Out and the Doubleclick databases, they have a powerful way of knowing exactly what you’re doing on the Internet, and what your intentions are.

From my perspective, the ultimate targeting tool for advertisers would be to combine all the data mentioned above here with some sociological data on life cycle of the average person. That would be interesting. With the right statistics and analyses, you can predict what the intentions are going to be of any person through their lifetime, who fits in a particular segment of behaviors before.

Google using a pop-up

The usage of a pop-up by Google can be called controversial for the following reasons:

• At the introduction of the Google toolbar was blocking pop-ups
• Google’s advertisement product has strict rules around the usage of pop-ups on your site. If you would like to advertise through Adwords or Adsense, you are not aloud to use pop-ups! From their terms and conditions:

Don’t use pop-up windows on your site.

We do not approve destination URLs that generate pop-ups when users enter or leave your landing page.

We consider a pop-up to be any window, regardless of content, that opens in addition to the original window.

This includes pop-unders, timed or intermittent pop-ups, mock system warnings, and pages that automatically initiate a download.

So I think about this for myself:

• Why do all webmasters still put up with the strict T’s & C’s of Mister Google, while they are breaking their own values time and time again?
• Do you have more examples of these? One good example that jumps into my mind are the paid link advertisements Google must be making good revenue on

When will the BIG shift away from Google products start, or hit a higher number. Until now, only a few bloggers were hit by the Google smack down, and started bitching about it. The question is, when will the Google Smack Down go mainstream?

Comments are more than welcome…