YBO Interactive Blog

After too many emails and phone calls to SPRY support, that ended up nowhere, it was time to move on. I’ve decided to look for new hosting, but the thought about migration scared the shit out of me…

And last night it finally happened: Gemalaya has moved to godaddy!

The process wasn’t easy, but thanks to a good plan, and Gil’s help, everything is up and running.

The best way to handle such a migration is to build your site on the new server, and update your local hosts file to think that www.gemalaya.com is on the new IP although your DNS server thinks different. This lets you test the site, mysql connections, backups, billing integration, cron jobs, google base connections, redirect rules, sitemap auto generation, salesForce and many other things that needs to be tested on an e-commerce site. Once everything works, clear your hosts file, update DNS and hold tight.

Fortunately, all our emails are already on Google Apps, so we could skip the most annoying part of such a migration. If yo’re thinking about moving anywhere, this a great chance to move your email to Google Apps and when this is done, move the rest of the site.

The new vps account we got is rocket fast, network looks great, and the 2 phone calls I made to godaddy support where asnwered right away without waiting online forever and then get a voice mail auto response (like happened more than once with SPRY).

This morning, another beautiful Pink Tourmaline was sold on Gemalaya, this time on the new server. I’m almost sure that the gems look more pretty on the new site, but maybe its just me

You all probably know by now that choosing a domain name with your keywords can help your SEO. When doing that, it is very important to verify how the new domain name sounds. 200ok has a very funny list of bad domain names, some of them are pretty famous sites.

few of my favorite examples are:

Experts Exchange - www.expertsexchange.com/

IP computer software - www.ipanywhere.com/

The First Cumming Methodist Church Web - www.cummingfirst.com/

and the best is

Speed of Art - www.speedofart.com/

I was playing with Google’s Keyword Tool quite a lot lately, and found something really strange.

There are a few keywords that seem to have exactly 1,000,000 searches per month. The thing is, it just doesn’t make sense that both “optimization“, “internet marketing” and also “seo” are searched exactly the same number of times.

Look at the results below:

These are the results for “Internet Marketing”

These are the results for “seo”

And that’s for “optimization”

Does this make any sense at all?

Is Google playing games without telling us about it?

Did you find more million searches keywords like these?

How much does it cost to bring a story to Digg front page? There is a guy offering this service for $500. Isn’t that a great price for 30K visitors?

Invesp has an interview with a Digg top user that tells a little about the way it works.

This guy charges anywhere between $300 - $500 depending on the quality of article, and $700 for for a submission and promotion, irrespective of whether the article is good or not.

He was asked if he feels like he is cheating the Digg community.

His answer was very straightforward:

Yes! I would feel guilty if I was the only one but find me one Digg user from the entire community who doesn’t cheat the system… I do what everybody else does. It is obvious that good content does not make it by itself on Digg.

At least on this interview he was honest!

update: For those who misunderstand my thoughts, I don’t think that cheating the Digg audience is a good idea. All I’m saying is that the Digg system turns into a sophisticated marketing machine and is less credible than it ever was.

When I work on multi lingual adwords campaigns, in many cases I use web based translators to figure out the right keywords in Japanese, French, Italian and other languages I don’t speak.

Is it possible that on one of those times, I made the same stupid mistake like the one this guy did?

I don’t know if it’s real or not, but who cares?

Nearly 15% of Fortune 500 companies communicate with consumers via blogs, according to a study conducted by Burson-Marsteller.

Why is this number so low? David Wallace wrote a nice post answering this question.

I think the most common excuse would be “we have nothing to say”, David has a great answer for this excuse:

• Write opinionated posts related to news and events surrounding your industry.
• Announce new products and/or special offers.
• Write in-depth product reviews.
• Highlight customer testimonies and praise.
• Do a Q&A style of post to deal with most common inquiries from clients.
• Publish company news - the more personal, the better.

Cover news in your specific industry. Add your own commentary to make your content unique.

I think that marketing managers don’t realize what a powerful communication tool a blog can be.

There is no reason to be afraid of it.

The beginning is always hard, but once you start, I promise, you WILL find yourself blogging about things you want to tell the world, and wait for comments, instead of sending those regular web1.0 emalis…

update: SEC had announced that companies may now spread their official news by posting information on their websites and blogs, rather than press releases distributed by press release companies. How cool is that!

This is a story about the guy that owned ILoveJackDaniels.com. One day, the guys from Jack Daniels contacted him and asked him to stop using their trademark including the domain name he owned. Like many such cases, where the little people have no money to fight the giants, the guy gave up and moved his site to a new domain - addedbytes.com.

The thing is, they are going to let him redirect his traffic from the old domain to the new domain only until June 2009!!!

And then what???

It simply doesn’t make any sense. Not using the domain name is one thing (I would argue on that one as well, but he decided not to). But not using the domain name to redirect his traffic? What about all the links that he gathered througout the years? They are all gone!

I hope that I’m not violating Jack Daniels trademark by setting the title of this post to the title I chose.

Their acts are simply outrages. I don’t drink Jack Daniels but if I would, I would stop now.

Checkout this excellent post by SEOmoz, 8 Innovative Design & UI Elements That Make Sites Better

My favorite item was news via the Logo that shows a super cool use for your logo for hot news or announcement. This is the most innovative logo concept I’ve seen , the only company I saw that changes it’s logo every now and then is Google, but who am I to say a word about Google’s innovation…

Another great item was the Product IS the homepage which is a very creative way to make the home page behave like a landing page. Very unusual, very nice. I WILL do that.

There are more cool tips there. Worth reading.

The Official Google Blog has a nice post called Introduction to Google Ranking. Surprisingly (or not…) this post doesn’t tell anything that you didn’t know, nor reviles any secret that can help you do better in anything…

However, there was one thing I did learn from that post: Google’s system is SIMPLE!  It is really is! At least that’s what the guy says.

Being involved in many software projects throughout my career, many of them coded with my own fingers, such a statement makes me smile

KISS! (Keep It Simple Stupid!) has always been a good advice for developers. The thing about developers is that their mind (I was there, I know) doesn’t work like that. They always always always tend to make everything complicated. Simplicity, doesn’t seem to work in this profession…

Maybe the ones that can make it simple work in Google?

A Google Groups thread has a discussion about blocking a whole continent from seeing your website. This guy has a lot of African traffic that he doesn’t want (because he has no customers in Africa?) and he wants to block them based on their location.

The answer he got from the Google guy is that this is against Google’s webmaster Guidelines.

I think this is absurd. The thing about Google Webmaster Guidelines is that you can’t ignore them. If you ignore them, they will ignore you, and we don’t want that to happen, right?

Now , what can we do if we find something really stupid in Google Webmaster Guidelines? Is it safe to ignore it? I don’t have the guts to say yes, although I think that this is the right answer. If the traffic from Iran is wasting my bandwidth and I don’t want to do any business with that country, what is wrong with sending the Iranian visitors to a page that says “Your region is not supported. Good bye and have a nice day (and on a personal level - stop supporting worldwide terrorism…).

I do agree with the Google anti-cloaking policy, I think it makes sense and goes together with their do-no-evil vision.

However, on this one, I think they went too far.

update (july 5th 2008) :
A correction was posted on the google groups thread. The guy from Google was wrong, he didn’t fully understand their policy…

After a bit of double-checking, I have a clarification where I was mistaken. Sorry about the confusion!
The important part is that you do not treat the Googlebots any different than other users from that region. So if your site blocks users in the region where the Googlebot comes from (based on the IP address and your IP/Location lookups), you should be blocking it as well. Blocking users outside of the Googlebot’s region would generally be ok.