wtf?

Strange Google keywords that landed at my blog

• [searching for something dirty]
• message link generator

Unrelated Yahoo search results that ended up here

• 404 justin
• 404 music / justin
• acta "only one ipod"
• base structure
• best punchlines humor
• blog [searching for something dirty]
• cach a poo
• cach the poo
• clickable link generator
• [searching for something dirty]
• [searching for something dirty]
• googol justin
• how do you make fans
• how much is the music industry worth
• my space cool
• [searching for something dirty]
• [searching for something dirty]

A whole grip of Microsoft Live/MSN search terms which, in some crazy stretch of the imagination, might possibly relate to my blog

• "types of stupidity"
• +brain fard
• +dot your happy friend dot info
• +dot your space friend dot info
• +what is acquaintances
• add,message,comment links
• again or contact info justin
• alphebetize iphone menu
• cach a poo
• cach a poo 2
• cach the poo
• catch a poo
• catchthe poo
• chuck hileman blogger
• clickable link generator
• [searching for something dirty]
• [searching for something dirty]
• define musing
• difference between a single dot ("./myimage.jpg") and a double dot ("../myimage.jpg")
• dot your freind dot info
• dot your happy friend dot info
• dot your space friend dot info
• frankie leman
• google justin
• googol hot open girls
• hi my conputer info
• hileman beer
• [searching for something dirty]

And it appears that Bing might be carrying on the tradition

• google justin
• jastin for laught
• [searching for something dirty]
• "girl jeans"
• advanced healing bandaid
• arnold bennett
• beautified quotes
• bringo stop talking to machines
• cach a poo
• cartoon register groceries
• doophp
• dot unicode
• download high def trailers
• drupal webfm securing
• em,px,
• firefox really slowing down my internet
• google.justin
• gustaso.com
• how to get firefox not to use memory when us load pages
• how to save e-mail info on xp full install
• howto disable url search ie
• i think i have disabled number lock
• ie6 backspace key
• inspiration when sleepy

Context: Each list above consists of the unrelated search terms found in the top 50 keyword referrers from each search engine. For example, Google was wrong in about 4% of its top fifty search terms. Microsoft Live search failed in an astounding 76% of its tries.

For the curious: All the [searching for something dirty] placeholders were variations on the name of a certain website which will remain nameless.

I prob'ly don't need to tell you this, but don't ever ask search engines to delist your site. Ever. They actually do it.

A bit of background...

Last month I relaunched justin hileman dot info with a fresh new theme, and a couple of cool features. While I was developing the replacement site, I had a staging version which I didn't want Google to index. I used a handy little robots.txt file to keep the search engine spiders at bay:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This file did the trick.

The staging site wasn't indexed, exactly as advertised. Unfortunately when the time came to deploy, my über-restrictive robots.txt file overwrote the existing file and slipped into the live site.

Google, Yahoo, and friends dutifully ignored every page on my site. The majority of the damage was instantaneous. Most high traffic and high PR pages were unindexed within a few hours. My crawl rate dropped, the major search engines removed more pages every time they crawled my site.

My SERP traffic, understandably, tanked.

Yesterday my search engine referrals hit zero.

The sharp drop in SERP traffic on February 12th coincides with the first Google crawl with the new robots.txt. The second drop, around the 23rd was the result of Yahoo's reindex. In just a few days my site was completely unlisted from the major search engines.

As of the time of this post, a search for "justin hileman dot info", which should result in about 1500 pages on this domain, returns nothing.

How could this have been avoided?

Google Webmaster tools provides a great overview of your site. It dutifully lists any problems encountered while spidering your domain, and what might have caused them. In my case, there's a huge red flag:

A few restricted URLs is normal, but 817 is certainly a bit excessive. Had I paid attention to the tools Google provides, I would have noticed an abrupt change in crawl rate, and the spike in restricted URLs. But at the time, I only saw the decline in traffic, and didn't think to consult the webmasters tools.

The moral of the story:

First, search engines actually respect your robots.txt file. Second, it's a really bad idea to tell them to go away, because they will. And take your traffic with them.

Google, Yahoo, I've learned my lesson... Please relist me.

Check out these Baskin Robbins Shakes of Death. For the record, just one of these meets the recommended daily allowance of awesome. And diabetes.

Now I want to go get a milkshake. That Chocolate Oreo shake looks delicious :)

(via)

3.2 ghz core 2 duo
4 gb pc2-6400 ram
10,000 rpm sata hard drive

so why is iTunes still so incredibly slow?

A few weeks ago I purchased the MacHeist II bundle, a program that hooks up Mac users with great deals on software and earns money for charity in the process... This year they donated almost half a million dollars. I've got no beef with MacHeist. I do, however, have a problem with Yazsoft, the vendors of Speed Download, which was included in the MacHeist bundle.

You see, Speed Download, like most applications, automatically checks for updates. In fact, Speed Download installs them automatically as well. This worked out just fine until version 5.0 was released. Right on cue, Speed Download installed the update and popped up a notification that I should relaunch the application.

The difference between this and previous updates is that version 5.0 was not included in the license I purchased. Without warning, without confirmation, Speed Download "updated" itself to a 21 day trial version. I entered the registration information, which I purchased less than three weeks ago as part of MacHeist. But since this update was from version 4 to 5.0, my old license was no good.

If you work in customer service, and your company just shipped a damaged product to a customer, don't tell the customer "Why don't you ship it back, and we'll check it out. If it proves defective then we'll replace it."

You just called me a liar. That's a good way to make me want to shop somewhere else.

A while ago gThing noticed that utah's latest pyramid scheme MLM opportunity, goyin, had an unintentionally comical—and not very search engine friendly—website.

Well, it looks like they've outdone themselves. Their website now sports no real text at all—not even in meta tags. And they top it all off with a really annoying flash based splash page.

Somehow, in just over a thousand characters, they managed to earn zero SEO points, work in an Internet Explorer CSS hack, fail XHTML validation, make their site completely inaccessible to anyone with a screen reader, and annoy the crap out of me. Great job, guys.

the complete landing page source code after the jump.

apparently somebody from Kingston Upon Thames was searching for "cach the poo" and ended up at my blog. huh?

the things you learn from server logs.

adobe (macromedia) flash is a very powerful tool which is, unfortunately, mostly used for evil.

flash is really good at embedding media, creating charts and graphs, making slideshows and games and all manner of great content.

it's a really, really, really, bad tool for your logo or website navigation or anything else that would be better done with html/css/javascript.

if you use flash to make a splash page for your site or build an entire website out of it, you should be kicked.

check out flash sucks: it's an interesting read.

I implore you: use it right, and only when absolutely, positively, unquestionably and undeniably necessary.

as an added bonus mike (the guy i quoted above) points out an html one-liner that brings internet explorer 6 to it's knees...

last night i was talking with sam from gthing. we discussed search engine optimization, CSS magic, and all sorts of nerdy stuff (pretty much par for the course)... and we talked about guns.

our coversation touched on each of the following five observations:

1. a lot of people carry a loaded handgun as a concealed weapon.
2. one common place to conceal said handgun is the crotchital region.
3. most of these people keep a round chambered.
4. some people even carry these concealed weapons, "cocked and locked".
5. a google search returns over 101 thousand results for "accidentally shot himself in the groin"...

i've lost my faith in humankind.