Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

A few months back I started experimenting with Jeremy Schoemaker’s Shoemoney Tools suite. In particular I tested out the Related Blog Post tool. While the other tools in the set are invaluable, this one caused me some serious grief because I failed to fully understand what the tool did.

As a result of my lack of understanding, Akisment banned me from the WordPress comment system. Anytime I attempted to leave a comment on another blog, it automatically went to their spam folder. It even treated my own trackbacks to other posts on this blog as spam in my own spam folder!

It should be pointed out that the tool does come with a warning that reads “Be careful with this one,” but I did not heed the warning.

The most basic explanation is that Google sees hyphens as spaces, and interprets them in the same way a space is used to separate two words.

One of the best explanations about how this works was written on Guru of Search where he posts that Google considers hyphens to be spaces in a domain name. If you start thinking of hyphens as spaces separating keywords as well, you can begin to select domain names that will have a slight edge in the search engine results positions (SERPs) over some of your competitors.

A friend of mine emailed me the other day and asked a very basic question about a term that gets tossed around the affiliate marketing industry pretty loosely.

He asked me what it means to “own” a keyword or phrase. I have to admit that I have used this term here in the past without much thought about how vague it really is.

Once again this year, Google gives the shaft to the veterans who fought and died to establish the very principles upon which their business is founded.

It has been conformed officially by Google that the referral buttons for the FireFox browser and the Google Pack are not being displayed as they should on thousands of sites across the Internet.

This afternoon I had a conversation with one of our web development customers about the placement of her website in Google. She was concerned that she was not close enough to the top of the results in Google, which puzzled her given that she ranked well in Yahoo and MSN.

I explained to her that saying she does well in Yahoo and MSN but not in Google is like saying the Huskers can beat any Texas high school team out there, just not the college ones.

As many of you know, the popular search engine Google regularly tasks it graphic artists to craft variation of its logo to celebrate holidays large and small. For example, Google recently adjusted their logo to honor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Birthday. They also change it for major holidays such as Halloween, Thanksgiving and the 4th of July.

So when I woke up this morning and found the standard Google logo on www.google.com, I was a bit shocked. I checked around some Google forums on the web and found that I was not the only one who was surprised at the lack of a change.

Some people gave Google the benefit of the doubt with excuses ranging from “their graphics designers took a long weekend” to “Google is international and this is an American holiday.” Each of those excuses is flawed because taking the day off to honor those who you refuse to honor on your website would be truly ironic, and if anyone has the ability to detect what country a visitor is coming from it would be Google. Seriously, Google can tell me what HOUSE visits my website in some cases!