To quote Merlin:

“Everyone wants to eat the hot dog, no one cares how it got made”

Update: As Leah mentioned the audio is a bit low, but Merlin speaks a bit louder than the man who introduces him so don’t let that stop you from catching this great presentation…

This is an update to my previous article on the Patricia Best Google bombing topic. Well, it looks like Traffik’s attempt made it first, obviously they rank higher in Google than I do, since they get about 1000x the traffic I do. In any event, if you now run a Google search for Patricia Best is woefully out of touch her “fresh” article about Google bombing now appears as the first result on Google. Obviously if there were more links to her story from sites with better pagerank this may not be the case, however it’s quite amusing and scary to see how effective this is. Thought you might get a kick out of it. I still feel Patricia Best is a silly technonoob.

So, Patricia Best, the silly techno noob at globeandmail is “reporting” “breaking news” that if you search for ‘failure’ in google you get to “laugh at what comes up first.” This is hardly news, and Google even has an explanation that appears right above the entry explaining how it happens.

Patricia, you’re about 3 years late to the party, and you didn’t even bring a gift. It’s called Google bombing or link bombing, and it’s nothing new. And I love how you title it ‘Google geeks drop a bomb on Mr. Bush’, as if the people at Google are up to it. And ‘Let others know before Google fixes it’ as if it’s something that’s broken or new. I guess what I like most about you Patricia is how fresh your content is, I can’t beleive you get paid to do your job. Who bothered to hire you, and why? I also find it fascinating that they’ve closed the comments on the article. Buy a clue Patricia Best you silly technonoob.

You are like the ubiquitous 70 year old grandmother who just got WebTV. God bless her kind but if I get another forwarded e-mail about how Microsoft and AOL’s new e-mail tracking program will make me rich if I forward it to 42348202 people, and it must be true because “it was on GOOD MORNING AMERICA” and because the message is from someone’s “good friend” and “she really is an attorney”, I’m going to never open my inbox again… Ok, not really but the last thing this world needs is a “tech” writer with that same mentality. (more…)

Nick Wilson from performancing has a pretty decent article on the 3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic, the mysterious and ever elusive art of SEO. Some really decent tips on boosting your rankings, defiantly worth the read if you’re trying to jump up to the 1st page of search results.

Of course, it’s worth mentioning that he doesn’t follow his own advice in the 3rd method “Where possible, make sure your urls contain your keywords” as his post slug is just an ID number instead of a key word.

I’ve been on the first page of Google a couple of times by mere accident. As it turns out, the times it happened were because I just happened to do everything he said, without knowing it of course.