Ode to a Forum
I love forums, they are excellent tools for website publishers with almost no downside and tremendous upside. If you have a site that you think would benefit from a forum, wait not another day, and get it done now.
Why are forums good? Well, there are many reasons, lets start first with how they provide a stable core of traffic for your site. If you have a popular, vibrant, growing forum with a critical mass of active users, even if all your search engine rankings were to evaporate your site would likely still survive as the forum would continue to grow. All your forum members would be telling their friends about it, linking to it from their Facebook profiles, and everything else. Forums provide a stabilizing affect on your traffic that helps your site weather swings and shifts in other traffic sources.
Of course, forums also help your search engine traffic by providing a treasure trove of content that search engines can index and list. Try making a content site that doesn’t rely on user submitted content and try to reach the sheer page count possible with a forum. You might have hundreds, even thousands, of articles on a website and yet a forum will almost always dwarf that with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of posts.
A forum can even help prevent losses in search engine traffic. When I, and many of you I’m sure, started in this business it was quite different, there was less competition, and overall less people knew that you could make money online. The bubble burst of 1999 and 2000 made most people think the Internet was money poison, a few of us knew that by staying small, and keeping costs low, you could make really good money.
Now, however, things have changed. The mainstream media has reported dozens and dozens of human interest stories of average people making large incomes by running websites out of their homes or small offices. This perception of easy money has attracted people who look for get rich quick schemes, people who do not quite understand how to program, market, design, or otherwise put out a good website. They rely on stolen content, stolen ideas, gibberish, spam, and other things. But they do know enough to at least make their website look real enough to a machine.
This is where human reviewers come in, search engines employ human reviewers in a quality control capacity for reviewing their search results. Additionally we’ve had human reviewers, in the form of link popularity algorithms, for a long time. As such it is vitally important that your site come off well to humans, and there are certain things you can do to accomplish that. One of them is bragging about your content, but additionally having a forum will help. The Google Human Reviewer handbook specifically has a section about how an active forum is a huge vote against labeling a site as spam. So when you want to be sure your site passes muster when reviewed by a human, a forum is a huge help.
Forums, are of course, just one form of user generated content, but thanks to sophisticated software, you can use your forum to handle all sorts of such content. The most recent version of vBulletin (3.7) has many social networking like features, it also has a robust plugin system and can integrate with blog, gallery, and review products. It is also easy to appropriate vBulletin’s user authentication system to power custom sections of your own site, saving you programming time and allowing your users to have just one login for your whole site.
For any site that is going to be built around user submitted content it will be hard to find a better CMS that a properly modded vBulletin forum.
Finally, forums are amazing tools for promoting other sites. You can market your other sites or products to your forum members and build sales and traffic that way. Additionally, you can use a tool like the vbGeek Autolinker to turn your forum into a link popularity machine. What the script does it turn select words into predefined links to help you build link popularity. For instance if you own a forum about widgets and a site that sells widgets you could have the word “purple widget” turned into a link to your page about purple widgets in any post that uses the word. I’ve used this technique to get great rankings for some of my ecommerce sites, in addition to the direct traffic it provides.
So, buy a forum, or build a forum, but get one, don’t wait any longer. It may take awhile to grow, or it may shoot up instantly, but almost all forums eventually become successful.
Here are some related articles that may be of interest:
The Ultimate vBulletin Optimization Guide
Should You Pay for Posts? Forum Posting Services Reviewed
Your .Community - A Guide
One Product eCommerce, One Year Later
This blog post will be part rant. I get frustrated sometimes. I don’t necessarily think I’m anything special, what I do does not seem special to me, and yet examples repeatedly crop up and make me think I must be a genius compared to so many other people. Namely the fact that I can walk down the street and think of new original website ideas, and other people apparently only are able to copy the ideas from others.
Is it really so hard to think of an original idea or angle? Apparently so, for what I had feared did come to pass. As you may recall in my original introduction to this site I said that while I was going to be upfront with everything about it, I hoped that no one would decide to merely copy me, and instead use my method as inspiration to come up with their own angle or product.
Yet, one loser did copy my site, and not only did he copy it, he asked for advice on it here in the forums, he spammed my blog to promote it, and on other forums he more or less assumed my identity by appropriating my gardening inspiration for making the site, and my webmaster inspiration for making the site. He was so dishonest he could not even admit on a money making forum that he stole the idea, and instead had to copy elements from my initial blog post to tell to others to talk up his own ego. Then, on a gardening forum, he also copied elements from my initial blog post explaining how he was looking for a tumbler for his own garden. This type of blatant dishonesty is so extremely annoying and it really ground my gears.
This episode has also really been the last straw for me on two fronts. I had always considered officially registering the copyrights to my sites, but it was always something I put off. No longer, had I registered the copyright to my compost tumbler site I could have bullied this weasel for what is likely all his cash, when you officially register your copyrights you can get statutory damages, the threat of which is usually enough to get a fat settlement check from the fool dumb enough to copy your intellectual property. Ask anyone who had stolen images from Corbis. Without an official registration you can only get actual damages (his pitiful profits) and an injunction (aka, get his website taken down, which is something I accomplished with DMCA notices anyways). I will be writing a long article on copyrights and registrations soon, based on what I learned in this process.
The second thing is I do not think I will share any more new sites publicly again, everything just ends up being copied. Probably one of the biggest mistakes I made was sharing the money making potential of my coupon site (which I had stumbled across through revenue experimentation on another of my sites). When I did so there were less than 10 main sites out there competing, afterwards it blossomed into hundreds, I had one Indian group rip off multiple of my sites to copy my cross linking methods. The competition surely hit my rankings and my income. I will of course continue to share things in the private area of Website Publisher’s forums, but not publicly in blogs and what not.
However, I did say I would share information from my one product ecommerce site, and so, here I am, one year later.
The site has been a tremendous success. Surprisingly enough it hasn’t even been seasonal, I figured mostly lots of sales in the Spring, and not much the rest of the year. I was wrong. In fact December has been one of my highest sales months so far (apparently, all the cool gardeners want compost tumblers for Christmas).
Since it started just a year and a week ago (more or less) I’ve had over 340 sales. That averages just under 1 a day, and for most of the year I had poor search engine rankings. My rankings have really started coming on strong since January though, and I’m now #1 on MSN for my target keywords, and on Google I keep bouncing between 4 and 7. I’m not getting much love from Yahoo, so I do fear an MS/Yahoo merger that could result in MSN ending up with Yahoo algorithm.
Anyways, profit margins are slim on the product which means credit card processing fees hurt my overall margins (the fee of probably around 3% aggregate is on the total cost, not my profit, which is only around 20%. So on a $200 item, the fee is $6, my margin is $40, so the fee is 15% of my margin, yikes!) but what can you do? Still, the site is very profitable for me.
Since the search engine rankings have improved I’ve been doing at least 3 sales a day, some days as high as 5 or 6, and it is still just April, much of the country is too cold to do much gardening yet.
My marketing plan has worked well. PPC advertising was profitable and helped keep the sales coming in before my organic SEO started paying off, then of course the plan to reach out to bloggers for reviews has to have contributed to my SEO success, I’ve gotten lots of nice incoming links from blogs (without spamming comments). I’m doing another set of blogger reviews this Spring, which should hopefully help cement my position in the top three of Google.
One thing I regret not doing earlier is to offer a mail order form on the site. Some people prefer to send checks rather than use credit cards online, and when they do so I have zero risk of a chargeback and don’t have to pay any credit card processing fees. Really, a mail order form is a great idea.
Perhaps the most surprising thing is that for March (and surely for April) the compost tumbler site beat my sword ecommerce business in total revenue (if not total profit), I really never expected that (though it won’t last, my sword business has new developments that will take off this year). When I made the site I was just hoping for profitability, maybe one sale a day, and averaging three now it is very nice. I’m guessing through the summer, especially if I improve my SERP positions even more, I’ll get up to averaging 5 a day.
Let me take this time now to, yet again, recommend ecommerce. You don’t need a big operation, a small operation selling just one product can work well, especially if you’ve got related content sites for cross promotion. Think of a product or something that would compliment your content sites well, and read the other blog posts and articles I’ve written on the subject. Just don’t copy my sites, please.
Behind the Scenes at Google, the Human Reviewer Playbook
You can optimize your site for search engine algorithms perfectly, but if a human working for a search engine comes in and makes a snap judgement that your site looks spammy or isn’t useful, and you’ll suffer.
I think, many of the unexplained rankings we see are a result of these human reviews and it is a reason why I have for years advocated making websites that not only have good SEO, but also have a site that has a good “human factor.” You want a fast loading professional looking site, a good logo, a good design, and you’ll want to brag about your content, then brag about it some more.
A copy of Google’s quality rater’s handbook from April of 07 has been leaked. This has happened before, this is a newer leak though. (EDIT: It looks like they took it down. Now I’m kicking myself for not saving a copy, although I atleast read through it all and remember most of it, it really makes this blog post less than useful to not have a source for you all to read it. If anyone did save a copy please email me. Thanks.)
Read it, you’ll see just how important first impressions are. Your site should look active, useful, and legitimate. Think of the concept of a tip jar (or hat, or guitar case). A street performer will put out a hat for tips and seed that hat with a few bucks, why do they do this? Because people are often lemmings and are much more comfortable following than leading. If you’re not the first, or only, person to leave a tip you’re more likely to do so, that is just how our minds work.
So, you want to let the quality rater know that if they approve of your site, they will not be the first one. Let them know that other people like your site too. If you can legitimately claim something, “The #1 knitting site on the Internet” for instance, then claim it. Remember, perception is reality and if you act big, important, and authoritative, people will see you as such.
Also, notice how the guidelines actually say to look for things like forums or return policies as evidence of legitimacy. This makes forum posting services even more attractive in my opinion. You’ll want the appearance of a popular forum before you’re reviewed, and the Google handbook has information on identifying forums with scraped or fake content, but nothing on posts that were done by paid writers. I’m sure I’ve probably avoided dismissal as an MFA site in the past because of forum content.
This is also one reason why over the past 2 or so years I’ve focused heavily on going back, redoing, and redesigning many of my older sites to make sure they look as professional as possible (at least, to my standards).
Now, do I have any new advice in this blog post? No, not really, just scroll up and look at all the links. There is a lot of good content here on WebsitePublisher.net, some of the older content perhaps gets forgotten, so go back and read some of these old posts and articles. I’m pleased to say that I long ago covered everything you’ll need to do to make your site look good to these human reviews, and if you followed it when I first posted it congratulate yourself on being ahead of the curve.
Video Production, The Wave of the Future
Video is becoming a larger and larger part of the Internet and I’m getting my feet wet with producing my own.
But, this is virgin territory for me and I need some help. I’m hoping to get advice and recommendations from those of you who have already done this.
The first thing I need is the technology. Are there are good scripts for creating a video system or gallery? Especially scripts or software that will accomodate preroll video ads.
Should I do anything special in regards to hosting? Is there a really good and reasonable offserver hosting location for video ads?
In regards to those preroll video ads, which networks do you recommend?
Can anyone recommend a company, service, or individual who can do minor editing for me, create titles, etc? Just polish up the videos to make them somewhat more professional looking.
I will not be doing user submitted videos perse, but they will be made by quasi-amateur users to spec. My total library will probably start at around a dozen 5 minute videos, increasing to maybe around 100 after a year, so not a huge number.
How I do Directory Submissions
Submitting to directories is one of the most straightforward ways to build links to your websites, however such a practice is not without problems, there is a prevalence of small directories and directory operators who mainly exist to swindle you. For instance a directory operator may constantly launch new directories, focusing all the PageRank they have on the new ones, to make it look like an attractive submission, then eventually they may get banned for manipulating PageRank etc, or submissions dwindle, and they open a new one, forsaking the old one. Meaning, that nice listing you paid for, quickly evaporates.
Directories alone also cannot be your only link building endeavor, you need other types of links as well, that being said, here is how I go about doing directory submissions.
There are three prime directories every site needs to consider.
DMOZ, the poorly managed free directory. It can take months or years to get in, and then a competitor who is a directory editor can just remove your listing or not approve it to begin with. There have been cases where even higher up DMOZ editors (so-called “meta editors”) were corrupt in this way. Still, every new site should be submitted. You just cannot count on it.
Yahoo, the premier pay directory, has vastly dropped in importance due to Yahoo’s own decisions to devalue and de-emphasize their directory in their search results and throughout their site. Meaning less and less traffic browses their directory than what used to. They also charge a yearly fee, not a one-time fee, of $300 a year. So, in order to submit to them you need make sure you will earn at least $300 a year directly off the traffic & link benefits you gain from the directory listing. In general I consider listings for sites whom I think can be rewarded with an increase of at least $10 a day through higher traffic. I know, an actual positive ROI would be around $1 a day, but there are other methods for raising traffic than a Yahoo submission, that would give a much better ROI, so the gains in my mind have to be substantial to justify it.
Best of the Web, what I consider the last of the top tier directories, has the benefit of being very similar to Yahoo, but better in that they have one time fee submission options. With a one time fee submission you have 5 years, 10 years, to make up the cost, it is much easier to justify than Yahoo’s yearly fee (BOTW also has a yearly fee option). BOTW has been around nearly as long as Yahoo as well, and throughout the directory PageRanks are very close. They have less traffic than Yahoo of course, but they are much cheaper too. By the way, BOTW has a coupon going on till the end of this month for $25, that makes a one time fee listing about half as much as Yahoo’s yearly fee. Coupon Code: SAVEBIG.
After those I go down a tier to secondary directories which are valid directories, and so I do not worry about then losing their ability to pass PageRank, but on the other hand they do not contribute large amounts of traffic. These are JoeAnt.com and especially GoGuides.org and I tend to regularly get submissions from them.
For a new site that is typically all I’ll do. If you can afford it, patient SEO is usually best. I never want to do too many directory listings at the same time. So I’ll wait a few months and see where I’m at and if I’m not pleased with the progress I’m making in the SERPs, I’ll do a few more submissions.
For these additional submissions I scour sites like ISEDB.com and DirectoryCritic.com looking for quality pay directories. I tend to only look for pay ones. Free ones I’ll find by doing backlink searches on my competitors and submit to them that way. Free ones that my competitors aren’t in tend to not be worth it so I don’t bother. Reciprocal link free ones are never worth it, you never want to link to a potential bad neighborhood, and just generic free ones can end up being covered in so much spam it is doubtful the link helps much at all.
So I focus on paid ones, and when looking for them I check the following criteria.
- If I see any sort of spammy sites in it, I move on.
- I check the PageRank, Google cache, and backlinks of both the homepage and the subcategory I will be submitting to. A blank in any of these isn’t an automatic disqualifier (except cache, no cache, no submission), pages at Yahoo and DMOZ will show blanks sometimes for PageRank or backlinks, but not having these things does weigh against the directory. Also, for the homepage, make sure the backlinks don’t look artificially generated.
- If the site loads slowly, looks unprofessional, is buggy, or otherwise looks amateurish, I move on.
- I check the whois of the site to see who owns it, I do reverse searches to see other sites owned or on the same server. If I find a directory that is owned by someone who owns a dozen directories, I move on because of the risks I outlined at the start of this post.
- I check compete.com and alexa.com to see traffic data.
This, like thinking of Yahoo is worth it for your site, is all very much a judgment call, but I think it pays to be picky. In the end I probably pass on 10 directories before finding one I’ll submit to, then I tend to submit at least 3 different sites if I find one I like.
The point being, link building is as much about your site’s reputation as your site’s rankings, and I think being discriminating in your submissions is a good thing and will help make sure you do not over do things and trip any present or future filter or penalty.
So I’ll do around 3 or 4 submissions for a site, and again, stop for a few months to see where I am at (stop with directory submissions, not necessarily all link building). Slow and steady, but reliable. If you can afford to be patient, be patient. There is nothing worse than racing to the top with shadier impatient methods only to fall back to oblivion thanks to a penalty or ban shortly after you get there.
User Tracking Isn’t So Bad
There has been much privacy broohaha for the past years about privacy and user tracking. Specifically how ad companies will “track” users across websites.
This, I think, has mostly been overblown, and really, is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I’m taking my wife to Vegas this Spring and these past two weeks I’ve been booking our trip and shopping for clothes. The evil ad company has profiled me, undoubtedly with the help of the evil travel website, and now on many sites I’m getting ads for… Las Vegas coupons and hotel deals! The nerve of those people to give me special offers and more targeted advertising just because they know I’m going to Vegas. I’m so offended!
Seriously though, they don’t know that I, Chris Beasley, tall goateed man, is going to Vegas. They know that user 897987 or user with ip of 333.444.555.666 is going to Vegas, and so, they’re showing this anonymous user appropriate ads. Sure, the travel website I booked with knows my personal information, but they don’t (and more importantly, don’t need to) share it with their ad partners. They just need to share a cookie, a small anonymous marker, and or my IP.
I’ve also been shopping on Bluefly.com for hot dresses for when I take my wife out at night. So what do I see on some sites now? Ads for 10% off my next purchase at Bluefly. The horror! Again, sure, Bluefly knows my personal information, but they don’t need to share it for this tracking to work, they just need to set a cookie or give my IP to the ad network.
As a consumer, I like this personalization and customization of the ads I see. I’d much rather see an ad for 10% off a store I might buy actually from, rather than an ad to download a smiley screensaver. I don’t feel creeped out about tracking because I know I’m just an arbitrary number to them, like just another box in that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
As a website publisher, this kind of advertising excites me and makes me feel good about the future of online advertising. In the February 18th issue of Fortune there was an article about one of the largest ad buyers in the world and how he is both impressed with and encouraged by the tracking ability of the web (and so spending more money on Internet advertising) as well as how he wants to port that same type of targeting to TV, if possible. So, really, this kind of tracking and targeting of advertising is what brings the big money to play on the Internet, making it important for every publisher.
Unfortunately, public perception of the negativity of such advertising persists, we all need to do our part to help our industry by educating, friends, family, and customers, as to the true value of these tracking systems.
Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for 44b
Read it up here.
Honestly, I don’t understand this move.
Yahoo sucks. Their search engine sucks, their advertising service sucks. Who here doesn’t think Microsoft Adcenter is better than Yahoo Search Marketing? I believe until just very recently YSM didn’t even allow you to opt out of their syndicated results, so to advertise on their search results you had to deal with a ton of spammy clickfraud like clicks.
Personally, MSN traffic converts better for me than any other search engine, I think their Adcenter program is well run, and I also think their search is better than Yahoo’s.
Granted, Yahoo has many other properties (Rightmedia, Flickr, etc), and Yahoo’s horrible performance over the past few years has hammered that stock and made it very cheap, but still, I feel MS had turned a corner as far as catching up goes and they could have had all of Yahoo’s market position without paying for it.
This is big for our industry of course. It would mean that those hoping MS would be able to offer an alternative to Adsense (in every way) will be disappointed since undoubtedly they’ll keep that comedy of errors that is YPN (read more about the joke that is YPN.)
Also, consider history. Yahoo gobbled up Overture, Inktomi, AllTheWeb, and AltaVista. Supposedly combining the best features of all of those sites (results to be determined), and now Microsoft wants to gobble up it all.
This will mean one less bit of diversity in our businesses, both in advertising and in SEO, and that I dislike. Additionally, what kind of pressure is this going to put on ASK.com? That will be interesting to see.
To our hosts and registrars, may they never meet
This post, I’m sure, will have many of you saying “Duh!” and rightfully so, most of you, I hope, know this, or realize it is common sense, but many people out there don’t and they get misled, confused, and screwed because of it.
I speak of course, of bundled services where your registrar is your host or your host is your registrar. For beginners this can be very attractive, one less thing to worry about, don’t have to learn about the NS stuff, you just tell your host what domain you want and they set it all up for you.
The problem is that, in most such circumstances, the legal owner of the domain ends up being the host, not you, and so if you ever want to move hosts (and everyone moves hosts eventually) you will not be able to, or you’ll have a hard time doing it.
This recently came up in the forums and the poster said he had 5 months of site downtime thanks to his host not releasing his domain. Unfortunately his experience is rather common, I hear about similar things once a month or so, and so, I felt this issue needed a big underline drawn beneath it (hence, this blog post).
Downtime is expensive, not only are you losing the direct income from the lost traffic, but indirectly you’re also hurting your long term promotional and SEO goals by being offline. The risk of downtime is far more expensive than the slight added cost of choosing not to take up your host or registrar on that bundled offer.
Your host is for your web space, and that is it, I would not use them for anything else. Your registrar is for your domain, and that is it, I would not use them for anything else. Even bundled design services, they may say that you cannot transfer your site off if you used them to get a design done.
No, keep everything separate.
My New Nutrition Site
I finally have something to blog about, after awhile of not getting any inspiration. I’ve finally launched a new site (more or less).
Nutriquiz.com a nutrition quiz site.
I am really into nutrition, both as I like to cook and I like to look good naked. So I’ve been “into” nutrition for awhile and was hit with a little inspiration last Spring. People are dumb, especially when it comes to food. Most people have no idea what food is healthy or not. Oh, they have ideas, but in general they haven’t a clue, or they don’t think about the issue enough. People think muffins are healthier than doughnuts because they contain fruit, or they think that chicken parmesean is healthier than a grilled sirloin steak because it has been so ingrained in their head that chicken is good and beef is bad. Food that is often marketed as healthy, often has as much added sugar as a candy bar, and food that is traditionally seen as unhealthy, isn’t always that bad.
I also had the idea that people learned the best through questions. If you tell someone something, okay, they hear you, but maybe they don’t fully comprehend, maybe it goes in one ear and out the other. If you ask them a question you force them to engage their brain and think about a topic. So, in that regard, I think a quiz format such as on my site is the best way to teach people, hence the goal of the site is to change the way people think about food, by making them use the same critical thinking skills they use when picking a quiz answer to make healthy choices when eating at restaurants or doing grocery shopping.
Of course, the site also has the goal of making me money. I feel though that by having a non-monetary goal helps all aspects of managing the site. If my goal is not just to make money, but to teach people and make the site easy and usable, hopefully that shows through and in the end results in greater success.
I hired Brainyminds, (you may know them as Stymiee and Ses5909) to do this site for me, and I gave them the goal of making it very Web 2.0-ish in design, and I’m quite pleased with the look and feel. This is my first truly Web 2.0 site and so everything about it was made from a standpoint of viral marketing and community involvement.
The site also includes a full nutritional database, but unlike typical such sites out there that use Brute Force SEO combined with a public domain nutrition database to gain traffic, I made the conscious decision to not do that, to not put the database in a browsable format. The goal here is to promote the quizzes, and I did not want to do anything that could perhaps end up hurting the site (duplicate content and all that). We’ll see if it pays off.
So, what makes this site good from a money making standpoint? Well, obviously the subject matter is good as it gets high paying advertisements and CPM rates. The weight loss field in general gives some of the best eCPM rates on the Internet.
Then there is the content of the site. The content is just simple quizzes, which I make up. It isn’t super easy to think of new quizzes, but neither is it super hard, and all the rest of the content is provided by users. Once I reach a critical mass of quizzes, I will have to do almost no work on the site other than simple moderation. Also, as far as my workload goes, I have a really fancy and easy to use backend with the site that makes managing/adding quizzes a breeze.
Finally, there is the interactive nature of quizzes themselves. By engaging the user in a test like a quiz you increase the page-views-per-visitor metric, which can result in an increase in ad revenue. Additionally you appeal to their competitive side which should, hopefully encourage them to share quizzes with their friends.
I’m hoping all of those factors come together into a perfect storm for this site, and ideally eventually some large company will wish to buy it from me for a large sum of money, but even if that doesn’t happen I could see this site becoming one of my top earners.
For other publishers, I think this site offers a great example of a way to be a website publisher when you’re not actually publishing any actual content. Not every site has to be article driven (and yes, I have a few articles on this site), or made with public domain or bought content, or any of the other typical strategies. You can build a site around a service, or some sort of interactive activity, and do just as well or better.
I also think it is a good example of how to swing for the fences. I paid programmers/designers better than myself to do this, because I wanted something better than what I could produce. I’m using bought stock photos for the quizzes, I added many additional little usability features, and I made sure everything was done to a high standard. Even though I’m a little guy, my goal here was to make the site look like it was run by a bigger company.
There are still some changes and tweaks to make of course, some minor additions, and I need to add dozens and dozens more quizzes, but the work is mostly done, and the site is ready as this point for public use. If you have any comments or suggestions (or quiz ideas) I’d appreciate the feedback.
Google and Meta Tags
For years I’ve taken the stand that Google doesn’t use meta tags for ranking purposes. Going back to 2001 I’ve always said that Google will sometimes use the meta description tag for generating a site abstract for the SERPs, but not for ranking, and the meta keywords tag is not used at all.
Not only have I told people that going on 7 years now, but I also did experiments showing it to be true, and yet still I would get into forum arguments on the topic, quite heated ones, and even one time someone who runs a webmaster site made a page on his site, calling me out by name, more or less calling me an idiot for believing what I did.
It is nice to be right. Like I said in my intro to my new SEO guide I have a really good track record of being right with things involving SEO, and this very literal post by Google confirms the meta tag issue in my favor very handily.
You’d think that since this “discussion” started in 2001 it would have ended by now, but it hasn’t. Only instead of me putting on the boxing gloves to teach the SEO neophytes over at SitePoint, John Conde has been doing it instead. The threads about meta tags still come up though, hopefully, now, they stop.
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