One of the hardest things to do as a designer is make a website look good while still being easy to understand and navigate. Google became Google by following this principle. To this day the home page has remained the same: a logo and a search bar with very little else. Most of us require [...]

Net neutrality is about allowing the telcos to dictate prices on a case-by-case basis instead of equal pricing for all consumers. What this means is that Google - a company I dislike - has a high stock price and without net neutrality AT&T (or whoever their local carrier is) can hike up the price of [...]

Google is too big and is using anticompetitive measures to shape the internet - and all business - to their design. Either you believe that or you believe that they really do carry out their “do no evil” motto despite the countless reports to the contrary. At this point, I don’t see how I can [...]

My favorite forums, SEO Refugee, has moved to a new server and with that the theme has been updated to match the colors and style of the home page blog. Congrats to Jim Cook, Refugee Admin and world-class website designer for a job well done. With the new server also comes another great treat: blazing fast [...]

I’m a bit behind revealing my stats for 2007. There’s been a lot of illness in my family and that set me back. Everyone is good now though so here’s the growth www.14thc.com experienced last year… Unique Visits increased an average of 6,096 monthly over 2007 Repeat Visits increased an average of 8,357 monthly over 2007 Page Views [...]

I recently relaunched a website from a single static page to a full-blown site with around 20 pages. The site structure fits within the guidelines (of course) and I did some link-building to get some general link-juice and to get the site to rank for the business name. With Google and Yahoo! results were as expected. [...]

One man… you go high enough you always come to one man… who? - Mel Gibson as Porter in Payback I know it’s really hard for some people to grasp that Google is an evil, lying, manipulative company (with fantastic PR). So I drew a picture. How many times have you heard Google representatives say that [...]

Yesterday, Microsoft announced corrections to their new cloaking-detector bot that was causing havoc with web stats and ad earnings. While many blogs are covering this announcement - hit tip to Donna for breaking the story - most are viewing this announcement as a positive step… or at least being diplomatic about accusing Microsoft of any wrongdoing. Screw [...]

… but this one is not meant to educate the masses. Of course, the search engine officials are telling us SEOs to keep things clean and to follow the rules. And really, we want to follow the rules and keep our little white hat unstained. Honest guv’, we do. At least we want everyone else to [...]

It’s Google’s right to rank websites how they see fit. When Google was “doing no evil” and only “organizing the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” I was a big fan. One of their biggest, most vocal supporters. I sent them a great deal of business and helped build their reputation. Google has [...]