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I can’t believe how many people (i.e. MMO bloggers) are still insisting that now is the PERFECT time to buy shares! Buy low sell high, the price can’t get any lower can it? Well of course it can you tits! I’ve got plenty of real life examples of people in the last 3 months who chucked large amounts of money at shares in the hope of a “long term” investment who chances are will not see any sort of a decent return
I was looking at some stats yesterday to see exactly what benefits I got from being a member of Traffic Kahuna. My plan was to write about my experiences some time late this week when I had the time to get my thoughts together BUT those raw figures have been enough to get me very angry. I had an awkward nights sleep last night so without further a do, my real thoughts on Traffic Kahuna in rant form.
I wrote a long time ago about being wary of Traffic Kahuna. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and fly’s like a duck 9 times out of 10 what you’re looking at is a duck. With Traffic Kahuna my quack alarm was going off and so I wrote about my concerns.
However, I received a few e-mails from people who were
GoDaddy hosting has just gone straight to the top of my list of hosts to avoid at all costs. It is the biggest pile of crap I’ve ever had the misfortune to try.
I’ve been building on this idea for a little while to try extending one of my most popular websites. I want to build a long term sustainable community around it. So in order to facilitate this I needed a domain name and some cheapo hosting, just to get it up and running. The thing is that timing was critical, in order to get the best impact possible I needed to have this ready by the weekend. It is absolutely critical to the early success of the project. I’ve got the content, all I need now is the website to post it to.
So yesterday I registered my chosen domain and went to Google, entered a search for “cheap domain host” and hit return. I got a GoDaddy advert clicked on it, researched some (possibly fake) testimonials and setup a hosting account with them. Why oh why did I search for cheap, school boy error?!
The first thing that pissed me of was the amount of upsell. They tried to flog me everything, including the kitchen sink. Bigger e-mail, secure e-mail, SSL certs, extra domains (I didn’t even register the domain through them), a larger cock and cuddly toys (the last 2 are fake but you get the gist). My scrolly wheel finger was worn out just getting to the bottom of the page where I eventually found the very small “no thanks” link.
Like some mentalist explorer I decided to battle on head first into the blizzard, if I had any sense I would have turned around and gone home to a warm cup of coco. After setting up 2 sets of account details and passwords (1 as my GoDaddy account and 1 for my hosting) I was almost at the point where I could login to the control panel and actually start working, or so I thought. My next problem was actually finding somewhere that I could login, amongst possibly the most jumbly text ridden page I’ve come across there was a small login box hidden in the corner. I put in my hosting account details, failure. I put in my GoDaddy account details, success, woo hoo! Now where is my control panel? The answer of course was nowhere in obvious site. Instead it was more random clicking until I hit the right combination My Account, My Products, Hosting and then eventually clicking my domain name brought me to the control panel. I’m very sorry GoDaddy but at the point where I’ve paid for a service and logged in this is where I expect to see the clean interface. I don’t expect to see dozens of adverts. I want a nice clean intuitive interface that I can use not to know that you are offering 50% of bulk domain registration.
At this point all I wanted was to set the nameservers at my domain registrar and go to bed. Thus started the “Search For The Missing Name Servers”. With EVERY other shared host I’ve ever used, part of the welcome e-mail includes your username, password, ftp details and the nameservers. The GoDaddy welcome letter gives you your overall GoDaddy account details and yet more upsell offers. Fuck Off!!!!!!!!!! I spent 8 hours crawling the web trying to find out what nameservers I needed to use. Every secureserver.net combo I tried got rejected as being old.
I resorted to checking every option in the control panel, eventually throwing a random click at something that filled the screen with “You’re Domain Isn’t Registered With Us, How Dare You, Don’t you Know Who We Are? You’d better contact customer “, or something similar.
I’ve never had any of these problems with any hosts. Even the worst resellers, resellers, reseller hosting setup has at least been able to provide some nice straight forward straight to control panel login details and a couple of nameservers. With GoDaddy I’ve submitted my support ticket but in the meantime setup with another host. It took minutes, there were no problems at all. Everything I need e-mailed to me within an hour of creating an account.
The only trouble is that I’ve lost that time messing around with GoDaddy hosting, it’s put me behind in what was a very time dependent launch. This is going to end up costing me a chunk of money, cheap hosting with GoDaddy? From my experience that is the biggest false economy I’ve managed to date. The lesson here is never do a search with “cheap” in it and never to host with GoDaddy. Who would I recommend? BlueHost or MidPhase every single time!
Now this was supposed to be a post where I write about that no matter how good I think Chrome is or isn’t it is something that will only be adopted by the techy “I own my own website” types. And that how for a lot of users Internet Explorer still IS the internet, Firefox, never heard of it mate.
That’s how it was supposed to be, working from guessing based on my own personal experiences with friends and family. Then I looked at the stats of 2 of my websites for the last 4 days. The top one is very much webmaster based (this blog in fact). The bottom figures are those from a much more general website aimed at a very broad demographic of visitors, the vast majority I expect would have no tech experience at all (look at those IE figures!):-
It just goes to prove that you should never second guess people. On both sites Chrome usage is around 2%. If I look at a day to day comparison I can see it growing steadily. After about 1 week with only Windows support I think that’s pretty good and I’m sure that Google will be happy with it. On the other hand it now means of course that I’d better go and fix my JavaScript problems (Damn you stats) 
There is a lot of buzz around the blogosphere again about just how great contests are for boosting your blog traffic. Besides the links you can gain by having people enter by posting there’s also a number of blogs dedicated to nothing else other than summarising blog contests. This is an easy way of gaining a few extra back links. All you really need then is a prize, or prizes and some way of drawing your winners. It’s such an easy way of gaining traffic and links but beware, it can also seriously damage your reputation.
The Cardinal Sin Of Blog Contests
Your prize? What prize? Twice in recent times I’ve won on a blog contest, one was supposed to be money, the other a review. Guess how many prizes I’ve actually received? Yep, not a bloody one! It’s REALLY easy to say you’re giving this away or that away, but if you talk the talk you’ve got to walk the walk and actually do it. What’s worst is that many bloggers think that they can use the standard “we’re not responsible for getting the prizes to you” blurb. Deal with the prize “sponsor” directly and chances are they’ll completely ignore any e-mails you send. Besides I entered a contest on YOUR blog, not the sponsors. If you don’t know the person well enough to know that they’re going to deliver on their prize then why the hell are you asking them to sponsor a prize anyway? If you don’t want the responsibility of having some involvement with actually making sure entrants are getting their prizes then don’t run a contest.
I’ve only ever ran one serious contest from this blog (I don’t really count the Entrecard contest). It was for a straight up $125 via Paypal. I actually ended up giving the winner more than that, why? Because I was brought up to believe that it is better to understate your position and be able to pleasantly surprise people rather than promise the world and deliver shit. Back when I worked in full time software development when ever the “how long” question was raised I’d always give a time 1 or 2 days longer than I thought. That way when I finished it a week early it looked great! Far better than saying I can do it in a day and it taking 3. All I’m trying to say is don’t make promises that you can’t deliver on, if that promise is prizes in a contest then when you fuck up you’re going to lose a lot of reputation.
And just for the record here are the 2 contests I’ve “won”:-
Google, loved by many hated by few. I wonder if that’s about to change, big time?
I’ve been avoiding writing about Knol, Google’s wiki killer. Google have stolen the wiki idea and ran with it giving publishers a fancy new blog style interface that allows real HTML, the main kicker though is that they will revenue share with any advertising on your Knol articles. So what? That’s exactly what I said, I can publish my content on my own sites and get a revenue share from Google as well as using any other advertising I choose to use as well as building a long term “property” that I can be proud of for years to come. Or I can publish on Knol and get the same revenue share from Google. Why would I ever choose to publish my content on Knol?
Well I wouldn’t would I, but then again if you don’t have a website or a blog then I suppose it could be of use. Then again if you’re such an authority on a subject to write about it on Knol maybe you should have a website anyway? This was my initial stand point but that may have to change.
I figured there was no way that Google would bias in favour of its own Knol content in the natural search rankings, I was very wrong. SEO guru Aaron Wall has written an excellent article on his blog covering a very early experiment he ran with Knol. If at this very early stage, within days of going live, duplicate content posted onto Google Knol is ranking above the original authoritive source then anyone who publishers content via their own websites has a lot to worry about. There is nothing to stop somebody stealing your content, posting it to Knol and not only having your original out ranked but also the possibility of having it removed as duplicate content. That’s shit, wrong and really annoying for anybody who spends the time to write their own content.
I hope for all our sakes that this is just an early blip but somehow I doubt it. It’s very well known that Google did and do give YouTube pages a helping hand in their search results so I guess we’d all be a bit naive to think that they wouldn’t do the same with Knol. Isn’t it ironic that the same Google that actively ignores the rights of video producers via YouTube (to much support from the web community as a whole) is now about to ride rough shot over the rights of that same group of people.
ps From what I’ve seen so far, other than the medical articles every post contains a huge number of back links to an “original” source website. This whole Knol thing stinks of nothing but ripped off content + link spam to me 
Somebody please tell me this is some sort of a joke? Please!
(Of course they do SEO as well)