I now live in Los Angeles, CA. I have two great cats. I have a well-paying full-time job, but still consult because I cannot shake being an entrepreneur at heart….damn you, MBA student loans for making bootstrapping an impossibility for me at the moment. I know you will pay off eventually, but for now, I smite thee.

I still do internet marketing. I still write. I still consult, and I still take on new clients.

Are we all up to speed, now? Ok, good.

That said, I’d like to point out that my absence from this blog has made a point that I’ve long stressed to anyone looking for SEO link building services: know where the links are going, the PR of the page, what the sites have to do with…in short, make sure the person you hire to do this is reputable and transparent.

Wanna know why? I’m going to tell you, so click away if you don’t want to know.

I had over 23,000 comments on this blog. That hadn’t been posted to in a year. All of them were spam. Every.single.one.

How does that prove my point? Look, I love my site and I love my blog, and I’m committed to posting regularly once again because I miss it. That said, I don’t delude myself that its page rank is non-existent and the traffic I once enjoyed is gone (my fault, of course). Soooo….why would anyone want a back link from here?

Especially when the terms are things like naked celebrity photos, haircuts, products I’ve never heard of, online pharmacies…you get the idea.

So we just established that tens of thousands of spammers left links on my site when: 1. it has zero page rank, so backlinks to someone’s site mean next to nothing and 2. they were backlinks named things that have zero to do with the purpose of my site. Which, by the way, is internet marketing. Not nekkid Hannah Montana photos. (I swear. I can’t make this up.)

Moral of the story:

Use reputable backlink providers, not the bargain basement ones who promise you thousands of backlinks. Those thousands of backlinks will come from sites like these, and while I’m an ultra-cool and very knowledgeable person, that should still scare you considering that those qualities hold no weight in SEO.

Nice to be back. As you were.

Tweet This Post  Buzz This Post  Delicious This Post  Digg This Post  Ping This Post  Reddit This Post  Stumble This Post 

Look, I’ll be the first to admit my web traffic is pretty sad. It’s not what it should be given that I do this stuff for a living…which is probably why I don’t have the time to put my mad skillz to use in my own little space here. That said, I still look at my analytics every day, because I’m compulsive that way.

I was sipping my coffee, checking out yesterday’s numbers, and was interested to see there was a spike. I was curious as to why, so I checked out my referring traffic, and drilled down to a particular link that was doing it. It’s an “XHTML Challenge” and there on the page was my friend Naomi over at IttyBiz vs. my piddly little site right here. You can check it out here. I have no idea what the stuff on there means (other than our content ratios, which shows right there why she has a much bigger audience than I do). I do know that even though at the moment I’m winning 7 votes vs. 3, I will likely lose because I don’t have scores of minions. (Though I do love my faithful readers, and you know who you are *cough*JuddandMichael*cough*.)

The interesting part is that you can see who started the challenge, and it’s none other than Jon over at Freelance Folder. (At least I think it is. It’d be a mighty huge coincidence if there was another “JPhilips” out there who reads both Naomi and myself.) I suspect that because he’s male, he wants to see a girlfight complete with mud wrestling, but he’s also probably smart enough to know that Naomi and I are the furthest thing from that.

Then again, would it get me more readers?

Tweet This Post  Buzz This Post  Delicious This Post  Digg This Post  Ping This Post  Reddit This Post  Stumble This Post 

I can’t stand things that clang.

Let me clarify. Got a set of keys? Please. For the love of all things holy…do not jangle them. It literally makes my teeth hurt. A close runner up is silverware being clanged around. It’s my worst nightmare to be in a restaurant with a kid banging silverware together. My teeth feel like they’re getting the creepy crawlies. I have no idea where this comes from, it’s been that way for as long as I can remember.

Oh, and if you get the devilish look in your eye and do it on purpose, you’d better duck. Silverware does serve useful purposes other than giving me the heebie jeebies.

I will do 18 loads of laundry…and not put it away.

If anyone can explain this phenomenon to me, that’d be great. I start feeling nutty when there’s too much laundry piled up. Nothing makes me feel better than shoveling that stuff into the washer and getting it outta my sight. Then I drag my feet on the folding thing, but it’s still a necessary evil if I want to get through the other piles of laundry.

Then?

It sits in a neatly folded pile. Like, forever. I HATE putting it away. I have no clue why. My closet is nicely organized, but I cannot force myself to walk it from the pile on the trunk to the shelves in there. Rationally, it makes no sense whatsoever.

Then?

I get annoyed because it’s sitting there. So I start wearing what’s sitting out there to get rid of the pile. Months later when I actually look in my closet, I’m all, “Wow, I forgot about that shirt.”

Yeah. Wonder why.

My kitchen sink can gross me out.

There can be explosions of junk ALL OVER the countertop in the kitchen, but my eye will go right to the sink. To any weird little pieces of food stuck on the stainless steel. To any dark splash marks from the morning’s coffee that was dumped. To the ONE glass that might be sitting in there. Everything else fades away, and that’s all I see.

Consequently, I’ll wind up absolutely scouring the sink, and leaving the rest of the crap everywhere.

Don’t ask. I have no idea.

I am on the Most Wanted list for houseplant death.

I am absolutely horrific with indoor plants. I seem to do ok with the ones outside (which usually consequently fry in Virginia’s summer heat) but I should attend some kind of group therapy for what I impose on houseplants. They’ll be there, on a stand of some kind, and I’ll walk right by them. The poor things are probably falling out of their pot trying to wave me down. “Hey! YOU! Waitwaitwait! I’ll do it! I’ll jump.” And I breeze on by, oblivious to the leaf depletion that happens thanks to lack of water or a feline that gets the munchies.

So there you have it. I kill plants, I hate keys and silverware, I have an odd obsession with my kitchen sink, and no matter how many times I walk into my closet in a day, I refuse to take clean clothes in there.

Told you I was weird. Good news is, we all are.

Tweet This Post  Buzz This Post  Delicious This Post  Digg This Post  Ping This Post  Reddit This Post  Stumble This Post