Blackhat SEO – Esrun

vegas custom tshirt

The annoying thing is vegas is the constant ID checking. I understand that they get fined heavily if they allow underage gambling or drinking but they need to come up with a better method of checking ages than having every staff ask you for ID every 10-15 minutes because it becomes really annoying.

I got a custom tshirt made and It actually worked quite well.

It reduced the amount of people who asked me for ID to prove my age and those who did I just had to say “Are you sure? Because you’ll be killing a rabbit” and most backed off. It was quite amusing when I went back to my room and a security woman starting getting quite emotional about it and I said, well if you ID me thats what happens, and its not just a rabbit.. a puppy also dies and a little girl will be crying over her dead dog.

Good morning vegas.. maybe

Well it took me in total about 22 hours of travelling to get to Vegas. On the plane I had some giant sitting next to me so that didn’t make the 10ish hour flight from UK to Phoenix that great. I had a quick wash and change of clothes and then met up with people for drinks where mr Mike Nott was already leading the drunk race. Then we went to the Wynn and met up with everyone.

Apologies to those I was talking to in the Wynn bar last night who I told I would be right back. I actually went to find a bathroom but got distracted and decided I wanted food so i ended up stumbling across the road to treasure island and then off to bed.

I literally have no idea what time or day it is. I didn’t reset my clocks through any part of the journey so its all a mystery but my head hurts a bit.

Is anyone going to UFC? I really want to go!

Pubcon vegas

I’m warming up for vegas with a bottle of laurent perrier, some american beers (cools) and a gambling game (monopoly) ready for pubcon vegas!.

I’m driving from Southend (6am!) to Gatwick to drop evil green donkey off at and from there onto Heathrow for my flight.

If you’re at pubcon and wanna meet then fire me an email

GMAIL Account Creator

Well I haven’t updated my blog with anything useful for awhile and have heard a few people recently mention it would be useful to have a GMAIL account creator script so I decided to whip something together and in true Google style released it in half assed version where it does enough to be useful but not quite a finished product.

Test the online demo and then download the script and test/mod to your hearts content. I will be adding features to the script as and when time is available.

The legendary evilgreenmonkey

I think just about everyone was at the manchester SEO pissup meeting and it was great to meet up with a lot of people I hadn’t previously run into. Big props to 4eyes for managing to arrange everything and keep people heading in the right direction!

I was lucky enough to meet the legendary evilgreenmonkey (aka Rob Kerry). This one man alone has been absolutely revolutionising the whole SEO industry and it was clear at the meeting that people have nothing but respect for this great man. I still can’t believe I was lucky enough to sit down and drink a snakebite or two with this guy and his knowledge just blows you away.

This is still a blackhat seo blog

Many people will know Rob from running search engine watch forums and just recently became the new editor of Sphinn which is a forum and community site launched by Danny Sullivan and Third door media. He also writes for the searchenginewatch expert section.

Trip to Europe

Okay well the last post about my trip to Europe was pictures of my crashed car… oops! Anyway I now have a new car and I’m still waiting for the insurance company to sort out my claim.

A few people have made comments about me writing “going to Europe” when I live in England which is part of Europe(E.g Dirk! and Evilgreenmoney)… Very true but I think its fair to say that most people living in England would understand that if you said you were going to Europe that you mean mainland.

Anyway while I was over there this time I met up with the legendary fantomaster which as you know is the king of cloaking. It was great to meet Dirk and Ralph. I had breakfast with Ralph and his family and then in the evening Dirk and Ralph treated me to a swanky restaurant with champagne and quite a lot of lager! After the meal me and Ralph had some more drinks outside my hotel… yes they stop serving drinks at a certain time but that rule doesn’t appear to apply when Ralph is around lol! I have to say, I don’t know anyone who knows as much as Ralph… seriously he must have a computer in his head hooked up to the net or something. Anyway big thanks to the Fantomaster team.

On the day of the crash I was actually on my way to an adventure park to do a bungee jump, unfortunately on the way there I was involved in an accident with a subaru travelling about 70mph and the side of my car… oops. Funny enough, subaru wagons are what the fantomaster team drive lol. I didn’t get on well with the french police, both myself and the other driver were breathlised at the scene and then our cars were taken away. I was nearly arrested for refusing to sign forms on the basis that they were french and I couldn’t understand them. It was a long and stressful day getting buses, trains, trams and taxis with all my stuff to travel the 400 miles to the ferry. Not bad enough but then I had to argue for literally over an hour to get them to let me get a ferry home without my car!

I am working on a little something with the fantomaster boys so keep your eyes opened. When they do things, they REALLY go for it. They have the knowledge and resource to do pretty much anything.

SEO sales calls

I know many people cant stand sales calls, I simply love them! You know the deal, your phone rings and you answer it to hear a pause and then someone answering the phone… quite obviously an automated calling system connecting you to operators. I love to wind up these callers and they’re usually trying so hard to build up a good rapport with you that they don’t even realise you’re leading them down an amusing path.

For instance I just got off the phone to someone claiming to be calling from BT business and offering me a guaranteed increase in customers. After a short chat I determined that this would work by them simply running PPC for me. When the woman said “So you’re in XYZ business yeah?” I replied saying that I was actually in the adult industry and sell things like adult videos.   She wasn’t sure if they could promote the adult industry so put me on hold and came back rather sheepishly saying they couldn’t do it “due to Legal issues”. At this point the conversation took a funny turn:

Woman: Actually I just checked and we cant actually do the adult industry due to legal issues, which is a real shame because we would have got you a lot of new customers.

Esrun: Okay well that’s a shame but nevermind. Would you be interested in coming to work for us at all? You know, maybe make a few videos…

Woman: *Nervous laugh* oh no, I couldn’t and I’m working full time in Ireland right now

Esrun: That’s perfect, I love Irish girls! We can get you setup straight away.

Woman: *more nervous giggling and general embarrassment* I can’t, I have kids but uh oh uh thanks for the offer.

Oh well, it was very fun for me :p I had another call not that long ago from another SEO place which had a name like ‘monkey business’ or similar and I managed to get the sales guy to make monkey noises. It was great amusement for everyone listening on the loud speaker in our office.

So the moral? Don’t get angry with sales people, just play along and have some fun!

Funny little argument

Well there is quite an amusing argument going on right now between David Naylor and his aftervote website and Jason Calacanis Mahalo

What is Aftervote?

Well dave I sent you a IM… I can’t be bothered to actually write a description. Put a shorter one on your site for a copy/paste job! Click here for the about aftervote.

What is Mahalo? (taken from mahalo.com , not written by me!)

Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.

The argument?

Jason C seems to be getting baited quite well from Dave. I don’t think Dave is really bothered about any of this but like the typical British, he loves an argument Jason C is arguing that the way aftervote is scraping search results is illegal and against various T&Cs. This is one thing which has always bugged me… when Google, Yahoo or MSN scrape your pages, cache them, take your images and make money out of all this by sticking adverts next to them and calling it a search engine no one has any problem with it. When I scrape your sites and put adverts next to the results I’m called a scraper or spammer or god knows what else. Wake up and smell the coffee! Anyway Jason D had a similar view and posted probably one of the funniest videos I have seen from an SEO… So check out the Jason D Mooney.

SEO Bookmarklets

Seoidiot has just done a cool post on using bookmarklets for search purposes. If you’re fed up with having to keep changing your search preferences like setting google to display 10 or 100 results then this is the perfect solution.

Threadwatcher suspended

Oops for the syndk8 crew… threadwatcher site showing a ’suspended’ page from their hosts AQhost.