Hi Kurt,I know that you get and should get much credit for your forward thinking concepts.
I remember getting a major google slap long before the term was coined.
I was with Bob back when he was openly selling links on pages that had good Google PR (pagerank). Now, quite a few people were selling links in the same fashion, he just got a few more people to gether to form a network.
Well when google hit him with a zero PR, they also took down many people who had sites associated with him.
Even before this happened we know that from 1996 to 2000 search engines came and went, sometimes at a fairly fast clip.
Bob took a lot of heat, and even filed a lawsuit against google. At this time google spoke big about how that did not manually manipulate search results. However, as noted above many sites, when south by being associated with him. Of course the majority of people said he was wrong, but now there is an open industry selling links the same way.
As for search engine trends I have learned more from Kurt and Bob than any other source.
Bob, told me something a long time ago about search engines. " The best was to get top results in a search engine is to own the search engine."
Kurt came along with the same concept, but he made it extremely easy to creat said search engine.
My own bit of wisdom is " if you can take advantage of Google or any other search engine, please do so", however, understand that they can change the rules at any time. It boils down to this, don't put all your eggs in one searchengine basket."
NOTE: Taking advantage of search engines does not mean attempt to cheat. i.e. invisible text, keyword stuffing, etc
I have found that if you follow basic search engine marketing guidelines you are in a good position to make slight modifications.
Basics:
Good meta tags, ( title, desc, keywords )
good title and opening sentence in page body
good keyword phrases and anchor text through the page (site)
All search engines can take advantage of this format. So, if google drops you, you may find that yahoo or msn loves you, and vice versa.
OOps getting off the subject a bit.
Kurt's forum was the first time I saw people rank explained in print. You can call it a lot of other things, but companys have always wanted to get personal info on people that use their services. Others are starting to talk about the Google giants use of this personal info, that they say they don't track or won't use. (hahaha)
Last night I got a call from a company doing a transportation survey. What that wanted to know was about my perceptions and habits on how I used the local transportation system.
They are doing YOU rank over the phone. The big question is when will Google mess up and let some individual walk off with the YOU rank of millions of people, that by the way, they don't collect. Haha
Here's to you, Kurt and Bob.
kelvin
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