If anyone wants to keep up with the search engine world, the only real way to do this is by reading, reading, reading, reading and oh yeah, reading! The sites I tend to skim through you can find on the blogroll to the right. Of course, please do not take this as our thumbs up to listen and believe everything read on these sites, because while you can get some good info on them, most are just good windows into the rest of the world. A good illustration would be if something at work or within your family happens, you always have one or two people you instantly ask because they seem to always know the gossip. . .well that is just like this industry. I personally like to keep up with new theories and conversations out there, so I try and pay attention to the people who somehow have the time to post on every forum out there, maintain their own blog AND somehow still have time to do their jobs! It’s quite puzzling sometimes because if I spent time to post on just two (2) forums each day, there is no way I could keep up with the work we do for our customers.

Now that I’ve prefaced this post, I was reading one of these blogs earlier and found something that brought a chuckle to me. Mr. SEObook is one of those guys who I see E V E R Y W H E R E ! Matter of fact, he’s been here before to reference one of our products he wrote about along with another write up claiming we gave “less than stellar advice” on changing up link placement and titles of text ads. And mysteriously, someone ran to Matt Cutt’s with the email we sent around the same time we were related to pigs and lipstick on Aaron’s blog. (Which, by the way, our less than stellar advice seems like the sure fire way to get a link counted now with the recent Google update that can discount links on the sides, head or foot of the page. I hate when we’re wrong 😉 )

Ok, back to my point. . .on Mr. Wall’s blog, right under the title/logo, this is what’s said:

Got search engine questions? Ask Me!

Then as I was skimming through his recent posts, I happened across this gem:


Recently I had one person contact me about 5 times a day asking questions like where is the Overture suggest tool. Stuff that would easily pop on the first page in Google if they used the exact same queries as they instant messaged me with. I explained to them that search is there for a reason and my time was limited, but my explanation was to no avail.

Had I not progressively ignored them and gave continuously shorter answers to encourage reading or searching I would have probably got about 50 questions a day from them. Eventually things were not going to do well.

hehehe . . . I still get a chuckle out of it. Now don’t get me wrong, I can get good info from there since he seems to never sleep, but I couldn’t help but think of my wife when I read that!

“DO I LOOK FAT IN THIS?” . . . “A LITTLE” . . . “SLAP, PUNCH, SCREAM”

Then I was really shocked when I read this:

they bought my ebook ($79)

I hate to give “less than stellar advice” again, but in my opinion, posting that just doesn’t seem like it will help the sale of his ebook. It seems like more of a rant to tell friends that might not have an interest in purchasing anything.

On a side note, although I haven’t paid for the ebook, I have read it is a good bit of info for those just getting into search engine optimization. Plus, $79 bucks is a lot easier to chew than the thousands upon thousands of dollars these other companies will charge you on a monthly basis and do the same thing.