Happy Thanksgiving

To those in the States, LinkWorth wanted to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!

Our offices will be closed from Thursday, Nov. 26th through Sunday, Nov. 29th. We will be back on Monday, Nov. 30th and get to all support issues and new submissions.

A note to existing Partners who are considering changing something to their existing listing, you might want to wait until Monday so your listing is not offline while we are out of the office.

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Pubcon: The after-party

Drinks, new friends, dinners, tattoos, meetings, old friends, situs poker online tournaments, fake mustaches, and a few more drinks. That about sums up this year’s Pubcon show in Las Vegas.

I’ll be the first to admit that as soon as we rolled into the exhibit hall to set up our booth, I was underwhelmed. By my count, there were only 19 exhibitor displays in total. I was thinking to myself, “Wow…this one could be hard to justify.” It’s expensive business flying 6 people out to Vegas, after all, especially when you consider the way we tend to do things around here. But leave it to the salty-dogs of Pubcon to come through once again. Brett, my apologies for doubting you. Sure there might have been fewer exhibitors, but that sure didn’t seem to slow things down for us. All in all, I’ll have to say it was a great success yet again.

Wednesday was fantastic. We connected with friends and associates from the past and a bunch of new ones, too. I enjoyed chatting with everyone that came by the booth and for those of you that came to our happy hour at The Wynn…thanks for showing up! I hope you had as much fun as we did. I heard I had an especially good time. (Just kidding…I remember everything. Seriously.)

Things seemed to slow down at the show on Thursday, but that’s usually the case on day 2. Thursday night, however, we (err….most of us…I couldn’t make it) hooked up with the legendary DK to sponsor the bar tab at his annual Texas Holdem Poker Tournament, which I heard was a lot fun. Always great seeing you, bud. Congrats to the sbobet winner, whoever that was. I also heard we had some rather large “branding opportunities” as a result of our sponsorship…

Friday was epic. The big networking event was at a pretty cool pub in the Monte Carlo and, as usual, it lived up to its’ billing. It seemed like everyone from the show was there…all in one room…and conversation (and beer) flowed easily. It was there that we decided to crank things up a notch and put on our fake mustaches. There are certain folks in the industry that frown on some of the services we provide so we thought it best to be “incognito.” Or even more accurately, we just enjoy being silly and that we were. My hat is off to the girls on our team who played along. You wore them well Christine, Robin, Jerri & Amanda! We definitely got our share of strange looks, didn’t we???

But wait…we’re not done yet. Friday sort of flowed right into Friday night where we found ourselves enjoying an incredible dinner at N9NE at the Palms. It was awesome, but not as awesome as our two newest inductees to the InkWorth Hall of Fame. Yes, that’s right, there are now at least 6 people walking the earth with our logo forever stamped on them. And these two are women! Jerri and Amanda, we love your spirit and those tats look fantastic. I think we should start getting bulk discounts at Hart & Huntington! All of our pictures can be seen here on Flickr.

Don’t ask me what happened after that because I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that we made our flight on Saturday morning and all arrived home safely.

See you in March for Pubcon Dallas!

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Tell Us What You Would Like To See

Those that use LinkWorth usually have the best suggestions on how to make improvements to what we currently have. Periodically we’ll reach out and try to get good feedback on what you would like to see improved or added on to our existing system.

As always, we’re constantly adding new updates that make our Control Center function more efficiently, but it’s your turn to tell us what you think. All comments will be well thought out and if it makes sense, we’ll get it on the list and once it’s live, we’ll make an announcement and name it after you.

Now we already know that all Partners want more business, but this is not what we’re asking for. Keep this to improvements that will make what you do in your account easier. Just comment below with your suggestions.

(***Side Note*** if you’re planning on attending PubCon in Vegas next week, let us know. We’re thinking about having a little happy hour if there are enough customers that will be there. )

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DFWSEM

dfwsemLast week, I was asked to participate in a session on link building at this month’s DFWSEM meeting. We haven’t really been involved with them up to this point, but the group’s president, Tony Wright of WrightIMC, has done a great job of building their membership as there was quite a crowd on hand last night at the Renaissance Hotel in Richardson. I was joined on a panel by a few other local SEO consultants in Giovanni Gallucci, Jeff Martin, & Bill Hartzer to talk about all things links.

I think I was most pleased by the level of interest in a simple link building session. We live and breathe links here on a daily basis so it’s nice to get out amongst another group and hear their questions and perceptions about linking and how it plays out in SEO. It reminded me of a session at any one of the industry conferences; a good mix of basic questions and some higher-level stuff, as well. There were even a couple new techniques discussed that I found to be quite interesting.

Giovanni, a social media consultant here in Dallas, had some interesting things to say about the effectiveness of optimizing your Flickr images to get links. Even though they’re no-followed, he’s convinced that those links have gotten him page 1 rankings for a couple keywords; although they aren’t necessarily highly competitive keywords. Very interesting and obviously worth testing out! He also had some interesting things to say about YouTube that we’ll investigate. Good stuff.

Anyway, thanks again to Tony, who’s a major player in Dallas SEO, for reaching out to me. I just signed LinkWorth up as an official member to DFWSEM and I’d encourage anyone local in the industry to do the same. It’s a growing group and we’ll be sending some people there each month from here on out. Perhaps we’ll see you there.

Funeral products do not need a death certificate

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has the authority, under the law as of May 15, 2013, to require funeral companies to perform an annual death certificate with a Newrest Funeral product in cases with a death certificate. The statute specifies that such actions are allowed under the general rule applicable to funeral directors (HHS) and similar law, according to Houser’s ruling in December 2003.

The rule also sets an early date for the HOUSERS to begin enforcing the statute through a federal, state, or local appeals court, according to the HHS guidance, which outlines a broad range of actions and procedures and limits if the issue of a specific court-ordered death certificate is presented to appeal.

The agency already has provided this type of service in about 10 of the last 14 years, said Houser, who was involved in a review of complaints filed under the state Department of Health and Human Services Act of 1986 in which a coroner’s deputy found that the cemetery had been negligent or had been forced to move to an unresecured location with two deceased bodies in which there could not be a physical examination or death certificate provided by the coroner.

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Google Suggestions Gone Bad

Someone pointed this out to me and I thought it was worth a good chuckle. Google’s suggestion script is either wishing really bad things on us or having fun:

google-suggestion

Here’s another …

google-2

Have any good things to type in for weird suggestions? Comment below with what to type.

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PubCon – Vegas – 2009

PubconAnother year, another trip planned for Vegas to attend the popular PubCon show.

If you’ve been before, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s the “old dog” show, meaning all of us that have been around for years always make a point to attend this show because the networking is better than any other show you’ll attend.

We were given data showing trade shows this year have averaged a 30% drop in attendance, but something tells me PubCon probably will be kicking it as usual.

If you plan on going, we have a couple discount coupons available:

  • 15% Discount – li-81315 (only 9 of these left)
  • 10% Discount – li-21710

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LinkWorth Exhibiting at DMA 09

dma09-banner

LinkWorth will be exhibiting at the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) trade show, October 18-20. The actual conference goes from October 17-22, in San Diego, California. We’ll be at booth #2943 in the online marketing section of the exhibit floor.

We would like to invite our customers to attend this event where you can learn new marketing best practices through the many partners and vendors. They also have over 150 educational sessions covering every aspect of direct and interactive marketing, dozens of targeted networking events, keynote speakers including Martha Stewart, and over 500 exhibits.

If you would like to attend, we can currently offer a $300 discount PLUS 1 free night hotel stay for those that register for the full conference. To take advantage of this awesome discount, register through this page and be sure to use the discount code “AN610“. This offer expires Friday, September 25, so hurry to get this deal before it ends.

If you prefer to just attend the exhibit hall only, we have many “Preferred Exhibit Hall Passes” on hand to give out to those interested. Or you can go to the normal register page and use the discount code: DMSD9. This discount gives you a $250 value for only $30.

Please stop by our booth if you make it out!

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LinkWorth Downtime – 9PM CST – 9-16-09

We will be taking LinkWorth down tonight at 9PM Central Standard Time. The expected downtime will be 2 hours.

We’re adding additional hardware for our database and need to take it offline while these improvements are made. Please be aware that all any active sessions will be closed at 9PM to prevent data loss. If you plan on working in your account tonight, be sure to finish up about 15 minutes prior to 9PM CST.

As soon as the updates are finished and tested, we will get things back online as quickly as possible. You can check our progress on our twitter feed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

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LinkWorth at SMX East – NYC

smxe_120_240_weWe’re making the trip again to New York City for SMX East. It was a good show last year and we’re coming back for more. The dates are October 5-7.

If you are thinking about going and haven’t registered yet, register with our SMX discount coupon:

smx10linkworth

New York City is the center of it all. Millions of people in a small area and the shows always turn out great. If you’re in the area, or within a quick train or cab ride, do yourself a favor and make it there. If you make it there, stop by our booth and say “Hi”. We’re always happy to see familiar faces and/or names.

The venue is:

Jacob K. Javits Convention Center
655 West 34th Street
New York, NY 10001

For more details on the agenda and everything else around it, visit the Search Marketing Expo East site.

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Upgrade and Prank a Huge Success

Server Upgrade & Migration:

While our upgrade took a couple hours longer than expected last night, things turned out great! The load times are so much faster than before. If you are participating in our LinkWords program, you’ll notice our ads are loading faster than the pages now!

Our awesome hosting company told me late afternoon that we had already served 7.2 million requests in less than a day!!! Pretty amazing. I think we were missing a lot of requests with our older equipment.

We still have additional upgrades coming that will improve things further, but we will announce each as they arrive.

Office Prank:

robin-prank

After our successful upgrade, we (Matt and I) felt we needed to release some of this built up pressure of the upgrade anticipation. Just so happens, we have about 25 of these huge executive chair boxes that have been sitting around the office. We thought that we would make an office out of a cube with the boxes, so we hit “Bob the Builder” (Robin) since she made a comment about the boxes earlier.

I think she enjoyed it! (click images to see larger view)

robinprank1 robinprank2 robinprank3

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