37Signals & 1 Signal of *questionable* quality

Search engines love their signals of quality, but how about 37 signals of selling pagerank.

“Plus, The Deck ads are not redirected and the average page rank of the eight Deck sites is 7.125 which can make a significant difference in an advertiser’s search rankings during and well after a campaign is complete”

so are they selling pagerank? if it quacks like a dog…

Three points of interest:
1. Toolbar pagerank down to the thousandths?? sure, it’s an average, but is that really necessary or meaningful? don’t answer…
2. Is that 7.125 a result of “the deck” TM or a result of only accepting advertisers to “the deck” TM that they have heard of and like?
3. who cares? TBPR is next to useless. I cut myself off over a year ago and really, life is better. Even white hats agree

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Good band. Good video…of my dog

Feathergun on MySpace

Hey Betch…this is some good viral vids that was brought out at a party I was at on Saturday.

20.com was the big domain sold last week - for $75k. I wanted to see who the new owner was and what they were using it for, so I checked the whois to find that Jason Calcanis was the new proud papa of 20.com.

I didn’t realize he was a domainer and couldn’t figure out what he wants it for. Maybe it’ll be for the 20 “preditors” he’s poaching.

I haven’t seen anybody mention it - not that it’s a big deal or anything - but interesting nonetheless. I’m going to be poking around their setup and see if I can find any others to see what he’s up to.

There are many reasons - I was going to say legitimate and not, but I think it’s actually all “not” - for a site owner to try to hide which sites he/she owns and operates. When doing your due diligence on the competition, these sites are exactly the types of things you want to uncover. So here is a task list to figure out if those two sites that you are slightly suspicious of are a little too closely related:

1. Check the whois
domaintools.com/domaininquestion.com will quickly tell you if the site owners were complacent enough to just use the same registrant info or same name servers. Sometimes it will be the same DNS privacy company which is a hint in itself. I’ll do another post some other time on how to figure out who it is if the DNS is obfuscated. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not doing movie reviews, but Who killed the electric car? was pretty interesting. However, what I liked even more was when you search for “ev1″ on Google or Yahoo an ad came up directing the searcher to the GM blog. I like to do my own research after I see something very one-sided and GM was “helping” me with that. They provide their rebuttal in - get this - english! no legalease or corporate-speak. And they make good points. So, staying away from economic, political, and entertainment categories and not mentioning any of the ideas the movie brought up, with respect to marketing, this provides a good (and surprising) example of a company that gets “it”.