The Drawingboard

Did the July PageRank update come early?

Wednesday, June 30, 2010 10:50 AM

It sure looks like Google started updating PageRank Toolbar numbers around midnight last night. The update appears to be ongoing at the present time (10:44 am US Eastern time).

UPDATE

It's increasingly looking like this was a partial flush oft he PageRank Toolbar numbers caused by a change in the index upstream... MORE ... Read whole article

Servers handling "Pending Delete" .COM domains failing

Sunday, June 27, 2010 3:55 PM

Something is up with the servers handling the "Pending Delete" .COM domain names today. Whatever the cause is, the pending deletes didn't become available for purchase at their normal time, bwtween 11pm and 1:15pm U.S. Pacific time.

Even now, approaching 2pm Pacific, responses on domains made available are sporadic at best... MORE ... Read whole article

Photoshop CS5, first impressions

Saturday, May 15, 2010 10:31 PM

I'm not the king of the earlier adopters. But, I fell head over heels for Adobe's lavish tech demo of Photoshop CS5 and made the leap.

Was it worth it? Overall, yeah.

But, the first day I was really pissed. Let's just be clear upfront about the #1 thing that's making people adopt CS5 so quickly: it's the beneficiary of a very good tech demo... MORE ... Read whole article

Google PageRank toolbar updates coming today

Saturday, April 3, 2010 10:58 AM

I was scanning the PageRanks of sites I own or admin, and I noticed a lot of new PR improvements and a couple dips. Most of the surprises were upside one or two points. Real big pops across a lot of sites.

Not sure what all went into it, but it's a pleasant surprise for an already gorgeous day... MORE ... Read whole article

To Microsoft's credit

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 12:26 AM

I was discussing a problem in Windows with someone online, and the conversation turned to the fact that the type of problem -- though not this particular manifestation -- stretched all the way back to Windows 3.0, the first usable desktop computer with multitasking.

So, for grins I looked on MS's support website for the fix... MORE ... Read whole article

Tracking expiring and dropping domain names

Monday, February 15, 2010 1:29 PM

This is my most recent big project: DropCatchSell.com, a site for tracking expired and dropped domain names with value.

This is the culmination of much of my recent research into PR, SERP and other ranking systems. The idea is pretty straight forward if you understand the domain name acquisition process... MORE ... Read whole article

GoDaddy finally cleans up its checkout process

Tuesday, January 26, 2010 5:20 PM

GoDaddy has finally gone and done it. At long last, they've fixed a lot of what is wrong with their checkout process.

The #1 thing I now love is there is the option to permanently point all your future registrations toward your name servers -- long overdue, and good riddance to GoDaddy's fugly parking pages... MORE ... Read whole article

Back to basics: clean up your link names

Friday, January 22, 2010 11:44 AM

One of the biggest things search engine providers -- and thereby search engine users (your potential visitors and customers) -- rely up is the quality of the text in your links.

While you don't want to engage in skeevy techniques that amount to Googlebombing, you do want to do your level best to write your links cleanly for the actual thing that page you're linking to is about... MORE ... Read whole article

What the internet will look like in hell

Thursday, January 21, 2010 10:06 AM

Check this out: this is what the internet will look like in hell.

So many things done wrong. The Flash intro (frustrates customers who might just want the phone number). The Flash navigation (makes it hard for Google to index)... MORE ... Read whole article

Early release of expired domains is rare

Monday, January 18, 2010 1:06 PM

The last weekend I started compiling data on how expired domain names are handled. Here are the highlights:

1. While a lot of registrars do hold onto higher quality domains, the percentage of total expired domains that scored well in my analysis (respectable in-bound links, domain uses real English words, etc) that the registrars actually held onto themselves was surprisingly low... MORE ... Read whole article