Here are 5 signs you have “over optimized” your holiday party:

• Sign #1 –  Name tags are stuffed with way too much information. i.e. “John Smith, CMO, Internet Marketing and SEO Specialist, 10 Year Employee, Employee of the Month 3 Times, Based in Phoenix Office, Likes to Wakeboard”
• Sign #2 – It takes 2 hours to get through the award ceremony because HR has

  concocted a hugely elaborate scheme for how to fairly distribute prizes.  i.e. Based on years of service, Number of merits, Pay Scale, Gender, Family Status (Single, Has Kids etc..), Personal hobbies etc..

• Sign #3 – Your holiday party is separated into themes in order to accommodate the personal and religious preferences of all attendees. There are different rooms, drinks, decor etc..
• Sign #4 – The official name of the party is “The Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Three Kings Day, December Birthdays, New Years Celebration and Festival”
• Sign #5- Planning for the next holiday party begins immediately following the closing ceremony

We hope you have a wonderful and safe holiday season!

Why does he do this? According to Borker, he’s a jerk because it improves his rankings on Google.

Here’s what’s happening. It’s a given that people who are dissatisfied with a company are more likely to write a review on a consumer review site than someone who was happy with the product or service. Borker – who has never pretended to be nice to people who tried to return items – noticed that whenever his complaint quotient rose, his rankings for his search terms moved higher and higher up page one. Frequently, he outranked the home pages for the designer eyeglass companies that he sells through his site.

In other words, it didn’t matter what was being said about his company, but how many times the company was mentioned. As a result, DecorMyEyes.com continued to do great business in spite of admittedly horrible customer service.

Mr. Borker figured that all of those complaint sites – which required the complainer to type in the URL for the offending site – were providing link juice back to his site, which boosted his rankings, which led to more customers.

How is Borker getting away with this? Why can’t Google tell good from bad? Or can they? That’s what Danny Sullivan asked in his commentary on the Times article at SearchEngineLand.com. Sullivan, who was interviewed for the article, told the author that Google probably isn’t trying to determine the sentiment of a particular business – nor would you want it to, for a variety of reasons.

This doesn’t mean, however, that Google or Bing or any search engine can’t tell whether a business has a favorable or unfavorable reputation. Performing a shopping search on Google will often rank a vendor using more sophisticated methods, including the number of reviews written about the company. Then less favorable they average out to be, the lower the company falls in the search ranking.

However, and Sullivan points this out, most people don’t hit “shopping” when they shop through Google; they merely perform a standard search, where reviews are not a ranking factor.

So what’s to keep other companies from pulling this same tactic? If you’re willing to put up with the complainers, and those complainers are fueling your search ranking, why change?

First of all, it’s still bad SEO strategy. Being obnoxious is hardly a proven way to stay in business, whether you’re online or a brick-and-mortar store. Second, as the article points out, being bad is time-consuming. People call . They complain. They take up your time when you might otherwise be running a business. Third, as Sullivan is quick to point out, Borker may just be a fluke. Most of the sites containing complaints about DecorMyEyes.com appear to put “nofollow” on the URLs. If that’s so, than his claims about link juice don’t hold water.

For the time being, maintaining a good, trustworthy reputation with your customers  appears to be the best way to go, and one that we recommend, as well.

Here are the 2010 Halloween Costume Contest Contestants

From Left to Right :  Lacey (Taco), Tiffany (Disco Chick), Melissa (Office B–tch), Jim (Mario), Jarrod (Kirk), Jason (Emporer), Lesly (Nun), Katherine (Red Devil), Judy (Cowgirl), Tom (Rumba Man), Brisia (Hula Dancer), Spencer (Swat), Thom (Convict), Steve (PC Technician)

Congrats to the winner:  Jim “Super Mario” Slocum

A lot of guys in our industry are having a little fun playing blog tag. The idea is that you tag someone you want to learn more about, by calling them out in a blog post . It’s a good way to meet some new people and a great way to encourage some link love.

Todd Malicoat(who happens to be a great guy and an awesome link builder) just tagged me, so here it goes.

1. I’m an astronomy buff looking for a new telescope. Anyone that owns an online telescope store that wants to barter some services, let me know.

2. I love hot sauce. Yep you heard me, I get the chills just thinking about hot sauces. My current favorite is Trappy’s Red Devil. I get frustrated every time I go to a restaurant, ask for hot sauce, and end up getting Tobasco. When did Tobasco become the official hot sauce of the U.S.A anyways?

3. I started my online career as a developer back in 1996-97. One of the first websites I ever built was for a local golf Association. I first starting doing SEO about 5 years ago.

4. I love the outdoors. Partly due to me living in Alaska for about 4 years. Once you go Halibut and King Salmon fishing, you’ll never go back…

5. I’ve recently gotten very good at Ping Pong, although I’m nowhere close to as good as these guys

Now it’s my turn to tag someone. Of course the problem is trying to find someone not already tagged, who also blogs frequently.

Cameron, Neil and Rand have all been tagged already. I don’t see that SEOFangirl has been though. Neither has Rebecca from SEOmoz. I dont know if Rand is going to let Rebecca post a tag reply though, considering how much they are working on trying to reduce the noise, but she is definitely one of my favorite writers.

Here are a couple other people in our industry who have been tagged.

Andy Beal
Shoemoney

I’m a little bummed that I’m going to be out of town for the SEO Hold’em tournament, but if any of you are going to be around, it’s a great way to meet some other “like minded” people in our industry.

http://seoblackhat.com/2006/04/27/seo-no-limit-texas-holdem-poker-tournament/

If they make this a regular thing you can count on seeing me there.

Jarrod

I hadnt been to that site in a while, so I took a little stroll over. When I got there I noticed their newest program for spreading the Firefox word. It’s called Firefox Flicks.

Firefox Flicks allows you to quickly add a video testimonial about how much you like Firefox, or whatever you want, onto a map of the earth that is scrollable similar to Google maps.

You would have to go to an SES after hours party to see as many computer geeks attempting to be funny. I mean that in the best of ways

It really is a lot of great fun, makes me wish I had a webcam hooked up to my laptop.

Be sure to check out “Da Reaper”, his was the best of the ones I saw.

http://video2.spreadfirefox.com/

This is an actual scan of the fortune cookie message, I kid you not

Well I figured it’s nice to get away from work every now and then so here are couple of lists of non-SEO related shortcuts that might save you some time and effort in your everyday life. Heck you may even get some amusement out of them

Google Shortcuts: http://www.googleguide.com/shortcuts.html

Yahoo Shortcuts: http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/

My Favs:

Google Calculator Functions (1+1, 8*9, etc..) – just type in the equation and presto

Google Dictionary Function ( Define:yourword ) – Duh! How do you spell albuequerqe again?

Google Map Fuctions ( 231 E. Maple Phoenix ) – Easy access to numerous maps

Yahoo Gas Price Check ( Gas 95301 ) – Looks in your zip code for cheap Gas prices

Yahoo Traffic Report ( Phoenix Traffic ) – Get local traffic reports

Post some of your favorites in our forum..