7.29 am. The news on Facebook breaks on the BBC website, here is the link. Where it first said in the title that they were having trouble, title= ”Facebook site hit by outage”, a few minutes later this title was changed to: “Facebook website outage resolved”. 

More updates to come…

Update 7.42 am:

More tweets are coming in on the outage

Facebook is back, did anyone even notice?

The Popular social networking site Facebook has been hit by an outage

Update 7.45 am:

The News on the Facebook outage goes round on Twitter now…

Facebook had an outage? I wonder if it caught a social (networking) disease from Twitter?

Update 7.48 am:

Wondering why Facebook isn’t working and thinking about topics for my new blog - or should I just update my old blog?

Update your old…

Since a long time I tried to login to Facebook. I have not been using the service for weeks. But I could not reach the different parts of my profile after my first login. Overall the site seems slow or even down.

I have always been a heavy user of social networking sites. Years ago I signed up for Hyves.nl, where all my buddies are.. When I moved to the US, my former colleague, who now works for Facebook, introduced me to Facebook. Myspace was way to cluttered for me, and the clean page layout of Facebook was really nice.

However, after a couple of month, my interest died. I only had friends from my work on Facebook, all my ‘real’ friends were still at Hyves.nl. I always tried to keep these two groups seperate…for good reasons

Now that I have lost the interest in Facebook, and all other social network sites, I don’t really care that much anymore. But when I was tagged on 9 pictures over the weekend by somebody, I became interested again.

The bad experience not being able to access these pictures has made me realize I don’t really need to see these pictures, I can spend my time better at a long rant…

Here are my thoughts: If Facebook is down, or if they have serious scalability issues, why is nobody talking about it…???

Usually a story like this would break out in the blogosphere and would be on the first page of Techmeme in no-time! What is happening here…?

At a valuation of $15 billion, and the big prize in the battle between Microsoft and Google, you would expect that this would be news!

Now imagine you are a top SEO, and also speak at conferences like SMX advanced. You sit in a panel about link building. You can do two things…

1. Share all your best knowledge and hope there are potential clients in the audience
2. Or you can preach all gray & black hat tricks out of the book, and tell the audience that these still work

The first will get you some potential clients dropping their business card after the session, and you probably have given away all your tricks.

The second could have a more competitive effect, where you could find yourself in a pretty good position if it all works out.

Let me explain; In the panel, Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques, were a couple of people who have been, or it seems, experimented with buying links for competitors sites. The intention was really to burn those sites in the ground or messing up the link profile so they could buy some good links as well, and have their site better ranked. Smoothening the level playing field. Now if you do that a couple of times, this might cost you quite a lot of money.

Divide & conquer

If you are a A-list SEO link builder, speaking in a panel, you might be able to influence the audience opinion on controversial tactics like link buying.

You tell everybody that it works, and you definitely should buy as many links as you can, because it works.

By convincing the audience that they have to spend more on buying links, you can wipe out your competition through just one conference speech. (remember, Matt is in the room!)

This is why I thought the panel was pretty smart, at least if this were their intentions… The smartest SEO expert is the one that makes all the others believe something, and then benefits the most of all the following behavior of the sheep. As lambs to the slaughter…

Take this article today: Is the Main Character Missing? Maybe Not.

The whole story is about a blogger using Garfield comics, strips out the main character, and gives the comic a new meaning.

Halfway of the article, the writer is describing how a fan of the site is writing about it on his own blog.

So here is my problem with the article: there is NO link to the blog where the comics are displayed, which is the main subject of the whole story. Where the writer is mentioning the fan of the blog, she DOES link, but to the homepage, no deeplink.

When are traditional journalists going to learn how they can give their readers more information through better linking in their articles? Better linking will give the reader more value, which could result in more readers in the long run.

Newspapers are dealing with falling readership. I wonder why…

Right now, all goods, camera’s, stage furniture and lights of the Dutch home shopping network Liveshop are being sold in a public auction including the right to use the brand Liveshop.

Overall the hardware is getting a couple of bids in, but the brand is not having any bid. Why? Because the selling party has priced it way too high: 500K Euro!

What would you bid on a brand name, brand rights of a failure…???

The brand will always be associated with the failure of the former brand.

I would put in 1000 Euro, just for the usage of the brand name with the url!

The url liveshop.nl has only 23 incoming links to it, but still has a pagerank of: 5

On their blog they have the example where they analyze the Inlinks to SEOBook. It is an in depth analytics tool which gives you a lot of information of the link profile of any site you would like to analyze.

Within a day the tool has generated 11 backlinks.

Let’s just track the link building over time of this site to see how the inlinks will have an effect on PageRank and rankings.

From the Pop-up:

Access your bookmarks from any computer

Just click the star to create bookmarks, then access them from the bookmarks menu on any computer that has the latest version of theGoogle Toolbar.

As it looks from the pop-up, Google is trying to get more users accepting their bookmarking product.

Determining Relevance

It would be interesting to hear if you think the bookmarkings are being used to determine relevance. For the personal websearch Google is slowly building the assets to fully understand their users profile of Internet surfing habits.

• Webhistory, which sites did you visit
• Search history, with click through rates on both Paid & Natural Search results
• Bookmarks, which sites are important enough for you to bookmark, and how much do you visit these
• Feeds in Google reader, what feeds do you read and how many of their posts

Combining all this data, with the data they might collect with Google-Out and the Doubleclick databases, they have a powerful way of knowing exactly what you’re doing on the Internet, and what your intentions are.

From my perspective, the ultimate targeting tool for advertisers would be to combine all the data mentioned above here with some sociological data on life cycle of the average person. That would be interesting. With the right statistics and analyses, you can predict what the intentions are going to be of any person through their lifetime, who fits in a particular segment of behaviors before.

Google using a pop-up

The usage of a pop-up by Google can be called controversial for the following reasons:

• At the introduction of the Google toolbar was blocking pop-ups
• Google’s advertisement product has strict rules around the usage of pop-ups on your site. If you would like to advertise through Adwords or Adsense, you are not aloud to use pop-ups! From their terms and conditions:

Don’t use pop-up windows on your site.

We do not approve destination URLs that generate pop-ups when users enter or leave your landing page.

We consider a pop-up to be any window, regardless of content, that opens in addition to the original window.

This includes pop-unders, timed or intermittent pop-ups, mock system warnings, and pages that automatically initiate a download.

So I think about this for myself:

• Why do all webmasters still put up with the strict T’s & C’s of Mister Google, while they are breaking their own values time and time again?
• Do you have more examples of these? One good example that jumps into my mind are the paid link advertisements Google must be making good revenue on

When will the BIG shift away from Google products start, or hit a higher number. Until now, only a few bloggers were hit by the Google smack down, and started bitching about it. The question is, when will the Google Smack Down go mainstream?

Comments are more than welcome…

It all started with a Dr. Phil episode which I blogged about on my blog in Dutch. I find it very unusual that my Dutch blog is ranking that high in Yahoo. I guess that’s why Yahoo has been losing ground to Mister G for some time right now. If I’m a user, and located in the US, I probably won’t speak Dutch very good. So how relevant is it to show a Dutch blog in the top 10? Check out:

• Mannen opgelet: De oplossing, Sugardaddy.com!
• Sugardaddy.com pays off

These are number 7 and number 3 in the top 10 on Yahoo at the time of writing. Two pages in Dutch, with the term Sugardaddy.com in the title and url.

Number 4 and number 5 are also of my hands, but these pages are at least in English. After I saw all the traffic coming in on the Sugardaddy.com keyword, I though that there could be an opportunity to dominate the SERP’s on this query. And look at these two:

• Sugardaddy.com one way to find your partner
• Sugardaddy.com affiliate program

The absolute winner in this ranking game is the number 2 spot that I’ve conquered. The post is absolutely about making money online with the Sugardaddy.com dating site:

• Sugardaddy.com - Making money online

For everybody who would like to earn some extra cash from the program of Sugardaddy.com, you can subscribe here, and read about the potential of the Sugardaddy program in one of my monthly reviews.

Just in case this post is going to be featured in the top 10 as well, please subscribe to Sugardaddy.com.

We are a Sugar Daddy Matchmaking Service with the goal to bring together successful, rich men [Sugar Daddy] and attractive women who love to be pampered, spoiled and supported. Looking for an Extramarital affair? Find what you really want and join our free adult dating site - Cut to the Chase!

It sometimes amazes me how easy it is to rank on key-terms that bring in traffic. Look at the top 10 on Yahoo below here:

5 out of 10 results on Sugardaddy.com are my pages. Now the question will be if this pages will rank among these…

Technorati tags: Sugardaddy.com, sugardaddy, Yahoo!

I’ve been a stumbler since early this year, and slowly have been building up my profile. I only give sites the thumbs up if I really like them, and occasionally a thumbs down. This way I collected a humble Stumble profile. I liked (as time of writing):

• 360 pages
• 25 video’s
• 32 photo’s
• 25 fans

I came across two profiles that have been ramping up their stumbled sites like crazy. Seriously, these two must have been stumbling 24/7. Check this out:

OneDollarWiki Likes (at the time of writing):

• 4,500 pages
• 571 videos
• 2.607 photos
• 5 fans

Member since Oct 17, 2007

FiveDollarWiki Likes (at the time of writing):

• 7,659 pages
• 467 videos
• 8 photos
• 24 fans
• Received 3 reviews

Member since Oct 09, 2007

Robots?

Have these members automated the voting through StumbleUpon to build a profile as soon as possible? How would you do this kind of thing? And can this be considered as Stumble Spamming?

What is StumblUpon doing to prevent spamming?

I’m wondering what SU is doing to prevent automated profile building.

It would be interesting to do some sort of test with two different profiles and submit pages in the same niche, containing the same kind of content, but on different sites.

One submitted by a fast build up profile that matches the way these two have done it. Which means that you build a profile stumbling through more than 5000+ pages within a month.

The second profile used would be a profile you have build up over time. A timely build profile would show a more natural build up of the stumbles.

Who would have time to do such a test?

In September I read a post from a blogger who had received a letter from a lawyer from Domain Registry of America. It looks like more than one company is using these kind of techniques.

A search on Liberty Names of America says enough:

On the second spot there is a post of Jim Boykin: Many say Liberty Names of America are Scammers. He got the letter too, already in 2006. So I guess Liberty Names must be making money out of this scam.

It would be great if the top 10 results can be dominated with posts about the scam of Liberty Names of America. At this moment all but one are pages that talk about their scams. Only the first result is their own corporate website.

The Prices are unbelievable high. What about $25 for renewal of a domain? Sounds like a bargain…! Oh but wait a minute, in the letter the renewal costs are $29, and on the site it is $25. That is a difference of $4. If you react through the letter, you pay a 16% premium. I guess they have to make up the DM costs from somewhere.

So please link to Jim’s post, which is number two, with the keyword: Liberty names of America. Or you can link to:

• Liberty Names scam
• Scam Liberty Names of America
• BEWARE! Liberty Names of America Domain Hijacking Scam!
• Liberty Names Scam

Now we will have to wait where this post will come in the rankings.