I already went over this in Shilling Away Your Social Capital, but it’s actually worse than I originally thought.

I discussed wasting time in Time, Part 05: “Focus & Motion”. I mentioned how small interruptions in your day can stack up and completely blow your efficiency.

For instance.. If someone sends you an email and you have your mail app running in the background, you have to:

1. Recognize that that sound you heard was a new email
2. Decide that you’re going to check it out
3. Click over from the program you were using to your mail app
4. Look at the title
5. Look at the name of the sender
6. Click on the email and wait for it to open
7. Read the text until you have the gist of the communication
8. Think about whether you’re going to do anything about it
9. [Maybe] Take the time to respond, including possibly researching links
10. Click back to the program you were initially using
11. Get your head back in the game and get efficient with your project

Now.. That process can take you anywhere from 10 seconds to 3 minutes or even MORE, depending on how much time you’re willing to donate to that person’s query.

Let’s assume you spend 3 minutes responding to someone’s email. If you do that 20 times, you’ve just spent 60 minutes = an entire HOUR helping other people out and falling behind in YOUR work. Besides that, these people are all begging with their hands out, not paying you to be on retainer to them as technical support or even offering you ANYTHING of value WHATSOEVER for you wasting your time helping them out.

So what happens is that people become known for certain things. You can count on certain people to send you certain messages. You know who’s always shilling for a company. You know who’s always inviting you to stuff that they want you to pay for that you didn’t ask them about in the first place. You know who’s advertising their latest project, seminar, webinar, meetup or conference THAT. YOU. NEVER. ASKED. THEM. ABOUT in the first place.

These people become Google Ads.

Did you ever notice how once you’ve seen something you’re not interested in enough times, you virtually ignore it? It’s like you don’t even have to try. You literally don’t even SEE the ads in people’s sidebars, because you know they’re there.. you know you’re not interested.. and you know where the actual content is. The ads become like borders or art that has nothing to do with the reason you clicked on a page.

This is what happens to people who constantly shill for the same things and never offer ANY valuable content to you whatsoever. They become invisible. There’s no reason to read their emails. There’s no value in wasting your 10-30 seconds reading what they have to say this time, because it’s the same thing they had to say last time and every time before that.

So what happens is, as soon as you get to phase #3 or #4, where you read the title or the person’s name, you automatically click on it so it’s marked “read”, but you never actually look at it. You make sure it goes from bold (unread) to regular (read) and go back to whatever you were doing without missing a beat. This way, you spend about 3 seconds going back and forth from program to program instead of 10 or more, and your efficiency for the day skyrockets.

I suppose there are people that take it a step further and completely filter out people that send them bacn all day, every day.

Is this your goal in Social Media? Are you so interested in trying to push a product on someone that you’re willing to relegate yourself to the junk folder?

Do you really think you’re providing value for your client by making yourself a pariah? Who’s going to hire you to shill for them next year after you blow all your social cred this year?

The funny thing about all this is that people have come up with all these plots and scams to get more Twitter followers, and then they proceed to demonstrate to these people that they have nothing valuable to tell them. Why publicize your own lameness? Why not keep it to yourself?

Social Media is constantly changing. There’s no telling what the next iteration’s going to be. I think you’re better off regarding Social Media as a conversation instead of an opportunity to push products and services on people that didn’t ask you about that so that when the next fad shows up, people are willing to follow you there as a valued resource instead of blocking you on it because they don’t want more of the same garbage you served them this time around.

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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Such an interesting day… suddenly… :D

… At some point this morning, I went to check on my Google status.

The way I do that is to Google the word “Bill” or the word “bill”.

On November 12, 2007, I was on page 4: (#37 of 41,600,000 English pages for “Bill”)

On February 15, 2008, I was on page 1: (#10 of 42,000,000 English pages for “Bill”)

On April 20, 2008, I was STILL on page 1: (#3 of 29,700,000 English pages for “Bill”)

Now, I could have taken a screenshot every single day, if I gave a damn, because I haven’t been outside of the top ten results for “Bill” or “bill” for the last five (5) months. In fact, everybody KNOWS that, because I don’t carry business cards. I just tell people to “Google Bill”.

So anyway, hahahaha :D I google my first name, and interestingly enough, I’m not on page 1. I look at the number of entries and notice that it’s ballooned to 395,000,000 English pages.

So I’m like, ok. So what? This is interesting. For once, I get to see myself on page 2. When they get rid of those extra couple of hundred MILLION results, I’ll be back in position.

Nope! :D

Page 3?… 4?… 11?….. Nothing. :D

So now, I’m getting suspicious, so I start googling stuff that I *KNOW* I’m on page 1 for, such as “Bill Cammack” and the first thing that comes up is my Flickr set. :/

Photo by Jonathan Dingman

So now I’m like “oh. I see. My entire DOMAIN NAME has disappeared from Google”. :/ So then I did this search:

and received this: :D

And… Yes… I tried it in “all languages” too, as if I EVER post in anything except English.

Now…

I don’t know anything about how sites disappear/reappear in Google’s results. This Page gives Google’s explanation of what could happen to YOUR site:

Also, as I mentioned, there are usually tens of millions of English pages for “Bill” and today, there are hundreds of millions, almost ten times the usual number. However, that makes no difference, because my site is currently not indexed by google AT ALL, as if it never existed. :D

Now… Rewind a couple of days… On July 16, 2008, I was experimenting with Google Ads and wrote a post about it, so the two things that came to mind were that a) someone tampered with my site, or b) I messed something up when I added and then deleted my Google Ads within like two days, because they totally weren’t floating my boat. As I was discussing this with Tyme, she mentioned that my site might have been removed for some sort of Adsense violation. Googling removal situations, I landed on a page that said they usually send out some sort of explanation if they remove you themselves……

So I go to my junk mail folder, and lo and behold, there’s an email from “Google Search Quality”, which read:

Dear site owner or webmaster of billcammack.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

The following is some example hidden text we found at billcammack.com:

and went on to describe the offending text.

Interestingly enough, I received this email on July 17, 2008, less than a day after my Google Ads post. When I mentioned this to Tyme, she pointed me to a post she recently made on her 9rules blog, called Securing Your WordPress Site. Thanks to Tyme’s post, which cited this article by Brajeshwar, which describes how he found foreign code in his site’s header file, I figured out what had happened.

Sure Enough… a simple “View Page Source” revealed that my site had been ‘infected’ with “hidden” text when I searched for one of the words that Google informed me was on my site. I switched themes, upgraded WordPress and did a couple of other things to prepare to “request reconsideration” of my site for indexing in Google’s search results.

I did that today, June 18, 2008, and we’ll see how long it takes, since this is what’s written on the reconsideration request page:

Please allow several weeks for the re-evaluation process. Unfortunately, we can’t reply individually to reconsideration requests.

So this got me thinking….

Can YOU afford for your site to be removed from Google’s search results? Would that impact your business? Would it impact your social life? Would it impact your ‘cred’?

Personally, I don’t need google for business. I don’t need google for socialization. I am a REAL PERSON who does work for REAL COMPANIES and has REAL FRIENDS that I hang out with, regardless of whether my site is indexed in Google. The hits that I get from Google are all *RANDOMS*. The people that are wondering what Bill Cammack did last night or last week are either SUBSCRIBED to my site via RSS or have billcammack.com in their favorites or bookmarks somewhere. Being on Page 1 on Google for “Bill” is strictly a NOVELTY for me, because….. I never even BRANDED “Bill”. :D People ask me all the time, “What did you do to get to page 1 for ‘Bill’?”, and I can’t tell them, because all I did was POST. INTERESTING. ISH, like this post you’re reading right now. Granted, I can’t/won’t take credit for the popularity of my site, because other than Google (which, according to Google Analytics accounts for accountED for 56.04% of my page hits) I get a lot of referral traffic from people like Richard Blakeley & Lux Alptraum of Boinkology.com.

So, like I said in my posts about Fame and “Star Power”, I couldn’t possibly give a damn about people that I don’t know at all googling some topic that I happened to have posted about and enriching their own lives by reading what *I* wrote. :D Therefore, it doesn’t matter to me AT ALL, that according to Google right now, my site doesn’t even exist.

But what about you?

What would happen to YOUR business if Google suddenly didn’t see your site?
What would happen to YOUR standing in your field amongst people that don’t know your CV yet?
What happens if nobody can google YOUR company and see years worth of posts and videos and pictures and awards and accolades and recommendations?

I have over 1,000 posts on BillCammack.com that are currently absolutely ****ing INVISIBLE on Google. It’s funny, :) because this is such an odd feeling that I can’t really explain it. :D It’s relatively unique. It’s like the world suddenly caught amnesia when it comes to anything you’ve said or done over the past umpteen years.

The closest I can come to explaining it is… We’ve all seen what happens when Twitter fails.

What happens if Google fails YOU?

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I’m experimenting with Google Ads. I don’t actually LIKE them, so this experiment will probably be rather short-lived. :D

I used to use them a long time ago, but then I stopped. The general point was that they were poor-looking and at the same time generated close to *ZERO* revenue, hahaha. I think that when I went to reactivate my account, I had accrued like $10 or like $9.50 or something. Meanwhile, I could have stood in front of McDonald’s opening doors for people and requesting change from them as they left the establishment and made that much in one day…. well… actually in just a couple of hours.

The reason I decided to bring them back was that I get a lot of random traffic now. Most of the traffic I got before was from my posting links to social media sites, so it didn’t make sense to tell people “Come to my site to look at advertisements! :D “. At this point, most of my traffic comes from Google, and they tend to bounce pretty quickly, so if they decide to bounce to an ad link, that’s fine with me. :D

Still, I didn’t want the ads to show up to people who ‘normally’ browse my site, like actually going to my home page and seeing what’s on it. For that reason, I took Tyme‘s advice and implemented the ads in my single post code.

I decided to use link units instead of ad units, because I could get link units that were only 15 pixels high. The “thinnest” ad units I could get were 60 pixels high.

I immediately noticed a problem with relevance… Not that adsense was having trouble parsing the text on the page, but because I talk about so much different stuff in my posts. I don’t even TALK about cars, yet they were posting automobile links on my pages. One of my titles included the name “Nichelle”, so all the ads on the page were for “Helle” shoes or something. So, without the ability to specifically say “give me these type of ads”, there’s an incredible relevance ‘problem’. They would probably work better if my posts were only a couple of paragraphs long and about specifically one topic.

In general, I’m not a fan of random advertising anyway. I’ve been saying for probably a year now that product placement and sponsorship is the way to go. This is another reason these ads will probably have to vamoose immediately. :) I don’t enjoy seeing mentions of items that don’t have anything to do with anything on my pages. I also can’t imagine why anybody would want to click on the random words they come up with. Then again, I’m not aiming them at ME, I’m aiming them at people who randomly search through google for topics they want to read about at that point in time.

I guess part of the experiment is to gauge the worth of random google ads vs sponsored ads… which is practically ZERO since you’re guaranteed to get paid whatever amount by a sponsor by the nature of the relationship. Google ads are like a gamble. “I DEFINITELY show your ads, and I MAYBE get a couple of cents out of the deal”. :)

Anyway, it’ll be an interesting experiment. I’m up to 83 page impressions since this morning, with ZERO clicks and ZERO page CTR, hahaha. I’ll most likely be done with this experiment when I wake up tomorrow morning. :D

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