Cuil Added to Robots.txt Generator

As many of you know, I run one of the most popular robots.txt generators on the web. Some time ago, I sent an email to up and coming search engine "Cuil" for information so I could add their crawler to the tool.

Once they came out of stealth mode, I was sent an email with the information (which I've been procrastinating on) and just today discovered that Victor mentioned my tool in his blog.

Well, I could not procrastinate any more after that! So now, the robots.txt generator now fully supports Cuil and it's special features (ie crawl-delay).

If you haven't tried Cuil, you should. It's growing very rapidly and currently has the largest index of sites of all the search engines. It's pretty good at finding hard to locate information.

Ian

Spam King Kills Family

--Begin Rant--

Eddie Davidson, the so-called "Spam King", just murdered most of his family after escaping from jail. I have not the words to adequately describe my feelings towards this scumbag, but I assure you none of them are nice or polite. My feelings of sympathy are only with his family, not him.

I realize that not all spammers are child killing cowards, but they do tend to share his "looking for the easy way to make money fast while avoiding personal responsibility or caring about the effects on others" outlook on life, and tend, IMO, towards criminal behaviour as a result. Eddie is just the poster boy.

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_9996209

He tricked his family into going with him into the countryside, then killed them - his teenage daughter barely escaped to tell the story:

Davidson got out of the driver's side and pointed the gun at Amy. She tried to
grab the gun and he fired, hitting her in the head.

He then turned the gun on the teen in the backseat, and fired, hitting her in the neck as she ducked.

She believes Davidson thought she was dead, but she watched as he shot and
killed 3-year-old baby, still strapped in the car.

The teen then opened the door, kicked off her shoes and ran about a quarter mile until she reached the home of an off-duty Denver Police officer and told him what had happened.

The little girl never even got to tell daddy about her kindergarten report card she had with her.

I really think that spammers should be treated somewhat like people who torture animals for fun as children - as people who are probably disturbed and potentially criminals. People who need watching, and medical help.

Going too far in the heat of the moment? Maybe. But spamming is sociopathic behaviour, IMO. I realize that not all sociopaths become criminals (many/most just end up being that person who is making your life hell at work) but they certainly don't make the world a better place. Quite the opposite. The fact that many spammers are superficially charming just clarifies my opinion that many/most are sociopaths. I use the "many/most" phrasing because my personal experience indicates "most", but I realize one persons experiences are not scientifically accurate.

I know most spammers don't go on to do the things that Davidson did, but they do tend to be far more likely to become criminals than the average person (usually fraud), IMO - witness the owner of Traffic Power, as an example.

--End Rant--

My Opinion,

Ian

Muphry's Law

AS mny of you know, I kan't spel good sumtimes.

However, I've learned to use the Google Toolbar spellchecker (and the Word spellchecker, when I'm in there) and now most of the time my misspellings are more of the "properly spelled wrong word" variety. You know, typing "it it" instead of "it is" or my most infamous mistake, which, no matter how hard I try, I seem to consistently use wrongly: "its" vs "it's" vs "its'"

This is a bit of a Yak Shaving day for me, as I was reading a post by Rebecca over at SEOMoz and it led me to another post which led me to another with this wonderful term in it: "Muphry's Law" (no, not "Murphy's Law", that's something related but different).

Muphry's Law dictates that (a) if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written; (b) if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book; (c) the stronger the sentiment expressed in (a) and (b), the greater the fault; (d) any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.

In short, people wielding the sword of editorial righteousness tend to cut themselves with it. I've noticed this myself, and think it's really funny, especially since I'm almost always in the "spelling correctee" camp...

On a related note, there is another word I like: incorrection, or a correction that itself is incorrect. I used to get this all the time in legal discussions. I'd say something was X, then someone who'd obviously learned about the law watching the Jerry Springer show "corrects" me with a really stupid definition/usage. My favorite part is when they do this with that look on their face that says they pity me for being so stupid...

Anyway, this whole thing reminded me of misspellings and such, so I thought I'd through together some interesting references:

• It's vs. Its - OK, so now I know... The links on the side to other "English Difficulties" are pretty helpful too.
  
• 100 Most Often Misspelled Words in English

Of course, not all misspellings are bad - you can do very well for yourself as a marketer if you bid on, SEO for, and register domains with, misspellings. Here are some tools and resources for this:

• SEOBook Typo Generator
  
• Keyword Discovery has a Misspelling Function many people don't use, but should.

Other Hints

1. If you bid on typos in PPC, make sure you put them into their own Adgroup and then remove the DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) in your ads for that group - otherwise you look illiterate.
   
2. Testimonials, ALT attributes, the keyword metatag (for Yahoo and MSN, not Google), filenames (ie misspelling.htm), image names (misspelling.jpg), and incoming anchor text from a "misspelling glossary" on your site, or from other sites are all great ways to show up for misspellings in organic SEO.
   
3. For non-English languages, always include the spelling of words without special characters - if the word is "Montréal" or "piñata", then also optimize for "Montreal" or "pinata" - some people are using a US style keyboard, and find it easier to type without special characters, even if they know the language perfectly. They are used to Google helping them and giving them good results even though it's not perfectly spelled. You want to be one of those good results.
   
4. For English, don't forget "s" and "z" transpositions between the US and UK spellings - ie "optimize" vs "optimise".

Ian

PS: I'm well aware that since this is a post about spelling and I'm a lousy speller, I'm a prime candidate for Muphry's Law. So I've short-circuited the problem by deliberately leaving in some errors and announcing that I've done so. Let's see the damn Law deal with THAT... ;)