A day in Hua Hin

On Saturday night my friend called me and asked if I wanted to go to the west coast! I said, of course, yes, and we drove there late evening. Yesterday was a public Buddhist holiday so we had a very relaxing day. The weather wasn't so good, with a very heavy downpour. A bit overcast too. Still, we had a great time, with good food and laughter. Back to it today.

The healing powers of shopping!

Well, with that done, I feel it's time to have a mini-celebration! And where better to go but the Emporium. It's expensive, yes I know, but I just need to get out of the office for a while.

Spam report

Okay, the sites have been reported to Google's spam report! I'm feeling more confident about doing a good job for this client now. Cross fingers, I hope they do something!

Now we're getting somewhere

I've just received a post from a user on 5 Star Affiliate Programs Forum, saying, "If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts." The link doesn't work but http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html does!

Yahoo gives even more weight to domain spam!

On Yahoo, I see that two of this company's sites for bangkok property are on the front page and another two for bangkok condo. And, worse still, they have registered a dot org, which is doing well. This is not easy!

Googled but not squooggled

I think I'm just going to have to do my best with this. Deliver the report and explain what's happening. There's not much else I can do after writing in some of the forums. Must get on with other work.

Iain to the rescue?

Got in late this morning and opened my mail with a minor hangover. I just don't understand. Why do they allow this to go on? Why don't they penalise sites that do this like they say they do? Six identical websites? The rats! I thought Google's robot's were smarter than that! Now I'm not so convinced.

I've just read The Duplicate Conetent Myth on SitePro News (http://www.sitepronews.com/2008/05/14/the-duplicate-content-myth/). They say: "Let me set the record straight: I don't believe there is such a thing as a duplicate content penalty. Yes, search engines can detect duplicate pages and will do what they can to avoid including them. But that usually involves a filter-based algorithm to determine the "original" page and ignore the dupes...Google incorrectly assumes that the authority site is the originator of the content and ignores my pre-dated version."

I wrote in a couple of forums about all this yesterday and the advice was to report the site to Google. How do I do that?