So its no mystery that we have a great community here. And Ive never hid behind anything or shy away from public postings, even ones not in this forum. This can have some great benfits, I get to know some people on a personal level, of course the branding benefit, and people can put a name or personality to the company.

Unfortunately it isnt without its ugly side either. Our reputation among clients and the internet at large is nothing short of stellar <—I love to use, and over use that term! In a certain public forum, cough w, cough ht , cough, we have been eating quantities of crud in the last mont or so. The really unfortunate issue with this is that it all stems from just 2-3 users which are double back posting on each others threads, followed by heaps of competitors thread bumping while posting what they are construing as helpful post, and paid forum posters (yes this is a web service) of seemingly anonymous posters that back, recommend, or further create false and further damaging messages on these threads. The end result, 2 straight months of thread bumpings and to the public the appearance that we are some evil bad company. It also makes the less educated think, on no, this is the end of that host , better jump ship.

These host jumpers are not going to ever stick with one host and are of little concern. Its the educated long term clients that end up suffering when this happens. The degrading and deplorable acts of other hosts and clients that beleive support is done by 3rd party public forums is really a sickness to the hosting industry. Like all large muscle bound hosts we easily over come these negative acts and rarely if ever even notice a decline in sales for them. But what they do is affect our staff, morale, and that sirs does nothing for anyone on the web. Its all too easy these days to think that you can hide behind your monitor and type what you want. Has the world forgot that there are human beings that are meant to read your comments? Its my wish that one day the gutter of the internet becomes a little more civilized and online merchants get at least the same respect you would show to a clerk working at your local best buy.

Jeremy Schoemaker (aka ShoeMoney) a well known Internet marketer, and host of a weekly radio show Net Income is going to have a Adsense rep on his show Tuesday night. The show will be featuring recent changes to the Adsense TOS, but will be taking live calls, or you can post a question on ShoeMoney’s blog.

The broadcasts is scheduled for Tuesday at 6pm EST on WebmasterRadio.fm.

I think anyone who uses Adsense on their site might benefit from listening to this broadcast.

According to a recent article on CNET News Microsoft is losing in the battle among the big 3, (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) Search Engines.

A report on December Internet traffic from ComScore Networks showed Microsoft losing half a percentage point of market share in U.S. Web queries, down to 10.5 percent. Google and Yahoo both posted gains, to 47.3 percent and 28.5 percent, respectively.

CFO Chris Liddell said Microsoft continues to “take a long-term view of this business” and that the company is making progress in some areas.

Duplicate content is an issue that every site owner should be concerned about. Some things that cause duplicate content can be dealt with easier than others.

For instance. If your site can be accessed by:
domain.com
domain.com/index.html (or whatever the extension)
www.domain.com
www.domain.com/index.html

That is 4 different URLs that point to the same content on one web page. That is duplicate (quadruple) content.

The above example is easy to avoid. Pick one way to access your site. Then use a 301 redirect. direct domain.com to www.domain.com or www.domain.com to domain.com. I always redirect to www.domain.com because in my experience most people that link to your site naturally will use the www version.

Always link to your home page from internal pages using an absolute link. Never link back using the relative link index.html (or whatever your extension is).

Sometimes these issues never cause a problem. Sometimes they do. It is better to do things right from the beginning than wait for trouble to develop, and then try to correct the problem.

Eventually the SEs will pick one page and drop the others. In the mean time these duplicate pages can split PR. Some people refer to a duplicate content penalty. I don’t think there is normally a penalty for duplicate content. The SEs have filters to try and determine duplicate content, and filter out some pages.

You can get a little more information on my blog. In addition there is a good article in regard to duplicate content on the StepForth Blog.

To be continued.

Nearly all blogs and forums have duplicate content issues. Many e-commerce sites, as well as sites that build pages dynamically have duplicate content problems. Why? because you can access any page (or content) from several different URLs. Unfortunately addressing these issues is a little more difficult than what I have referred to above.

Then you have to consider affiliate sites, and scraper sites.

But the dumbest of all duplicate content issues is when a webmaster builds two completely different sites with similar content. In this case you might get a penalty.

Well it looks like I fannaly got the pateince to download the 5 cd’s for open suse 10.2. I will be making the switch here soon. The main question that remains is dual boot or no dual boot?

Sure it would be great to still have windows to use my skype phone (linksys CIT-200) and Macromedia/Adobe’s products but what funs is that? Wine was created with a purpose. I formerly was able to get dreamweaver working on ubuntu so I shall try again.

I will update everyone with my conclusions of windows vs suse 10.2 next week and maybe you like me can make the switch!