Aka: Winnow Complains about Fishing Net

Since dropping Google Adsense, SheepOverboard’s page rank dropped to 2 for the home page and "no page rank" - NOT zero, NO ranking information - for all other subpages.

We dropped Adsense because it made us look cheap. Like standing in doorways makes the editor look cheap.

Not because we have any gripe with the Big G, it’s just those little text ads - trying to sell Viagra to readers of a suicide article  - well, just waste space and confuse us all.

And, no, we don’t blackhat SEO or land dodgy Adwords links . It’s just plain old text articles on plain ol’ html.

Since we’re out of favor, it’s time to link to our old mate Daniel Brandt’s article on PageRank: Google’s Original Sin .. in a sour grapes sort of way.

Oh, and oops. Since PR is not supposed to be important anyway, the Big G has dumped our listings of the half-dozen pages that returned most of our search results over the last 4 years.

Which suggests we are comprehensively dissed.

Now this is not a paranoia rant, as SheepOverboard is less than a blip’s blip on the SE horizon. It implies ratings rules are built-in to Google and give significant boosts to pages running Adsense. And why wouldn’t they?

Even accepting that as given, Google is suddenly quite useless as a universal search engine if it confines one to the Adsense universe. Nearly as bad as being trapped in an AOL virtual web  (gasps and struggles in dark as creepy spider webs stick to face).

One might wonder why Google maintains the farce of having paid listings down the right. Ah, silly me! They’re the Premium listings. The vanilla classifieds masquerade as the standard search results.

Fortunately Yahoo loves SheepOverboard, doing about 10,000 spiderings last month and returning 2200 listings for us. Sure the Yahoo spider is known for ’slurping’ but still, they love us.

Tags:   Google · SEONo Comments.

As SheepOverboard’s own mission solidifies we now cast around to see what others do to similar effect.

The PR read well:

Two Indianapolis-based entrepreneurs have a creative idea to help bring peace, hope and security to the world in LittleRox, a "rock-in-a-box" that delivers a message based on character traits.

If people worldwide were to adopt character traits like benevolence, deference, dependability, forgiveness, generosity, honesty, humility and others, it would have a significant impact on mankind.

Good, I’m interested. How does it work?

We assigned different rocks like granite, obsidian, sandstone, shale, marble, etc each with a different characteristic. And we’ve launched our campaign with a percentage of the proceeds to go to organizations that stress character development.

Plus, we’ve created a Declaration for Humanity that people can sign to help spread the word worldwide.

Ok, I see. The standard ecom venture with the traditional "we’ll give some of our profit to NPOs.

The site is cute and the message effective. Thoroughly professional effort. But I spent more time than I had to spare looking for that extra earnestness.

I don’t doubt the sincerity or commitment of the founders and I’m sure it will do all it promises, which is more than many larger companies, more successful celebs, or wealthier people seem bothered.

But I was just a tad sad that LittleRox presented more as a slick novelty shop than a magnanimous altruistic thread weaving our social fabric.

LittleRox’s message and language aims deftly at younger kids with adult appeal too. You get to sign the Declaration For Humanity .. stop press, I wanted to but couldn’t sign it. The rocks have signed it, and 25 humans too, but..  hey guys, I want to sign online too!

The Declaration For Humanity is a superb idea and the most important document on the website - its heart and soul, in fact. Buy one and you get to sign it and hang it.

All in all a good effort and strong noble message. Hope the mission and dialogue is enlarged and prices reduced.

Great startup with good heart. Wish them the best.

Tags: No Comments.

You would notice a degree of amateurishness about this website - cyber-equivalent of smudged ink on newsprint, like an edu handout.

You cannot imagine how hard it is to create a professional-looking site from scratch and maintain it and write the content. Using free templates does not work. After adding graphics and tweaking the layout, that free glossy pro-design looks soo cheap.

Perversely nervous, we therefore are, of too much attention. Yet it’s time, our 5th year online, to dare a press release. Even the crappiest blog or e-com noob quickly twigs to press releases.

Why wait 5 years?

Apart from judging the appearance acceptable after the nth facelift we hadn’t failed noticing SheepOverboard sells nothing of commercial value, indeed contains little of literary value.

It’s a mere juvenile opinion sheet.

Anyhow, we scrubbed the place up to half look the part in case our first press release generated a paparazzi scrum were a PR9 blogger to resonate - shortly after  we win Lotto and achieve world peace.

And that PR? 

 Website Drops Paid Advertising

Like a fart in church.

Tags:   press release1 Comment