The (creative free and open) web has been killed by Google

The web is dead
this is so sad
it makes me mad!!

Okay, that's of course not entirely true, it's not the web that's dead, it's the web as an opportunity for creative people that has stopped to exist.

And yes, the claim Google had killed it all is not without merit.

Some of you SEO's might wonder, so i'll add a case study here.

I'll take you to a presumed paradise island for this, a popular winter get away for Europeans, far off the European mainland, off the North African West Coast in the Atlantic Ocean.
You already guessed it?
Yep, i am taking you to the Canary Islands, and there to one of the smaller islands called La Palma.

Say you have a nice Finca there with adjoining guest house that could be rented out to tourists from central Europe or where ever else.
But, your entire island is off the beaten path's of almost anything.
So, the only way you could reach out to potential customers is really the internet.

In this particular case a real person did exactly this, created a website, did the standard SEO stuff that was necessary back in the early 2000's to get the website found in big G etc.

The usual standard SEO back then was: saturating each page with the most important keyword or phrases, in this case something like "La Palma vacation rentals" or (in German) "Ferienwohnung La Palma" (see the actual website here).
In addition the website had to be submitted to whatever took submissions or dealt with vacation rentals or La Palma in general.

A bit later the irrational boom of social sharing sites started to unfold, so they had to also sign-up for plenty of those and do the usual promo run of their website there, and that was that.

This actually worked, the above named website was for years top ten for searches for La Palma vacation rentals etc.

But as IT keeps on evolving so did Google evolve with their infamous algorithms.
It seems since Google became a filthy rich publicly traded big Corporation they applied the bad old "feed the rich and tax the poor" methodology to their super algos.

Perhaps the idea is now that the more anyone invests in a website the more Google likes this website.
Good SEO these days means apparently that a site owner spends 500 or more a year for a security certificate for instance.
What does you personal creative website need an SSL certificate for??

None really, unless your site has a shopping cart or other sensitive functions built in, so, if you don't have such functions you do not need to waste any money on an SSL, and if you don't ... well, Google might just treat you as a second class virtual citizen!

If you are able to employ 10 IT staffers that make your website look and behave really really well you are one of them, "them" being brothers and sisters of the chosen few next to big G and Co. - if you can't put in a million or so, well, sorry buddy, try to get a life in real life perhaps, that's what the situation looks like today.

Back to the case study above, that's exactly where that site stands now, despite it's steadiness over all these years, a small site like this does no longer seem to have a chance today.
Others simply bought domain names like "vacaton-rentals-la-palma.something or lapalma-ferienwohnung.something" and voila, these oh so "clever" algorithms actually think that site is better, all though that's just baloney though of (but never totally thorough) by some techno head in front of mind activity lowering screens and keyboards.

Google likes the biggies now.

But, think of it, if you go online and want to find a vacation rental somewhere in the world, from some private owner rather than some robotic humoungous website that just exists so it can cream of some percentages off the actual owners plus some more percentages off renters, and in the process just making everything more expensive, how do you still find those sites on big G these days??
You think you can just add "from private owners" to your search criteria?
Forget it, big G will still display their beloved biggies on top, and what this means to you is big G does not serve you well anymore, their current role is a bit like the role of an art gallery owner who will only exhibit art work he / she likes or deems as possibly successful for his / her business.

If your search just lands you in the hands of such big websites your real search has only just begun, because now you have to start muddling through all these big sites to figure out where you can get what you really wanted to find on big G in the first place.

You might as well skip using Google to search for specific things and instead go straight to a site you know will give you what you want.

Of course, the other downside of the current situation at big G's search is that this kills the spirit on all the small regular people who just wanted to be creative and get a little slice of opportunity online.
You might think it doesn't matter if they are all gone because their websites suck, but the observations at the small web directories level tells a different story or at least the story from a different angle ... the web is indeed dying.
They drop like flies these days, all these websites some entity once paid for, domain names, web hosting, web design and maintenance and whatever peripherals, they made up a huge junk of income for so many SME that served these types of customers, now more like begging for these types of customers, because once the smallies realize they have no chance anymore of getting their sites into that small window of the web people searching through they will give up, why waste time and money if there nothing coming of it??

Summarized, the virtual world is now a mere reflection of the real world, a few biggies control everything and everyone and the smallies can only work hard to feed the biggies and eat crumbs all the while.

The Google Chrome problem

At some point in time i started to like Google Chrome, the browser.....

Yeah, those where the times!

But let's start at the beginning.

Soon after Google announced it's first Chrome release i jumped onto it. After all, if they can do such a good job on search technology or email they should also be able to come up with a great tool to browse the www.

Once installed i started using it - well, after about the fourth click the good old good old crashed down like a badly hit WW 1 fighter plane.

There where some other things i did not like about the initial release, so i uninstalled the unfortunate thing.

A good long while later i got back to Google Chrome.
It was during a period of time i tested out all browsers because my former favorite, SeaMonkey 1 went to SeaMonkey 2 and did not make me happy anymore, so i needed a browser that was fast, would do what i want and would handle almost every website more or less equally well as IE or FF.

Opera was not really all that great, at least not good enough to replace FF.
The other minor browsers remained as such, minor, because they had nowhere any advantage point over the most common browsers.

So, i kind of had no choice to install Chrome again.
And, see there, no crashing anymore at this stage of the Chrome development, and i especially liked the way the tabs where shown, on top of the location bar, rather than added on below it, and of course, the overall lean and small top bar all together, giving me some bit more of a view of the websites i open.

So i ran with it for a good while - until one fine day.....
I had many tabs open, maybe 20 or more, it crashed or slowed down to almost a standstill as it usually did when there where plenty of tabs open.

Only, this time things went from bad to worse, Chrome had stalled completely, and my lappy started to act very sick.
Once i had it turned off it rebooted with some awful sounds - and Windows did not come back to view again.
On to the computer store for the first time in my life.
Diagnosis: HD crash.

So, i got a new HD built in, but in my memory i connected Google Chrome with this crash, if rightfully or not i can not judge as i am not exactly a hard - or software expert.

Naturally i once again had to look around for the best possible browser besides of the Windows default one.
Glad to say that SeaMonkey has come around again and made it back as my default browser, but with FF i still had my minor issues, i kind of looked at it like some old lady......
So, i brought myself forward to once again install Google Chrome.

Nice to have a the second best choice browser, all though i could never stand the weird display of source code or especially not partial source code in Google Chrome, to much crap for people who might even know what of it is useful and what is just an overkill of details, but what the heck, i had SeaMonkey to deal with web design the way it's meant to be, and Chrome just for browsing around for some specific sites etc.

So, that should have settled the suspicion about there being something fundamentally wrong with Google's Chrome browser??

Yes it did - until another not so fine day just recently!
Not sure if my Windows XP Pro is by now a bit to outdated for glorious browsers like Chrome, but than again, such a major Corporation should be capable to make things work on all still commonly used OS, not just for the latest versions thereof??

What happened?
Well, same scenario, maybe 20 or so tabs open, and as always, Chrome starts to slow down, this time it completely stalled (froze) again, and so far this can happen with other browsers too, isn't it??
Sure, but once again, after i simply turned the computer off via the power button and rebooted it did not jump on as it normally should, Windows came on at least, but with some message like "Hard drive needs to be checked for inconsistencies..." (or so).
It was an automatic process of 3 steps, but in step 3 even this process stalled (rotated around the same position on an endless loop).

Kind of worry some, did not know if i should wait an eternity, but eventually decided to turn the pc off, again via the power button.
Restart - and again the same message, this time i realized that i can also skip it, so i did, and Windows came on again.
First thing i did now was removing the Google Chrome browser due to it's mysterious / notorious malicious behavior towards Windows or the HD (at least in my mind).

Cleaned out all the Registry entries as well, checked for any malware etc. than tried to reboot - same message from Windows again, this time i did let it run it's course, and see there, this time it did run properly and eventually fixed all issues it claimed to have found and that was the end of the story.

But, it did and does leave me wondering about Google Chrome on XP.
To me it seems that the risk of this odd and truly unpleasant behavior "under stress" is to great to just ignore and re-install Chrome again.

I also wonder if there have been others experiencing this or any similar behavior with Chrome??
If so, please use the commenting system below to post your experience, would be interesting to read for sure.

SEO is dead!

I have a new song for you all today.
SEO is deadeo, SEO is deadeo ... and so on ..., yes, you can sing along to that, even on the famous river side, has a great beat to it too.
Seo is deadeo, SEO is... now you know.

What??

Okay, i'll explain.
If you are active with websites online you probably too have gotten some emails that offered you best SEO services eh??
They land in your spam, they land in your inbox - heck, they even find you through your online contact forms.
SEO??
Wasen't that in 2004 the latest fashion, how can something survive for this long online??
Right, exactly, it didn't, there's just a bunch of folks out there that learned what SEO is only in 2006, and hence it still takes a while before they get it too, you know,
SEO is deadeo, SEO is deadeo......
(sounds very similar to "happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear S-EEE-OH happy birthday to you") - but let's not speak badly about the dead shall we, after all, it was fun while it lasted, keywords up the chimney and through the roof, meta tags thrown in for all their worth, a ton of doorway pages if you where really sickeningly into it - and the big bad spider people would soon find out what's going on and mock around those infamous algorithms again. Yoohoo!!

Oh how great where those golden old days when all you needed to do was give your site a title or URL like 007 bananasstore.pom and you would find it on top of any olden days Search Engine, and you know people where searching for bananas online in those days like crazy.......

So, all credit to those big bad spider bot people, they kept on learning about all the cheatin' tricks the human nature can think off to out due their silly little scripts on silly little servers and get back to the top of search results.

Eventually it came to the point where SEO became a bad term itself, spider bot technicians started to hate all these tricky tricks people came up with to get more links from more weird websites or, for havens sake, from something like a link farm (wonder how many cows they have in there..) so they started to ban bad SEO people's website for doing to much SEO!
Often that looked like good old Wild West lynch justice, but so far the law enforcement people did not hack off the fingers of the spider bot people, so beware of SEO, you could be hanged long before they ask you any questions (like "why me, why me....").

Lets get serious for a moment now, i told you a Swan song with a great beat to it above, so i might as well also tell you what i think is in these days, but before that i'd like to remind you, SEO is deadeo, got it?? Don't do it again Bro!

So what CAN you still do??
Go back to school!
Well, not physically, they don't like it these days when old guys mingle with regular school kids you know, but mentally, with your inner vision you need to go back to when you where in school and the teacher asked you to write up an essay or whatever.
Are you there yet??
Goooooood!

That's what you still can do these days without making the stressed out spider man behind the scenes nervous.
You don't just put some pictures onto your site, impressive Flash or picture on an empty entry page, nah, get right to it, explain, express, fill people in! In full detail, what your site is about, does, sells or offers.

And that's it??

• Nope that's not it!

Guess what, we still can trick those big bad spider man and woman!
"User contents" is what they are betting on today!
Haven't you sleepy heads noticed this lately??
Do a bunch of searches (for useful information rather than p.o.r.n please) and you might observe that some results of pages they show in the top ten have what you where looking for NOT within their own contents, but either in the sites forum or it's COMMENTS functions (if you know what i mean you Wordpress and Blogger folks out there)!

Yep, the Blog is not dead, i know, it's only SEO ... but i like it, like it, like it, yes i do (as the Rolling Stones would have sung for sure if they would have been born a bit later). Many Blogs these days have double or triple their own contents by "user input", people that COMMENT on what the webmaster has put up for reading - and the spider people think that's is "unbiased, non-fake, true" contents!
Well, maybe so, but maybe not so either!

In any case, the last word out is "get user input" onto your site if you want to be seen as "viable source of information that deserves to be found", hence replace any SEO activity with "GUI" activities!

Bing better than Google now?

Just a day or two ago i did my usual Google search routine.

One of the words within my keyphrase was "gallery" (or galleries).

Google returned - nonsense! (that is nonsense as in nonsense!)
Meaning; the results had text on them that had something to do with my search term or it had lots of links that had something to do with my search term, but nothing that simply showed the kind of image galleries i was looking for.

I rephrased it several times but still no luck.

So, against my not so fond attitude for Badda Bing (as i call it) i went there, I still feel kind of offended that Microsoft helped themselves to my original idea of a background image for the main search interface, which i invented back in 1996 at the Gold Coast, Australia, long before Microsoft could even spell Bing (or so).
See for yourself at Useroo Search Art!
Of course, they use randomly changing photos, while I used my own, personally created art work, using Paint Shop Pro, to create it from scratch, without using photos, and then enhanced it further with a bit of Flash.

Anyway, so i entered the same search citeria in Bing - and voila, I instantly got the results I was looking for.
I also rephrased it several times here, still more to what i was looking for than the Google "gods in transparency" could come up with, i was frankly a tad amazed.....

From now on I will compare the results and encourage everybody to test drive both search engines, and maybe include Yahoo.com as well. It shall be interesting to see what we will discover.

Maybe Google took a wrong turn somewhere, while Bing succeeded in offering customers a better search experience ?

Going social - or is that going virtual slave labour?

Boy are we all into it these days!

Not sex, who cares, we're into social networking sites, yes, i could cry,
but it wouldn't help, everyone talks about 'em everyone is on them, and so do i.
Wow, wait a minute, that was even poetic..........

Everyone Tweets something, you must be on Facebook, you want tot share your video on YouTube, and guess what, there is also a thing called FeedBurner, now also just swallowed up by the big Whale called Google - and it's not even bad, because now things work simple and easy.

I've just spent an afternoon and evening on nothing else than populating my feeds there, and it even lets me announce my latest Blog entries via my Blog feed at my website
(see rudolf.comxa.com )

Ripple effect, multiply your sites to the extreme, what a glorious world it will be (something from Donald Fagan's "Nightfly" album).

However, do we really see any more hits to our actual websites with this flurry of work we conduct to make these big social networking sites bigger and bigger??

I am not so sure, because what i do has been done by millions - uhps, sorry i think i under estimated things a bit here, maybe i should make that billions - before me and endless more after me, we engage in over populating the web with contents aimed at placing our back links in hope we get higher Google PR or at least more traffic to our websites.
Only trouble with this "spread my sites" thing would be that there are so many same same out there we will still be hard - or even harder - to be found than ever before.

So, are we going anywhere by dedicating each day or week about a full working day to work for free on populating huge sites that make their living off us populating them in incredibly big numbers??

I know, it's kind of fun or for some a challenge to figure out all these sites and what they could possibly do for us, but besides of that it just looks like we conduct a modern version of slave labour, and no one cares, least ourselves.

New professional account at viadeo opened up

New; International Web Design Services

If you can produce an english text for a website you need to be created - then i can also work out a well written website for you, that you then can translate into your second or even multiple languages and i add these language as same looks language versions to your site.

More examples of multi lingual web site layout works by freelance webdesigner Rudolf Megert:

A web hosting firms web site.

Another example for a vacation rentals website design by freelancer Rudolf Megert