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As Yahoo! transfers its search technology to Microsoft’s Bing platform, if my prediction of brand death for Yahoo! Search is fulfilled, many Websites will find themselves in the same undesirable position I am heading toward: dependence upon Google for search referral traffic.

Many people in the SEO industry have focused almost exclusively on Google search referral traffic to the detriment of their own and their clients’ interests. I can’t do anything about SEO short-sightedness but those of us who have maintained search referral diversity now face a problem of serious magnitude.

Let me illustrate with some personal data from Xenite.Org.

A year ago Xenite was receiving around 3,000 search visitors per month from Yahoo! search. In years previous Yahoo! used to send as many as 10,000 visitors a month but the traffic declined gradually over time. A couple of years ago Yahoo! was sending about 5-6,000 visitors per month.

Part of the decline was due to stale content on Xenite, a topic I’ve discussed in the past. I just don’t have as much time to create content for my science fiction network as I did 10 years ago. But we do still publish new content every now and then, some of it extremely link-worthy (such as a recent interview with Craig Horner, star of Legend of the Seeker, which drew in thousands of visitors).

So I know that Yahoo!’s declining search market health has been a real factor for many people. Nonetheless, I’ve never abandoned looking to Yahoo! for traffic.

Microsoft search, on the other hand, has always been a minor player for me. A year ago Xenite received about 1400 visitors from Live search. There have been times in the past when we’ve received as many as 1800 visitors a month from Microsoft, but I don’t really remember any higher numbers.

Last month Microsoft’s Bing sent about 2,000 search referrals to Xenite. Yahoo! sent about 2500. There has been virtually no growth in the non-Google search traffic as far as these two competitors are concerned. Microsoft is essentially leeching traffic away from Yahoo!. I expect that trend to continue, perhaps to even accelerate.

Our Google traffic is up over the past year, no doubt due in part to the occasional new content that Xenite continues to publish. Google typically sends us between 18,000 and 20,000 search referrals a month (NOTE: Technically, all these services send much more traffic — I’m just using data from the most popular referral URLs to avoid adding up long lists of referral data).

Although our search referral traffic has not exactly flat-lined, I don’t see much opportunity for growth in either Google or Bing. I mean, to increase search referral traffic we’ll have to add more content and, frankly, I don’t have time for that.

Yahoo! search referral traffic is dying so trying to improve my content’s visibility over there makes no sense, especially since they are now on a 2-year plan to phase out their algorithm. As Bing’s referral traffic grows, Xenite will certainly benefit from the diversity.

But what happens if, for some reason, Bing’s algorithm changes in favor of sites that compete with Xenite.Org? That pretty much leaves me stuck with Google.

You may feel good about relying on Google for your search traffic but I don’t.

Admittedly, search referral traffic only plays a minor role in our traffic building strategies. We get a lot of traffic from other sources. Still, I don’t like getting 85% of my search referral traffic from Google. Time was, back when I had time to focus on my own sites, Google drove about 50% of the search referral traffic.

If Google banned Xenite today we’d still get a lot of traffic but no one wants to take a 15-20% hit.

So what to do?

The only really viable search engine out there besides Google and Bing is now Ask. I haven’t tried to optimize for Ask in ages. We rank well at Ask but we don’t get much traffic from Ask.

Search optimization doesn’t just include ranking well in a search result. It also includes building a query space and enhancing a search brand’s visibility.

In other words, through the years, I have often advised people who struggled to match in Google what they were accomplishing with other search engine rankings to market their non-Google search visibility. This is a strategy that works very well, especially for sites that cannot rank in Google at all.

There are ways to promote your Ask search visibility. They can be as simple as telling people to “search Ask.com for Our Brand Name” or as complex as incorporating Ask search into your marketing efforts (keep in mind that Ask is a trademark so you have to be careful about how you refer to it).

Marketing goes well beyond advertising. It includes all your outreach efforts. Every communication between you and your marketplace can include reference to the search engines where you rank well. You can include Ask in those references and also give Ask special prominence in them.

The fact that Ask does a very poor job of marketing itself doesn’t mean no one uses it. Tens of millions of people use Ask search every month. You should make sure your sites are listed in and ranking in Ask. You should also make sure that people know how to find you in Ask.

Your goal should not be to take market share away from Bing for Ask. Your goal should be to increase your visibility to the people who use Ask.

And if you’re not marketing to Microsoft’s search visitors, you need to be doing that, too. I expect my Bing search referral traffic to increase substantially over the next 2 years. You should set a similar expectation for yourself and make sure you don’t do anything to prevent that from happening.

Maybe Google really does control 85% of the search market. I seriously doubt that (most searchers use more than one search engine). It’s easy to optimize for Google if you don’t obsess over links and targeted queries. It seems to be getting easier to optimize for Bing.

If you want to maximize your SEO efforts, then you need to think about ways of cutting inroads into substantial search market audiences you don’t normally reach out to.

Ask is the low-hanging fruit. It will take most of us 6 months to a year to gear up for Ask. In the meantime, we need to be casing the other search services to see who is coming up behind Ask.

Don’t depend on just one search engine. That’s the worst possible SEO philosophy. I’ve been negligent about my own sites but at least I’m still aware of where they get their traffic from. I intend to do something about resetting my search diversity.

What are you going to do for yours?

PageRank Sculpting Is The Badhat SEO Technique From Hell

PageRank Sculpting is one of those really bad concepts that just won’t go away. The PageRank sculpting model falsely suggests that, by hiding internal links from search engines, a Website can improve its search visibility. Since the idea was first proposed in 2007, no one has ever been able to show that it works. In fact, last year Google showed that it does NOT work.

You would think that after seeing Googler Matt Cutts come out and say “[Pagerank sculpting] isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank” people would get the message that PageRank Sculpting IS NOT THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO UTILIZE YOUR PAGERANK.

Nonetheless, some rather surprising people (including but not limited to Rand Fishkin and Eric Enge) have failed to embrace the immediately obvious fact that PageRank sculpting does NOT work. Remember, Matt Cutts told everyone that Google “figured that site owners or people running tests would notice [that PageRank flow affected by "rel='nofollow'" on internal links had changed], but they didn’t.”

Completely Failed SEO Analysis Misled The SEO Industry

All the people claiming they were working miracles through their PageRank sculpting had absolutely no clue for over a year that their “sculpting” had been negated by Google. The reason Google disabled the PR Sculpting “Off Switch” was that “some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites … ended up excluding … high-quality information….”

Based on that absolutely awful analytical record, reasonable people should conclude that SEOs would not be able to hit the broad side of a barn with a baseball bat — even if one helps them swing the bat in the right direction (e.g. Googlers consistently and repeatedly advised people NOT to sculpt PageRank going all the way back to 2007).

You may recall that one of the early and oft-cited justifications for attempting to sculpt PageRank in the first place was that “unimportant pages” were outranking more important pages in search results. Rather than fix this problem, people in the SEO community leaped upon PageRank Sculpting as a hot new idea that would impress the masses — thus creating an even worse problem to mask the original problem.

Proof That PageRank Sculpting Harms Websites Emerges

For months I’ve been monitoring requests for help in various SEO and Google support forums. Many, many Webmasters have come out of the woodwork complaining about lost Google rankings, sites not being indexed, etc. (And additionally dozens of Webmasters have privately asked me to look at their sites through forum-based private messaging.) In nearly every case where I investigated the sites’ structures and backlink profiles I was able to show that at least one of several factors was the probable cause of the Websites’ search invisibility:

• The sites were using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links
• The sites were using “noindex,nofollow” in meta tags
• The sites were using “disallow” in robots.txt
• The sites were using 302-redirects or other odd functions on internal links
• The sites had few or no inbound links
• The sites had obtained many suspicious links (comprising 70% or more of their backlink profiles)

On more than one occasion when I suggested that suspicious backlink problems might be an issue, Google employees tacitly agreed with me without actually saying that was the problem.

By far, however, the most common issue I have found with sites that have lost search traffic, search rankings, and search visibility is that they implemented PageRank Sculpting by use of “rel=’nofollow’” or “noindex,nofollow” meta tags on their pages. By preventing major search engines from crawling and indexing their content, these sites effectively removed themselves from the long tail of search.

How PageRank Sculpting Harms Websites

And by preventing the search engines from indexing all those pages, those sites effectively deleted most of their own accumulated PageRank.

POOF! PageRank vanished simply because it was never allowed to flow through the site, not because it “evaporated” through “rel=’nofollow’”.

Of course link-poor sites don’t have much PageRank to work with in the first place, so preventing unique articles from attracting and passing on PageRank is anything but an effective SEO strategy.

*NEW* PageRank Sculpting Techniques Worse Than The Original

Notice that PageRank sculpting doesn’t simply harm your site through “rel=’nofollow’”. Any method of hiding internal, navigational or cross-promotional links from search engines will reduce a Website’s search visibility and reach. That means that all the NEW methods of “sculpting” PageRank will inflict at least as much harm, if not more, on the Wesbites that implement them.

So using 302-redirects on internal links, embedding navigation into inline frames, using encrypted Javascript links, embedding “noindex” on pages, disallowing robots from directories of user-accessible content — all the so-called “Google-friendly” methods of restricting PageRank flow through a Website (now being promoted by various SEO pundits, gurus, and bloggers) are just as bad and harmful to your site as merely using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links.

The noindex and robots.txt methods pretty much ensure that you are taking a lot of content out of the running, making your site less competitive, less visible, and less likely to draw more traffic.

One Plausible-sounding Variation Does Not Justify Badhat SEO

Rand Fishkin did propose consolidating pages in the hope of combining PageRank into fewer pages. Of all the 2nd-generation PageRank sculpting techniques, this one at least preserves the indexability of content — but then he coupled that idea with the extremely bad and ill-reasoned suggestion that people who have already dropped tons of “nofollows” into their internal navigation links do nothing to fix that problem (to leave the “nofollow” attributes in place).

Remember that SEOmoz has yet to publish a viable, credible test or report that shows they know how to manage PageRank flow (or even just correctly interpret the data they collect). So the recommendation to leave everything in place should be ignored (unless you’d rather just work on other projects). You can still love Rand for being the great guy he is. In fact you should continue to respect him for being the fantastic marketer he is. Keep watching the videos SEOmoz puts out. Just don’t believe them when they say that PageRank Sculpting (still) works because they’ve never been able to show that it does.

(NOTE: In the comments to his blog post cited above, Matt Cutts did say to one questioner: “this is a change that’s been live for well over a year; if you’ve got a site that works for you and you’re happy with, I wouldn’t worry about going back to change a lot of work.” While I understand Matt’s reluctance to offer generic do this/don’t do this advice — I am sure his comment is considered justification for the Do Nothing To Fix The Problem Principle.)

Badhat SEOs Are Compounding Past Errors With New Trouble

PageRank sculpting never fixed the original problem (bad site design) in the first place. All the sites that turned to PageRank Sculpting to resolve that issue simply made their situations worse. They piled one bad design decision on top of another.

Any SEO who cannot get the root URL of a domain to outrank the “About Us” page without blocking crawlers is completely and utterly incompetent, in my opinion. Don’t do business with those people, if the best they can suggest is that you hide internal, navigational links from search engines in order to reduce the PageRank of the “About Us” or other incidental pages.

I noticed with some amusement that certain pro-Sculptors never said another word on the subject after Matt Cutts pulled the rug out from under their snake oil SEO technique last summer. I hope they quietly went back to their clients and got those sites to remove the internalized nofollow code because in my opinion it is professionally irresponsible to leave that kind of “solution” in place.

The real problem lately, however, is that some people continue to talk about PageRank Sculpting as if it works. They clearly are ignoring the memo Google sent out and they are advising other people to ignore it. That is REALLY bad advice.

Goodhat SEOs MUST Disavow PageRank Sculpting

PageRank Sculpting is the process of hiding internal navigation links from search engines. It doesn’t matter whether you do it with “rel=’nofollow’” or “noindex,nofollow” or “disallow” or some screwy Javascript encryption scheme. When you hide internal navigation from a search engine you destroy crawlability, you destroy index visibility, and you deny your content the PageRank it is rightfully entitled to.

Is this really the kind of “optimization” the SEO community wants to be known for? Because if this is the flag YOU want to wave for YOUR SEO expertise, you can count me among the people who consider you to be nothing more than scam artists, snake oil salesmen, charlatans, and amateurs.

It’s time for the SEO community to stop promoting harmful tactics that bring absolutely nothing positive to the table. You can love your friends and conference idols all you want. You can promote their blogs above mine in all the ways you can think of. I don’t care about that — but if I were one of your clients who had taken your advice to sculpt PageRank — and if you had not come back to me and advised me to take down the “nofollow” attributes — I’d be suing you right now.

I’m not advising anyone to file lawsuits against PageRank Sculpting SEO companies (lawsuits are expensive AND the courts don’t understand this stuff at all) — but this kind of repeat bad behavior is what leads to lawsuits and legislation. The SEO community needs to get out of the PageRank Sculpting business as soon as possible. It IS a scam. I want nothing to do with it.

No one in this industry has any excuse for promoting such a clearly debunked and discredited technique. To ALL SEOs who advocate sculpting PageRank I say: Swallow your pride, get over it, and shut up when you feel the urge to talk about “sculpting PageRank”. You cannot do it, you don’t know how to do it, and you have no business telling anyone else to do it.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are strictly those of the author and do not reflect the views or opinions of any other person, party, or entity.

The screaming and shrieking have reached crescendo volume. Search engine optimization’s dirty little secret — that highly experienced optimizers don’t like to divulge their “real” secrets — has almost gone mainstream. This perception is approaching the status of SEO myth — not necessarily because it’s not true (although it’s not) because it is being used in classic myth-like fashion to explain why the SEO advice people find on the Web seems to suck.

Why the SEO advice you find sucks — Really

There is certainly plenty of bad SEO advice being hammered into naive people’s heads and hearts every day but I think a more common occurrence is that people looking for SEO advice are just getting hammered for asking for help.

On the one hand, many people are willing to offer an occasional quick glance at a Website. Some SEOs do this regularly in an attempt to drum up business, I suppose. I do it so that I can see what is actually happening on the Web “out there”, beyond the circles of experienced SEO.

On the other hand, many of the most helpful SEOs resent being treated as a free service pack for some stranger’s Website. They get a little testy when they see a message like, “Hi, I just launched a Website. Would someone please review it and tell me if I’m doing this right?”

People looking for that kind of help are setting themselves up for failure. Experienced hands usually don’t like to give free SEO reviews, and the people most eager to provide such reviews in response to those kinds of requests usually lack the experience you’re looking for.

So while people like me will complain about bad SEOs giving out advice, the apparent dearth of good SEO advice is really not a dearth. After all, there are thousands of pretty good articles and blog posts still available through many archives.

All the SEO bloggers have stopped blogging about SEO

While it’s true that some people get burned out on a topic, most people in the field move on to something else. It’s a natural part of the personal evolutionary process. Many people who start out learning search engine optimization move into social media optimization and some of those folks move into Web business marketing and strategy. The pathways unfold in many directions.

But there comes a point where after you’ve proved your SEO chops on your blog you have to acknowledge that there is more to Web marketing than search engine optimization. Search is not the only source of traffic on the Web. It never has been and hopefully it never will be.

There are relatively few people in the industry who can keep saying something about search engine optimization without drifting off into another social media escapade. SEOs have coopted social media prerogatives in so many ways it could be argued that most of us should now call ourselves Social Media Marketers rather than Search Engine Optimizers. Many people have made that transition already.

I think a new generation of SEO bloggers is emerging and that group of people will flower into something brilliant. All it takes is time. There is still much to be said (and learned) about search engine marketing, but you’re probably going to have to look for the newer voices to find something that hasn’t been said before.

It’s not that all the SEO bloggers have stopped blogging about SEO so much as that there is a new set of SEO bloggers who have found their passion for the topic.

The times, they are a-changin’

It’s hard for me to remember which search year I’m in. Today’s search results look like the results from last year. Today’s grave SEO doubts about what is happening on the Web sound like those from five years ago.

Google is getting bigger, faster, pickier, and I can’t get my site to rank in Google and how many links do I need to succeed with Google?

With all the innovations in search that we’ve seen through the past five years, people still seem to grouse about the same old stuff: their sites are penalized, not indexed, not being crawled, not ranking well for all keywords, etc.

Search engine optimization is being called on the carpet every year for promoting smarmy sites. The SEO industry leaps to defend itself every time someone criticizes it. And we cannot agree on which methods are “white hat”, effective, or the best practices everyone should be using.

So why are the times a-changin’? Danny Sullivan is still running search conferences — he’s just using a different company to do that, now.

Rand Fishkin is still trying to get everyone to share their SEO thoughts on his site — he’s just got more money to work with now.

Todd Friesen is still having a blast with all his buds at the bar — he’s just living in the U.S. now.

We have no standards, no trustworthy certifications, and no means of reining in unethical SEOs.

I don’t see that all that much has changed in search engine optimization. We’re still batting away noisome flies with nothing to do and building Websites and planting links and looking at search results.

It’s the people that have changed, not the times, not the process.

Understanding that will help you cope with all the change you’re seeing today and tomorrow. Change is the only constant in this industry.

Jeremy Bencken wrote an interesting post on his site in which he disclosed an email from 2006 that was accidentally sent to him by a Google engineer. In the message, the engineer mentioned that PageRank determines which pages are assigned to the Supplemental Index.

Let me say something about Google’s Supplemental Results (again). In 2008, I noted on SEO Theory that Danny Sullivan has tried to defuse the SEO industry’s hysteria over Google’s Supplemental Results by pointing out that other search engines have dual indexes, too.

In my SEO Theory post from 2008 I wrote:

Okay, fine. Everyone uses dual indexes. The problem, however, is that pages that rank well in other search engines DUE TO RELEVANCE usually suck in Google’s search results until you point value-passing links at them. That means Google’s Supplemental Index is more than just a “secondary index”.

The Supplemental Index is, so far as we know, still with us today. The earliest confirmation I can find from a Googler that (internal/non-Toolbar) PageRank determined which index a page went into is a post by Matt Cutts from January 2007. Maybe he mentioned it prior to that time. I know Matt brought this up when I asked him a question at SMX Advanced later that year.

Jeremy’s post is trying to support a conjecture Rand Fishkin made on SEOmoz — that Google sets a limit to how many pages it will index for a site. Jeremy argues that your PageRank limits your inclusion in the Main Web Index (really, that is the only index any SEO should want to be in). Jeremy is right, but that doesn’t mean there must be some sort of hard limit. It just means that Matt’s Peanut Butter Principle (”you only get so much PageRank for your site and you have to spread it like peanut butter across a slice of bread”) implies there is a practical limit to how many pages any given amount of PageRank will move into the Main Web Index.

This is, of course, where all the so-called PageRank Sculpting ideas come from. A few people in the SEO industry proposed that it should be possible to direct the flow of your PageRank throughout your site by cutting off “less important” pages so that more PageRank is directed to the “more important” pages.

The concept is theoretically sound. I have said that before and I will say it again. The problem with PageRank Sculpting is that no one outside of Google has been able to do it. Sure, people have changed the flow of PageRank around their sites. In fact, we do THAT constantly by adding and deleting pages, redirecting URLs, building links, etc.

But no one in the SEO industry has the capability to sculpt PageRank flow. They cannot track and measure it — which means they don’t know when Google assesses the PageRank assigned to any given page on a site. If they knew that kind of information, they would be tracking and measuring PageRank. This is the simplest point in the whole debate and yet people continue to miss it.

Do you know how much INTERNAL PageRank Google will assign to any page on your site today, tomorrow, next week, or 2 months from now? Absolutely not. You don’t, you won’t, you can’t, and therefore you cannot sculpt your PageRank.

What you can do is hack your internal navigation structure so that Google and other search engines are less likely to recrawl certain pages as frequently as before. Apparently, enough people did this with such alarming success that Google felt compelled sometime in late 2007 or early 2008 to take the drastic action of changing how it computes PageRank.

Why? Because the brilliant PageRank Sculpting community was screwing up Websites’ search visibility. So let’s zip forward here.

The myth that you can improve your search results by nofollowing or otherwise blocking some of your pages from being indexed persists to this day. We could easily argue that it’s better to leave idiot SEO techniques to the idiots but I feel there is something morally wrong in that position.

Besides, I may one day be asked to help fix a site that has attempted to Sculpt PageRank. I’ve already reviewed quite a few sites in various Webmaster groups and forums where the owners admitted to sculpting PageRank (and they were all complaining about indexing problems — am I the only person to see a correlation here?).

You can’t do it. I admit I cannot do it. And I won’t be stupid enough to try to do it.

But what does all this have to do with the Supplemental Blues? I think I just made that point (twice) but let me put it another way: Sculpting PageRank increases your Supplemental Agony.

The first thing you can do when you’re concerned that your highly relevant content is being overlooked by Google is to see if you’re sculpting PageRank. Someone recently asked me why SEO Theory uses “nofollow” on its link to the root URL. All I can say is that it appears to be built into the Thesis them.

Is it a stupid thing to do? Yes.

Will I fix it? No. Why? Because I don’t care about it.

I can optimize any Website, with or without nofollows embedded on internal pages. It’s not difficult to figure out the solution for when you cannot change the internal structure of a Website that has indexing problems: get more value-passing links to point to the pages that lack PageRank.

I’m pretty sure that all the links people have pointed at SEO-Theory.com through the years will ensure that the root URL has lots of PageRank. Am I sculpting it? No. I’m just not concerned about whether PageRank affects the site’s ability to rank for its own name.

The recent hullabaloo over at SEOmoz concerning their invalid claim to have proven that “PageRank Sculpting still works” shows that people still care about PageRank. The SEO community is extremely hypocritical on this topic. They pay lip service to the principle of “PageRank is not important” but they don’t live it.

Well, I HAVE lived it. I had no idea that the internal links to SEO Theory’s root URL were nofollowed. I never cared about the PageRank. What is the point of caring about PageRank?

Does SEO Theory have pages in the Supplemental Index? I think so. In fact, if I had to bet on whether it does or does not, I would bet that it does. So what?

I had a much bigger cow when I learned that we were using the All-In-One SEO Plug-in for Wordpress. I absolutely hate that plug-in. It uses “rel=’nofollow’” on your category and tag pages by default. Those are some of the most useful pages a blog can have. Who in their right mind would want to block the things?

I find myself talking to Webmasters quite often about which SEO plug-in you need for Wordpress. When I tell them you don’t need any, people get defensive. Why? Because they have read on dozens of blogs and forums that if you’re going to create a blog you need Wordpress but “Wordpress is not SEO-friendly” and therefore you need an SEO plug-in.

Sorry, folks, but that dog won’t hunt. Anyone in the SEO community who is worth their salt knows that the Wordpress development community fixed all those custom field issues a long time ago. They got some very good advice on the matter from a highly reliable source in 2007: Matt Cutts (this is a video).

It doesn’t bother me to know I have Supplemental Pages. It does bother me if I am unable to get pages indexed the way I want them indexed. Sometimes you just need to point a few more links at a deeper page. Sometimes you need to look under the hood and see if maybe someone else’s idea of “good SEO” is pulling you down.

You cannot prove that PageRank Sculpting works because even if you COULD create a set of isolated sites that manage to direct the flow of PageRank as you intend, they would be completely unlike anything in the real world.

Doubling up a document’s PageRank won’t make it more relevant for more queries.

Doubling up a document’s PageRank won’t make it a better quality document.

Doubling up a document’s PageRank MIGHT get it to rank better for its primary keyword if it is stuck in the Supplemental Index.

The real issue facing Webmasters and SEOs alike today, however, is not how much Google’s Supplemental Index is hurting you — it’s how much you’re hurting yourself by implementing truly bad and unreliable SEO methods. You could be doing that right now without realizing it. If you do your job right, though, your site can tolerate a lot of mistakes.

That’s the most important point. It takes a really incompetent SEO to complain that an “About us”, “Privacy Policy”, or other so-called Incidental Page is so powerful it needs to be nofollowed, noindexed, or blocked by robots.txt.

If you are working with a site that has that kind of problem, and you don’t know how to fix it except by hiding the problem, YOU SUCK as an SEO.

And you can quote me on that.

The real-time Web will be grabbing people’s attention for the next few months, but something that many people in the SEO community seem to have done is walk away from their blogs.

I can understand if you’re too busy to write content every day but if you expect to monitor the way search engines handle blogs in a world full of tweets and SMS-based applications, how do you plan to do that?

Blogging is a chore — but it’s also still a great search visibility methodology that should not be lightly abandoned.

To be honest, I don’t have much time for blogging myself right now, but I’m determined to find a way to keep saying something and hopefully it’s something worthwhile, no matter how brief it may be.

Facebook is not yet ready to be your public platform. MySpace was never very good as a consumer-facing medium for pontificators, either. The plain and simple truth is that when you need to remind people that you exist, there is still nothing better than (or even as good as) a traditional good, old-fashioned Web 1.5 blog.

Don’t ever forget that.