Published on June 24, 2009
in Ideas.
I don’t have a brand preference when it comes to Macs vs PCs, so I was happy with PCs as long as they cost less and provided the same value to me. A couple of years ago, I realized I was wasting so much time dealing with the power management on my PC. I’d close my laptop, take it home. Then. When I went to open it. It would freeze. I’d have to hard reset it. That took a lot of time.
Jay had a Mac, so I asked him if he had Mac sleeping issues. He said never. So, I ponied up the extra cost for the Mac and haven’t looked back. The ability to wake up and go to sleep was the number one issue. I live with the other inconviences of a Mac soley for this. I’d be happy to switch back at the end of life for my current laptop if the PC laptops will wake up and go to sleep reliably and quickly. Looks like Microsoft is about to solve it. Once people try it, I’d love to hear how it works on laptops.
One thing about technology. It’s usually easy to switch back when someone gets it right.
Published on June 11, 2009
in Ideas.
A recent NYT article pegs Craigslist at $100 Million in Revenues. They have something like thirty employees. Maybe the employee cost is about $6 Million a year. A rough guess on all the overhead, servers etc is $20 Million.
That leaves profits of about $75 Million per year or $2.5 Million in profits per employee. Google’s profits per employee are a little over $200K which is pretty close to Microsofts, although I think Microsoft’s is more impressive since they are a much larger company. Something for Google to aspire to. But. Wow. Craigslist. That’s phenominal and a great example of how the web can scale with the right business model.
Published on June 11, 2009
in Ideas.
We’ve recently done a bit of pagerank sculpting to HubPages to stop following links to our paginated pages. There might not be as much benefit as we hoped. All the details from Search Engine Land. I was in the room when Matt Cutts made this remark - felt like a bomb had been dropped on all the natural SEOs.
What I’m still trying to understand is if the nofollow link is good for indexing efficiencies. If we no follow all of our paginated tag and topic pages does that direct the Google Bot to more important pages with a greater chance of getting those pages in the index? Maybe we can get an answer from Google on this…
Published on June 11, 2009
in Ideas.
CircuitCity.com is back after Systemax purchased the brand and domain at bankruptcy auction for $14 million. Systemax also owns TigerDirect.com and acquired CompUSA last year. CircuitCity.com was quickly relaunched last week to capitalize on the remaining brand strength and traffic to the website.
How much was the link equity worth?
While big brands may enjoy more favor in the serps, I think it would be very damaging if a site was sold and it’s ranking vanished. Even if the acquiring company owns all ten sites on the front page.
My gut is there will be massive consolidation of websites. Although the web is so fractured it probably won’t make a large dent in how much search traffic is rolled up, but the value of sites (The kind that do well in serps) would plummet if they lost their rankings when sold.
As long as sites hold their rankings for competitive search terms in the natural results, I suspect the practice of acquiring these sites will grow. I’m sure manufacturers are already acquiring content sites that rank for the products they sell. Maybe Dell should buy Laptop Mag and have three listings on the first page for laptops?
The time might be here where large corporations are SEO savvy and know a great ROI when they see it.
