I am a search god

So over the past couple of hours I have been doing what you could call an excessive amount of google searches. I am currently working on SEO for 4 different websites, so you can imagine how many searches I’ve been performing trying to come up with the most successful keyword strategies.  I never would have thought anything about it until suddenly this screen popped up.

Apparently I made google angry with my amazing searching skills.

A few weeks ago while doing some search engine optimization at Dempsey Graphics with another team member, we noticed that we were getting completely different search results than each other on Google.  Certain search phrases we were monitoring showed our site on the front page in his results and the third page on mine.  This is a huge difference!  On average, the total search results varried by 10 – 30,000 results.  This was obviously why our ranking was different for each others searches.  But why were we getting different search totals for the same search phrase?

It turns out that the only difference between his computer and mine, was his openDNS nameservers.  I hate the way openDNS redirects bad URLs to its own search results, so I never use it… but it does making jumping from network to network a bit easier.  So he deleted his openDNS nameservers and BAM!  We now were both seeing the exact same google results.

Im not really sure why openDNS shows such drastically different results… something fishy is going on!  Does anyone know why?

There are many web developers (like myself) who absolutely hate Flash.  Yes, we know that it can look cool when done properly.  However, there’s no way around the fact that the internet is successful because it is easy to find what your looking for using google and other search engines.  Flash is still just a movie and cannot be indexed by google.  Information is pointless if no one can find it.  Anyways, there is already plenty of information on the web about why flash sucks, so that’s not the point of this post.

Here is the point: LiveFaceOnWeb.com ( I don’t want to create a link, just c&p it!).  I have been seeing these “flash people” for years, and they won’t die!  When will people learn that the internet is NOT TV!  If some one goes to your website and has no control over what content they look at or at what rate they receive it, your site sucks!  Despite what companies like this say, flash people do not add a “personal touch” to your site.  If anything they add an automated cold and obnoxious feeling.

Here is a common scenario to show why flash people (and music on sites in general) suck:  Your listening to your favorite artist in iTunes and surfing the web…. BAM!!! Your speakers begin to shake violently and distort with the booming sound of an over compressed voice talking about how awesome some company is; you scramble for the audio knob frantically to turn it down.  “What the hell”, you say to yourself as you search for the stop button on this “flash person”.  Unbelievably, some times, flash people don’t even have a stop or pause button!

The Summary: Flash people are annoying, they do not add a “personal touch” to a site, and most importantly they are counter productive to increasing web usability.  You know that angry feeling you get when you watch a shitty movie that was once an awesome book?  Thats the feeling I get when I see flash people talking about things that would have been better as a paragraph of indexable text.

Here I am, there you are, and this is my first post!  As time goes on I will be adding articles about my experiences as a website developer.  I am always learning new things, and discovering new scripts almost on a daily basis.  This will be a place for me to share my experiences and link to all of the great sites I come across.