by cameron | Nov 18, 2008 | Brisbane, Melbourne, TPN
A few weeks ago, Google decided to drop TPN from its index. Why? They apparently think we’re lowly spammers. I need your help.
First, a little history –
As some of you may recall, back in March, on the day I was leaving Melbourne to relocate to Brisbane, I found out that TPN had been massively hacked. We’d parted ways with out IT partner a few months prior and had spent that time waiting for our new IT partner, a large firm in Melbourne, to get their act together and provide us with a contract to begin work. In the meantime, our servers weren’t upgraded with the latest patches, someone got in through a security hole and went to town exploiting the hell out of our backend. Almost every one of TPN’s 100+ sub-domains had hidden pharmaceutical spam all over it, our email server was sending out spam, there were even a couple of banking phishing sites.
So I spent the first week waiting for the new IT partner to help us out. As it turned out, they were useless and did nothing. So I started looking for a NEW partner. As you know, TPN runs on the smell of an oily rag, so finding a new IT partner wasn’t going to be easy. I can’t just call up IBM Global Services and offer them $1 trillion to create miracles.
However, after I called for help on Twitter, the guys from Pollenizer quickly introduced me to a firm in India called XMinds. Xminds jumped straight into our system and started cleaning it up and re-building it. They were Oscar Goldman and TPN’s servers were their Steve Austin (but they didn’t cost anywhere near six million dollars).
We cleaned out our servers (or so we thought) and re-built and re-launched. The process took about 3 weeks.
Fast forward to Nov 5 when I was notified by a few people that TPN wasn’t listed in Google’s index. I jumped into my Google web account where I found a notification from them saying they had discovered pharamaceutical spam on one of our old, long-dead sub-domains and, as a result, had delisted our ENTIRE site from their index. Not just the one sub-domain, our ENTIRE site. No warning. No communication. Just delisted us, a war of shock and awe launched on our site.
I immediately had XMinds delete the old sub-domain completely and then I re-submitted TPN into the Google index. That was 13 days ago. We’re still not listed.
I’ve asked around, trying to find someone at Google to talk to, and I’ve been told that I’m wasting my time, that the process will take 30+ days and even then there will probably be a penalty to our googlerank.
Now, I know TPN isn’t the biggest and most important site in the world. But, on the other hand, we’re not totally small fry either. We’ve got about 400,000 – 500,000 unique visitors a month and over 6 million page views a month. We’ve never done anything illegal or even dubious. I’ve always maintained a clean site. No gambling, no porn, nothing.
And, like many sites, a great deal of our traffic comes from Google. Fortunately, iTunes is probably a bigger referral of traffic, but Google is #2. And being dropped from their index is hurting us.
So… if anyone out there knows of anything we can do, or anyone we can talk to, to get TPN re-listed in Google’s index, I’d appreciate the help.
by cameron | Sep 18, 2008 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
An infomercial for Tex Perkins and His Lazyboys album “No. 1’s & No. 2’s”. This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time and it’s also the best viral marketing idea I’ve seen in ages. I think it’s going to go off. And the best thing about it is – this is exactly the kind of schmaltzy act you’d expect to see at places like Crown in Melbourne – but Tex is taking the piss out of them… and making money from doing it at the same time. Brilliant!
As Tex says:
Hi, my name’s Tex Perkins and I was huge during the early 90’s (a golden period for scumbag indy rockers). Having endured a 25 year career in the music biz, I’ve done and seen it all.
So here we are at the beginning of the new century and the record industry is on its knees, ravaged by years of careless self indulgent big spending and a complete inability to understand the potential of the new technologies, poor fools. It was within this context that I began work on my last contracted recording for Universal music. All was going well, and I was 3/4 way through the writing and recording of this ALL original album, when I was called in for a meeting with the biggest heads of the company. They showed me the figures, and they were very grim indeed. If things continued to slide, George Ash, the head of the company may have had to sell his private helicopter! They then began to openly beg me, that’s right, BEG me to help save the company and perhaps the entire record business.
It was then we came upon THE IDEA: I would record an album of classic cover versions, songs so good, so irresistible, so well known, so…classic, that the general public would have no choice but to hunt down, buy and love a bunch of songs that they can hear on Gold fm pretty much every day of the week anyway….. hmmm….
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeK3s-rIwaU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1]
by cameron | Sep 16, 2008 | Melbourne, Podcast, TPN
Cam & Kev (from TPN’s SOUSED podcast) hit a few more Melbourne cocktail bars a couple of weeks ago… it was RESEARCH goddamit!…. to chat with some of the owners and bartenders who have been nominated for the upcoming Melbourne Bar Awards.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bobSCmDszXI&hl=en&fs=1]
by cameron | Aug 20, 2008 | environment, Melbourne, Podcast
This morning I was given an opportunity to interview Hilary Mine, Alcatel-Lucent’s Managing Director Australasia and North Asia, about the launch of the Alcatel-Lucent Broadband Environment Challenge 2008 they did this morning in Melbourne with Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
The Challenge looks to award the Eckermann-TJA Prize ($10,000 provided by Alcatel-Lucent) for the best paper on broadband telecommunications applications and/or solutions that have the potential to deliver significant benefits to environmental sustainability.
Hilary and I discussed how the Challenge came together (this is its second year) and some of the ways that broadband might be able to contribute positively to environmental sustainability. Hilary mentioned that she telecommutes one day a week to show her senior team that it is possible and practical. I think more large Australia companies should be encouraging their staff to telecommute. As I mention in the show, we were talking about this stuff back at Ozemail in 1996 and it surprises me that it isn’t more commonplace yet.
More information about the competition can be found at www.tsa.org.au. Entries close Monday 6 October 2008.
To be completely up front (as you know I always am), this is a paid gig and my client is Alcatel-Lucent.
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by cameron | Jul 3, 2008 | climate change, Melbourne, Podcast
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My guest today is Peter Singer.
He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), University of Melbourne. Outside academic circles, Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation, widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal liberation movement.
I invited him onto the show to talk about the recent news from Spain that they will soon probably extend basic legal rights to all non-human hominids, an idea that has been driven by an organization that Peter co-founded, The Great Ape Project. We also talk about the basic ethics of utilitarianism and how the best thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is to stop eating meat.
The G’Day World theme music:
Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)
More On This Album
