I am constantly inundated with spam from supposed “SEO” (Search Engine Optimization) companies that go something like this:

We are interested to get your website on first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing. Please get back to us for more details.

These are always the same, normally someone sitting in India using a Gmail account, not disclosing their website and claiming to be named “Bob”, “Anna” or any other American sounding name.  (On occasion it’s some bored college kid, trying to not get a real job, which I can respect, but I still am not going for it.)

To be fair, there probably are legit “White Hat” SEO companies out there, but the “Black Hat” crowd has muddied the waters so bad that it’d be hard to spot them.

Without going into all of that, I’ve came up with my own canned response that just as full of crap:

We have all the SEO we can handle AND are already on the 1st page of every site. We own half of the Internet.

But hey, if you want to sponsor us to help you get on the 1st page too, feel free to do so.

All joking aside, if you’re really interested in hiring someone for SEO, here’s one main fact that you need to know:

No one can guarantee you the #1 spot in any search engine.

Now with enough money, you can purchase the top spot for an ad for a specific keyword in the search engines, but that’s a different animal which has absolutely nothing to do with the SEO company/individual. Money talks & why pay someone else to spend your money for you?

Anyway, if you want to talk general “SEO” practices, I’ll leave that for Watershed Studio.  And before you ask, no, SEO isn’t an official service that we provide, mainly as a business choice due to the nonsense mentioned above.

Via The Wall Street Journal News Alerts:

Simon Property offered to buy General Growth Properties Inc. for about $10 billion, as the world’s largest shopping-mall operator seeks to absorb the No. 2 mall owner in the U.S. while General Growth grapples with its exit from bankruptcy court.

Although shopping-mall real estate investment trusts have been struggling with declines in consumer spending, Simon is viewed as one of the healthiest. Reporting better-than-expected profit for the fourth quarter last month, Simon was still hurt by write-downs and lower occupancy rates, but it predicted brighter days for 2010.

They just sold off some malls, but lately they’ve been buying more. Hmmm.

Cabela’s has put their 96 acres in Greenwood up for sale, thus effectively removing any hopes that they will be here in the Hoosier state any time soon, if at all.  Not that I find that surprising (they officially announced that they were pulling out back in July), but it is very unfortunate due to the money that was poured into developing the surrounding area solely based on the announcement of their opening.

The Indy Star also has a brief article about this.

Via The Wall Street Journal Alerts:

General Motors posted a 45% drop in September U.S. light-vehicle sales, while Chrysler’s sales fell 42%. Ford saw a much more modest drop of 5.1%. Among Japanese auto makers, Toyota said its September U.S. sales declined 16% from a year earlier, while Nissan saw its results fall 7% and Honda said its sales slid 23%. The auto industry was hurt by the expiration of the U.S. government’s “cash-for-clunkers” rebate program.

File this under “duh”. And don’t be surprised for some time to come at the repercussions of program.

Via The Wall Street Journal:

A company owned by Skype’s founders filed a copyright suit against Skype, a move that could complicate the $2 billion deal by eBay to sell the online communications company to a group of investors.

Joltid, owned by Skype’s founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, filed suit seeking an injunction against Skype and statutory damages for copyright infringements. Joltid owns a peer-to-peer technology that is used in Skype’s software.

As I said on Blue Shotgun Radio #40, eBay was extremely ignorant in this deal from the get-go and I have no idea what the new investors are thinking.  Nothing good can come of this in my opinion.

If you’re getting a new online phone number, I’d opt for Gizmo.  I have had one of each for a few years & like Gizmo a little better than Skype.

Mel Simon died this morning at the age of 82. Mel was best known around Indianapolis as chairman emeritus of the board of Simon Property Group (mainly malls, malls & more malls) and owner of the Indiana Pacers.  To say that he had a major impact on the city, as well as the entire country, would be an understatement.  Most recently Mel and his wife, Bren, donated $25 million to Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center at the IU School of Medicine campus in Indianapolis.

Check out the Indy Star for an in depth article about Mel Simon.

Via the Indy Star:

Eli Lilly and Co. said today that it plans to cut employee headcount worldwide by 5,500, or about 13 percent, by the end of 2011, as part of a move to slash $1 billion in costs.

I’m not sure if that’s a sign of the times or not, but that is sad regardless, especially since Lilly is a major employer in the city (who doesn’t know someone that works or has worked at Lilly, directly or indirectly?).

As a small business owner, this “Health Care Reform” nonsense makes me cringe & uncontrollably start muttering things under my breath. While I won’t get nailed with this at the moment, it’s not hard to see what will happen for many small businesses.

It’s really quite simple actually:

1. Small businesses will hire fewer employees. We’re seeing this already all over the place due to the economy.  Less money equals less jobs. So sure, let’s keep that unemployment ball rolling along.
    
2. Employees will be offered crappy insurance coverage and/or pay through the nose to have it. Anyone who has worked for a small business probably has seen this already. Yes, there is insurance available, but if you’re in need of family coverage you’re probably going to get hosed with the cost of this.  And many will opt to not take the coverage as taking the risk and paying for doctor visits out of pocket looks to be cheaper (I have seen this in very large corporations as well).  So how is that helping the health insurance situation?

Anyway, if they do pass this it’s going to be interesting to watch as they begin to see this work itself out on paper. “What do you mean we’ve poured all of this money into it and we haven’t helped matters? Go fix the numbers and don’t come back until you do. In the meantime, lets raise taxes some more to cover it.”

I know that those two predictions will anger some people, but I don’t see how health care can truly be reformed until we get to the source of the problem; the insurance companies.  While I hate the government meddling in things like this, if all of the people who voted for this administration really want the governments’ help in the matter, how about having them require insurance companies to offer the same policy to everyone for the same price, regardless of the size of your company.  Yes, there are still some flaws in that (like, dare I say it, the portion paid by the employer), but at least it’s a start.

Am I wrong? Let me know your thoughts.

Last week Jeff shared his subscription woes with Fast Company so I thought that I’d share my own recent woes with The Wall Street Journal.

I signed up for a print & online subscription to The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, October 19th.  52 weeks (plus a few free weeks) for $99 (or $8.75/month).

To date I have only received issues on:

• Friday, October 24th
• Monday, October 27th

I was told that my subscription was to start on Thursday, October 23rd, which means I have missed 3 out of 5 issues (or every other issue):

• Thursday, October 23rd
• Saturday, October 25th
• Tuesday, October 28th

Today I went to log in and it told me that my subscription had expired and wanted me to “renew” for $349.  Renew? What are you talking about? And at $349 a year? I don’t think so.

I don’t recall seeing an every-other-day option (and who would want that anyway), so something is obviously very wrong here so I’ve e-mailed them in hopes of getting things resolved.  This is very frustrating and as if I didn’t already have enough to worry about.

[Update #1: November 6th, 2008]

After the three missed issues, The Wall Street Journal began to show up regularly along with my copy of The Indianapolis Star.  Apparently they had to find a carrier to deliver it, which appears to be my Star carrier. But this morning my copy of WSJ was nowhere to be seen.  I imagine that there are a lot of working pieces to putting out a national newspaper, but come on guys, you’ve been publishing for over a century.

Jeff put up a good post about Katie Couric doing marketing…and someone thinking that’s a good idea to push some books.

Check it out.