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Held Hostage By Craptastic Comcast Service

Sometimes life just throws all sorts of crap at you. I haven't updated this blog in months because work has been insane. On top of the laundry list of challenges in addition to the heavy work schedule since the start of this year, my Internet went down on Sunday, March 26. I had some issues with it dropping a week or so previous, but on this Sunday when I called Comcast customer service (twice, once that went on for half an hour to no avail), they claimed they had known outages and were working on it. When my service was still not restored on Monday the 27th, I called again and set up a service appointment. The earliest they could give me was Thursday, which I was pretty pissed off about already, but grudgingly accepted. A scheduling conflict became apparent and the next day I rescheduled for the later time slot (11-2) on that same Thursday.

Wednesday evening I got the confirmation call, which stated the correct time of the appointment for the following day. Late Wednesday night, Internet connectivity was restored, but I didn't trust it (because it had come and gone a few times in a matter of 15 minutes) and still planned for a technician to come out.

On Thursday my connection seemed ok until around lunch time. This would be perfect since the tech was supposed to arrive between 11am and 2pm - and for once, they could actually witness the problem instead of everything mysteriously working during that time...if they actually arrived. At five 'til two, I called Comcast to make sure they were coming, and it turns out they were not. They proceeded to tell me that a technician was out on Wednesday, and then changed the story to "I have no appointment in the system for you." So the lady whose voice is in the confirmation recordings must have called me up personally as an April fools gag, right? The service rep then proceeded to tell me that they have no openings and the earliest appointment they can give me is Sunday! Talking to a "supervisor" made no difference, and I suspected they just did the age old trick of passing the phone to the person next to them, who doesn't give a damn about you or Comcast service either. They are drones and talking to them only reinforced that, as claims of the ridiculousness of the situation and why I have to pay the price (in time wasted/lost) for the screw-up were dismissed in a monotonous droning voice over and over. Meanwhile I will be waiting a full week with mostly no Internet and substandard TV service (it's been breaking up and dropping sound on and off) before anyone will even come out and look at our issues. And chances are that they won't even be able to fix the problem, since my neighbors have been experiencing similar issues as well.

What more could I expect but the usual Craptastic service from Comcast? Don't even get me started on the number of times I was told that if I had upgraded to a business account I would have next-day service. Let's put this into perspective: if I were running a small office on a business account (as it's intended) and had 5-10 people lose a day of work due to a Comcast outage, that would still be unacceptable and I'd be paying much more for the service. There is no way to dress it up - Comcast's service sucks. If they did not have a monopoly in our area, I would drop them in a second - and I plan to the day Verizon gets FIOS service in here.

The bottom line is that - yes, losing Internet access sucks, especially when you telecommute and own a website that you need to maintain - but it's excrutiatingly frustrating when other people's incompetence makes life harder on you. And to top it off, they were unwilling to lift a finger to make things right. If there was any competition, Comcast would be gone. The service that we pay for from Comcast - both TV and Internet - is already obscenely overpriced. The customer service that they provide is a disgrace and completely unacceptable even if the service was free. To top it off, no one is accountable. If they were even accountable for their actions or serving customers, then the drone-like attitudes would be gone. In retrospect, it's pretty clear they don't care about a damn thing from "Hello." I guess I should have seen the rest coming then.

Comcast is a dinosaur that has long outlasted its time and deserves to be extinct. The more I read about Comcast's strong arm lobbying tactics as well as other underhanded tactics used in court, the more I realize that's the only reason they are still around - they spend all their effort protecting their monopoly, not pleasing their customers or tending to their network.

A Guide To On-Page Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is comprised of several facets, and new facets are being added often as the search algorithms get more advanced and smarter. As new layers of complexity get added to these algoritms, the older factets often get forgotten or talked about less because they are not the hot topics any more. But the fact is that often those older facets are still important to the core strategy, and a newcomer entering the web arena who discounts them may have a harder time succeeding. The facets of Search Engine Optimization right now are:

• On-page optimization: was most important in the early days of search (along with meta-tags) but has waned in importance over the years as other factors for ranking have been introduced. However, on-page optimization is still central to any SEO strategy, especially for long-tail searches (the abundance of lower competition search phrases and their frequency of searches based on power laws), as noted here.


• Link Building: Google made the link the currency of the web by factoring it so heavily into their pagerank algorithm. After link buying became widespread via link brokers, paid reviews and paid directories, Google has steadily reduced the importance of links alone. Links are still an indication of authority, however, and quality and diversity of links and link text are still important trust/authority indicators, moreso than just total number of backlinks.


• Trust/Authority Ranking?: Factors to validate a site's authority, such as who links to them, age of the domain, and temporal analysis of content creation and link building are thought to be weighed more heavily now, making social marketing a very effective marketing and SEO strategy currently.

Start with the basics and make sure you're doing things right for on-page optimization. On-page optimization alone will not earn you great rankings for any competitive keywords, but doing it properly means that you're not handicapping yourself down the road, and it can get you ranked for some low-competition long-tail phrases that accumulate over time to become a significant source of traffic. On-page optimization also cascades over to your link building campaign, since poorly crafted titles or headings can sabotage your efforts to build quality links from social media and other bloggers. On-page optimization is often overlooked these days, as it is not the controlling factor to get ranked on the search engines, but it is, in fact, an important foundation that should not be overlooked or neglected. On-page optimization should not drive content creation to the detriment of making content interesting for human consumption, but should be applied in an intelligent manner to make content work best for both humans and search engines.

Continue reading "A Guide To On-Page Search Engine Optimization."

How Much Can you Trust Google With Your Email?

Like many people, I've been using Google's hosted email solution for some time. Google is pretty good at filtering spam, so (again) like many others, I let my email go to Google, have them filter the spam, and then pull it down via Thunderbird. When I notice a lull in email, I usually think something is up, and today upon logging in to the hosted email account directly, I see dozens of legitimate emails in the spam folder, including my Google Analytics report from Google themselves. Wonderful.

Now my spam folder is thousands of messages large, so it's not really a good use of time to go through them all looking for false positives, but I'll have to sample the last few days at least.

Conspiracy threories aside (I've never bought into any of the Google conspiracy theories I've heard), the question that has to be asked is at what point does a free service like this become a liability to your busniness? It's definitely made me think twice about hosting any more domain email accounts with them.

I just thought I'd warn some of you about my experience and I'd be interested in hearing if you've experience the same issue lately.

Content Is King, But Marketing Is Queen...

Problogger.com recently posted 13 Tips on Building a Profitable Blog, derived from Gary Vaynerchuk's Blog World Expo keynote. In this article, one line in particular struct a chord with me:

content is king but marketing is queen and the queen runs the household.

I really like this and I obviously could not have said it better. This statement concisely summarizes what I was trying to say in my recent post, entitled "Debunking The 'Build It And They Will Come' Myth For Websites, and Is Content Really King?."

In non-analogy terms, content creation alone is usually not enough to create a hugely successful blog or web site, and the content you do create should be part of and integrate with your SEO and marketing efforts. Marketing is usually what really puts a site over the top in success. Sometimes the marketing and content are one in the same (e.g. linkbait, controversial articles, viral content) and other times the marketing is totally separate.

Continue reading "Content Is King, But Marketing Is Queen...."

Miss Teen USA 2007 South Carolina For V.P.?

Is it just me or does this:

remind you of this?:

Oh wait, I just noticed someone actually posted the latter as a response to the former on YouTube, so I guess it's not just me.

I really don't care for politics on any level, but Palin sure isn't doing her party any favors with a number of comments I've heard.

P.S. 45 minutes of tonight's debate is about all I could take.