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Sitting in the big chair marked Dumbass this week is an annoying little SEO outfit from Manchester called Web Propeller.

I ranted yesterday about how they were evil site scraping bastards because they basically steal the content from this blog within an hour of me posting it. I’m not the only one they steal from. They scrape Marty’s content too, as well as Niall Kennedy’s blog and others, listing us all as “contributors” on their blog home page. What’s up with that? As someone commented on my post yesterday, perhaps they should change that title to “unwilling, unwitting contributors”.

Well as luck would have it, they scraped my post from yesterday. So now they are proudly announcing on their own site what evil site scraping bastards they really are. And the kicker? They’ve tagged the post under the category seo problems. Bwa ha haaaaa!

And just in case somebody from Web Propeller notices their stupidity and deletes the post from their site (perhaps while on a break from stealing other people’s content), I’ve posted a screen shot:

Some days, I really love my job. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if they scraped this post too?

UPDATE: ROTFL

UPDATE 2: ROTFLMAO

I think it’s time they changed their catch phrase from “making you rank better” to “making you rank better for your own stupidity”.

UPDATE 3: The penny has dropped. According to a public apology by the scraper himself, Web Propeller is a fictional company and the domain is owned by a company called Creative Suit.

The site scraping was apparently nothing more than an unauthorized experiment by a naughty junior staff member. His boss is plenty mad about it and is asking for suitable punishment suggestions. I was going to suggest they make him use this picture as his screen saver, but figured that was too cruel.

Apology accepted! Maybe site scrapers will think twice now before doing this to anyone else.

Popularity: 40%

Yep, check it out. A mob called Web Propeller are scraping every single post I write on this blog, within an hour of me posting them. Compare my recent post to theirs.  They’ve even stolen my image!

I feel a site scraping bastards Googlebomb coming on! Anyone care to help?

Popularity: 36%

SiteProNews have now published my 2 part article based on the Webstock 2008 presentation by Google’s Senior Research Scientist, Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning.

Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.

In his presentation, Craig, who is New Zealand born and bred, explained how Google uses science to develop more precise search techniques. I found his talk absolutely riveting and typed frantically during the whole thing in my hurry to blog it.

Here are a couple of classic excerpts:

Google used to do a terrible job of defining terms. Craig noticed people were searching for “definition of…”, or “what is a….” etc so he wanted the search engine to provide better results for these searches. He found lots of web pages that contained glossaries and definitions, so he hacked up a Perl script to get the glossary formats.

The first recall results were only 50 percent accurate. He wanted to improve this rate, so he did some experiments with the data. But he could never reach an accuracy level he was happy with. It was later he realized that most of the questions people actually needed answers to could be answered with his crappy little Perl script. He concluded that 100 percent accuracy is not important, that scale is much more important.

Craig says that once a week, a person at each data center has a list of all the failed hard disks and walks around the datacenter with a pile of hard drives, replacing them one at a time. Velcro is Google’s secret weapon! All Google’s hard disks are velcroed in. This allows super quick service and replacement time. So curiously, there is no downside to hardware failures at Google, because they are expected and managed via scale.

Fascinating stuff!

Popularity: 29%

For you naughty non-subscribers out there who’ve missed it, our March Search Light newsletter went out last week.

Apart from some of the more interesting Q and A’s from this blog, this month’s issue includes an article about how to use keyphrase differentiators in your SEO campaign and information on our SMX Sydney free pass competition. If you’re not already a subscriber, there’s a big tab at the top marked (funnily enough) NEWSLETTER. Click it to subscribe - duh!

Popularity: 13%

We’ve been busy bees at Search Engine College this week. First up, we’ve created new Certification Seals for graduating students to place on their web sites as proof they have completed a Certification course with us.

The new seals replace our existing ribbon-style seals and contain the student id number embedded within them to aid verification of a student’s Certification status by potential employers or clients. You can see an example on our Certification page.

Inspired by the Google AdWords Professional program (GAP) and the verification page provided for every GAP, we have also created a dedicated Certification Status page for every graduate of Search Engine College. The status page lists a student’s id number, the course/s they have successfully completed and any resulting Certification. It also displays a copy of their Certification Seal for verification purposes. Example here.

Any graduate wishing to replace their old Certification Seal with the new version and obtain their Status Page URL should contact me.

Popularity: 30%