A staff member here sent me a screengrab from a Google search he had made and pointed out one of the Sponsored Links / AdWords ads at the top of the page (see screen grab below) . He had conducted a search for *cheap glasses new zealand* and Google displayed a range of organic and paid results on the SERP.

Here’s a screengrab of the original search page showing the top 3 sponsored results:

When my colleague clicked on the 3rd Sponsored Link on the page, it took him to a 404 Error Page. Thinking that the URL was simply malformed and he could find what he needed from the home page, he stripped the tracking URL down to the top level domain and refreshed the page. Again, he was taken to a 404 Error Page.

At first I thought perhaps the site was offline temporarily or simply not loading in his browser so I asked him to send me the destination URL from the ad so I could try.

Because I have the Google Toolbar installed, when I tried to view the same broken link, instead of a standard 404 error, I received a Google error page stating: “Oops! This link appears to be broken. Did you mean: www.­lessforspecs.­co.­nz?”

Aha! Mystery solved. The advertiser Less for Specs had accidently used dot com in their destination URL instead of .co.nz. Turns out, the dot com site doesn’t even exist, which is probably for the best as they would have been paying to send traffic to their competitor’s site if it did.

Normally, the AdWords system detects malformed destination URLs and either doesn’t approve the ad or sends you an alert very quickly and pauses the ad for you. However, for whatever reason (perhaps the dot com site did exist at one point), the ad was allowed to go live.

An identical search today doesn’t trigger the same ad, so perhaps the problem is resolved. Maybe Google alerted them of the problem. Perhaps the mistake was made by a 3rd party agency managing the site’s PPC campaign. But who knows how many people clicked on the link and were taken to a 404 error page before it was fixed? Who knows how many dollars the mistake cost the advertiser in click costs in the meantime?

Now, I don’t mean to single out Less For Specs. I’ve seen similar errors in Pay Per Click ads by many companies over the years, heck, I’ve made them myself. But seeing this example reminded me that we should be taking more care with our PPC campaigns in order to get the best value for money out of them.

Here’s a list of common PREVENTABLE errors I’ve seen in PPC ads:

• Malformed destination URLs.
• Incorrect or misleading display URLs.
• Destination URLs leading to a *this page is under construction* placeholder.
• Forgetting to pause a PPC campaign during a scheduled site outage (I have to admit guilt on this one!)
• Moving a domain but forgetting to redirect PPC landing pages.
• Not knowing about an unscheduled site outage for 48 hours.
• Spelling or grammatical errors within ads.
• Sexist, racist or otherwise ignorant ad wording.

Yes, some PPC systems such as AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter have built in checks to prevent dumb user errors, but they’re not bullet proof. Dumbass happens. Just don’t let it happen to you.

It all began last week when Read Write Web, (a very popular blog based here in New Zealand), published a post about Facebook’s new partnership with AOL called FB Wants to Be Your One True Login.

Apparently the post started ranking in the top Google SERPs for *facebook login*. Nothing wrong with that so far, it makes perfect sense given the post title and TrustRank the site has built up in Google.

BUT, all these strange and inappropriately angry comments with excessive use of exclamation marks began appearing on the RWW post.

Comments like this:

“When can we log in?”

“I don’t like the new facebook. Why fix something that isn’t broken. this really sucks..”

“I just want to log in to Facebook – what with the red color and all?”

“Quit this crap and let me sign in!

“All I wanted to do was LOG IN TO MY FACE BOOK ACCOUNT! I don’t like this new way! “If it an’t broke why fix it?”

“Can we log into face book? This is crazy I want to get all my info off and be done with this.”

“How do you get in?”

“I just want to get into my Facebook page.”

“This is such a mess I can’t do a thing on my facebook . The changes you have made are ridiculous,I can’t even login!!!!!I am very upset!!!”

“I was just learning,why would you mess it up?”

“All I want to do is log in, this sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN.”

RWW staff were confused at first, but then it dawned on them. Instead of bookmarking Facebook.com or entering www.facebook.com in their browser address bar like anyone with half a brain, all these commenters were apparently typing *facebook login* into Google whenever they wanted to login to Facebook and then clicking randomly on one of the results. The RWW post just happened to be the one they clicked on.

Having arrived at the Read Write Web post about Facebook, they somehow thought it WAS the *new* Facebook, despite the completely different color, design and the very clear Read Write Web heading at the top of the page. Not only did they think they were AT Facebook, but these commenters, in their hundreds, somehow managed to ignore the post itself, work out how to comment ON the post and leave their inappropriate rants about how much the hated the *new* Facebook. Except for one commenter, who claimed he liked the new design.

As the hours wore on and the page rose even higher in the Google results for *facebook login*, the comments became even more inappropriately angry and amusing:

“I WANT THE OLD FACEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!!”

“I am going to delete my account (IF I CAN EVER LOG IN) as this SUCKS BIG TIME ! If this does not get back to NORMAL you are going to lose a lot of folks who hate this and as you can see from all the comments they think it sucks too !!! facebook was great for connecting with old friends …now, NOT SO MUCH. SO HOW DO I LOG IN?”

“Bring me back old facebook this is sheet”

“I HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK PAGE , IN FACT I HAVE STARTED TO VISIT IT LESS, BECAUSE IT IS A HASSLE”

“Who’s idea was this?? Hope he’s not too big to fire cause he just LOST a bunch of faithful users. Chances are it’ll never be the same as it was before….cya”

“I’m going back to my f*ckin space u ass holes have to f*ck up a good this !!!!! dumn asses

To add to the hilarity, a Facebook user called Laraine (bless her heart), found a new way for Facebook users to solve their *problem*:

“For those of you that want to get in face book now just go to Bing..put in face book and search (or it will pop up) hit on face book login and it takes you  to your password page…i did it…. if this ever gets back to normal I will use the address bar from now on…..”

Read Write Web added a big bold paragraph to the original post stating *This site is not Facebook* and wrote a new post addressing the issue called We’re Still Not Facebook, but they continued to be bombarded with flames. It’s a little something I like to call The Walmart Effect.

There are two morals to this story:

1) There should be some type of study done on the correlation between IQ and the use of exclamation marks.

2) You need to design your web site and your software for the lowest common denominator.

I’m reminded of Damian Conway’s fantastic presentation at Webstock Web 2.Overwhelming – 22 Ways to Frustrate Your Visitors where he amusingly drilled into us that the majority of our web site users are NOT geeks, they’re NOT tech savvy and as this example shows, Dumb User Errors (DUE) are terrifyingly commonplace.

Make your stuff embarrassingly easy to use, because Dumb Happens.

The email announced that the recipient had been granted a free upgrade to Velocity Gold, the Gold level membership of Virgin Blue’s frequent flyer programme for a period of one year. The email went on to describe perks available to Gold members when travelling including:

• Free Lounge membership, so you can catch up on work, relax and escape the airport crowds.
• Priority check-in.
• Up to 32kg of checked baggage at no cost.
• Two personalised baggage tags

No reason for the unexpected upgrade was given, apart from “you came so close to making it on your own”, suggesting that the recipient’s Velocity points for the past 12 months came close to the number required to qualify for Gold status. Except they didn’t. At least not in my case. Not even close. You normally need to reach 50,000 points to qualify.

My husband received the same email, as did many others, judging by the discussion on Twitter shortly thereafter.

Still, it was a delightful surprise. Feeling chuffed, I click on a link within the email to an explanation of Velocity Gold. ONOZ. It led to a bizarre error message stating that the whole thing had been a terrible mistake:

Friday the 13th strike
Oops! Due to an error, you may have received an email regarding a Gold upgrade by mistake. Please disregard the free upgrade communication. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Virgin Blue is yet to offer any explanation for the error, apart from a single tweet blaming the email screw up on Friday the 13th. The backlash on Twitter so far has been brutal. Result? Gold Standard Marketing FAIL.

What do you think? Should Virgin Blue honour their original offer? Or is their Friday 13th excuse enough? Please add your comments below.

UPDATE 1: According to @bengrubb, Virgin Blue is blaming an IT glitch for the problem.

UPDATE 2: I created a new hash tag on Twitter for the incident called #velocitygate and it seems to have taken off.

UPDATE 3: Not sure when it went up, but the Velocity Rewards site now features an apology front and center of their home page. It’s a step in the right direction:

UPDATE 4: According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald today (17 November), the email glitch was human error, pure and simple and accompanied by tears of panic as it was posted out to over 1 million recipients by mistake. No action will be taken by Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over the glitch and if Velocity members still have an issue, they are being advised to contact the airline directly. Drama over, move along please, nothing to see here.

]]> http://www.ask-kalena.com/social-media/dumbass-of-the-week-virgin-blue/feed/ 22 http://www.ask-kalena.com/seo/dumbass-of-the-week-derek-powazek/ http://www.ask-kalena.com/seo/dumbass-of-the-week-derek-powazek/#comments Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:20:58 +0000 Kalena Jordan http://www.ask-kalena.com/?p=1337 It’s been a long time since we’ve had a candidate sitting on the Dumbass throne. But this month, we’ve had two. I couldn’t decide which to blog first, so I decided to go with the one who made me the angriest. That, my friends, was Derek Powazek who has decided that Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) is worthless.

Let me start by saying that I’m familiar with Derek’s many years in the industry. I know he’s worked at Blogger and Technorati and has been on the web a year longer than me. I know he works with Internet start ups and big names like Hewlett Packard.  I also know that Derek was named one of the top 40 “Industry Influencers” of 2007.

I’ve even heard Derek speak at Webstock about community driven websites and live-blogged his crowd-sourcing wisdom so others could learn from it.

All this just makes his anti SEO rant this week all the more frightening in its ignorance. Derek claims:

“Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.“

In fact, Derek has some pretty strong opinions about those of us who practice SEO. Apart from calling us brainless, soul-less con-artists, he says:

• we’re spammers
• we’re evildoers
• we’re opportunists
• we’re scammers
• we’re not to be trusted
• we’re poisoning the web
• what we do can result in a lifetime ban in Google (which doesn’t even exist BTW)
• we’re cockroaches
• we employ botnets, third-world labor, and zombie computers
• we’re bastards
• we’re hackers planting worm viruses
• we create programs to grab expired domain names
• we create web pages filled with content stolen from RSS feeds
• we’re jerkwads with disreputable clients
• we encourage people to dumb down their content for Google instead of for their readers

I’m not paraphrasing here, his post actually says this stuff.

When his rant was pointed out to me and I first read it, I was sure it was just link bait and I ignored it. But after a day or two of seeing his responses to industry commentators and his replies via comments, it became obvious he meant every single word.

The vitriol even spilled over into his Twitter feed:

“There is no such thing as honest SEO. There’s only making good websites.”

“The term “SEO” sounds inoffensive but it covers a spectrum of practices that are ineffective at best, and destructive at worst.”

“So I guess SEO creeps exist because bad web designers exist. Crap begets crap.”

“What a great rallying cry for an industry: SEO! We fix other people’s crap! Every ecosystem needs bottom-feeders, I guess.”

A few people have responded directly to Derek’s outburst, including Danny Sullivan, who wrote a restrained, intelligent response to the original post and a detailed deconstruction of Derek’s own follow up post.

Derek apparently thought Danny’s post was a personal attack and tweeted as such:

“I may have stirred up a hornets nest, but I didn’t attack anyone personally. too bad @dannysullivan can’t pay me the same respect.”

At this point my bullshit radar couldn’t take any more and I tweeted in response. Here’s the exchange that followed:

Me: @fraying I would say that calling SEOs bottom feeders qualifies as an attack.

Derek: @kalena I attacked an industry, not a person. There’s a difference.

Me: @fraying No, you attacked people who work in an industry. So a whole slew of people.

I’m not going to attempt my own deconstruction of Derek’s anti SEO rant, because Danny has done a great job of this already and Derek still doesn’t get it.  But I’m not going to stand by and let Derek’s ignorance go unchecked.

Yes, the SEO industry has a dodgy reputation. Yes, some SEO firms are trying to push silly ideas on clients. Yes, the industry has some scam artists. But I bet you’ll find many more SEO firms that are providing an honest, valuable service. Even Google agrees:

“If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.”

What really yanks my chain is that unenlightened posts from someone as influential as Derek do even more damage to an already unfairly scorned industry. Making sweeping statements about all SEO’s being “snake oil salesmen” and “bottom feeders” just prove that you don’t understand SEO.

Search Engine College was born out of questions I was constantly bombarded with about SEO. Webmasters would write to me with the idea that SEO was black magic and beyond their ability. This is CRAP. Anyone can SEO a web site. I know some in this industry scorn us for providing non-technical courses in a subject that can be highly technical. But to me, that’s the God.Damn.Point. Taking what can be a highly complex subject and de-jargonizing it for the masses. Taking SEO back to basics and making it accessible.

In my experience, the only people claiming SEO is smoke and mirrors are the media or those who are trying to hide something from clients. I get the sense that Derek (and others) think that all SEOs are pretending to perform rocket science or trick clients into thinking as much. That’s ignorant. Any professional SEO will educate their client along the way and provide a fully transparent and quantifiable service. And there are plenty of them out there.

SEOs aren’t scam artists and SEO isn’t rocket science. Anyone telling clients what they do is magic is not an SEO. Just an asshole. And guess what Derek? Assholes aren’t limited to the SEO industry.

Update 1: Oh and Derek, you might like to know that your employer HP doesn’t think SEOs are scammers. At least they didn’t when they hired me to perform search engine optimization on their Asia Pacific sites some years back.

Update 2: Before I published this post, Derek had approved a comment I left on his follow up post but has since decided to remove it and many others that criticize his stance. Yet he claims SEOs are defensive? Pot, meet kettle.

For what it’s worth, here’s my comment:

Derek,  I heard you speak at Webstock earlier this year about the power of crowd sourcing and was inspired by your passion for building community driven websites. I’m bewildered that you would choose to isolate an entire community by attacking them with an ignorant and uninformed rant. Disappointed.

Update 3: In his original post, Derek boasted about ranking for his own name on Google. Now I can boast about the same thing. Still think SEO is ineffective?

Update 4: It seems Derek has had second thoughts about his rant and has posted an apology of sorts on his blog. This is to be commended and I’m pleased he finally seems to understand why he was wrong to isolate an industry. BUT, he kind of negates the apology by accusing us of being too defensive. I’ve submitted a comment to the thread, hopefully it will be published rather than deleted this time. The comment was rather long, so I’ve turned it into a blog post.

I thought maybe the logo was in celebration of the book’s 40th anniversary. But instead the logo IMG Attribute reads “First Day of Fall” and links to a Google search results page for that phrase.

Nothing wrong with that you say? Sure. If you happen to live in North America where the term *Fall* is almost exclusively used. Here in the Southern Hemisphere and other parts of the world, we use the term *Autumn* to describe the season that transitions Summer to Winter. Heck, even if you look up the term Fall on Wikipedia it takes you to their definition of Autumn.

If you look at the actual search results that the logo links to, they’re not even relevant to the Southern Hemisphere. They all discuss the first day of Fall as it applies to North America or else the March Equinox. According to Twitter buddy Roy Britten, they didn’t even get the Autumn Equinox date right. As Massey University states, Autumn Equinox occurs tomorrow, March 21.

Now if today had been the first day of *Fall* in the Northern Hemisphere and Google had used that logo, I would have overlooked the matter. But to produce a special logo for their regional sites that has no relevance to persons who actually use those sites screams cultural insensitivity to me. Am I wrong?

For a company that boasts so many employees with MBAs and PhDs, this is an embarrassment. That’s why I’m crowning Google: DUMBASS OF THE WEEK.

From the corporate page of Google New Zealand:

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

I think they left two words off the end of that sentence: “to Americans”.

Update 1: According to Twitter buddy Alan Perkins, Google.co.uk is also sporting a Eric Carle logo, with the alt text reading “First day of Spring”. Click on the logo and you’ll be taken to Google search results for that phrase, with the first listing announcing March 1 being the first day of Spring. Huh? Seems there is some confusion over the official date that Spring starts and Vernal Equinox. But don’t worry, Google has overuled that.

Update 2: I must have more influence than I thought. Mike Cochrane just informed me that Google New Zealand has CHANGED their alt tag to read “First Day of Autumn”. Good onya Google! Would be nice to see a “we were wrong” post though.

Update 3: Apparently, Google New Zealand made the change after noticing the error early this morning (see comments below left by Annie Baxter of Google NZ). Riiigggghhht. Well I’m just glad it’s fixed.

Update 4: Just spotted by Twitter user RiddlerMusic, the caterpillar logo used on Google.co.uk now links to search results for Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar instead of “First day of Spring”. The logo alt text remains the same and other regional domains still link to the Spring/Autumn SERPs. Perhaps this is due to the confusion over the official start date of the Vernal Equinox as mentioned above. Coincidence? Hmmmm

I come across Number 4 a LOT and it still makes my eyes water.  Reminds me of the Top 10 Dumbest Web Site Decisions article I wrote for SiteProNews last year.

The moral of this story? Beware the angry SEO!

Sadly, a level of bureaucratic lunacy seems to have pervaded Google AdWords in terms of ad approvals and editorial policy in the past 12 months. Here’s the latest example:

My client, a psychotherapist based in New York, had asked me to create a series of new ads for his AdWords campaign based on a new service he was offering. His site domain is unusual in that it contains 44 characters – way beyond the standard 35 character limit allowed by Google for display URLs in text ads. So we had been using a non-existent but similar shortened version of the URL as the display URL for years, with Google’s approval.

Scores of ads were still running successfully using the fake display URL so when it came time to draft new ads a couple of weeks ago, I used it again. But every time I created a new ad, it would show up as “disapproved” within minutes. I double checked the running ads to make sure I typed the display ad correctly and tried again and again. Every time the ads would be approved and then show up a few minutes later as “disapproved” with the display URL being cited as the cause of the problem.

In despair I emailed AdWords support staff to ask for their help. The first response I got was from Manvee, who wrote:

“The ads are getting disapproved when you are using another shortened version. Please know that I reviewed your client’s account and found that their ads are being disapproved because they are using display URLs which do not match their destination URL. Please know that we have allowed your client to use only specific shortened versions like [shortened display URL]. Therefore, their ads will be disapproved if they use any other version that we have not allowed.”

Sure. Except that the specific shortened version they suggested WAS the one we were using. So after another week of disapprovals and an increasingly frustrated client, I sent a follow up email asking AdWords staff to please have somebody login and manually approve the ads or explain why the display URL they recommend was no longer acceptable, even though it was running fine on older ads.

The next response I received from AdWords support was from Ruchi:

“Thank you for your email. I understand that you are concerned about your ads being disapproved even after you have made the required changes.

WHAT WE FOUND

Our AdWords Specialists found that there was unauthorized access to your AdWords account [account number removed]. No campaign changes were made to your account on that date, but we believe that the security of your account has been compromised.”

Huh? What? Did I not just explain that my client and I both have full access to the account via separate logins? Could it be that you think one of us is a hacker? And even if the account was compromised (which it wasn’t), how on earth would that influence the approval or disapproval of my client’s display URL? And why haven’t you addressed my actual problem?

As you can imagine, my patience was fast running out.  I emailed my frustration and asked Ruchi to escalate the issue to a senior account manager. The response I received was not the one I was expecting:

“Thank you for your response. I apologize for any frustration experienced by you. We suspect unauthorized access to you account by a 3rd party. We have reactivated the MCC and child account. However for the client account: [account number removed] we still need you to check and confirm that all the changes made in your account were authorized. As soon as your confirm this we will activate your account.”

So not only did they NOT offer any assistance with the problem at hand, but they de-activated my client’s account without warning! At this point, my client stepped in and called AdWords support directly, which was probably a good idea given my plummeting patience and rising stress levels. This time we both received a response from someone called Priti:

“Thank you so much for your patience.  I received a response from our specialist team, and it looks like in order to use an alternative URL for your ad, the URL must be of a non-functioning website.  Currently, [shortened display URL] is a functioning site (this is possibly a recent development), so the ads cannot be approved for this URL.

We definitely want your ads to be approved, so here are the steps that need to be taken:

1) Please change the display URL for these ads to [shortened display URL (a)]
 or [shortened display URL (b)] (both of which are non-existent websites and within the character limit)

2) Please then email me back you once you have done so.

3) I will then send your ads back to our Ad Review team for expedited review, and follow up with you once they have done so.”

Phew! At last somebody at AdWords support was offering us a solution. I logged into my client’s account, made the changes to the ads and emailed Priti immediately. Problem solved right? Wrong! Within a couple of hours, my client received the dreaded You Have Disapproved Ads status notification.

By this stage, my client’s stress levels had caught up to mine and he sent back an email to Google that simply said:

Here we go again! When will it ever end!?

I was dumbfounded by 3 weeks of fighting AdWords bureaucracy and decided it simply wasn’t worth pursuing any further. It wasn’t until 4 days later that my client received the following email from Priti:

“Thank you again for your patience.  I apologize – I was not in the office over the weekend, and so did not get your email nor Kalena’s email until just now.  I do see that you have made these changes in the account, and I am going to send this to the ad review team immediately so that they can approve your ads.”

She then expedited the process and the ads were up and running within the hour.

Hats off to Priti for finally resolving things, but shame on Google for hiring support staff that don’t seem to have the ability to solve relatively simple problems and for creating so many unecessary layers of bureaucracy for advertisers to jump through in order to do so.

Given the number of web sites inflating the size of the Internet on a daily basis, it’s likely that domain lengths are going to increase as fewer short domain names become available for registration. In light of this, you would think that perhaps Google would consider increasing the allowed character limit of display URLs, or at least suggest alternatives at the point of ad creation.

Anyone else got a tale of woe to share about AdWords editorial policy?

Hello Madam,

I am SEO and working more than 55 sites last one year, i want to know the Online Marketing Strateges like google adsence (sic) and adwards (sic) etc. I also how can i get one way links, is free one way links are good or not? like gotlinks.com, backlinkspider.com etc, Till how many keywords i use in title tag, description tag and how can i use h1, h2 in our pages. Pls give me all the information as soon as possilbe (sic).

thanks
iliyas

Hi iliyas

First up, my name is Kalena. I would’ve thought that was pretty obvious from the site name, but perhaps not. I don’t expect to be called madam until I’m 96 and using a walking frame. Or being schmoozed by a door greeter in Walmart. Either way I don’t like it and never will.

Next, if you can’t even spell them correctly, I doubt you will be able to grasp the complexities of Google AdWords and Google AdSense. It takes our students up to 6 months to do it.

And as for “Pls give me all the information as soon as possilbe” – what’s up with that? Not even a triple grande white chocolate mocha donation could compensate for that crap. You didn’t even offer me a short black.

Lastly, if you’ve SEO’d over 50 sites and you still don’t know how to obtain one way links, how to use heading tags or how many keywords should go in your title and meta tags, your clients are in real trouble.

Perhaps you should start from scratch and take our Search Engine Optimization Starter Course?

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.

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