Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist - Latest Comments in Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Paul Walsh — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:23:16 -0000

@Michele - as cheap as you selling links :)

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Michele Neylon — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:21:35 -0000

@Paul - as cheap as what / who?
/me is confused

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Michele Neylon — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:20:01 -0000

Google PR doesn't really matter anymore anyway :)

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Paul Walsh — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:19:24 -0000

@Michele - shame your hosting isn't as cheap LOL

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Michele Neylon — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:17:03 -0000

Nah. My Google rank is low because I sold text links in the footer. Since they're paying enough to cover my car repayments they're staying :)

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Paul Walsh — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:06:21 -0000

@Michele - could be why your Google rank is so low?

I don't mean that sarcastically. I really want to provide as many outbound links as possible. I just want to be sure we get it right before we make changes to a bunch of blogs that I author.

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Michele Neylon — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 08:52:50 -0000

That's rubbish tbh :)

I've got "follow" on all comment links on all my blogs (both personal and business)
If you have a look at the post I linked to earlier and some of the other posts linked to it you'll see a lot of people are doing "follow"

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Paul Walsh — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 08:49:57 -0000

@Michele we only moderate the first comment you make as it tells us that you're (at least in part) human.

Kamrul's concern is that the noflow could tell Google that we're link farms. This can have a serious impact on their ranking of our own site. Not that we've ever been bothered by Google Ranking anyway. Kamrul and Aido are looking into this.

Would be great to get feedback from Donncha

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Michele Neylon — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 08:46:05 -0000

There's no security issues that I'm aware of. If you're moderating your comments sanely you won't have any issues :)

The only reason some of the software developers turned on "nofollow" by default was to thrawt comment spammers.
As far as I know there are a couple of plugins for Wordpress that will "magically" remove the "nofollow" reference or you could simply hack the template. The plugin might make maintenance easier however

Michele

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Paul Walsh — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 07:17:06 -0000

@Michele - I hope you'd assume that I would always show the link love. In fact, I've been linking your name in my own comments to see if it would increase the link-love for you.

I had no idea what nofollow was until you brought it to my attention. Could you help Kamrul better understand how to implement it in a security-conscious way?

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Michele Neylon — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 05:59:33 -0000

Kamrul
Wikipedia's "nofollow" was a recent change and has come under a lot of criticism from SEO professionals.
The entire idea behind no follow is to tell Google et al not to follow the link, so it impacts SEO negatively.
I and others are more than happy to share link juice on our blogs and I'm quite surprised and disappointed that Paul doesn't want to
Michele

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Kamrul Hassan — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:10:17 -0000

Michele,

As far as i know "nofollow" does not prevent a search engine to index or scroll the comments. Google says it doesn’t but if you use web master tools, you will see they do index, Google don’t scroll but Yahoo,MSN and Ask do. "nofollow" just excludes the links from Googles ranking calculation. Here is an article by Loren Baker from search engine journal that explains in depth “nofollow” vs. “Search engine”.

A genuine contribution is priceless, but should a page rank calculation prevent them from contributing? Wikipedia uses "nofollow", which doesn't stop genuine contributions.

Thats my take.

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Michele Neylon — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 08:33:47 -0000

Paul - you :)

All the links to commenter's sites are marked as "nofollow"
See: http://www.mneylon.com/blog...

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Paul Walsh — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 08:09:26 -0000

@Michele - who are you talking to and what do you mean by 'nofollow'?

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Michele Neylon — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:40:30 -0000

What's with all the "nofollow" stuff?

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Tom Raftery — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:08:57 -0000

Aw, nice one, thanks Paul. That looks a lot better.

One request, can you drop a couple of paragraph breaks into my first comment too?

Cheers

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Paul Walsh — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:00:38 -0000

@Tom - Thanks, I'll have that looked into as soon as possible. I hope I did you proud with my edit in the meantime :)

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Tom Raftery — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:51:22 -0000

As a complete aside, commenting on this site with Firefox keeps my paragraph spacing, comments left above in Safari lose all paragraph info!

Thought you should know.

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Tom Raftery — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:49:46 -0000

By the way, I outed the Blueface CEO for lying on my blog.

If he had any proof that he wasn't lying, data privacy laws or no, I'd be receiving a takedown notice quicker than you can say "liar, liar pants on fire!"

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Paul Walsh — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:13:52 -0000

@Michele "the focus on a particular ceo is probably helped by your explicit reference in your post"

True. It just happens that the same people are commentating on both posts. I purposely didn't link to Tom's post as to not detract from the general question.

That's not to say that Tom's post isn't a very interesting one, because it is.

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Michele Neylon — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:09:39 -0000

@Paul - the focus on a particular ceo is probably helped by your explicit reference in your post :)
People commenting on these things only get to see a very small part of the picture. Regardless of which companies are involved. Companies such as ourselves have to respect the data privacy legislation, which means that we cannot share the full story in public ever.

Michele

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Tom Raftery — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:06:53 -0000

In this case, yes, it would be refreshing to get an honest response from the CEO!!!His every comment contained some lie, personal insult or blatantly false allegation.

As I said previously, this only reflected poorly on himself personally and the Blueface brand which he represents, as well.

There are many, far more appropriate responses he could have made. Dissing a former customer in a public forum never looks good. But lying in the process and being caught out doing so is unforgivable.

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Paul Walsh — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:53:20 -0000

@Michele - agreed. I consult major brands on this stuff and my reason for them to have a blog is so they can either
<ol>
<li>apologise</li>
<li>explain themselves or</li>
<li>defend their position and explain to commentators why they are wrong.</li>
</ol>

@HeavyLight - so we're back to a specific CEO now. I thought we could keep it general here. No hope eh :)

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Michele Neylon — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:46:47 -0000

Paul - aye. The problem is that some people will expect CEOs to cow tow to them constantly. I'm a firm believer in firing customers when required :)

Michele

Re: Should the CEO get involved? - Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

HeavyLight — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:46:37 -0000

@Michele - while I too dislike anodyne, please-all statements from company representatives, the CEO highlighted in the account on Tom's blog could have got his point across to it's wider readership far more effectively had he left his emotions at the door.

And as you've brought it up, I particularly didn't want to call his honesty into question as I suspect (and hope that) Blueface has mistaken Tom for another, less co-operative, ex-customer.