I’m telling you, the Internet is great. I love the Internet! And what’s more great than the Internet. Blogs on the Internet! Blogs, I’m telling ya! Without the Internet, I could not have made up these awesome true life stories.
It started sometime in 2002 or 2003 when we decided to setup a web site for our cat. We named our cat after the cat in the Peppy Le Pew cartoon love interest Penelope or Penny for short because of her tuxedo coloring. Her nickname was Monkey Kitty. Well, obviously penny.com or Penelope.com was already taken, we wanted something unique, so amazingly monkeykitty.com was available. It was a learning process for my wife in building a site from an HTML template and I think it was the first time both of us ever used CSS and server side includes. We used some ASP based photo gallery software, can’t remember when I switched it over to CopperMine. It was your normal run of the mill personal pet website with a photo gallery. Once we set it up we really didn’t update it much at all. In 2009 our cat passed away and that was probably the first time since 2007 I had done any sort of updates with the site.
So as you can tell by my other blog entries, I have been working on all my domains, learning new things here and there. I discovered kind of randomly this Google service for Webmasters. It’s part of Google Search and it will tell you about what the Google Search Bots are finding on your site and a bit more information about how your site is indexed in Google searches. I initially setup the Equestrian Pages site as the first for this and it gave me some good information and over time I think it will be helpful. So I setup a few more domains with this, AutoNarcosis, Equestrian Journal, and Monkey Kitty.
So, I wait the 48 hours or so for the information to roll in on the domains. It’s information I am not surprised by. Everything is consistent with what I knew from years of web log analyzing the domains. But, Monkey Kitty seemed to have an odd thing. It only had one web site linking to it. I was surprised that there was even one link to it. It’s such a plain personal cat site, not much there. It’s barely ever updated. Penny is cute though. The domain linking to her site pointed back to this ‘Web Technologists’ blog site. Before specifically searching for the link I read through quite a bit of the blogs and got the increasing feeling that when I find the blog entry for my cats site, it would be derogatory in some way.
I couldn’t manually find the blog entry with the link in it. I am beginning to wonder if it’s a link within the comments. I do some searches with the sites built in search and nothing comes up. So I go back to google to search for the mention within the sites domain. Sure enough, I find it. Oh wow, yeah. (Here’s the article)
The article is about the authors definition of award to justify some rant about a competing award website that is more obviously setup as a link system. They specifically use my cats website as an example of a site that should not have been awarded something from an award site that gives out awards. It’s been so long it is hard to tell what award Monkey Kitty was given, so we no longer know if it’s in or out of context. I point out that the award site they are ranting about in the article is not linked to in the article, yet they did take the time to link to the sites they deemed should not have gotten awards. And years later, the illegitimate award site being complained about is still up and running, but the competing award site he is defending is some plain looking blog in German. So much for that business model. Perhaps there is a reason?
Oh, but it gets better! Whats this on his blog site? A link to a pet blog? His wifes pet blog? This is just classic! Rip on some personal pet web site to make your competitor look illegitimate at the same time making the content of the site seem just as illegitimate then setup a pet blog later on.
I talked to my wife after writing the majority of this article before publishing it. It’s even better, since, she remembers signing up for both award sites. So, it wasn’t the site he was ragging on how he found the cat site, it was submitted to the site he was a judge on.
Circle of douchebaggery complete!