The customer service people over at Globe Telecom should wake up before this snowballs into one huge mother…

I’m not sure if its the earthquake that hit Taiwan or what, but so far the speed I’ve been getting from my E220 has been slower than dial up. I live near Libis and I only get 1 bar when using HSPDA signal. Whats worse is my download speed is at a dismal 25Kbps (according to bandwidthplace.com and cnet.com. I then tried local sites and still the same. I tried accessing the sites using my regular DSL connection and there seems to be no problem with them. The next test is in my office in Valenzuela. HSPDA signal is 4 bars. Speed is 34Kbps. Useless! Tried my regular DSL connection, the sites that I go to are ok. My wife gave birth in Medical City along Ortigas, UMTS connection, 20Kbps. So for P2000 I’m actually getting slower than dial up speeds. I’ve only been a subscriber for less than a week and would like to return the unit, but I have to pay a termination fee of P11 thousand plus. That’s where Globe grabs you by the balls and squeezes it tight till the 24th month of service.

Customer service shouldn’t be a passive exercise. Don’t wait for us to call your hotline to complain because no amount of Taiwan-bashing will compensate for the crazy download speeds. Be proactive, face the problem and come up with a solution. Before you know it, the heat from the buzz might be too hot to handle. Pretty soon, you might want to rethink your Better than 3G positioning because it’s starting to sound like a lie.

I still recommend getting the Visibility service from Globe because nothing beats mobile broadband, just not now. Once they’re back to full capacity, it’s a no-brainer.

From Craigslist Phlippines:

Are you looking wife? maid…. drop me a line - 26

Email me for more information.. im single mom.. who need someone to be with and to help me.. or if you are looking wife.. just email me.

thanks for reading.

Chimeron offers some compelling insights on the two alpha beings in the SEO savannah:

The rockstar-type is less likely to try to MAKE MONEY out of his status - he is less likely to publish an SEO book, less likely to aggressively monetize his web properties, and less inclined to intentionally try to build a following in order to advertise himself. He is also less likely to syndicate other people’s work aside from the occasional referencing because his work revolves around “his techniques” and “his experiments”.

The guru-type, on the other hand, has the depth of perspective necessary to do all that. He is more likely to write an SEO book (and more likely to give the book-paying community what they want to hear). He is more likely to aggressively monetize his web properties. He is more likely to syndicate/scrape other people’s work (in case what he knows isn’t exactly what sells). And he is more likely to build a following around himself to commercially benefit from his status.

He doesn’t blog yet, but I’m sure we’ll hear more from this rockstar-in-hiding soon.

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Just released:

• SponsoredReviews.com
• Contextual Links

More and more players joining this market. Which one will be king?

The big sites that I’ve been blessed to work on always had a supplementals-related issue and it’s one area of SEO I’m paying more attention to these days. I always thought it was somehow related to these factors:

• too high page similarity scores
• non-unique TITLEs
• weak internal/external link popularity

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s a far more comprehensive supplementals factors/solutions list from Halfdeck (grab the feed, you can thank me later).

Hat tip to DazzlinDonna.

The options available for 3rd world countries as far as earning good money online are limited but that doesn’t mean we can’t join the parade :) Although site monetization methods apply to all citizens of the world, there are special considerations to take note of especially if you’re from the Philippines or another non-US country. This post aims to give you an overview of tried and tested ways to get cash by operating a website or a network of sites. But there’s a catch. You’ll read about it at the bottom of the post.
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We all need a refreshing jolt once in a while.

3. Because lately the SEO industry is LAME and BORING - Want a proof of that?

- The SEO industry is just a bunch of self-proclaimed gurus making more money from their “guru” status than from SEO.

- The blogsphere (God I hate that word) is filled with countless “SEO blogs” syndicating what other “SEO blog” syndicated from another “SEO blog” that syndicated some bullshit guru.

- The most insightful and fun thing that has happened recently in the SEO industry (and anyways It was a looong time ago!) was the freaking search engine spammer who indexed billions of pages in Google thanks to a bug in Blogger, some DNS wildcards and a PHP content generator. Oh boy, people over webmasterwold and digitalpoint where going crazy about it!. So I’m about to bring back some fun to your lives…

While this dude has some personal issues I think he should deal with first, I agree with his no bullshit assessment above (highlights are mine). OT: why has it become so fashionable to pair “SEO” and “bullshit” together? :)

Did a quick survey of SEO professionals in the Philippines. So is SEO stupid easy? I’m with Oilman on that :)
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Was testing out the Keyword Forecast Tool on the Microsoft adCenter Labs site . It’s obviously a powerful tool to profile your market and your keyword niche. But it can also be the source of some pretty funny SEO info :)
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SEJ features a cross site scripting case study, not unlike this Quadzilla list. Do these links pass on trust? Do the search engines even see them?