Matt Cutts

This is absolutely correct. This guy's forum is the .01% case.

The OP should simply delete these messages and move on. But I guess doing that doesn't drive traffic from HN.

What Google has said is that they just want evidence a reformed spammy site has /attempted/ to remove offending links manually.

See Slide 16: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pubcon-2012-slides/

Note how Google wants to see evidence in the Link Disavow file that sites have TRIED to remove links manually:

Here's a sample of a valid file:

#example.com removed most links, but missed these
http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html
http://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html
# Contacted owner of shadyseo.com on 7/1/2012 to
# ask for link removal but got no response
domain:shadyseo.com

So this whole post seems like sort of a hissy fit from the edge case of a site that a) failed to protect itself by linking out with followed links from untrusted posters and then got spammed to hell, and then b) gets offended when he reads a comment directed at sites who are trying to profit by removing links when all he really needs to do is hit delete when he gets emailed with link removal requests.

I agree with the comment that this is fair play or an "ethics tax" on people who bought links... f-em I say, since they cheated to begin with and hurt sites who played by the rules and whose content should have enjoyed better rankings and traffic than it did due to the spammers. So whatever…

If you wanted to learn about SEO then you could always jump in the deep end and setup a small website or blog with a dot.com domain name with some original content around a niche (topic) something small that you know a lot about and try play the Google/bing/yahoo(?) game and aim to get your site ranked well. It will take a while especially with a new 'virgin' site.

The best place to start would be google webmaster Tools. Follow best practices they recommend and go from there. There are loads of articles on SEO, some good, some bad and some erm shady.

Google's algorithm is regularly updated and changes and there is no 100% certified or guaranteed no matter what anyone may say or try to sell you to get to number 1 spot. It is a mixture of luck, links, good original content and more luck. There's no one way to be top and the best is to just jump straight into it and get your hands dirty. Build up experience and go from there.

Some people who I would trust with good SEO advice is Google's Matt Cutts. His blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ is a good way of keeping in the loop.

For search engine news there is a journalist called Danny Sullivan. His personal blog is http://daggle.com/ and he also blogs at http://searchengineland.com/ He is someone who I would respect with good reporting on search engines.

There's plenty of others too. Google et al are your friends there. They are just a couple that came into my mind.

The only way to stay on top is to follow Google's and…

It depends. Most HTML e-mail can be parsed within the mutt viewer using an external program that converts HTML -> text in a graceful way. That works for 99 % of the HTML e-mail (which is typically just people that send it that way because they don't know better.)

For newsletters and such, you can have a shortcut that opens the HTML portion in a browser tab automatically.

This is done by adding this to your ~/.mailcap:

text/html; mutt_bgrun /usr/bin/firefox %s >/dev/null 2>&1; needsterminal
text/html; elinks -dump ; copiousoutput

(where `mutt_bgrun` is here: https://www.mattcutts.com/files/mutt_bgrun)

And then on ~/.muttrc:

macro index,pager ,b "<view-attachments>/html<enter><view-mailcap><exit>" "View first HTML attachment in browser"

That way, if I'm on an e-mail and I want the actual HTML rendering, I hit ",b" and it goes to a browser tab.

Dilbert’s One Page Personal Finance List

• Make a will.

• Pay off your credit card balance.

• Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.

• Fund your company 401K to the maximum.

• Fund your IRA to the maximum.

• Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.

• Put six months’ expenses in a money market account.

• Take whatever is left over and invest it 70 percent in a stock index fund and 30 percent in a bond fund through any discount brokerage company and never touch it until retirement

• If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issue), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges you a percentage of your portfolio.

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scott-adams-financial-advice/

Scott Adams is very entertaining. He predicted Trump's staying power way back in the summer when everyone (including me) thought his candidacy was just a joke. In fact, he has predicted a landslide for Trump in the general election. He says it's based on his training as a hypnotist, which gives him an insight into the art of persuasion.

Over the years I've learned many things from following Adams' blog. He recommended Cialdini's books on persuasion, which are a must read for all sales people and all entrepreneurs (because we are salespeople, like it or not). His financial advice [1] is rock solid, and his latest book on goal-oriented vs. systems-oriented thinking was also an eye-opener.

TLDR: I like the dude.

[1] https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scott-adams-financial-advice/

I would recommend something simple to start. How about this USB nerf rocket launcher from ThinkGeek: http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/warfare/8a0f/ It's cheap ($25), cool, has horizontal and vertical movement plus firing, and the software is Windows-only. Not to mention that a Kinect + rocket launcher combo would be awesome.

My secondary vote (and it's a selfish one) is this pedometer that only has Windows software: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/my-favorite-pedometer-omron-hj-720itc/ . Another possibility would the the Fitbit.

I'd be happy to get you any of these devices if you wanted to document what you find with adafruit-like clarity. Even better would be an exchange to hook willing USB reverse engineers up with people willing to provide devices for those engineers. :)