Ron Paul Annihilating Hillary Clinton on Google Trends

With the USA Presidential Election coming up, even through I’m from the UK I find the whole online buzz on Ron Paul pretty incredible and thought it would be interesting to stick a few of the runners in to Google trends against Ron to gauge online popularity.

Here’s the results including the mainstream media-popular Hillary Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani, Barak Obama and then the lesser known Ron Paul, who which I’m sure more Americans will hear of over the coming weeks and months.

I’m sure with his upcoming appearance on Jay Leno (over 5 million viewers) and plenty of money being put in his kitty for radio and TV advertisements the trend graph below will become even more surprising in the near future.

Clearly Hillary is ahead purely on news media coverage popularity but as we can see from the search trends chart above Ron Paul is leading the pack in search popularity by a substantial margin. That’s a lot of interest in a lesser-known candidate.

Pretty interesting I thought.. now off to the bookies I go before Ron Paul gains more traction in the media and his odds are slashed even more than they are being already week upon week!

Matt Cutts & Matt Mullenweg Start a Gay Relationship

Firstly, I’m not suggesting Matt Cutts & Matt Mullenweg are gay or having sexual relations, what I’m referring to is the big gay totally-blown-out-of-proportion hoo-har in the Wordpress community about the use of ’sponsored themes’.

Sponsored themes can be used by anyone who uses Wordpress, free of charge, with the actual design of the themes supported by advertisers whom pay to have their URL at the bottom of the theme. The designer or creator of the theme receives money for their handy work.

Well that’s cool - right? Yeah, you would think so.. I mean, look at Template Monster where designers put Wordpress themes up and charge $300+ for the use - what sponsored themes for Wordpress do is allow anyone to use great looking themes for free, the only ‘cost’ is keeping the advertisers link at the bottom intact. You know, like software supported by advertising.

A bit like… search engines (and their staffs pay packets) supported by advertising.

A bit like… Wordpress supported by Matt Mullenweg creating un-related pages on asbestos, debt consolidation etc to game the search engines not so long ago using the high PR power of Wordpress.org from guess what? Having the ‘Powered by Wordpress’ link on every single damn un-modified Wordpress blog out there.

So I really don’t get why Matt Cutts or Matt Mullenweg have beef and are speaking out against sponsored themes. Sure if it was themes that were malicious or had hacker exploits in them, remove them from Wordpress.org etc - else just ensure sponsored themes are labelled, explain what that means and leave it as such.

Sponsored themes rock-on, not everyone can afford the cost of custom themes or the high price tags on Template Monster, and most ‘free’ themes are garbage, it only takes a brief look on Alex King’s popular Theme Viewer to notice that.

Ever Had Your Pages Stolen and then De-indexed?

Update: After mailing and threatening to report the content thief to Google AdSense and Search he promptly removed all of my content off his site - I thought I may as well put the shits up him and it seemed to work. I’ll watch to see if those particular pages are re-indexed as I’m still unsure wether it’s because he copied them or because Google is just fucked at the moment.

Apparently I’m not the only one.

I have so far managed to track 6 articles of mine that I put on my website that have been copied, which have led to the 6 pages on my site being de-indexed while the person who stole them is indexed, with them being the only website in Google with those articles now.

The articles in question cost me $6 each which isn’t much, but that’s $36 I spent on content to rank for 6 phrases which means the thief in question has took money out of my pocket and is now the only one who can actually profit off the articles.

Given I have spent over $1,800 in content with over 300 pages on this particular site, can I really afford to lose anymore in this fashion? No.

Why exactly have Google decided another site that came after mine should be indexed for the article and I should be de-indexed, exactly?

It seems I certainly aren’t alone and there’s plenty of people affected by this, so why is it still happening 6 months after Googleguy took a look in to the issue at this persons blog and knowing about all of the people on Webmasterworld who have suffered.

Should I just continue to purchase original content and have it stolen and then de-indexed. Is that what you suggest, Google?

Fucking sort it out, you have had long enough.