Although I found out about the Narconon drug rehabilitation program in 1972 when I was working in Los Angeles, and I visited their drug rehab center, I never met Willie Benitez. But I heard the story; as an addict and prisoner at Arizona State Prison in the mid-1960’s, Willie figured out how to apply some of the information developed by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Scientology religion, to help himself and others overcome drug addiction. I was then and still am a Scientologist. I visited the Narconon center then to see first-hand what they were doing. It was very encouraging.

It’s not just a matter of drug withdrawal. These days that’s relatively easy. There are reasons that people start taking drugs, and go back on drugs after a stint in drug rehab. These reasons for going back on drugs have to do with loss of self-respect, lack of ability to communicate, inability to deal with other people in one’s circle of family and friends, lack of a personal moral code, and lack of the skills necessary to get and hold a job. As well as the physiological pull that drugs have for people who have used them.

The physiological aspects of drug addiction are handled, in large part, by doing a purification program that gets the drug residues sweated out of the fatty tissues in the body. It’s a rigorous program (I’ve done it) and it is life-changing all by itself.

But what those who have become addicted to drugs really need are tools for dealing with other people and making a success of their lives.

Willie Benitez recognized (while reading a book by Mr. Hubbard) that the practical drills in the book would help him and other addicts, and he adapted them for use in the prison system to help addicts learn to communicate, learn how to educate themselves, and get out of the trap of drug addiction.

Willie turned down a parole so he could stay in prison and make sure the Narconon program he started there would continue to help drug addicts after his release from Prison. That’s determination at work. Willie Benitez, who passed away a few years ago, would be very proud of the work now being done by Narconon International to help educate people about drugs and to help addicts like him get off and stay off drugs.

His reply came a few days ago in the mail. It’s an obvious form letter he sent to answer all those annoying faxes that mysteriously piled up in his office from the thousands of people like me who faxed him our objections and asked him, as our senator, not to vote for Obamacare, which he did anyway.

The gist of his message to me is this: “I am pleased that this legislation would reform the health care system in a fiscally responsible manner.”

“Fiscally responsible?” My blood pressure just keeps going up as I read through this mealy-mouthed attempt to calm down the republicans and independents to whom he sent this form letter. He has no clue what implementation of this bill is going to do to the economy, or to health care in America, or how it will, in the long term, cause trillions of dollars of deficit spending every year.

He also says: “Oregonians can always expect me to listen to their concerns and be honest and straightforward with my answers. I hope you will continue to keep me informed about the issues that matter most to you.”

Here’s my reply to Senator Merkley: “Great – I’ll keep on writing you, Jeff, so that you can just keep right on ignoring me, like you ignored the millions of Americans who showed up in Washington DC to protest against Obamacare last summer. Rest assured that we Oregon voters will take your record into account when voting you out of office when your term is up.”

Note that ECT Machines have never been tested for “safety” — they can’t pass any such safety inspections or tests because they cause irrevocable harm to patients who are, for the most part, forcibly administered electro shock. Sending hundreds of volts of electricity through the brain is not something that should be condoned by the FDA.

Give the FDA a piece of your mind about it here: ECT Machines.

I found one such banned link today on my site, on a page I hadn’t updated in a a while; I updated it with all the info I have on how to effectively get links to your site.

The article is here: How to Get Links To your Site

Good luck on using it. If you have questions about link building, I’ll be happy to answer them below.

Best,

Jere Matlock

I have recently obtained a domain name. Under my domain are products sold through Amazon.com sure you are well aware of associate marketing. I guess i need somebody to be honest about forthcoming costs in relation to registering on search engines and how to go about it successfully with minimum cost, maximum effect. Can you help ?

——————-

My reply: You are in for a long uphill battle if you want to compete against Amazon itself for the sale of the products you are selling as one of their affiliates.

Google doesn’t like affiliate sites and penalizes them in various ways.

For example, there are thousands of Amway distributors in the USA, but the organic search results of sites that come up in a search for “amway” are pretty focused on corporate amway and anti-amway sites, because of something called “QDD” or “query deserves diversity”, a rule within the Google algorithm that says for some queries, it’s better to have a diversity of websites that present different views of that subject. So instead of a list of Amway distributors, you get all kinds of other stuff. Same with queries for “judaism”, “christianity”, “amish”, and so on. Rather than just present sites that deal positively with those things, you get results from Nazis, apostates, muslims, etc., bashing whatever you’re looking for at Google.

When you search for the products that you are trying to sell, are there ANY affiliate sites showing up in Google’s search results? If so, they will usually be the best optimized and oldest of such sites. But Google won’t show new sites in the natural search resulst for anything, for about six to nine months (look up “Google sandbox”).

Which means that as a new site you’ll need to get a ton of links to your site from other relevant sites in order to have any chance of ranking well at Google, and you’ll have to wait for most of a year to have a chance to come up in the organic search results at Google.

Of course, you can use Google Adwords to get immediate visitors to your site (because they can’t find you in the organic Google search results you’ll have to advertise with Google), but then you’ll be spending money to get traffic to your site with no guarantee that those visitors will buy anything from you.

You’ll need to spend a lot of time getting links to your site. And you’ll need to spend a lot of money on Google AdWords.

So the question becomes – at what point do you think this project is going to make you money instead of costing you money?

If you create a blog or website that a lot of people visit, you can set up affiliate links to Amazon and sell stuff that you talk about. But the odds of havnig a new blog that people visit are pretty slim. Unless you’re a great or funny writer or very clever in some way and generate some buzz that gets you noticed.

Are you?

It’s your call.

Best,

Jeré Matlock

http://www.wordsinarow.com

Website Design & Marketing / SEO

Hi there,

I have a question about search engine friendly sites in regard to your article here about SEO of Database-driven Websites. I’m trying to make a website search engine friendly, using descriptive urls. Currently every link to a subpage looks like this: www.dom.ain/?visit=cat

So I only have 1 index file that provides information the user wants. Is there any way to improve this without creating a new php for every page on the site?

I thought about creating a *.htm that will route to the corresponding php url.

E.g. company.htm file routes to /?visit=comp

But I gathered that search engines don’t like links that are opened via Java Script.

Thx for any help, it would be greatly aprechiated.

Kind Regards, Jan

I replied:

When we have a website that uses variables in the domain names, we usually
use a system called Mod Rewrite on a Linux/Apache/mySQL/PHP (LAMP) server
to make more user-friendly URLs. This doesn’t work the same a Windows IIS
server, but works well on a LAMP server. Most websites nowadays are on LAMP
servers.

It works like this:

In the .htaccess file put these lines for each of the pages of the site.
(Contact a web programmer for a quote on doing this if it is beyond your
technical skills — it should be fairly fast and cheap to get done.)

—-
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^airport.php /community.php?unit=airport.php&language=english [L]

—–
You only need to tell it “RewriteEngine On” once. For every page you want to rewrite like this, you add another line.

So when someone goes to airport.php, what they actually get is the community.php page, with all its variables. What Google “sees” is airport.php. What a visitor “sees” in his browser address bar is airport.php.

What’s actually displaying to both Google and your visitor is

community.php?unit=airport.php&language=english

This allows you to have a shorter URL that is more search engine friendly.

Here’s a better example:

RewriteRule ^big-green-widgets.php /product-display.php?productid=widgets&productstyle=blue&productsize=big[L]

There IS no page named big-green-widgets.php on the server. (Like Neo learns in The Matrix movie, “There is no spoon.”)

The server sees a request for the page “big-green-widgets.php” and because of this line in the .htaccess file, the server goes and gets the info it
needs to create the page on-the-fly.

Also, don’t use JavaScript for your links. In your navigation menus, link to the names of the pages you set up in the .htacess file, like “big-green-widgets.php”. Even if that actually mod rewrites over to www.dom.ain/?visit=cat1324, it doesn’t matter. As far as Google and your visitors are concerned, you have a page called big-green-widgets.php.

Mod rewrite is a wonderful tool for anyone trying to optimize a site that is built using only a single page with variables, or using a long string of variables and a database.

Make sense?

Best,

Jeré Matlock

http://www.wordsinarow.com

Website Design & Marketing / SEO

“I don’t seem to have a static IP. When I did your test, and used the IP # given, It did not take me to my web page but the to hosting
companies’ web page ”

My answer was:

“Yeah, that happens a lot. It means your website has a ‘dynamic, shared IP address’ which saves the web hosting company a ton of money.”

Chuck is talking about the process of figuring out whether your website has its own static, dedicated IP address. The way you can know this is to open up a command prompt (the good old DOS prompt), and typing in the following:

ping www.mywebsite.com
(inserting your real website name there.)

Let’s try it for this website, www.jmblog.com:

ping www.jmblog.com

The result will be a reply an IP address.

In this case, that IP address is 65.38.173.51.

If you take that IP address and copy it into your browser window, it will return my website, www.jmblog.com. That means that my site has its own, static, dedicated IP address. It doesn’t change. It’s been at the same IP address for about 5 or 6 years now.

The following is a gross oversimplification, but it will give you the idea:

I host about 50 clients on my dedicated server. Each website on my server is set up with a static, dedicated IP address. It’s better for search engine rankings. It helps a litle bit at Google to have a dedicated, static IP address. (Bruce Clay has proven this definitely — and I trust Bruce’s data above what Google says, which is that it doesn’t matter. It does matter.) That’s why I offer static IP addresses to my SEO and web design clients when I wind up hosting them.

But it costs me about a dollar per IP address per month.

Most web servers are set up to handle 2000 or more websites. (Remember, this is a GROSS oversimplification I’m giving here.) As I understand it, most of those websites are sitting idle most of the time, with no one visiting them (sad but true). But when someone does visit them, a normal server will dynamically assign an IP address from a small pool of IP addresses, and so for the duration of the visit (someone looking at the site in his browser) the site is assigned an IP address from the pool. When that session is over, a visitor to a different website hosted on that server will be given the exact same IP address from the pool. So the IP address is dynamic (happens whenever there’s a request) and it’s shared, and its somewhat random. A server can handle 2000 websites or more, while using less than 100 IP addresses, most of the time. So that’s what most web hosting companies do. (There are lots of exceptions to this, but you get the idea.)

Your website could be sharing IP addresses with known spammers, with porn sites, or with drug or gambling sites, and you’d never know. But Google will know.

And since IP addresses are in a dwindling supply (they are talking about implenting a new six-number IP address scheme in the next few years after we run completely out of IP addresses using four numbers), the cost of them is going up and it’s hard to get any more. I can’t get any more IP addresses from the company where I lease my dedicated server; they won’t sell them to me because they need them to set up new servers.

However, there’s usually a back-door kind of way to get an IP address from your current web hosting company. Just buy a security certificate for your website. Tell them you’re going to be setting up a shopping cart and need a secure server and your own security certificate. When they sell you a security cert, it has to be assigned to JUST ONE IP address. So you’ll end up with a static, dedicated IP address for your website when you buy a security certificate.

Which helps a little bit with your Google ranking. Not a lot, but some.

To prove it to yourself, do this little test. It won’t take 10 minutes:

Go check the websites ranking in the top 10 at Google for your keywords and see how many of them have their own static, dedicated IP address. Then go to page 10 of the Google search results for that same keyword and see how many websites have their own static, dedicated IP addresses. Whenever I’ve done this, it’s shown a distinct lack of static IP addresses for those on page 10, and an abundance of static IP addresses on page 1 of the Google SERPs.

Is it a causal relationship? Or Coincidence? Sites that rank well tend to be selling something, which means they have a security cert, which means they have a static, dedicated IP address. And they tend to be better optimized, more focused, have better content, and so on — in other words they have been actively driven to the first page of Google search results by someone like me.

Either way, it still relates: sites with a static, dedicated IP address tend to do better in the Google search results.

Is having a dedicated, static IP address as important as having tons of relevant content? Not even remotely. It is as important as having tons of links to your site from relevant web pages that also have their own PageRank? Nope.

It’s just barely important enough that we make it a requirement for our SEO clients to have a static, dedicated IP address. And we’ll help them get one, one way or another. It’s usually easy.

If your content is sparse and stale and you have few links to your site, which by the way is built entirely with Flash, then don’t sweat the fact that you’ve got a dynamic IP address. You’ve got MUCH bigger problems to worry about.

But if you’re duking it out on page 1 of the Google search results for your main keyword, and you can’t seem to make it up past the 4th position, getting your site a static IP address may just boost your site that last little bit to get you to position 3. There are dozens of minor points, each of which may help. Having a static IP address is just one of them.

I use a proprietary checklist of about 60 points that we know make a difference to Google, based on our experience doing search engine optimization for more than a decade. We were doing this back before they were trying to figure out what to call it and eventually settled on “SEO” and “SEM”.

Many points of SEO technique have come and gone from that checklist over the years. Meta keywords tags, invisible text, stuffing keywords in table summary tags, stuffing keywords in comment tags, reciprocal link directories, etc., have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

We give away free consultations where we try to give you one concrete thing that you can do to make your site rank better in the Google search results; no one will twist your arm to buy our SEO audit services but if you want to know what your site needs to rank well, feel free to contact me.

Bluntly, he says that psychiatry is pseudo-science and that all their bunk hangs from one skyhook, “that mental disorder is brain disorder”. And that there is no proof whatever to that premise.

As he says, “bugger the money” that’s being wasted on psychiatry and psych medicine. It’s the inability of psychiatry to actually help people, and the actual harm that it does to people, that is at issue.

Psychiatry is to medicine as astrology is to astronomy. A system of beliefs based on observation and tradition — and not much more.