After putting the kiddo to bed, I sat down in front of the TV to watch the Packers play the Lions on Sunday night. I had DVRed the game, and was 20-30 minutes behind live TV. As I watched the Lions march down the field, I wondered about the remaining schedule for Green Bay. So I whipped out my phone and asked Siri to “show me the remaining Packers schedule”.
Great; she understood me completely.
Argh! Why why WHY Siri are you telling me the score when that is clearly NOT what I asked!?
Fortunately, of course, the Packers managed to overcome the Lions, but still, I wish I’d seen the first quarter domination by Detroit unfold in real time, rather than have Siri spoil it for me through a half-baked answer.
I am redacting this person’s email address, perhaps out of a sense of decency that she and her company don’t display themselves.
I received this email on Aug 3, 2012:
Hi there,
My name is Lucy and I am writing to you from the Livestreamingsport.com outreach team to ask you for your help.
We are currently dealing with a penalty imposed by Google which has resulted in the near de-indexing of Livestreamingsport.com. Google has sent us a warning about excessive link building and have reduced our site’s trust factor to zero, which has in turn unfortunately reduced Google’s share of traffic to our site from 90% to 10%.
We have appealed Google’s decision, but the Google webmaster team continues to demand we remove as many inbound links as we possibly can.
During our full link review, we have come across this link on your site:
(References a link on my wiki of a user account created as a spam link, linking back to her site)
As you can imagine, we are trying to please Google in order to rebuild our site’s trust as quickly as possible, so it would be great if you could help us out.
While this is of course no reflection on your site at all, we would really appreciate it if you could help us remove this link to Livestreamingsport.com.
Essentially, we are trying to start with a clean slate which means we need to remove as many links manually before we can ask Google again to consider us for re-indexing.
Thank you very much for your time and assistance here, we really appreciate it! If we can ever reciprocate the favor in the future we will of course try and help you out too.
Many thanks for your help!
–
Lucy Allen
My reply on Aug 3:
So you spammed my site in order to drive your page rank up, and now that Google has wised up, you want me to remove it?
Lucy again on Aug 4:
Hi John,
We found a number of bad links linking to us and this is just one of them. We did outsource some article promotions some time ago and we believe this is what triggered the penalty as articles were being sent out through a service called uniquearticlewizard and probably others. We have actually come across a number of wiki type links and been able to edit and delete them ourselves but with your site it doesn’t seem possible to do this and this is why I contacted you.
If you can remove the link to our site it would be greatly appreciated!
Best Regards
Me on Aug 4:
So was that a yes?
Lucy again, Aug 7:
Hi Stewart,
Look, we are not here to play games. Yes we did have some promotional work done on our site but if you take a look at most sites, you will see that they too in some form or another have had promotional work done. We made some bad choices in terms of outsourcing work as we are now seeing the full picture and are now tirelessly working on cleaning this issue up. We have to contact a number of webmasters asking if they can remove links to our site which is not a fun process to go through. Most webmasters are very helpful, they remove the links and wish us well, others take a different approach.
We are simply asking webmasters if they can remove links to our site. If you can remove the links, it would be very much appreciated. All that I or other members of my team can do is ask.
Thank you for your time.
Me, Aug 7:
We are simply asking webmasters if they can remove links to our site. If you can remove the links, it would be very much appreciated. All that I or other members of my team can do is ask.
No, you could do much, much more thank just ask. You could:
- Start with a sincere apology for thieving other’s resources in order to artificially inflate your page rank.
- Pledge not to further engage in deceptive business practices.
- If indeed, as you suggest (but don’t actually state), you used a third party marketing organization who created these “bad links”, then call out who it is so when I post this saga on my website, we can assign blame to the correct place.
But that’s what you could start with. In addition, after all of the above, you could also donate $100 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Once you’ve done the items above and you’ve provided proof of such donation, I will comply with your request to update the URL you spammed on my website.
Lucy Aug 7:
John,If you want to remove the spam page from your site or not, it’s up to you. I will no longer be contacting you regarding this matter.
I am sorry for the stress this has caused you and apologise.
$100 to remove the link is simply unrealistic when webmasters at the most ask for $5.
There is obviously a problem with your site because having checked there are thousands of pages such as these; (references a bunch of user accounts created to generate blogspam) . Perhaps it would be an idea to simply remove the wiki feature from your site as this is obviously a big problem.
So we’ve gotten somewhere at least… she admits it’s spam!
What her company has done is seek out open comment forms and wikis and pollute them with spam links back to her site. In the process, she has made money at the expense of harming others.
I have had to effectively shut down my wiki as a result of her actions. The very reason she is unable to now update her spam links is because I had to turn off non-admin editing altogether. This has harmed me, and the people who used to update my wiki.
Shame on you and your company, Lucy.
Shame on you for taking advantage of a loophole in Google’s page rank, and taking advantage of those thousands of us who tried to have a nice little place online for our friends and family to share information.
Shame on you for not taking responsibility for your actions.
And, finally, shame on you for suggesting the problem is with ME because my wiki was abused by YOU. Blaming the victim! I’m sure I was just asking for it, right?
I will keep these links in place in perpetuity, or at least as long as I care to, in the hopes that your site becomes invisible to Google.
I learned to snowboard about 10 years ago. Brett was the best man at my wedding, and also my snowboarding mentor.
This picture was from 2002, not long after he got me onto a snowboard.
A couple of years into it, I moved to hardbooting and started racing.
I’ve gradually gotten better at it, and now am one of the fastest snowboard racers at the local hill. However, Brett has always beat me.
Now, I don’t mean “usually” or “almost always”. I mean ALWAYS. A year or two ago I finally looked it up and put together a spreadsheet to track the races.
Between 2005 and yesterday, January 24th, 2011, Brett and I had raced head to head in a NASTAR course 48 times. I’ve had good days and bad days, but my good days were never enough to beat him.
FORTY-EIGHT races. That’s some pretty amazing consistency, especially since my only real goal for the past few years has been to beat him. He is truly my white whale.
Finally, last night, his run came to an end. In our Monday night race (in Tyrol Basin‘s Double Diamond Race League), I laid down an excellent first run, and he didn’t. I was ahead.
Now, I’d been in this position dozens of times before, but every other time when I’ve been in the lead out of one run (out of the two we get), he’s always shit out a great run to take me down.
So the Pack won yesterday (hell yes!). Hopefully Aaron Rodgers is all right, but he took a hit from Julius Peppers that was totally uncalled for, and seemed to put him off his game.
Untouched and in Rodgers’ blind spot, he hit him hard, helmet to helmet. Knocked his helmet half off and he was spitting blood. It could have ended his season. Hell, could have ended his career. Dirty, ugly shit.
Fine, maybe he didn’t mean to hit with his helmet, but what burns my toast is that he, and the Bears coach on the sideline, were complaining about the completely appropriate 15-yard penalty! Completely classless. He should have been ejected.
Here’s him complaining:
Here’s video of the hit; though I’m sure Youtube will pull this for copyright violation before long:
Interestingly, here’s another dirty hit from Peppers on Rodgers, out of bounds, from when he played for the Panthers; this must have been when they met in 2008. Just shows what a classless asshole Julius Peppers really is. This wasn’t just one dirty play, but it’s apparently just the way he plays:
The video cannot be shown at the moment. Please try again later.
I hope the NFL doles out a serious fine for this. Not that it will do any good, since if he was arguing against the penalty, he obviously doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong.
Edit: He was fined $10k. I don’t think that’s the minimum, but it’s also tiny compared to his salary.
As of today, January 18, 2011, there have been 181 games played between the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears. It’s by far the longest running rivalry in the NFL (and maybe all of American sports?).
Frankly, for most of 90′s and 00′s, I never considered the Bears much rivals to my Packers, since we beat them so often. However, since 2005, the Bears have been winning with frightening regularity.
This Sunday is, to say the very least, a big game. The Packers are fielding the best team I have seen since at least 1997. The Bears, disrespected by all (including me) in the beginning of the season, managed to sail to an 11-5 record and win the NFC North. They might be the real deal.
After a close win by the Bears early in the season, they met again for the final game. The Packers needed a win to secure a playoff spot, and they got one.
The Packers managed to defeat the Eagles in the first round of the playoffs, and then the number one seeded Atlanta Falcons. Suddenly people outside of Cheesehead-dom have been noticing that the Packers may also, indeed, be the real deal.
Aaron Rodgers is a huge part of that. So is a Dom Capers defense that fell apart at the end of last season, but has been superlative this year. So has been the much-needed depth provided by Ted Thompson’s excellent work on personnel.
There are many things to say about Rodgers. Suffice it to say that he’s awesome, and that he wasn’t picked to go to the Pro Bowl is a travesty. Let’s take a look who was.
Michael Vick was picked to start for the NFC in the Pro Bowl. Since the Packers took out his team the first round of the playoffs, he’ll be able to make the trip to Hawaii. Drew Brees was picked as an alternate. He’ll be able to make the trip, too, since his team also went down in the wild card round.
And the other alternate? Matt Ryan, whose team was just destroyed by Aaron Rogers’ offense.
I think any one of those three quarterbacks would say they’d rather be playing this Sunday than headed to Hawaii for the Pro Bowl. I’m happy Aaron Rodgers has his chance.
Brett Favre, the once bright star, has officially retired this week. It’s been a rough year for him. He’s not getting away with things that he certainly got away with before. I don’t feel the schadenfreude that I expected to when I last posted about him.
Just as he didn’t understand the realities of the NFL when he re-un-re-un-retired from the Packers, I don’t think he understands the implications of today’s internet when sending around pictures of his wee-wee.
The last time, the only time, the Packers and Bears have ever met in the playoffs was in 1941, a week after Pearl Harbor. More than 43,000 packed Wrigley Field to see the rivals clash. The next week when the Giants played the Bears for the actual NFL Championship, only 13,000 came.
The same is true today. The fans of the winning team this Sunday will consider the Super Bowl a letdown (Jets? Steelers? They seem so insignificant and far off).
The fans of the losing team will consider the season over after their team loses. Either way, for both Cheeseheads and FIBs, this Sunday is the REAL Super Bowl.
The below was an article I found and put online in 1996 as Art Modell was taking his Browns out of Cleveland and into Baltimore. I noted it as being written by Bill McEwen for the Fresno Bee, but I have found no other copy than my own I put online way back then.
I don’t believe in fairy tales, aliens from outer space or the psychic hot line.
But I believe in the Green Bay Packers, whose story begins once upon a time.
By the way we keep score in professional sports, the Packers have no business in today’s NFC championship game. They’re the ultimate small market, the corner grocery store butting heads against Safeway and Vons.
They play in a Wisconsin city of 98,000 residents and in a stadium that is one of the smallest in the NFL. The winters are long, the summers short. Green Bay’s sister city is in Siberia. The No. 1 export is earmuffs.
Yet the Packers thrive, even as Art Modell and Bud Adams flee from Cleveland and Houston mega-markets with football teams that couldn’t break .500. Even as Bud Selig, owner of the down-the-road-a-piece Milwaukee Brewers and grand pooh-bah of big-league baseball, rants and raves that he can’t compete without a state-of-the-art stadium.
How it must gall Selig that while his team was losing favorite son Paul Molitor to free agency, the Packers were luring Reggie White, one of the best defensive ends ever, to Green Bay with a once-in-a-lifetime contract and sweet talk about the quality of life and cheese in their humble hamlet.
The Packers are all about grit and substance and adhering to tradition, and that’s satisfying. Sound management, it turns out, is more vital to success than a deck of luxury suites. Players can find happiness somewhere besides the Sun Belt. Ticket-buying fans are more important to the bottom line than television sets.
As team president Robert Harlan likes to say, the Packers are a warm story in a very cold place.
The Dallas Cowboys, with high-kicking cheerleaders and stars on their jerseys, have anointed themselves America’s Team. So have the Atlanta Braves, a marvelous baseball team that doubles as programming for their owner’s cable station.
The Packers, in their unfashionable green-and-yellow uniforms, are the true representatives of the red-white-and-blue. They’re older than dirt, two years older than the NFL itself.
Four times during their first 32 years, the Packers nearly were scorched from their frozen tundra. Each time, the community came to the rescue with cash.
These people love their football. It was $2,500 in 1922, the Packers’ second season in the NFL, and $15,000 in 1934, the year a fan fell out of the stands and sued the team. In 1949, the Packers played an intrasquad game on Thanksgiving Day that raised $50,000.
The financially ailing club went public a year later. Shares were sold for $25 each and $118,000 poured into the coffers. Today, the Packers have 1,898 shareholders, a 45-person board of directors and a seven-member executive committee.
Though the Packers expect to make $4 million this season, there will be no dividend. All the profits are plowed back into the team. The franchise has an estimated worth of $160 million. A share, when you can find one, still sells for $25.
The Packers are America’s Team for all the above reasons and more:
They play in a stadium named after a legend (Curly Lambeau), not an airline or a bank.
They practice in a facility named after legend (Don Hutson), not a sneaker company.
They play outdoors, not in a dome.
They play on real grass, not artificial turf.
They’ve got a quarterback (Brett Favre) from a town (Kiln, Miss.) that is 82 times smaller than Green Bay.
They’ve won more NFL titles (11) than any other franchise.
They’ve had 19 Hall of Famers, among them, Vince Lombardi, Ray Nitschke, Bart Starr, Jim Taylor, Paul Hornung, Willie Davis, Willie Wood, Johnny (Blood) McNally, Lambeau and Hutson.
They’ve got the Cheeseheads, the best advertisement for the dairy industry since the fondue pot.
After the Packers exposed the mold on the San Francisco 49ers, Green Bay coach Mike Holmgren used two words not usually associated with pro sports — “fun” and “unselfish” — to describe his season and his team.
Tight end Mark Chmura said the Packers’ unity might stem from playing in the place that became known as “Title Town” during Lombardi’s unprecedented run of success in the 1960s. “I don’t know if it’s that we really want to win or because this town keeps us all close, but there really isn’t any jealousy here,” Chmura said.
The Packers might not be strong enough to overcome the Cowboys, who have that massive offensive line, Emmitt Smith, Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin and the world’s leading practitioner of self promotion, Deion Sanders. But they’ve already proven themselves to be extraordinary in many ways.
This season, after Modell revealed he was turning his back on the city that had faithfully supported the Browns for 50 years, Cleveland mayor Michael White said, “If this can happen here, there is no safe franchise in America.”
There is an exception. Green Bay is safe. The Packers will be there tomorrow, the day after that and when our children’s children are having children. We all can take comfort in that.
That’s awesome. I’m happy to be a part of it; I bought a share when they went on sale in 1997 to refurbish Lambeau Field.
