Eric Ward: Good Guy; Justin Seibert: Giant Jag-Off
Posted on March 4th, 2008 by Justin Seibert in Business Blogging, Link Building, SEO, Search Engine Reputation Management, Web Credibility
TAGS: Eric Ward, justin seibert, Link Building, Search Engine Reputation Management
Mmmm – my size 10 Johnston & Murphy tastes pretty good. Maybe that’s why I try to cram it in there so often. I went almost 2 years without causing a stir and now I can’t go 2 posts without doing something stupid. If I didn’t mind coming off like a meathead, I could probably be a pretty good link baiter.
Yesterday I posted an interview with David Temple about paid search certification and SEO training. In case you don’t want to click back or try to split screen two browser windows, I offered:
We tried contacting Eric Ward to purchase a half day training program, but I guess he’s too busy to cash a check (read: he won’t get back to me and I’m going to feel like a giant jag-off if it turns out God forbid there’s some family or personal reason I’m not aware of…although I’ve tried contacting him a couple times on 2 different occasions….
Well, today I received a comment that temporarily got caught up in our akismet commenting spam box, an email, and a phone call from Eric. Apparently, Eric’s as big a fan of search engine reputation management as we.
The short version – Eric was sorry for not getting back to me either time. The first time was around when he became a father again and this second time?
Sadly, my father recently had a stroke that pretty much left him unable to care for himself, and my brother and I are handling the situation as best we can.
Backpeddle, backpeddle, backpeddle. What I meant to say before was that Eric Ward offers excellent link building training, is quite handsome, and should have a statue of bronze built in his honor and placed next to Abe’s in Lincoln Park.
Seriously – my public apologies to Eric (we already had our phone hug-it-out). While I tend to be flippant about a lot of subjects, family and stroke are not something I would touch.
On the positive side – Eric very graciously peace piped a one-hour link building Q&A to my firm. So now the question – what do we want to ask Eric?
Finally, it is my hope that this post will serve as a notice to any other folks that may have had trouble getting in touch with Eric that the delay has been caused by something very personal that he did not want – for obvious reasons – post on his site.
I’m going to go find someone to take me out to the shed now as we would say in West Virginia.
Update: I didn’t realize Eric was from Knoxville. He might not like this picture, which I had captured for a never-written Vandy-UT recap post:
Or this one:
Or this one:
Lordy if I had known you were a Vandy grad I never would have called. Those photos are salt in the wound from that game, which I blame 100% on the refs.
Go Big Orange.
Interesting google news results
vanderbilt beats tennessee – 2,402
tennessee beats vanderbilt – 2,416
We are winning by 14.
Comment by Eric Ward on March 4, 2008
As one of the “half dozen regular readers” of your blog (and skimmer of the long posts), I have an ease-of-use question. Why is it that for all the bigdog blogs out there, I can conveniently read them in my Reader, but for directom I only get the first few sentences before having to click “more” and get redirected to your site? answer me that jag.
Comment by Jotham on March 4, 2008
Good on Eric Ward for keeping track of his name for reputation management. Good on me for not commenting on your afore mentioned question and mentioning Eric as a link master. Good on you for the public apology.
Comment by David Temple on March 5, 2008
Faithful Reader #011 a/k/a Jotham – Weren’t aware of any issues until now. Please email me or comment back with answers to 2 questions: 1. which feed reader, and 2. is this recurring or just with yesterday’s post? We made some changes to the blog’s presentation yesterday and I want to know if that caused any or no change. Cheers!
Comment by Justin Seibert on March 5, 2008
@Jotham: It’s regular readers like your good self who point out ‘ease of use’ issues. Thank the Lord we don’t have more than half a dozen otherwise we’d probably be inundated with all manner of usability questions.
Anyway, just for you, I’ve installed a plugin that displays the full text in RSS feeds. You see, we’ve just been switching from the excerpt view of posts to using the more tag in posts as the more tag allows for better formatting. The problem with the more tag is that it truncates the feed text as well. Apparently that is something that will be changed in the next big Wordpress update.
Anyway, I’ve tested the plugin and it’s working when you view the feed from feedburner although I’m not seeing a change in Google Reader as yet.
That means – give it a bit of time if there doesn’t appear to be a change.
Comment by Paul Woodhouse on March 5, 2008