Eric Ward: Good Guy; Justin Seibert: Giant Jag-Off

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.