We all were newbies once.

Hilarious story about my SEO-apprentice.

[pmkpmk]

I recently hired a techwriter. He is an engineer, but his past few jobs were in techwriting. He was sick to write manuals and looked for something more interesting, and since he showed potential I hired him for copywriting. I'm slowly introducing him to the aspects of SEO in copy, and yesterday I told him to work on the pagetitles of a less important site and to redo them under SEO aspects. I made him read Brett's "101 Signals of Quality - The Page Title" first.

So he started to work on these things, but by noon he was really frustrated.

I asked him, what's up?

He told me "Whatever I do - it doesn't change anything!"

I asked what he means with "nothing changes"?

He said "Well I change the title of the page, but the change doesn't show up in Google!"

So it turned out that he thought that any change he does shows up IMMEDIATELY in the Google index! I was stunned first, but then broke into laughter (which was probably not the most polite thing to do). Of course I explained to him how the concept of spidering the web works and after that he understood the whole issue. Nevertheless it was very insightful for me as well.

[jecasc]

That reminds me of several years ago when I created my first PDF file in Photoshop. It was an advertisement for the local newspaper. I sent it out to the newspaper and they called me back and said they could not read the file because some fonts where missing and asked me to include the fonts into the PDF.

But instead of selecting "include fonts" when saving the PDF, I copied the font files together with the pdf file into a zip file and sent everything to the newspaper.

[phidentity]

Sometimes we forget just how much knowledge is involved in SEO!

Theres lot's and lot's to take onboard.

[SilverLining]

jecasc, that is absolutely hilarious! just what i needed for a friday chuckle...

[httpwebwitch]

This thread could plunge into another water-cooler chat about funny user bloopers. "Any Key", anyone?

Recently had a moment where someone was tipped that their site content was duped. They selected a few sentences of text from their site and pasted them into the Google box. When 120,000 results returned, they panicked... 120,000 sites stealing my content?!

I suggested they put the text in quotes and try again

Turns out the site content was indeed duped. by 2 scrapers, not 120,000

[skibum]

A new hire at the agency (more on the media side of things - no so much focused on search) not to long ago, for months tried to figure out why we were always talking about paperclips and what paperclips had to do with advertising campaigns on Google and Yahoo!

[pmkpmk]

Erm... what DO they have to do with them? Or are you not talking about the little bent wire things to - well - clip papers together?

(Sorry, I'm not an English native speaker so I might miss a pun in here)

[Woz]

Pmkpmk, the person misunderstood Pay Per Clicks as Paperclips.

Onya
Woz

[pmkpmk]

*slapping hand against forehead*

[tomda]

I had a similar hilarous experience with a delivery man, it is not related to the web but it is as funny as pmkpmk's story.

TITLE
"Don't ask to a delivery man to call his office, he is just a newbie delivery man"

STORY
While we were waiting for the delivery man to come, his office called us asking for him. The guy arrived few minutes later.
"Your office has called, you can take a seat here and call them back"
So the guy took a seat on the chair looking strangely at the phone. The phone was the old-type of phone, the one that our grannies used to have, with the handset and the noisy numbered wheel. After a while - I though he was trying to remember the number of his office - he dialed the number on the wheel without picking the handset. We were all laughing behind our desk. After completed the number, he was stupidly waiting for somebody to speak.
I had never seen that before and had a big laugh in front of him while one of my colleague was nicely explaining him how to use a phone.