The Randolf Jorberg Blog

When I split my blog into a German and an English one, I was aware that I wouldn’t blog too much on the English one, while living in Germany. But I really didn’t plan to blog THIS little, so I’m just trying to give you a rough overview what happened and what’s coming up very soon.

October 17th-18th is going to be a big day for the german online marketing industry. More than 8000 visitors are going to visit the leading online marketing düsseldorf (OMD) fair and afterwards more than 700 of them are going to visit the OMclub Party organised by me. This event is title-sponsored by Layer-Ads.de and co-sponsored by many well-known companies and friends of mine. We started small by planning an alternative party to the big and boring official party but were overwhelmed by the positive response from visitors and sponsors alike. If you go to Düsseldorf this year make sure not to miss the OMclub event!

We used this opportunity of so many marketing heads directed into our direction to give our newest project an extra boost. We aquired Macnotes.de (a leading German Mac and iPhone blogazine) in June and now decided to sponsor the OMclub event with an iPhone 3G 16 GB (without any contract or SIMlock) from 3Gstore.de. We think this is the coolest price you can give and just hope someone would ever give us a similar present… We hope that alot of webmasters will agree and participate in our competition, because this iPhone is given to the person who appears in the first spot on google.de for the keyword “Befreiphone“. Befreiphone is a made up term, that can be translated as “freed phone” so we want to show how useful an iPhone without any SIMlock could be. I’d love to have such an iPhone, as I could use it with my german SIM as well as with my South African Number…

Besides aquiring Macnotes.de we also moved into new larger offices in April, wrote a (real hardcover) book about 10 years with gulli.com and had a blast at the office opening / book release / birthday party early August.

Update from September 29th: The Befreiphone SEO-Contest was a huge success with circa 3000 blogs and mainstream media sites like bild.de or welt.de participating and the newly coined term ‘befreiphone’ gets more than 550,000 results with Google as of today. This and other contests created alot of buzz during the hectic OMD days for our OMclub that was a smash hit. With 1000 party-goers attending we grew bigger than anyone expected and observers blogged that the OMclub was more talked about than the actual OMD-fair we all came to visit… (Photos)

As you can see there is lots of business and partying going on right now in Germany and I’ll be happy once all this is over and I can finally return to Cape Town in October to concentrate on the South African business again…

Just a short hello to all the folks I’ve met so far and I’m hopefully gonna meet at this year’s Search Engine Strategies in San Jose.

I’ve just finished todays Webmaster on the Roof radio show together with Marcus ‘Mediadonis’ Tandler and many other guests. All guests and more background are on seofm.com. During the show a TV-Team from 3sat/ZDF appeared we were interviewed about Google and related subjects by Journalist Dagmar Hovestadt for a piece that will be aired on the ‘neues’ show somewhen in November.

SES was a very good show so far, but the real fun is just about to start soon. The Google Dance 2007 is gonna happen tonight and we’ve got a lot of partying to do. So far I’ve met too many people to list, but I’m sending special shouts to Thorsten ‘trafficer’ Loth, Marco Ciachera, Jill Sampey, Marcus Tober and Pascal Fantou.

If Matt Cutts says that the Googlebomb Problem was solved using a new algorythm that must be correct. After all it THE Matt Cutts from all-beloved Search-Engine Giant Google! Or is it possible that they lie to you? Why do they still claim that everything on Google’s result pages is still ordered by algorythms? Because it’s still done the manual way, they still don’t get the ’smaller’ language-specific Googlebombs like the case of ‘völlige inkompetenz‘ (complete incompetence in german) that ranks the austrian politician Karl-Heinz Grasser #1 when searching for it with Google:

funny enough: when the safe search is activated the politicians webpage does not appear in the Google results. Does it mean that Google thinks of this Politician’s (empty) homepage as an adult site?

There were too many lies about Googlebombing-Algos on the internet - hope that stops somehow soon. Google just started manually modifying their rankings on a massive scale and tries to hide that from their observers.

On a side note: the most impressive changes in the search rankings due to the manual anti googlebomb ‘algo’ was caused for the term ‘exit‘. Before Google shuffled the results the Top 3 spots were occupied by disney.com, Google and Yahoo, who’re linked by tens of thousand adult sites with an ‘exit’ button on their index page but that is gone by now.