http://www.twitter.com/acasalena

Thaaaaaaaaaaanks.

http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/1259

We’re in no rush to get this position filled and would rather see it not be filled rather than have the wrong person on board. Get in touch if you know someone (being in the New York metro area is a plus!).

We originally signed up with Commission Junction for our affiliate program for a number of reasons. CJ acts as a third party tracking and payment service — which means that our publishers can feel safe that another party is in charge of tracking the payments and handling the payouts. That sort of arrangement is much more fair than just Squarespace doing the tracking, as they track such arrangements for thousands of other advertisers. They can also pay by check — something we don’t have the capacity to do. They’ve helped us improve our payouts and launch incentive discounts for affiliate performance.

One additional neat perk of the CJ affiliation was that they have a network of publishers already — some of whom might be interested in advertising Squarespace. Since we’ve started there, we’ve had 1,400 advertisers sign up to be a part of our program.

… which ended up being the biggest nightmare I’ve ever engaged in. Here’s what came of that:

• Many, many site operators taking out search AdWords under our company name, where we already advertise, in an attempt to skim commissions from people who would have found us anyway. All of these people had their accounts terminated from our program. There is absolutely no value being added here.

• A bunch of coupon sites attempting to monopolize “Squarespace coupons” searches, and going as far as to tell individuals on their landing page to “click here for Squarespace
  coupons” — even though there are none — so they get commissions from those searches. Again, anyone looking for “Squarespace coupons” already knew about us, so there’s no value add — and they’re further lying to get people to click on the links. That’s incredibly deceptive.

• One single individual advertising from a legit site that we’d actually like to be a part of. Out of 1,400 people subscribed. Seriously.

(Note: These are the “Network Recruited” people — not our real customers who we’ve added to our program. None of our real customers have done any of this sort of thing.)

Managing and tracking all of the bad stuff has consumed hours and hours. Masked affiliate links under our company name take forever to track, and we end up finding because our own tracking software clearly shows where the people were actually signing up from.

After terminating another “affiliate” today for more advertising under our company name, we got the most incredible email back of all. He suggested that we allow that sort of advertising to continue so that we can boost our rankings in the CJ network. That’s correct: Allow a bunch of individuals to simply take thousands of dollars in commissions — for leeching on the brand we’ve already established — so our ranking numbers improve within CJ. Are our “competitors” in CJ really doing this? That’s a mind-blowing waste of money, and we refuse to participate.

Let me be really clear: With crap like this going on, we DO NOT CARE WHAT OUR EPC IS WITIHN THE CJ INTERFACE. Do not try and scam this program or lie to your site visitors.

The arrangement, in case anyone is actually confused, is really (really) simple: If you’ve got a site that can refer people who are interested in publishing to Squarespace, we’d LOVE to pay you. In fact, if you’ve got an amazingly large site and would like to negotiate terms, we’d love to talk to you as well. Be completely honest and promote our site honestly, and we’ll pay you.

Why is that so hard to do?

Click to read more »

Squarespace will be alpha testing a new application soon that you may just love.

Just added 6 new sites to our directory:

http://www.squarespace.com/directory/

And now I want to add 3 more I just uncovered. What a great problem to have :) Please do keep the feature requests and feedback flowing in — I read every piece of correspondence that comes in. We can’t implement everything, but everyone’s thoughts together helps shape the direction we move towards.

1) I’m trying to sell my car. It’s in cars.com. I’m receiving periodic cell phone calls from sketchy car companies trying to charge me to re-list my car that’s already for sale on cars.com with their service (for $150!). They each expect me to sit on my cell phone with them while they discuss how national exposure is going to help me sell my car (I just want to sell it locally — wtf is someone in California going to do with my car on the east coast?).

2) I’m trying to sell a PowerBook G4 (anyone want one?) on craigslist in Manhattan. I’ve received 3 scammer emails (out of like, 6 emails total) from people trying to “offer me $100 more” than I listed the item at if I “ship the item using their fedex account” and let them “explain to me how to accept a USPS money order”. Thanks, I understand how to accept a money order. You send it to me, and I deposit it. Your stupid confirmation email isn’t money in my bank account, and I’m not sending you anything preemptively. I actually had to tack on “WILL NOT ACCEPT ANYTHING OTHER THAN LOCAL EXCHANGE” on my ad. Silly me for thinking posting on craigslist IN MANHATTAN assumed that.

3) I received about 120 spam emails.

4) 50% of emails to our Squarespace support email address are spam.

5) I spent the night updating Squarespace’s spam filters to edge out the .01% of spam that’s still getting through. 97% of all comments posted to Squarespace yesterday (Sunday) were spam. 97%. Odd additional fact:

85% of all new spam domains on my blacklist are on Google’s blogspot. Presumably a lot of these spammers are monetizing their spam through AdWords eventually. It’s really just bizarre that the #1 host of spam is probably also the #1 beneficiary (AdWords charges us advertisers for clicks on our ads, and we have no way of knowing if the clicks are coming from spammer sites, or are legit). Google: Please give me a place to submit these 100 blogspot sites a day from the spammers.

You know what you should do, Google? (Sorry to be one of these people..) With all that money and all those computing resources.. why not really start fighting the spammers? Any company in the precarious position of being both a host and a profit center for spam should probably just.. you know.. give it a shot (instead of making online spreadsheets or whatever they do now).

Isn’t it also quite alarming alarming that the one company that was able to stop this shit, Blue Security, was taken offline by a gigantic DDOS — and instead of pulling together and beefing up our zombie elimination and identification, everyone just shuts up? Google, come on. Tackle that one. I really hate to just point at Google and say “please” — but what large company has more at risk if they don’t control the spammers?

I need to go sit alone in a cafe for an hour — alone — before I explode.

It — uh — doesn’t support WPA encryption. Even though it says it does. So it’s more or less totally useless as a wireless print server. I wouldn’t normally post something like this, but it’s just simply unreal that they haven’t pulled these from shelves.

Their fix instead of pulling them? Make the firmware upgrade remove mentions of WPA in the configuration interface.

Enjoy using this on all of your unsecured wireless networks. Just great.

Searching for “SEO” is a really interesting for a number of reasons. Certainly, every single “SEO expert” out there is using every little trick in their book in order to increase their rankings on the term “SEO” — as what in the SEO field could be more of a mark of accomplishment? Some observations from the first page of results:

1) In the top 3 results, only one of the sites even has a meta keywords tag. That’s right. Absolutely no meta keywords tag on sites ranked #2 and #3 for the word “SEO”. How could Google possibly find these sites and rank them above the 10,000 other sites that no doubt have the term “SEO” in their meta keywords? Easy: Google ignores the meta keywords tag.

2) Hit #7 or so is a regular blog. It’s actually an excellent blog to read, as it’s written buy a guy who has been working on Google search team for years. There’s a great interview with him up at ClickZ as well. Summary of his comments on search? Google’s job is to find and index the most relevant content on the web. Sometimes that content comes from large budget sites that can afford to worry about how search engines perceive them, some of that content comes from mom and pop shops that have never heard the word SEO. It does not matter. The best and most relevant content for a particular keyword is the only thing that will increase your rankings within Google or any other modern search engine — it’s literally their job to ensure that (see below for an explanation of how Google defines “best”, roughly).

3) This one is my absolute, all-time favorite: The #2 hit for “SEO” has nothing to do with search engine marketing. Nothing at all. All of the SEO tricks in the world got only one single SEO site above the site for Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO). Let’s have a look under the hood at the HTML for this site — as certainly it must contain a number of sneaky tricks in order to compete with the top SEO marketers out there and get ranked under THEIR term! Wrong again. The HTML looks like it was written in 1999. Totally table based layout, lots of dense HTML, inline styles, no meta tags whatsoever. And it outranks every single search engine marketer out there — all of who have had years to compete.

So how to increase your rankings? It’s not a secret meta tag. Google tells you. Become an expert for whatever topic you’re speaking about. What defines an expert? Recognition — and receiving recognition on the web is done through the hyperlink. Unequivocally, the more organic links you have pointing to your site, the more authority Google and other search engines will give your site.

The Search Engine Optimization industry is obsolete. Google doesn’t care about your meta keywords tags, the placement of your navigation bar in your code, or if you used 3 divs to wrap your content or 100. This isn’t 1999. You can’t game search engines by adjusting code. If you could, the #2 result for the term SEO on Google wouldn’t be a company that has absolutely nothing to do with search engine marketing and has HTML from 1999.

Instead of trying to tweak your page and worry about SEO issues, why not spending that time writing a new article for your site. If it’s good, maybe some people will even link to it. Before those links even begin become picked up by Google and increase your keyword rankings, you’ll have the traffic from those links driving interested visitors right to your content. Isn’t that what you wanted? Using your time thinking about SEO, especially when you have a system like Squarespace generating your site’s code (we generates extremely clean site code), is a total waste.

A high rank in Google for your search terms isn’t a means for exposure, it’s a result of it.