Wow, that may be the most specific post title I have ever written.  But I want to capitalize on the extreme amount of google love we're getting lately to save someone else a LOT of time.

We're doing a beta of our Social Suite and it depends on iOpus's most excellent iMacro for FireFox.  Except that they released a new version (6.0.4.1) which killed our software.  Thanks guys.

So, how simple could this be: we just needed the previous version (6.0.3.9). 

Which is NOT on their website.  Nor is it mentioned in their otherwise comprehensive wiki. And when you try to search google for it, well, good luck with that. 

So, it turns out that previous versions of iMacro for FireFox are kept on the FireFox/Mozilla website.  Go here to get version 6.0.3.9 and earlier versions of iMacro for FireFox.

You know what else I know now?  There is (often) a "see all versions" button at the bottom of the addon for FireFox that gets you to the same place. 

[Bump and update: two hours after posting and  we have the number one slot for our own  whois search.  Neat.]

This is not yet another weary re-telling of the Google Blogscoped article on whois this morning. I am sure our readership has an almost 100% overlap with the blogscoped guys. I am also sure that at least a few "SEO Bloggers" will duplicate the article with some added tips and tricks.

No, whenever I read a google "trick" or "feature" article I always use it on my site name and our key, er, keywords to see what will happen. I can't remember who suggested this to me, but I'm sure it was someone a lot smarter than me (that's a bit set!)

Whois Promote-My-Site.com on Google

So type in "whois promote-my-site.com" in google and see what happens:

Which is accurate and cool and handy - at least a dozen times a year.

But what struck me is that our site did not get even one mention in the results.

Hmmm.

So I tried some other SEO domains (seomoz.org didn't show up in the first two pages, etc...) and found that this is a common issue - lots of mentions of the site from other sites, but no direct link.

Then I bumped into seobook.com having the first four results. And it is because he has a "whois tool."

Not being entirely without wits, I immediately wrote this post about google's whois tool and what I found when I queried "whois promote-my-site.com."

Because now I'll rank with a good article on whois and how it affects my site. Assuming that there isn't some strange search logic going on in google-land.

Ever used Baidu? I haven't because, well, my Chinese is not much better than my French or my German. And without even cognates from five years of Latin to guess my way around a site, heck, I don't think I've ever used it.

And, yes, yes, I know that there are more internet users in China than there are people in the US, blah, blah, blah. I am focused more on the fact that my 12 year old makes more mowing lawns in a weekend than the average Chinese guy working in a factory for a month. And I sell stuff that doesn't cost a dime, so the vast masses of Chinese consumers are worth significantly less to me than they are to, say, P&G.

Logs Are Worth Reading

I was looking through our logs, saw a search string, and clicked on it. It turns our that we rank for:

PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL. This e-mail address is not monitored

Which is the strangest search string I've seen in a while.

Wile there I tried searching on "Promote My Site" - we usually rank between 4th and 6th or so on Google, depending if Matt Cutts had oatmeal or a biscuit for brekky that day. Here is the result for that on Baidu (we are 6th):

Ok, the string they show is:

GOTO=http://technorati.com/blogs/promote-my-site.comblogreactions&&HREF:http://technorati.com/search/promote-...GOTO=http://promote-my-site.com/authtrans.php?authority_string={{!VAR1}} TAG POS=1 TYPE=DATA EXTRACT=...

Perhaps this all makes sense in China. But it really reminds me of the very very early days when everyone was switching from X to google and every once in while you'd get a result where you just had to scratch your head.

I think we forget how much better that all works now.