You try to make your customers happy. You sincerely WANT them to be pleased with your products and service. You go out of your way to provide quality and integrity in everything you do.

So, why is it that every once in a while there's a customer who insists on totally, absolutely and completely pissing you off?

How long is a string?

There are some questions, answers to which, will always elude me. Are you with me on this?

I received an email message from a customer who must have not only have awoke on wrong side of bed, but must have also found himself in wrong bed, in wrong bedroom, in wrong house, on wrong block, in wrong city, and in wrong life. As I read this message, I was seething with anger -my hands literally shaking.

Wanting to somehow reach through my ethernet connection to find neck attached to head of person who could be so rude was my first priority.

What do you do at this point? How do you satisfy irrational?

ANSWER: You don't.

Romans 12:20 says, "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head."

This is what I attempted to do in my reply to Mr. Disgruntled. Here's a formula that you can use; and if you do this, satisfaction will outweigh - many times over - anger you initially felt.

Step 1: Stop. Close email. Put down poison mouse and walk away.

Step 2: Consider situation carefully. Can you imagine a time and place where you might have blasted someone in same way? Is there even tiniest hint of legitimacy to claim of this angry customer? Things aren't always as you might perceive them. There are always multiple sides to every story. Does this condone abusive behavior? Of course not.

Now, if answers are "no, No, and NO, this is unjustified", stick with this formula anyway. When you've done what's right, you'll be bigger person and your self image will be elevated.

Link Popularity history:

To gain a better understanding of link popularity it is useful to know why it became so crucial for search engine rankings. In past a web page's ranking was determined, amongst other factors, by number of keyword occurences within 'on-page' elements i.e. in page text, META tags, title tag. When web developers learned that they could trick a search engine to return their web pages by cramming keywords into their pages search engines had to get a bit smarter. They were using 'on-page' elements to determine relevance so it was only natural that they would look to elements out of direct control of web page creator i.e. 'off-page' elements. Search engines made assumption that greater number of links from other sites pointing to a web site, more popular web site is and therefore a more quality resource. This worked nicely in theory but in practice it was also to be abused.

Web site owners figured out many ways to get links pointing to their web sites one example of which was through use of link farms, pages contained nothing more than a collection of links, Quantity of links was being abused so search engines made use of old saying "quality not quantity" and began to assign a quality factor to each of links pointing to a web site. Now web sites that had a higher number of high quality links were looked upon favourably by search engines. Building link popularity became a science in itself and today is still most time-consuming and frustrating activity for a search engine optimizer.

Main classes of links:

Note: In following examples SiteA is our web site and SiteB is an outside site i.e. a web site under a different domain name than SiteA.

Inbound links: Inbound links to a web site are links that originate from an outside web site . An example would be a link on SiteB pointing into a page on SiteA. SiteA <----- SiteB

Outbound links: Outbound links from a web site are links pointing to a page on an outside web site. An example would be a link on SiteA pointing out to a page on SiteB. SiteA -----> SiteB

There are two further classifications of links:

Reciprocal links: An example of a reciprocal link is when SiteA links to SiteB AND SiteB links to SiteA, link is reciprocated by both parties. SiteA -----> SiteB AND SiteA <----- SiteB

One-way links: An example of a one-way link is when either SiteA links to SiteB OR SiteB links to SiteA, it is one-way only. SiteA -----> SiteB OR SiteA <----- SiteB