Linksys Gigabit Switch SR2016: AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE

haha, great idea to rip on them and then get into the top of the search ranks! My server which uses one will surely be switched as a result of your rant!

This post rocks!! well done sean :)

Nice! You're right... google has been VERY fast indexing these days. Pretty amazing.

Power to the people!

Glad someone got a kick out of this ;)

Ah the power of a good blog post! Gotta love it!

Amen, and Amen! Especially about the customer service - worse than not having any.

All the IT guys I know refer to them "affectionately" as Linksh*t. :) Sorry for your woes. Good luck with the new equipment.

Linkshit indeed! Although I must say I have been happy with their WRT54G router for many years now, but that's a consumer product. The switch that died is marketed as a business product so I expected quality.

Hmm, someone important noticed. This post no longer shows up anywhere for the searches linked to. Nice censorship, Google. My post is completely relevant to this product.

This post no longer shows up anywhere for the searches linked to.

You're still on the first page for the second search, and on the 6th page of the third search.

Ian - for me, none of these searches show our article within the first 10 pages on Google.

I wonder if Google has some sort of algorithm where if you post a link to search results on Google, and those results contain a link back to your same page, or even just your domain, if it's penalized somehow. Maybe having the phrase "page rank" makes this more likely to happen, because that obviously says to Google that you at least kind of know how the system works, which means you also might abuse it.

I can't think of why they would do this though. Maybe is somehow discourages blackhat SEOs from showing off ways in which they can build up "link juice" to potential customers? I guess?

No matter if this change in results was automated or manual, we have been censored by Google. And that's bullshit because the article is completely relevant for these search terms.

Well I removed the term "page rank" from the post, see if that makes any difference. Of course, now it's used several times in the comments so probably not...

Heh found a great forum thread about people talking about the exact same problem we had. Added it to the main post as well.

http://forums.linksys.com/linksys/board/message?board.id=Switches&message.id=2783#M2783

Good news, your search terms are back in Google, the first two are on the first page, and the third is on the top of the second.

Perhaps it was a fluke or perhaps it was because I removed "PR" from the post?

Who knows. All bow to the almighty Google :P

Great post guys! I love it when people use the web to expose bad service or poorly manufactured products.

Blog link juice is great for a few days than as the post get older they lose their relevance. It's not google censorship it the way of the blog. That's why you have dropped down the ranking - if it were censorship then you would have been removed from the index.

However, still a good post.

The ways of Google are mysterious -- this isn't the first time I've heard about results having different ranking for different people. I don't think there's anything malicious about it. Perhaps searches are randomly assigned to different server farms. Or, we know that they refine their algorithms constantly, and presumably they test them out against each other in the process; so perhaps something you catch a beta version.

It's common for newly spidered pages to get an initial boost when they're first discovered, and then disappear again for a short while: no conspiracy, and your results are likely to return.

It's perhaps a problem associated with wanting 'fresh' results but also relying on a link-based algorithm - which requires time to properly evaluate your page as compared to competing pages.

all those searches are on the first page for me

You should enter a clear descriptive summary of your dissatisfaction with the product in 160 characters or less, and make it the meta-description for this post.

That way, when people are on the Google SERP, even if they don't click through to read this post, they will see your message about the product.

Also, the less ranty your meta-description is, the more minds you will influence and accomplish your objective better.

I just wanted to let you know that I, and others, have been very patient with your growing pains.

However, yet again another period of downtime during the day leads me to believe one of two things is occurring:

1. Your hardware sucks and seeing that you purchased a near consumer level piece of Linksys hardware you lack either the funds to buy better or the knowledge on where to spend your funds most wisely.

2. You do not want to perform system updates during the very early morning hours/weekend/non-peak times or your application is not coded well enough to scale to the size you are asking.

At this point we will not be renewing any of our accounts and will be moving to Mint or Google Analytics for our sites.

If you get your shit together in the future we may return however at this point your amateurish practices are proving to be detrimental to our relationship.

Good bye and Good Luck

-Lee

Lee that's understandable and I won't deny there is room for improvement. We wish we could be at Google's level in terms of team members, financing, and backend software. Google probably has 20-50 people on the GA team. They have unlimited amounts of money to spend on hardware, and there are probably 10,000+ servers backing Analytics (Clicky has 5). They have amazing products like BigTable and GFS to support their backend, which are not available outside of Google (Google App Engine doesn't count). It's hard to compete with that. We're just a tiny Portland Oregon startup with 2 employees (about to be 3) and our only funding coming from profits from Clicky. We're trying our best though, I promise.

The DB maintenance this morning was unplanned, we never intentionally take things down during the week. There was a UPS failure which knocked 3 of our servers offline for a bit over an hour. The UPS' are provided by our host, they are quality, one of them just failed, it happens. We didn't lose any data during the downtime, our tracking servers were still fine. The data was just unavailable for a few hours.

The linksys switch was purchased at a time when we didn't have very much money. Now we do and we replaced it with a much higher quality product from 3com, as well we have a backup in place too in case it happens again.

Random update, we've already had at least 5 people land on this article from legitimate searches for this product. I wonder if we've changed anyone's mind yet? :D

I know that 5 may not sound like that much, but it's not like this is a huge consumer product or anything. If you need a 16 port switch you are probably doing something business related, so the user pool is much smaller.