Merry Christmas to all!
Love,
I would be very angry also. This man suffers from what I call the "levis for Lada" syndrome. You may rember a commercial many years ago where this young man trades his Levis for a Lada or scoda? to go pick up his girlfriend. While under communist rule, the Russian people and others under such rule longed for what they could not have (pretty much everything...) this to some extent remains in effect to this day. This man, obviously very talented at least as a craftsman, might not be able to sell his own work for lack of interest, yet people apparently commission nock-offs of the forbidden, foreign etc.
About including other makers names in keywords etc on ones web page.
I do that, I have done such thing from 1995 when I started developping webs. I offer no appology, and I feel it is 100% ethical and furthermore 100% consistent with the spirit of the web. What my intention has allways been is to expose people to alternatives to the things and data they are searching for. It is no different than a link from another page, it offers people alternatives, an opportunity to see more of the same or related.
This technique, stems from having read the search engines recommendations and guidelines, you could do the same.
In absolutedly no way have I ever implied selling anything other than my creations, nor than there are any similarities, I think there aren't.
Here is a screen shot of the site's stats as of tonight.
http://www.bolasdefuego.com/WA/images/keyphrases.gif
you will see that hits from search engines for this kind of site are but a small percentage of the total. (I should ask Tokutomy if he wants to sell his pipes on my site..
![Razz :P](./images/smilies/icon_razz.gif)
) I have invited many pipemakers to exchange links, including yourself.
I must add that I share the above opinion, that people are going to buy what they want, seldom does this technique yield a higher position on the search engines than the main (makers web) site, if they got to mine they were probably not interested anyway.
I feel this is fair game, and that people should not be affraid of fair competition.
I more than welcome your opinions, as long as you understand the technique and its purpose.
On another note, that frankly has me quite sad and disappointed about the whole pipe scene. And that I suspect has to do with this matter of the keywords.
I call it Quixote does the beltsander shuffle. BTW the two shots were sent to me with a very nice email unfortunately my reply for more info yielded a "failure Notice".
You be the judge.
http://www.bolasdefuego.com/WA/quixoteshuffle.html
What other makers do you know off that use this technique Love?
As far as I know I came up with this in 1995, but of course I am not special.
I compete in a fair manner, if anyone had reservations they should have contacted me directly.
Too many Rock Stars. I am a Designer, at this time I design and craft tobacco smoking pipes.
Daniel Lafforgue
Bolas De Fuego Pipes
Seattle, USA