The past few months have seen a number of interviews with the guys from the Google Webmaster Help Group.
Summaries and links to all these informative interviews with this nice crowd of experts can now be found here.
***That ‘G’ thingy at the top is copyright of Google, ok?***
As a techie and writer I was caught in a rut; my life and career going nowhere fast.
It’s funny how even the thankless task of saving the world from technological disaster on a daily basis can become a tedious drag after a while and so, stuck doing the same thing day in day out, I was yearning for a new experience; a way to find fortune, fame and preferably my own island in the Caribbean.
Then, one day last week, I spotted an advert at ‘Honest JLH’s Designer Emporium‘ for the ‘Adam Lasnik Bucket Hat‘; an item of headwear which, although I could not foresee it at the time, was to change my life forever.
On the 9th of June, an organisation few people had previously heard of, released a report branding Google as the worst offender on the web where user privacy is concerned.
This in turn, prompted a rather heart-felt response from Google’s Matt Cutts in his personal blog.
This post is the result of a discussion thread, currently underway over at the Google Webmaster Help Group.
In fact, it more or less mirrors my own response therein:
Ok… so now we all know that Google is an ‘Information Mugger’ who hits you over the head and steals your wallet.
No, this is not a badly spelled post about flattering others. A Complament is the outcry of sheer misery and frustration when your customer phones you because his computer has fallen over for the Nth time due to a suspected PICNIC* error which you have as yet failed to track down.
*PICNIC = ‘Problem In Chair, Not In Computer’ – a.k.a. an ID-10T error or PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard)
Anyway, as is usually the case, the user was wearing a sheepish expression and pleading complete innocence to any and all wrongdoing where the machine was concerned, despite the fact that, to paraphrase Monty Python, it had:
‘…kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibule!! THIS WAS AN EX-COMPUTER!!’.
This blog is rapidly turning into a ’small time’ attempt to ridicule the tactics used by spammers and unethical SEOs; a case in point being an email which arrived in one of my boxes earlier today…
“Fill out your registration form. Please!!” (pertaining to a supposed mortgage application form)
Now, let’s for a moment assume I was actually looking for a mortgage or had filled in an application form with some lender or another… how would I assess the sender’s credibility?
For starters, the message originated from cosmology@punkass.com (my apologies about the return spam, and if it’s not your fault – sorry lads; you’ve been hacked ;-)… This would of course be that reputable lender ‘Punkass, Bitch and Associates of Philadelphia Ltd.‘, who are, as we all know, a universally trusted financial institution.
To use the worn-out quote from the 1986 classic Highlander… “There can be only one.”
But, like so many of my posts, the point may not be immediately obvious, so please bear with me a moment.
It’s been a hell of a month work-wise, so the blog posts have been sadly neglected, but… I guess if you have too much time for blogging, you’re not spending any time working. 
Anyway… What does this SEO post have to do with a film about immortals battling through time?
A few days ago, I ran across an old colleague of mine (now sadly lost to ‘The Dark Side’) and we got talking for a couple of minutes in the street. Until a couple of years ago, she was at the forefront of the SEO industry, 100% ethical, strictly playing by the rules of major search engines and the World Wide Web Consortium and forever experimenting with new developments in her field of expertise.
During past eighteen months or so however, her work ethics do seem to have undergone a fundamental change, at least where her approach towards clients is concerned. In fact, like so many rock stars (err… Phil Collins, Paul McCartney or Robbie Williams for instance), the dollar sign seems to have triumphed over talent or work-ethics.
Spammers have been called a carbuncle on the internet’s buttock. But are article spamshiners not merely making life difficult for themselves?
Back in early December I posted a rant about ‘How to get it wrong with Article Marketing‘ which illustrated the sad decline in the overall standards of articles posted on the web as they are becoming just another aspect of off-site SEO vulnerable to sp@mming.
Now, some three months later, I thought I’d post a follow-up, not only touching on article spamshiners and the long-term futility of their actions but also outlining the many benefits handling article marketing properly.
“Links! Links! Links! Links!*“
*In all likelihood, Google will now pick up this post thinking it is a rant by German left-wing radicals… Sorry
The past couple of years have seen an increasing trend to use articles as nothing more than a means of garnering inbound links for off-site SEO purposes.
Not only have the ‘bad grammar – nothing to say’ crowd jumped on the bandwagon by posting ‘automatically rewritten original’ (don’t get me started on that again) content; writers who are seemingly able to put together a coherent article are now starting to sp@m the various categories of article search engines with postings totally unrelated to the prevailing topic.
An example of what I’m talking about can be seen in an article posted at my favourite directory some time ago.
“There’s a difference between magic & witchcraft? I always thought they were one and the same. What the hell does it have to do with search engines anyway?“
Ok, so this is a bit of an odd approach to a post about SEO, but a number of well known authors* have drawn quite a clear distinction between magic and witchcraft and, whilst the connection may not be immediately apparent, this particular analogy does apply to the realm of search engine optimisation in much the same way as the realm of magic… or witchcraft… though probably not for web design or home baking.
*Most notably the British humorist Terry Pratchett. If you haven’t read any of his work, give it a go; although whilst I think about it, Robert Rankin (no strange SEO analogies or comparisons) is possibly an even better choice of author if you have a taste for the slightly strange.
Although on the face of it, magic and witchcraft may seem to share a lot of common ground, they are in fact fundamentally different.
Whilst magic is a very ostentatious affair, relying on showmanship and clever tricks to produce the result in the eyes of its audience, witchcraft is rarely showy and any bystanders who happen to be around when it is practiced will rarely realise that anything has even happened until the results can be seen.
Ok, now for the point I’m trying to make…
Classification – Ultra Mega – Above Top Secret
“Gentlemen! We have identified a new threat! Jerry is getting ready to make his move and Cyprus is facing an invasion of unprecedented proportions which is threatening to destroy our very business infrastructure.”
As you all know, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a relatively new term not only in the Republic of Cyprus, but in much of the remaining Mediterranean region also.
In fact, it is only in the past year or so that the term SEO has been used by Cypriot operatives as a means of bringing their services to the attention of the general public.
But SEO-Jerry has been watching us with envious eyes and he considers businesses on our sacred isle to be virgin territory, there for the taking.
Who is SEO-Jerry?
It all sounded simple enough:
“Could you come to the International Conference Centre in Nicosia and cover the 2007 FIFE cat show for the Pan-Cyprian Cat Club’s forthcoming web site?”
“Certainly; I’ll need an internet connection though.”
“Oh that’s no problem; the conference centre is fully wireless.”
How many times has someone uttered the words ‘no problem’ to you and you’ve just known that there’s trouble on the horizon?
As those of you who have been to Cyprus will most likely know, the island only gets about forty days of rain each year, and most of these happen between the end of November and the end of February.
Today is one of those rainy days…
Ok, so you may be asking yourself around about now just how exactly we got from a cat show in Nicosia to a weather report.
The point I’m so laboriously working towards is that Cypriot drivers are not used to wet roads; a little bit of moisture on the asphalt and drivers get cautious, a heavy rainfall with soaked roads and their behaviour becomes downright panicky (sort of like the UK if someone spots a snowflake).
