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?***
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?
