I’ll be honest, I have written a few posts that may have fallen into the wide category of Search Engine Optimization, but the current trend is just baffling to say the least; a hundred articles on how to check your backlinks? C’mon give me a break.
I am all for the tips and so called “secrets” that these white hat search engine hackers employ, as a webmaster myself I am interested in making my website as visible as it can be with the minimum of fuss. It’s just that SEO posts are fastly becoming the equivalent to Spam, all the sites using the same products and ideas to market something that has no tried or tested method.
What is the main reason Askimet has blocked 20,000 spam comments? SEO. By bombarding peoples servers with linked comments advertising Phentermine and Viagra, they are attempting to build backlinks whilst obviously trying to drive sales from that particular website. The more backinks a website has, the more “credible” it appears to search engines as a useful place for information. I may fall into this trap because I employ the “You Comment, I Follow” rule, which basically strips the nofollow tag from the comment authors website link and allows them to receive a backlink from my website. This maybe why I get a lot comment Spam, or maybe because this blog rocks (hehe).
Head over to a prominent Social Media website such as Mixx or Digg, you will find hundreds of submissions from “self made” internet entrepreneurs who make their living employing SEO tactics or teaching others to do the same. Their posts are linkbait, re-hashing the same content from their own blogs, let alone the thousands of other SEO websites that reside on the web.
Perhaps I don’t understand it, my attempts at making money on the web have resulted in a £100 cheque from Google Adsense, and a few pounds here and there. I don’t write many posts that are baited for visitors because I like to write about things personal to me or showcase something that I found useful.
The sites that make money from SEO, fair play to you. There is no rulebook on how to rank highly on Google (notice I say Google and no other search engine) and you plug and plug away to get that extra figure in your pagerank. In my eyes, a well coded website and relevant content are all you need to do well in your rankings, but then again I don’t rely on Google for my income.
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March 13th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
I work as a web designer/developer/whatever and SEO bugs the #@$#@ out of me. One of my managers is convinced that I need to research keywords and write a tight description in the meta loaded with the perfect combination of keywords for sites that have no content. A site is nothing without some original content, so until people have something new to say just forget SEO and my manager can shove it. *getting off my soapbox now*
March 13th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
I completely agree. I’m running several sites for the place I’m working at right now, and pretty much every morning all I hear is SEO - META TAGS - GOOGLE RANKINGS.
Look, if someone wants to buy any of the c**p you sell, they’ll find you themselves, don’t try to shove your site down peoples throats.
It gets to a point where people won’t just be boosting the strings relative to their site, they’ll be trying to optimize, say, an ecommerce site using tags like Golf, and Internet.
The world of SEO and Rankings is going to lay dormant until sites become original again.
March 14th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Erica, thanks for your comment.
I think we all have an interest that our sites are being displayed properly but I think that’s as far as we go. I have a few plugins to encourage people to comment and for submissions to social media sites but that’s for people who want to submit my content, not me forcing it down their throats.
Having a really cool readerbase and constructive comments are what I like, not boasting how many people I can fit into my Feedburner count.
March 14th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
…though the Feedburner count is cool to see.