a late response to seo is bullshit

A blog post over at contrast got a lot of attention the last few weeks. Some people say it’s just linkbait but I’m pretty sure it’s how he feels. I think it shows the divide in the way web designers/developers and seo/marketers think.

This is a business. Companies hire people to design websites because they want to increase profits. (Then there’s government websites that I’m sure feeds half the industry, with incompetent civil servants flashing the chequebook but forget them). It’s no good having an all singing-all dancing website if noone comes to it and buys your products or hires your services.

I’ve taken on a few SEO clients locally and the initial meeting is always the same. Some two-bit web design firm has designed the site for 2 grand plus in some crappy WYSIWYG editor with atrocious code. One website had the template Dreamweaver JS menu that no search engine could crawl, two different domains with the same website and incoming links divided between them and internal links going to the www version and non-www version whenever the designer felt like it. So the company had a nice looking website with 3 pages indexed in Google and none ranking for terms apart from their name.

I asked Dave if a site, built from scratch and constructed using industry-standard best practices (semantic markup, IA, usability and accessibility), still requires SEO? And if so, why? … If I’m providing relevant, interesting, quality content … people will link to it and talk about it in the same way that throughout the history of modern man

If you’re creating a government site, sure. Great content and people will link to it and it will rank very easily. But most commissioned sites are business. Say you designed an overseas property site. What content can you create that people will link to – competitors certainly won’t no matter what you think of. The post talks about ‘tricks’. There’s no tricks apart from buying links, begging for links whatever it takes from good places. Spamming links only works these days to get pages indexed. He’s right that SEO is good marketing. It’s results based. If you’re not ranking the client site for converting keywords, you’re in trouble.

Next, I asked Dave if he thinks on-site SEO practices are perfectly aligned with the interests of the visitor?

I think so. The JS menu I talked about earlier, I replaced with an identical one that used indexable divs, ul and li tags. A good descriptive anchor text is good for the user and the search engine.

I asked Dave what he considers as acceptable off-site SEO practices?… This is pure bullshit. This is filling the web with crap…. SEOs of the world: be good web citizens. Stop adding to the tripe out there on the net and stop spending your time destructively gaming Google. Go out there and make something beautiful, something worth linking to… SEO is bullshit and SEO is bad. Stop it.

Anything and everything is acceptable as off-site SEO if it gets a better rank or ranks for converting keywords. Automating posting of links on forums and blogs is not illegal, it just doesn’t work anymore (except to be indexed) and can give a bad name to a website if they care about that. Write all the spammy articles you want and submit them to article networks if it works. It doesn’t, again only if you need to be indexed, which is OK for spammy .infos with pure long tail crap but no client wants this.

We’re all in this to make money and whatever works and is within the law you should keep doing. ‘polluting the internet – lolz

jason calacanis at affiliate summit

Blogosphere going a bit mad over Jason Calacanis comments at Affiliate Summit. He’s an ‘aul pro at getting people talking. My favourite quote:

You guys really think small. Holding up a six figure check is frankly pathetic. It’s desperate. The industry I’m in, like the Internet industry, like Web 2.0 industry elitist, you know. Kevin Rose, whatever. They would laugh at that. It’s sad. It’s embarrassing.

This is just the kind of bullshit I hate, faggots in Silicon Valley going down the route of brainstorming a shitty idea, sucking off VCs for money who probably don’t have the first clue how the Net works and then blowing all that cash on fancy offices and Tesla Roadsters, I dunno.

One web 2.0 company in a thousand ‘takes off’ with a loyal band of users to create the content and is hyped up until they’re bought out by one of the real big boys with too much money and nothing to do with it. What happens to the other 999 companies? They fail, VCs lose their money and the founders go back to their real estate jobs or whatever. It’s like an Internet gold rush, some get really rich but most don’t.

Affiliate marketing is the complete opposite, if you work hard and do your research you *will* succeed. I don’t know many people pulling in ‘pathetic’ six figure cheques but I knows loads, myself included who are making a decent living doing this. Your own boss, your own hours, neither clients or managers to listen to. Bliss.

And I don’t think Kevin Rose is laughing, or should be laughing. I’d love to know how much the company has lost in the past few years. What’s the revenue model? The ads are terribly targeted and I’d guess the loyal band of pre-pubescent teenage gamers don’t have much money to spend anyway. Don’t matter anyway, it will most likely be bought in the near future by a traditional media company for a silly number only to be written off on the sly in a few years when they realise their folly.

downgrading to xp on a dell inspiron 1521

Bought an inspiron on dells refurbished site for half nothing but it came with Vista. I never tried Vista but have no interest in leaving XP, which works grand. Dells site doesn’t have many XP drivers if you enter inspiron 1521 and it took me agggess on the Google to get video drivers for the inspiron 1521 graphics card. Figured out eventually that the XP graphics card drivers on the dell site for the latitude D531 work for it

Interesting was the google suggestions when I entered ‘inspiron 1521’. One was [inspiron 1521 ubuntu] and another was ‘inspiron 1521 xp video driver‘ both with loads of threads and blog posts as you could guess. Think vista in trouble alright.

calacanis wants to outsource ‘repetative’ (sic) tasks to ireland

Jason Calacanis showing his ignorance with a twitter last night on how he wants to outsource mindless drone work to irish or indians. I’ve often used cheap labour myself for stuff like captcha solving but I wouldn’t be sourcing anywhere local. Indian GDP per capita is $3,800. Irish GDP per capita is $44,500. A little world economy lesson for ya there Jason.

Calacanis has a web 2.0 startup called Mahalo which has a ridiculous business model. He wants to generate human edited search results for the most common queries. A few issues I have with the idea:

1) I don’t think anything human edited can keep up with the current pace of the web. A breaking blog post on a topic can be indexed and highly ranked in Google in a matter of hours these days as long as it has authority links. The authority sites are doing the human editing for Google. Real human editing could not possibly keep up.

2) OK, the Mahalo editors might be doing a good service with these result pages but it’s like something the wikimedia foundation would bring out and release completely free. Thousands of editors are writing pages for Wikipedia for free (I don’t know why, but they do) but Jason is paying editors to make pages for Mahalo. It is not a good business model.

3) If a super search engine came out tomorrow with a much vaster index than G and better relevancy, it would still take a long while for people to switch. Google’s results are ‘good enough’ to prevent people to actively look for other engines.

Do people think of something they want to read about or (more importantly) buy and load up the Mahalo homepage to start a search? I seriously doubt it. I assume the majority of Mahalo’s traffic comes from Google. It’s a crap idea, it will be forgotten in a years time when Bubble 2.0 has burst and swept away all the shite

getting your mobile site to work on all phones

I have a fairly popular WAP site which is running Adsense Mobile ads and getting 300,000 impressions a day according to that so it’s pretty big. Problem is it was coded in WML 1.3 years ago when that was the only format that mobiles used. But smartphone browsers like my Nokia E61 use xhmtl-mp and don’t recognise WML at all. So I’m getting loads of emails from pissed off teenagers who can’t access the mobile site. Then there’s phones in Asia that use cHTML, a completely different format,, but I don’t think I have many users from Asia. So how do you cater for all these phones, create a different site for each format?

I was looking into this until I found the WURFL project which is a big database of all known phones and their capabilites and preferred languages. Luca Passani created WALL, the Wireless Abstraction Library for Java and Kaspars Foigts ported it for PHP. To use this you code all your pages using standard tags like and and WALL gets the phone user agent, queries the WURFL xml file and returns the appropriate code. This obviously doesn’t scale well so Tera WURFL grabs the WURFL xml file once and stores it in a local MySQL table for querying. I agree with others that the mobile web is finally coming of age about 6 years after the disastrous rollout of black and white WAP in shitty small mobile screens.

saudi rape victim punished with 200 lashes

A court in the ultra-conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia is punishing a female victim of gang rape with 200 lashes and six months in jail, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

The 19-year-old woman — whose six armed attackers have been sentenced to jail terms — was initially ordered to undergo 90 lashes for “being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape,” the Arab News reported.

But in a new verdict issued after Saudi Arabia’s Higher Judicial Council ordered a retrial, the court in the eastern town of Al-Qatif more than doubled the number of lashes to 200.

source: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=071115145104.rykb7bub&show_article=1

wtf. If these countries didn’t have the majority of the world’s oil supply we could be done with them. How could any modern civilisation think this is OK?

yet another monster ireland spam post

Monster caught spamming people scraped from it@corks member list, not too serious in fairness, just trying to drum up business but going it around the completely wrong way. Why would anyone send unsolicited email signed with their respectable company name?

And then John Burns Monster claiming the email addresses of the member list were fair game! He obviously has little online experience and how to go about things on the net. The spam police are up in arms about it stating the maximum fines that are possible but of course nothing will happen.

But shocking PR for Monster and they’re own fault for taking on the blogosphere. Nobody would give a shit about blogs if we didn’t have so much trustrank with Google. A query for <Monster Ireland> on the big G already brings up his post from a few hours on page two! Monster might be hiring a few SEO companies to do some ‘reputation management’ work soon.