A Page Can Only Have 1 Title Tag!

Remember the quote about if another country forced our standards of education on us we’d consider it an act of war? Here’s a glowing example. The web isn’t so hard to understand. I’m reading a book by Tim Leary, it has a title. A as in 1. Just like a book has 1 title, a web page has 1 title.

But our friend at “SEO 101 Blog” want to try multiple titles to get his clients (?) better search engine rankings. Titles in the footer, titles in images, titles in Firefox, titles galore. This apparently comes from a misunderstanding of html, specifically the difference between tags and attributes. For people with no idea, tags are surrounded with <pointy brackets> and attributes aren’t. An attribute is something that describes or gives more information to a tag.

I don’t think the importance of a basic understanding of html can be overstated for the SEO industry. If our friend wants to bait search engines, and these creaturs try to tease out semantic meaning from html, it stands to reason that he and others like him would benefit from walking a mile in Google Bot’s shoes.

Why important? Two people can’t share new ideas with each other about a complex system when they can’t describe the parts they’re talking about in a way the other will understand. Words (and these are technical ones, less well known to many) have established, agreed on meanings. Rather than inventing new ones and then trying to convince people to take you up on their meanings, simply use them as intended if you wish to be understood.

Buying Links on Ebay?

Earlier we found that Ebay is anti human, now we see their ideal customer is someone who follows GoogleBot like a drunken lover. Where else but on Digital Pointless would buying links on Ebay be a topic of discusion?

I’m sure the search engine manipulator who sold a link from his home page on Ebay would tell us he truly believes in the quality of the content he’s linking to, that by using a Buy It Now button he put care into selecting the right site to sell a link to. This is the reallying cry of SEO wannabes, “I’m editorially reviewing the content like Yahoo Directory and ODP”. (ODP is short for DOPE.)

Google – I Feel Lucky

Holy Friggen Crap! Page Rank 4!!!

Yeah, that’s right, 4, four.  Note my meteroic rise – last time I checked it was N/A, as in null, as in not even a zero. I’m coming up like a rocket. Even Adam of the North and Forest’s Fine Photography don’t have PR 4 blogs! Most experts will tell you that’s almost meaningless, but most “experts” would cut off their grandmother’s right arm for an extra point. And that, dear reader, is the point.

Let’s take a step back and cover the basics. Page Rank is a number Google publishes for every page they know about. Google is the search engine (it’s a freaking verb!), so while companies can find new customers by advertising, if they can get them from Google, there’s no fee, but a potentially abundand stream of shoppers. At one time commercial traffic was banned from the internet, but it seems like these days that’s all there is. The PR number is calculated from the number and PR of pages that link to a URL, so links from high PR pages have become a commodity in and of themselves. Some would even rather have PR than visitors, because it helps them sell more links, which are in essense nothing. The things have tremendous value because people think they have value.

Rather than waste my time “link building” I’ve strived to provide something worth reading, and to capture my thoughts as they leave an impression upon me. Some of these are quite short, and others are dissertations. The cartoons (Cyanide and Happiness) crack me up, but each one represents the best of 50+ I looked at, to find one worth showing to my readers. While many in the SEO industry seek out sites that might link to them, I spend hours looking for sites to link to, worth my reader’s time and attention. Nareev, who writes intelligently about pressing international questions is one example. If you like what I write about, his Blackwater article is a must see.

So I don’t do “off page” SEO which means emailing people begging for links. I don’t do on page SEO, either, which is basically web design. WordPress doesn’t let me change much of that. I can set the title and use <H1> and down on to 6 tags, mostly because I think as a stream of consciousness, and find it easier to express myself that way. Finally, my blog doesn’t really have much of a theme, or a criteria for publiciation. Many have said foolish things like getting links from sites that aren’t “topically related” to you will cause a Google ban. And yet this blog is about social consciousness, republican bashing, occasional computer programming tips when I’ve ben stuck and cried Eureka!

Simple English Wikipedia

What the hell is this?  Basic English???

Wikipedia has 2.25 million English Language articles. About 1.5 million are spam or “stub” articles, meaning they have a title and a few words, plus massive internal links. Here is an article about a quack doctor who has a web site hawking a book. The article explains that healthy food can kill you by means of starvation.

I’ve mentioned this as early as a year ago – for profit Wikia has until recently hosted a sexual fetish site devoted to spanking. (I would link to my old site on the issue, but the WordPress database is lost.) While links to references backing up Wikipedia’s claims were struck with a nofollow, links going out to the for profit Wikia community are given coveted PageRank with search engine friendly links. (This would be a good time to mention PR means almsot nothing except to lemmings – but there are millions of lemmings in the world.)

I applaud Wikipedia for helping people with special needs, but I question their motives.