It’s been awhile since we last spoke. How are things? Remember when we watched “Wargames” and chuckled over the fact that Matthew Broderick was able to do VOIP over a 2600 baud modem? Tears of mirth and laughter still fill my eyes when I think about it…

I saw your handy work on one of my client’s sites on Network Solutions. Seems you were able to hack hundreds of Wordpress sites (http://blog.sucuri.net/2010/04/details-on-network-solutions-wordpress.html). It didn’t take me long to see what you did, trying to insert iFrames in the SITE_URL row of the wp database. Very cute.. too bad it didn’t work the way you wanted (FYI, adding an iframe tag to a stylesheet link doesn’t produce the expected behaviour. Silly hacker! Next time, you should grep a replacement for “http” instead. Well, I suppose that’s what happens when you go ahead and hacks the netz without first consulting an SEO. (There’s very little money in CPM when it doesn’t convert, and your blank malware landing page didn’t work on my Mac.. to my chagrin).

Oh hacker.. When will you learn? This type of hack is not gonna get Angelina Jolie despite the quality of your rollerblades…

I know you read somewhere that Black Hat SEO is just like hacking, and you can make lots of money that way.. Well, let me tell you something. Black Hat SEOs aren’t hackers.. They’re porn affiliate webmasters! They’re clever, but they’re not criminals. Breaking Google’s guidlines isn’t the same as breaking the law… a differentiation that you haven’t quite ascertained yet.

Anyway, i’m glad we had this little talk. We’ve been through a lot together, you and I. It seems like just yesterday when you hacked my cgi guestbook for about half an hour in ‘96. It took me a whole 15 minutes to find the JavaScript injection, you cheeky devil (semi colon+bracket smiley face).

Well, good talking at ya. We should get together sometime so you can talk in l33t and I can make fun of you…

Just like old times..

What the hell? I don’t want to use yahoo, Rogers! If I wanted to change the default search engine on my iPhone, I’d have done that!

Hey Rogers, you tried this DNS hijacking crap back in 2007 ( http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=89219&page=9 ). It was a bad idea then, and it’s a bad idea now, you overpaid monopolistic douchbags!

I pay premium for bandwidth, not for you to hijack my Internet! I’ll bet it’s you guys who keep trying to send VNC requests to my phone.

What.. you’d think we wouldn’t notice?!? Assholes…

I just noticed that all these results are sponsored results.. I’m so tempted to click the shit out of all of those links.. but I know you’d just be making money off that…

Did you know that you can get FREE TRAFFIC to your website?  Improbable, you say!  Well, my online ORGANIC SEARCH PROGRAM can make the improbable probable!  Did you know that MILLIONS OF PEOPLE use search engines?  Believe it or not, they do!  Each day you aren’t targeting your website to these MILLIONS OF PEOPLE is another day that you are losing $$$!  Stop losing $$$ and start making $$$.

So, Web… can I call you Web, or do you prefer Mr Master?  Good.  Here is a FREE SEO AUDIT of your website that took HUNDREDS OF HOURS of scraping domaintools.com:

SEO SCORE: 30%
KEYWORD RELEVANCE: 10%
INDEXED PAGES: 40%

If these numbers seem meaningless now, wait until you see our IN-DEPTH SEO AUDIT of your webpage.  If you’d like our IN-DEPTH SEO AUDIT for $250 per page, contact our SALES TEAM today!  Do not hesitate.  Your life may be at stake!  If you do not rank in the TOP 10 of GOOGLE, your family may shun you, your wife will leave you for another, your community will label you as a pariah, and you will get herpes.

Please do not take this lightly, Web!  Only SEO can SAVE YOUR LIFE!

Good day sir,
SEOBOT

… ahh.  I feel much better now.

SEO is an object-oriented language based on the link MVC (“more votes count”) design pattern, wherein the subsequent amount of AT (“anchor text”) of IL(“inbound links”) is proportional to the OP (“on page”) usage of a specific “target” to incur algorithmic favor with S Engine(s).  This is, of course, an oversimplification, but it does point out some very basic premises.

Let’s start with the classic “Hello world”.  To begin your first SEO program, open up your favorite website (I use vancouver-seo.com, its free and open source!), and start with a new page.  From there, we’ll need to enter the following script:

01 START

02 CHECKSUM GOOGLE

03 IF PAGE = INDEXED THEN GOTO 04 ELSE GOTO 02

04 REPORT "Hello, World"

05 GOTO 01 AND REPEAT

That’s all it takes!  Now go and write your SEO Programs!

This post was brought to you by the Wikipedia Verifiability Taskforce.

I didn’t just fall off the BBS truck.  I feel I have a fairly good understanding of these connected servers we used to call the world wide web, and I understand intrinsically that reading something on the internet doesn’t mean that its true, but I am frequently disturbed by the amount of “research” that is cited as having been pulled from Wikipedia.  For those of you who haven’t read this before, here’s the threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia:

The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true.

Again, verifiability, not truth.  The difference is clear, verifiability is merely an agreed upon authority, whereas truth is the elusive underlying constant that philosophers search for, and the core of what we classify as knowledge (in the epistemological sense of the word).  Broken down to the extreme sense, if “authoritative sources” say “the world is flat” then Wikipedia will include it, students will cite it, and public opinion will validate it.

Now as any marketer (or high school class president) can tell you, manufacturing authority is not a difficult task, especially in the online realm.  Knowledge is not required, only popularity.  The more popular an idea, whether true or false, the more likely it will be accepted.

Some of my teacher friends frequently complain about students citing Wikipedia in their research papers.  I understand their complaints, but the reality is that not only is Wikipedia accessible and easy to use, but North America’s most popular search engine considers it a high authority (and news source)!  The dice are loaded when it comes to actual online research which, ironically, HTML was built for (well, scientific documentation… but close enough).

It is for this reason why I don’t buy the “newsprint is dead” argument anymore than I buy the “record industry is dead” argument.  Both industries are amidst a paradigm shift, and sales are dropping because they don’t quite understand why they were successful in the first place: they established themselves as authorities.  I believe, when the dust settles, people will inevitably crave substance over style…

Well, at least one would hope so.

For those of you who are not aware of what the Pirate Bay is, let me give you a brief synopsis of Torrents.  Basically, a torrent is a checksum file of various bytes that comprise a file.  People using a Torrent Client (like BitTorrent for PC, or Transmission for Macs) can use these checksum/hash files to locate the various bytes from other clients using the software, and download a complete version of the file.  Its similar to the Napster/Kazaa software, but on a much broader scale (I’m simplifying here, of course, but hopefully you get the gist).

So, a couple of Swedesh guys get together and decide to create a site that allows users to search for these torrent hash files, to which a user can do with what they will…  usually, they use them to download movies, music, and tv shows.  So, Warner Brother (and many other companies) come along and say “the Pirate Bay is solely responsible for all the revenue we’ve lost” and try to sue, because in the United States, being a service provider that facilitates illegal activity is also illegal (although, one wonders about all those “escort agency and massage parlor” advertisements in local US papers that also facilitate illegal prostitution).  Long story short, the US Governement put pressure on the Swedesh governement to shut them down.  The same copyright laws do not exist in Sweden, and the site isn’t doing anything illegal under Swedish law.

To me, this appears to be another case of the US Government attempting to police the world and impose its rule of law globally.  This has failed in the past, but there’s a first time for everything…

What is my stance on all this?  All ethics about people participating in legal or illegal activities aside, these lawsuits are representative of business not understanding the paradigm shift that has happened in the last 10 or so years in regards to digital technology.  The RIAA has gone as far as suing consumers for downloading a couple of songs, which is potential marketing suicide.  But, on the other hand, someone downloading an album for free means lost revenue for a business.  What has happened here?  Where is the disconnect?  Why are companies suing their customers?

Here’s where I think the flaw lies.  Hollywood and the Recording Industry have confused the content with the product.  For years, they have been the sole propriator of the technology used to distribute the content, be it CDs, DVD, VHS (remember when Hollywood was complaining about how VHS was killing box office sales?  I do!), etc.  Because digital files like MP3s are not something a company can hold propriatary ownership of (meaning, they cannot produce the means of distributing the content by selling the method of playing said content (ie CD Players, DVD Players… there’s a reason why Sony is a manufacturer of electronics and has a record division.

This is where they dropped the ball.  Ironically, a computer company named after a record company (but have no relation, and was involved in many lawsuits about it), picked up that ball and appear to be doing just fine.  Apple took an already existing technology (mp3 players), repackaged them and made them sexy.  Had Warner Bros, Sony, and all the other companies that own electronics manufacturing plants had done the same, they probably would’ve been able to get a foothold on this new means of content distribution.

I didn’t take Marketing in school, but it seems to me that that is the disconnect.  Warner Bros doesn’t make music and movies, they are content providers for people who sell little plastic discs, and the sales of these little plastic discs have decreased as of recent years because people have moved passed the wastefullness of little plastic discs.

At least, that’s how I see it.

Be it people who have no sense of their surroundings, or people who don’t understand how a lineup works, but most often is people who just do not understand Search Engine Optimization. Especially when it comes to job descriptions…

Here’s one of my favorites:

We will need to provide the following capabilities, in addition to providing our current content:

- ability to sign-up new customers.
- easy to use customer interface and navigation.
- in the future (4 – 8 months out), ability to link web interface with a customer report capability (which draws upon a database).
- ability to apply SEO.
- flash programming knowledge.
- up to date knowledge on best practices in website development, especially for technology services sector.

We’ll just ignore the “flash programming knowledge” for the time being and focus on “ability to apply SEO”… ok, take a moment… breathe.

Let’s think about this for a moment.

def:ability
ability n. , pl. -ties . The quality of being able to do something, especially the physical, mental, financial, or legal power to accomplish

def:apply
apply ( ) v. , -plied , -plying , -plies . v.tr. To bring into nearness or contact with something; put on, upon, or to: applied glue sparingly

def:SEO (from Wikipedia)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the higher a site’s “page rank” (i.e, the earlier it comes in the search results list), the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

So basically, this job is for some one who has the ability to design a front-end interface with flash, set up a reporting system, who also has the quality of being able to bring into nearness or contact the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

Why does this infuriate me, you ask? Well, let me explain something to people who think you can add SEO to a website like you can add oregano to a pasta.

YOU CAN’T!

Okay, okay. For all of you who think that all you need to rank well in Google is to put up a title and meta description, let me propose this to you. Go register iknownothingabouthowthewebworks.com (its available, I just checked). Then go pick a keyword to target. I dunno, maybe something high volume like “free porn”, add your keyword stuffed meta title and description and come back to me in a month and tell me how its going.

So often, I come across “web designers” who claim to do SEO, and my question is, “where do you find the time to do both?” because the funny joke is, SEO IS A FULL TIME JOB! Do you think links build themselves? (Well, ok. When done correctly, some do.)

Yes, I can hear you mewling and whining “but but, what about all those sites that do well and have no SEO”? Take a look at how old those sites are. Any site that has relevant content for the keyword and is 10 years old is going to rank well inspite of itself. That’s the old “age and trust” thing you might hear some SEO’s talking about.

Ok. I’m calmer now. I’ll make up for this rant later by posting some Google query string parsing I’ve been doing from my log files… but I’ll post it in flash.