I had a chance to catch Craig Buckler over at sitepoint.com talking about 10 Common Mistakes Made by Novice Web Developers. Bullet point #9, "Scorning SEO," caught my eye. As Craig says, the way SEO is presented as "a mixture of psychoanalysis, technical complexity, and mysterious black arts," it's no wonder that novices scorn it.

Working as an online freelance writer, I have gone over the years from tolerantly humoring clients who want SEO magic, to strenuously warning clients that what they want is witchcraft, all the way to flat-out bolting from a client the second the subject comes up. Even if you're waving fistfuls of cash in my face and offering a sports-car as a signing bonus, merely mentioning SEO will suddenly cause me to realize that my schedule is way too full to accept new clients right now.

It's no longer a business question. It's just disturbing and scary now. I've become an SEOphobiac. It's like watching an emo cut themselves every day. Even if it's their body and you're very liberal, you eventually just don't want to watch any more.

Just browsing off the top, here's some of the amazing nonsense I see SEO people preaching. I'm not going to link to examples because I'm not singling people out and don't want to... upset them... but see if you recognize these:

One guy says that one-page sales-letter style sites work best of all. Think, when's the last time you saw one of these? You know, the kind "direct marketers" had on places like GEOCities? He goes on to say that this is because every time you force a user to click to a different page, more of them abandon the sales letter. How would you prove this? And what, are visitors these robots who are kept helpless reading long pages because they are powerless to escape?

The "keyword formula." You can recognize one of these mad SEO scientists when they spout pages of scientific-sounding phrases. "Long-term SEO strategy," "focus-selected keyword phrases," "optimal keyword attack formula," "backlink normalization," "optimally-related keyword phrases." There's this percentage, you want your content to have X% keywords. How much? 15%. No, wait, it's 3%. Actually it's 4.0032145%. Yeah. We tested it. We wrote random numbers down and showed them to the dog until he barked at one.

Then they turn around and debunk real jargon. One guy's putting down "latent semantic indexing," he says it's all hooey. To summarize in the quickest way, to avoid bringing actual tears of boredom to your eyes, it has to do with putting search terms into context. Like when you type in "hound dog," it should try to figure out from other words in your query whether you want the dog breed or the song made popular by Elvis (but written by Leiber and Stoller for Big Mama Thornton!). Anyway, this guy puts it down. Why? He says so.

People hate SEO because it works. Man, I'd love to link to this one, because it wins the circular reasoning prize if ever there was one. It also goes on to say, that SEO works because there's a market for it, that Google is lying about not liking SEO because Google hosts Webmaster Tools, and that it's the search engine's fault that we have to use SEO. This goes on for paragraphs. The same guy also uses "SEO" interchangeably as a noun, verb, title, adjective... "SEOs SEO their SEO SEO."

The limit to get into the first page of Google results for competitive terms is two years. Once again, how can you possibly substantiate that claim? I know legitimate websites that have been around for a decade that don't front-page for anything, despite books' worth of content, and yet, if, say, I started a new site about 'malignant mesothelioma' and got enough people on Digg to link to it through buying votes, it could pop to number one in a week. I just searched for that exact phrase and got one site on page one that whois says was created March 2009.

One guy says he uses a software tool to spy on his competitors and what "link baits" they are developing! Wow, that's pretty good. It reads minds? Right through the tin foil and everything?

Link exchange still works in Google. You see this insistence on clinging to decade-outdated tricks everywhere. No it does not work, Google says so. What do the nay-sayers do to back up their counter-claim? They just stand there going "Does too! Does too! Desu desu desu!"

And one guy announces the stunning discovery that you can improve the situation for a page ranking PR-0 by getting more links to it. Hey, finally, something that's definitely true! Of course, knowing that fact isn't the problem. It's like saying "water puts out fire." And all these years you've been using rubbing alcohol, you silly goose.

Woo, n., "a term used among skeptical writers for pseudosciences with certain common characteristics." To understand the spirit of this term, say "Wooooooooooo!" while making a fishface and dancing your fingers in the air, as if you were making fun of somebody for believing in ghosts. Now explain to your co-workers what you were just doing.

SEO is so infested with woo, you can mine it all day long and hardly come up with a true fact to show for your trouble. You really can't prove anything right and wrong most of the time. You can use common sense, though. You can simply ask, "Would a search engine that allowed itself to be easily gamed remain popular for long?" Let the implications of that hang in the air for a minute.

Perhaps it's just inexperience. Search engines have been big business for only about 15 years now, tops, and only about 12 if you count the dawn of Google as the start of the serious SEO arms race. It's the pioneer days, but time isn't going to heal this wound. I can tell, because I see the woo pile up and get worse every year.

You just have to wonder...

I'm playing with this gizmo that analyzes your writing style, called I Write Like. Discovered from this Boing Boing link. Here's some results from various stuff I've clattered up:

Three recent blog posts:

"God, I Hope Webcomics Don't Go the Way of Print Comics" - David Foster Wallace

"What Science Fiction Would Be Like If Science Fiction Writers Had Sense" - Douglas Adams
Makes sense. Funny essay about science fiction.

"Did You Know Deer Will Let You Get This Close?" - Stephen King
Huh?

Other, unpublished pieces I have lurking around my hard drives (works-in-progress and whatnot):

A Wikipedia-type definition of copy-writing - Margaret Atwood

An essay entitled "Elitism is Good!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Yay! I was going for Papa Kurt!

An essay entitled "The Hacker as Archetype" - William Gibson
Logical enough.

Code:

An old Python command-line poker program I wrote - Bram Stoker!
That's about right for how I code.

The complete source to my Flash Drop-A-Block game - David Foster Wallace

My current .emacs file - David Foster Wallace

I kept getting a buttload of DFW. On like every two blog posts I tried. The Boing-Boing commenters also remark that DFW pops up a lot. So this thing seems to not be too scientific. I'm sorry, but I never heard of this Wallace bird before, and he doesn't really impress me as somebody to emulate.

But at least I didn't get one Dan Brown!

Update 7/17/10: Apparently it "went viral" now, according to the write up over at Huffy-Poo.

Before I get to the point, let me just say that I've been AWOL from the blog lately because of the usual excuse of huge piles of paid work to catch up on. I'll return to you shortly.

Anyway, I ran across a story where - sit down for this one - Comic artist Alan Moore himself is having some regrets about the way fans take his work.

It gives us all a shiver. Here you're trying to do light entertainment, and the next thing you know people are running around in your character's mask and living their whole lives by it. He must feel at times like he's created a monster. With what sanity he has left (being Alan Moore, after all), he's recanting in the face of the Internet Rage Machine which has taken his work too seriously and out of step with what he intended.

I've seen it happen with manga, too. Graphic novels, manga, all manner of fiction has that lunatic fringe. For every thousand fans who read Catcher in the Rye and grin "cool yarn," there's a psychopath who stands on a bloody sidewalk reading it after shooting John Lennon.

This is the darker side of what TVTropes calls serious business.

Now, I know my own silly little webcomic is taken lightly. By everybody. I hope. I have more planned, beyond the end of Doomed to Obscurity. Some of it will be dramatic instead of funny. But through it all, if I catch anybody taking any of it the least little bit seriously, I'm going to be first in line to picket my own creation.

For that matter, sometimes just the business of writing a blog leans too far into serious territory. Hey, let me remind all of you, even when I rant and rave, my tongue is firmly in my cheek the whole time. I'm just one in a sea of bloggers, I'm just another big mouth shooting off tech punditry, I'm not going to change the world, my work is not to be carved in stone. When I go over the top, I'm doing so on purpose, just to clown it up. It's a blog, it's supposed to be ranty and fevered! That's how I see this media form. Granted, computers and software and computing freedom are serious subjects. I realize that too. But I try to keep a balance. That's why I retired from "Linux Advocacy," because if you're turning into a missionary, you're doing it wrong.

Will webcomics ever go the way of print comics? Will we some day encounter mobs wearing Dinosaur Comics masks and posing like the frames? Will webcomics someday have a Golden Age and a Silver Age and lots of zealots having life-and-death flame wars over which was better? Will troubled teens be caught trying to imitate Ctrl Alt Del?

And which medium will we all have to run to after that?

Here are a few scenes that will at first sound common to anybody's standard of science fiction practice, but I've altered them so that they reflect what the real universe would be like. Isn't that peachy of me?

###

"Remarkable! These Rovorgians look just like humans, except they have blue skin and forked noses!"

"Actually, Captain, those are the boys from engineering. They thought they'd put on some make-up and have a bit of fun with you. Real aliens come from dozens of lightyears away, having evolved on planets with completely different biomes, so it would be impossible to have a coincidence where they resembled humans in any way at all."

###

"What is the Seguzians religion? I expect they are an entire race of warriors modeled after the Earth Japanese Shinto religion?"

"That's a pretty stupid question. There are about four major denominations of religion on Seguzia and hundreds of minor subdivisions, not including those who are agnostic, atheist, or weak of faith. Only a small fraction of them are warriors at all. In fact, you might want to sit down for this one, but they find it easier to manage the planet by subdividing it into a whole bunch of smaller nations, rather than having one world government. Exactly like you'd expect from any developed society."

###

"Our starship is stranded until we find a planet close by where we can mine some Hijixian crystals!"

"Will you stop being a drama queen and punch 'hijixian crystal' into the replicator already? That'll be enough to get us home. And when we do, we're court-marshalling the logistics engineer who sent us into deep space without a back-up fuel supply."

###

"Perhaps the aliens came for our Earth-women."

"No, actually, since the aliens are hideously abominable to us, we look equally repulsive to them, and sex with our females would be no more appealing to them than sex with a squid would be to us."

###

"Of course, our human emotions must be confusing to an android such as you who cannot experience them."

"Uh, if you're done being such a condescending smartass, I'll point out that I have a functional IQ the equivalent of a 1000, hundreds of terabytes of memory at my disposal, and full programming in every facet of human knowledge available. Your primal monkey feelings are no more a challenge for me to know and anticipate any more than the mating habits of salmon."

###

"Any luck that this is a class-H planet capable of sustaining human life?"

"You ask that every time. No, even though plenty of other life forms find the place to be perfectly cozy, it's gravity is nowhere near 9.8 meters per second ^2, its ambient temperature isn't close to 70 degrees F, its atmosphere doesn't just happen to have the exact components needed to make it safe for humans to breathe, and in any case, it's a planet, not a basketball, so it has different climates and biomes all over it just like any other planet, including Earth!"

###

"Hi, we're from the future! We're here to stop the assassination of your president!"

"Bullshit! In the first place, need I point out that you speak my language perfectly even down to my regional accent? Then you have clothes similar to mine, though you didn't bother to dress for my exact period instead of that cheap spandex jumpsuit of yours. You have no protection from germs of our time so you would have to be currently dying of airborne diseases that your immune system has never been exposed to. And finally, you seem overly familiar with our local customs and culture, not to mention our system of government, whereas if you were really telling the truth, you'd be as out of place in my time as I would be if I went back to ancient Egypt on a mission to rescue King Tut."

###

"Did the four-person rebel force infiltrate the base of the galactic overlord?"

"Uh, no. The suicide mission you sent them on turned out to be, what a surprise, suicidal. Might have something to do with the thousands of highly-trained guards who are armored like tanks and armed like a walking munitions factory, against your four kids wearing leisure suits and carrying pistols. They were greasy spots on the deck before they even made it to the gate."

###

"Prepare for light speed! Warp factor seven!"

"Very funny, captain, but we still have plain old regular physics in our everyday Einsteinian universe. Who's up for a sixteen-year chess tournament en route?"

Interrupting my morning perusal of Projects I Will Never Finish, I toddled off for a coffee break this foggy Iowa morning and happened to catch this guy out my living room window. Now, deer in this neck of Iowa woods are nearly an everyday thing - trouble is, they're usually so shy that by the time you get into halfway decent photo range, they're turning and bolting away, leaving you with a picture of a tiny tan-and-white blur receding into the brush that you have to explain is a deer.

So this time, I said, "The heck with trying to capture it on film, I'm going to go out and just enjoy my coffee and watch the deer." So of course, the deer let me get so close this time I could practically pet it! Well, a few minutes of that, and I went back for the camera just to prove to myself that I am not lucky enough to get close-up deer shots.

Instead, surprise, I got these! Not only that, but he had a buddy with him. I didn't get them both together because the camera battery was dying. So I stop and take apart the camera and fiddle with it, the two deer stand side by side and pose patiently, I get the camera going and bring it up, the two deer have given up and wandered off away from each other until my camera fritzes out again, at which point they decide to regroup for pose number-two, etc.

So, from my cumulative months of deer-stalking experience, here's everything I can tell you about how to get close to deer:

Find young deer. These two are barely out of the fawn stage; I'm pretty sure they were both does. It could be that they're young enough to have not had too many encounters with humans before, haven't learned fear, or something.

Be quiet. I was barefoot. The tread of heavy boots seems to upset them on previous occasions.

Be early. These were taken at 6 AM, and it's also very foggy this morning, so they felt a little bolder about coming out from cover.

When the deer first spots you, freeze. It will likewise freeze. Have a brief, non-aggressive staring contest. After the deer has watched you for about a minute, it will flick its tail. Stay still. It will watch you for another few seconds, then look away or down and go on about its business. Now you can start walking closer until it once again realizes that you're invading its personal space and zooms in on you, at which point this little dance repeats all over again.

I'm pretty sure the tail flick is a test to see if you're a predator who will chase it at the slightest sign of movement.

After I'd gotten within about fifteen feet, the deer just started behaving like it was completely comfortable with me and its friend wandered up out of the woods, where it had apparently been watching us to see how this encounter went before taking its own chances.

After a while, I started to relax, too. I started chatting, telling them I'd make them famous by posting them on a blog this morning, and so on. They shook their heads and twitched their ears at me, apparently fine with this idea. I started whistling while fiddling with the camera, and both of them pricked up their ears and looked at me with this expression that said, "Whoa! That's a cool trick! How do you do that?"

I think they were quite as entertained with me as I was with them.

Update: Only a few days after this posted, I saw this Boing Boing link to a video of a deer kicking the stuffing out of a dog (border collie mix?) and even trading punches with a cat. Pursuing the matter further, there's quite a few videos of deer attacking people.

So I'll just point out, (a) I would have been more careful with a buck than a doe, (b) I would definitely have thought twice about going close to a doe if there were baby fawn in the picture, (c) it just so happens that my parents owned an animal shelter which I helped out at in the tradition of the "family business" - so I have experience with animals both wild and domestic and know a bit about General Animal Common Sense - not that I'd get overconfident about it.

But I'm adding that and the links to these videos just to be sure I said, PSA "Hey kids! Be careful around deer! They can kick your butt!" in case anybody gets the wrong idea from my own interaction.

I don't know why the electronics industry as a whole is in such a rush to declare the desktop PC dead. You could of course make the first assumption that they want to sell more handheld gadgets to fill the void, but really they make money from selling PCs too, you know. The PC made the computing industry what it is today.

(By the way, a note to Apple-ites: YEEEEEEEESSSSSSS I include "Macs" when I say "desktop PC!" Is it a computer? Is it your personal property? Is it on your desk? Then it's a desktop PC. Even if it's from Mars. Moving right along...)

Just recently it's BIOS, a standard PC firmware interface going bye-bye - of course, that's declared so by the company that wants you to replace it with what they're offering. A short while ago it was no less than Google insisting that desktop PCs will go away in three short years. For that matter, you can't swing a mouse without hitting another article about the death of the PC.

Really, I know of no other industry but the computing one that has so many premature funerals. Floppy disks were supposed to die, but I'll be smacked if the desktop PCs I bought brand new over the last year didn't all come with a floppy drive. I can't think of any programming language that hasn't been declared dead, and yet they're still hiring for so many of them. And of course there's the famous IE6 funeral... oh, if only it were that easy! Even Microsoft can't get its own users to give up on IE6, which shows you what kind of a corner you paint yourself into when you make the lowest common denominator your base.

Desktop PCs are never going away. They might be marginalized to a smaller market, which is a good thing, but going away, no. Mainframes are still out there too, you know. Like PCs, they have applications which are more industrial than end-consumer. Now the PC will always have uses for production just like that.

Oh, if I could wave a magic wand and make the PC market be composed entirely of industrial users and no end-consumers at all, I would be just as happy! That day may come. But the day will never come when everybody is using a handheld gadget and nobody has a desktop box. For the simple reason that the handheld gadgets are for consumers only.

I'm typing this on a laptop right now. I've loved having a laptop since I finally got one, because it frees me up to be portable and even take my act on the road if need be. But it's never going to be good for more than a few things. Those things are (a) casual web use, (b) viewing streaming video, (c) writing, and (d) some light coding and scripting.

Because this laptop, bought just this year, is taxed to its disk-buzzing, fan-blowing maximum if I have five tabs in Firefox, a text editor, and a terminal open at the same time. How am I going to compile tarballs, render ray-traced 3D scenes, or compose large multimedia presentations on this thing?

For another point, interfaces on gadgets will always be limiting. I wonder how many people out there complaining about the interface for Gimp and Blender are actually trying to use it on a netbook? I've tried Gimping on this laptop - it has one of those touchpads - and it's nowhere near the control you have with a mouse or tablet. Yes, I can plug my tablet into the laptop and work from there, but now I'm defeating the purpose of a "laptop" - I can't balance a laptop and a tablet on my lap and get any work done. Might as well have a desk. And Blender becomes really, really, really hard without that 105-key IBM-type keyboard with the separate number pad. Even SVG editing on a laptop is painful, though least of all out of vector, raster, and 3D meshing. So, again, how can I design graphics on a professional scale if the world offers only handheld gizmos?

That's what the desktop's for.

I have complained for many, many years that the solution to "desktop usability" for Joe Sixpack is NOT to stupid down the desktop until it's fit only for a doggy chew-toy, but rather to take that desktop AWAY from Joe and patiently explain to him that he needs to buy one of those handheld shiny toys. Joe isn't going to make anything to save his life, beyond a MySpace profile and a Twitter account for him to hurr and durr on. Do you sell a backhoe to every granny who comes into the car lot looking for a car that will just get her to the grocery store and weekly bingo game? Then why do we sell a PC to every granny who just wants to check her email and look at her grandkid's photos? And now it looks like I'm finally going to get my wish. The for-dummies-only crowd lost and I won.

So yeah, as far as the muggles are concerned, the desktop PC is going to be extinct. Good, that's great, shhhhh! Don't tell them! The desktop PC will go back to being by producers for producers (and the hobbyist hardcore gamer who needs that kind of power). Let me tell you, when the PC desktop market becomes all developers all the time, you'll see them singing a different tune about the market share of Linux systems.

At this rate, September might even end!

Update 6/21/10: Here's a great example of the kind of story I'm talking about, published just six days after this post: Three Reasons the PC Era Is Coming To An End. Summary of Techi.com's post:

• Reason #1: The Cloud! The Cloud!
• Reason #2: OMGWTFBBQ! THE CLOOOUUUUD!
• Reason #3: Tablets! Because, dude, the Cloud!

I am at one mind with Larry Ellison regarding Cloud Computing. Uncle Larry speak big heap wisdom. Tablets are just what I'm talking about when I say you can't replace the desktop PC.

Don't get me wrong: If these dainty little TOYS had decent power, I'd be singing a different tune. But we're about 20 years further away from that time, if it ever gets here at all. The bottleneck is battery power and overheating.

Saw this ad today while browsing online bid-request ads and thought I'd snap it, just to show what's behind those pain-in-the-ass spams we have to delete every day (assuming your blog has open comments like mine does)...

Note that this won't be a bot job - there need be no automation at this rate. 100 spam comments at US $30 is thirty cents per comment. Sadly, you'll find plenty of people even in the industrialized world willing to work for that rate, considering that they can copy-and-paste the content from a file and visit 100 blogs they have bookmarked. All the CAPTCHAs in the world won't stop them. The job has four bids so far.

And note, #4 "no spamming comment" is bunk. That is what posting 100 links for the purpose of site promotion is, is spamming. It doesn't matter how you try to whitewash it.

I know I could report this to the site, but it's like pulling up a dandelion. I see an average of about five per day lately. The account name on this one is "prince11," with zero past ratings, obviously a brand new account. The poster is from India. How's that for irony? India can now afford to outsource to the US, and considering that it would be about an hour's work, can offer a very competitive wage!

Here's a goldie oldie for you: Years back on this blog I would have a semi-regular feature called searchbag which would always start with a spiel like this:

"Hello, True Believers! It's time once again to pull up a few items from the search-bag, that list of search terms tracked by my b2evolution stats which show some of the phrases which landed people here. What I'm mostly interested in are the "near-misses" - those phrases which show that the searcher came here looking for something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unhere."

And man, you wouldn't believe the cra-a-a-azy things people typed into Google and company that landed them here...

Does looking up penguin pictures mean you have a mental problem?

Yes. I mean really, it's a matter of scale. Just as a one-time thing, no, not at all. But if it's constant, it's all you can think about, it's interfering with other parts of your life, it's the only thing in your life with meaning, then yes. You didn't specify all that, so the default assumption is that if you have to ask, it is a mental problem.

penguin graphics smoking weed

Here it is:

PS What is it with geeks and pot lately? I could see other non-linear creative pursuits, like musicians or visual artists, but a linear exercise like programming? Isn't it hard enough already to remember what all your inherited classes do without being blazed?

can we agree that the plural of abacus is abaci

It's fine with me, but this is the Internet. We still haven't settled 100 other, more obvious and common spelling and grammar controversies, so good luck with that.

ubuntu means slackware is too difficult for me

I can't believe I didn't think of this one myself. And I actually went from Slackware to Ubuntu, too. Maybe it's a message from me in the future.

accidentally clicked on something labeled nsfw could my boss see that

I'm ready to write a doctoral thesis on the "NSFW" disease. It is a disease, a phobia caused by childhood anxiety about over-controlling parents and the fear that they'd find your porn stash and beat you with a belt and send you to reform school. Freud could probably trace it back to something to do with dad finding out about your Oedipal fantasies and punishing you in some unspeakable primal way. Folks, seriously, NOBODY GIVES A HOT FART WHAT YOU HAVE ON YOUR COMPUTER SCREEN! It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, IT DOESN'T MATTER! Everybody else within sighting distance is more likely than not looking at their own screen. And if you work somewhere where you still have to explain that you accidentally had something unsavory pop up on your screen for a moment, you are working for Fred Flintstone in the stone club factory and you should quit right now and move out of the Jurassic era.

....wait, I think there's more...

I swear, I'm going to develop a Tyler Durden alter-ego and run around splicing porn clips into otherwise-safe media until this ridiculous mass panic stops! (extra leftover exclamation points: !!!!!!) There are scenes that actually pass in a Disney cartoon that if you put them online, they'd be hooted at by the NSFW-screech-owls! (bwah ha ha the rant-rage feeds itself) There is nothing, nothing at all, that could not be labeled "NSFW." EVEN THE LETTERS IN NSFW??? (Oops, I mean !!!) Noooo wiiiire haaaaangers iiiiiin thiiiiis hoooooouuuuuse!!!!!! EVAR!!!!

*Pant pant pant puffff pant.*

Whew. OK, where was I?

hacker kid has to save the world movie

Don't you hate those? But the public loves 'em. I even parody this in the webcomic I draw which I'm not going to name or link to this time, and what the hell, the character I use as the parody is becoming one of the most popular (or, at least, most commented-upon) characters in the strip. That's just the way the cracker cracks. It's a combination of the tropes Wake Up Go To School Save The World and Magical Computer.

how to stop being a geek

Ooooh, maybe this twelve-step program will do the trick:

1. Watch lots of TV. No sci-fi!
2. Get rid of all computers and digital devices larger than your cell phone.
3. Start paying attention to sports. Pick a favorite sport and team.
4. Switch to any non-technology career.
5. Go to the doctor and get diagnosed with something requiring medicating. The idea here is to treat your intelligence like a disease and seek to rid yourself of it.
6. Get a firm religious conviction. Believe the literal, fundamental truth of every word of its scripture.
7. Join the tea-bagger party.
8. Buy Hallmark cards for every person on every occasion.
9. Throw away all your books.
10. Get all of your news from TV. Pick one station and be loyal to it, swallowing every word spoon-fed to you.
11. Dump your current significant other and aim to hook up with someone a little closer to the mundane end of the spectrum. Someone who will look down on your for using big words.
12. Wear a suit and tie.

Practice all of the above for a year, and you'll be a changed person.

A parody of the infographic meme going around the web lately. Please feel free to copy and share around the world (don't worry, it has my URL in the corner). Post it on 4chan, troll Conservapedia, critique it on Digg!