SEO

• The Washington Post delivers one of the all-time finest editorial corrections after it was brought to their attention that Public Enemy’s “911 Is A Joke,” released in 1990, was not written in mockery of the events of September 11, 2001. The revised article actually casts PE in a positive light otherwise. The mistaken tune and its lyrics. And who among us could forget the Carlton Banks version?
• The Daily Mirror’s associate editor pledges to put SEO in its place after becoming sick of finding his site awash in traffic but bereft of readers. We say it a thousand times a day just to clean our teeth: good SEO is a tactic, not a goal. Having the galaxy’s highest-ranking website doesn’t mean anything if you’re not connecting with people.
• Self-explanatory! Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them

Special bonus thing.

I continue to marvel at the amount of time certain individuals are able to set aside for making Super Mario levels that play songs. This one features four Marios gallivanting simultaneously on four custom levels. They add up to recreate the four parts of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.” Can you believe this?

Lightning round.

We were linked to by the Wall Street Journal a couple days ago!

It would appear that way, but that article was written a few days before this one, so maybe they just heard their brother-in-law talking about meta tags?

• Who doesn’t start a new week by tracing the paths of hundreds of spacecraft? Click for your morning SCIENCE:

  

  Look at Galileo! A spin around Venus, two laps around Earth, then a dramatic death spiral around Jupiter. A death spiral around Jupiter — no matter what, you won’t have a more stressful week than that.

• Danny Sullivan’s SEO FAQ That’s Not From The Land Of Unicorns and Open Letter To Derek Powazek On The Value Of SEO, written in retort to the feelgood linkbait of the week, that one weird SEO rant that got popular around Wednesday.
• Certainly the best possible explanation for why we still celebrate Columbus Day. Also, A+ Halloween costume idea.

In web news, politicians still basically suck at internet. This time around it’s the red team: Top Ten Reasons Why The GOP Website Relaunch Is Fizzlin’.

We have a proposition for you.

We want to give you $100; let’s get the ball rolling. All that needs to happen: You send a friend or colleague our way. If we end up taking on a website project for them, we owe you a $100 finder’s fee.

Your neighbor’s grandma needs a WordPress site? $100. Son-in-law needs Drupal work? $100.

That’s $100 for you, from us, if you send us someone who becomes our client. Thank goodness, we can finally send Ben Franklin home to you.

Example scenario:

Your aunt: My small business needs a new website.
You: You should hire Engine.
(She hires Engine)
Us: Here is $100.
(We give you $100)
You: Thank you.

Stipulations:

• Make sure they mention your name when they contact us. Obviously.
• No chicanery. We know you won’t do this, but we want to make sure nobody else tries any of that oh-boy-I’ll-get-my-friend-to-refer-me-and-we’ll-split-the-$100 nonsense. We’re all grownups here.
• No limit. We love building websites as much as you love getting $100. Which means we’d be insane and cruel to cut off you and us both. This offer stands, rain or shine. Why not refer 10 friends at once? One friend per season? 1,000 friends by 2049? Think big!

These are our terms. Your task: Make it rain like Tlaloc.

Unlike WMDs, of course.

Last week, Fox News claimed SEO means “working full-time to create thousands of other Web sites that link to the spam site.” Not only does this have nothing to do with SEO, it would actually be a totally worthless strategy.

According to Wikipedia, SEO is an Arabic
word meaning “He who can move Egypt”

Since Google and Bing rank pages that have been around for a while and earned reputable links, each of these “thousands of” sites would have no link power to pass on to the “spam site.” Sure, some disreputable types try crap like this, and a few might even make money in the short run, but engines are more likely to ban a site with thousands of spammy links than to rank it highly.

As SearchEngineLand pointed out here, Fox News practices SEO on their sites. On the offending page in question, as a matter of fact. Meta description, sitemaps, and a robots.txt file to boot. Textbook SEO.

And SEOBook notes this “spamlaws.com” site that Fox News is so worked up about is serving “scammy reverse billing fraud fakevertising ads” that can also be found at… (you have three guesses, and the first two don’t count): FoxNews.com! Ta da!

Finally, here’s an interview with the head of Fox’s sixteen-person SEO team.

But whatever. Big media doesn’t understand the internet. That’s hardly news.