No Blogs Allowed

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 24, 2007 in Web spam

There was a Charlie Brown movie or television special many years ago when Charlie had to go into the hospital and Snoopy undertook the arduous task of visiting him. Every place Snoopy went he ran into a sign that read (and was accompanied in the soundtrack by a deep basso voice saying) “NO DOGS ALLOWED”.

Today’s universal cure for search engine optimization woes is the blog. In fact, I just visited an SEO forum earlier this evening and suggested to someone that they write 1-2 articles per day on a blog in order to build their search visibility and attract links.

Hey, it works for me.

Sometimes I feel like the millionaire who stands in front of an audience where everyone paid $1,000 to hear his motivational lecture. “You too can be just like me, friends! All you have to do is BELIEVE in yourselves enough to make a difference!”

Woohoo! Sign me up, baby!

Oh, wait. I AM me.

Anyway, I blog now. Didn’t used to, and I never really hurt for search engine referrals or links once I got the hang of this SEO stuff. The easy part is creating the content. The hard part is managing the Web site.

Blog software takes a lot of the grief out of the Web site management process. It introduces a fair amount of grief, in my opinion (like, for example, I don’t know how to get Wordpress to acknowledge that this blog is only PART of the larger SEO Theory Web site, which provides more content than just a blog). Maybe I just need to read the manual a little bit more, but that’s inconvenient.

If you’re going to make Web site creation and management convenient for me, you need to make it flexible, too. But don’t give me massive control panels with dozens of confusing options until you learn how to make them self-explanatory with popup balloons that say, “This option lets you include a link to your Web site’s home page (also called a root URL)”.

People like me can take blogs or leave them. If I could never write another blog post again I’d still be able to write content and I would be able to get it into the blog indexes because all I would have to do is update an RSS feed. The RSS feed (written in fairly simple XML) would make my hand-coded Web site look like a blog.

The distinction between a (We)blog and a Website is very thin. It’s so grey as to be either black or white, although not both. All free-standing blogs are Web sites. But not all Web sites are blogs.

Except, we really don’t know what a Web site is. No one has actually bothered to define a Web site from a conceptual point of view. What do we mean when we talk about a “Web site”?

A domain may be a site, or it may host many sites, or it may not be or host any Web sites at all.

A Web site may consist of only one page, or it may contain many pages.

The page(s) of a Web site may be formatted with XML, HTML, or not at all. They may be .DOC, .XLS, .EXE, or .PDF files. They may be something else altogether.

Is an image a Web page? If the only file on your Web “site” is a .JPEG file, do you have a Web site? Is it a Web page? If it’s not a Web page but you have a Web site, then is it sufficient to say that a Web site can be comprised of files that may or may not be formatted text documents or images?

And don’t even get me started on FLASH.

The point of all this is that we have come not to think so much of the World Wide Web as of the Great Blogging Community. Static Web sites still produce a lot of great content and they still rank in many competitive queries. People may like the ease with which they can blog but I like the ease with which I don’t have to blog.

Social media sites focus mostly on social media technology, not on Web technology. If you don’t blog you feel like no one will DIGG, Sphinn, or Stumble Upon you. You won’t cross any Bloglines. You won’t join the Technorati. You can’t be blogrolled. You’re nothing, nowhere, no one if you don’t have a blog.

Stop.

Just stop the blog propaganda for a moment and remember that blogging is really just canned peas in water. It’s soup from a plastic cup. You’re talking pre-cut hamburgers from the cheapest most fat-laden meats in the butcher shop. Blogs are the fast food of Web content production.

The average SEO blog post consist of 1-2 short paragraphs dominated by links to other SEO blogs that don’t have much else to say. Bloggers applaud each other for their linkiness but they don’t really say anything. A few long-winded bloggers like me still try to say something but we don’t even have the patience to write out a page outline.


Sometimes I toss in a centered H3 header


Sometimes I bold what I say. But like most bloggers even I don’t take time to practice those good layout skills I honed to near-perfection in my carefree young SEO days when I had to make individual pages rank.

Now if I want search engine rankings I wag the long tail and dump a hundred query expressions in a post. So what if it looks weird? I’ll write another one tomorrow, and another one the day after that. Eventually the long-tail wag will drop off the front page and people will only find it through search engine referrals (and what will they make of that?) and links from other blogs.

I don’t often sit down to design a nice-looking, well-written, compelling page full of copy any more. It takes too long. I just grab the french fried template Wordpress gives me and toss out a Bloggy Meal hoping someone will smack their lips.

Where will it all end? What is the point of optimizing pages when you’re looking at templates that don’t even let you link home to the root URL with the keyword “home”?

You have to be able to hand-code a decent HTML page in Wordpad before you can call yourself an SEO in my book.

USING tables.

Screw CSS. I don’t care how pretty it looks. I want to manipulate search engine results.

I miss the good old days when you had to think, plan, and strategize. You had to peak over the fence to see what the next guy was doing. Now if you look at your neighbor’s yard you’ll get Javascript Ad-envy and start clearing screen space in your template so you can throw more annoying ads in your visitors’ faces.


Buy Understanding Middle-earth by Michael Martinez

It’s all about advertising. Many a so-called SEO sets up a blog just so he can load it up with ads. Are you selling ad space or your expertise? Or have you sold out to cookie-cutter spam recipes and you just want to look like an SEO long enough to get someone to click on your ads?

Real search engine optimization is not about advertising. It’s not about blogs. It’s about starting with eggs and finishing with cake. It’s about planting corn and serving tortillas. It’s about digging up sand so you can lay down a concrete highway.

Search engine optimization starts at the beginning and finishes at the end but it charts a course through the long, rough middle without taking any shortcuts.

So why do I blog?

Well, it saves time out of my life. It’s easy. I don’t have to worry about file types. It gets me from point A to point B. It brings in traffic.

But if I didn’t have a blog to play with, you’d still be here, reading my latest rant on how much time and trouble I put into the art of search engine optimization. I’d find a way to do it if blogs didn’t exist. So would you. That’s SEO.

‘Nuff said.

7 Comments on No Blogs Allowed

By Connie on August 24, 2007 at 2:36 pm

Everybody can’t roll out the quality content on such a variety of subjects that you can. :)

To add a link to your home page, edit your sidebar template, and manually add the link . You’ll see were to put it from the two pages you have in the side bar.

By Michael Martinez on August 24, 2007 at 3:59 pm

Thanks, Connie (for the compliment and the tip).

I’ll add that to the list of things we need to do with this site. :) I should get the home page link up by next week. I wonder what anchor text I should use ….

By Connie on August 24, 2007 at 6:57 pm

You could always use “Home” as the anchor text. Then use the “title attribute” to name the site. :).

A couple of other suggestions on the link.

You could add a page to something like “my sites”. I know you are evolved in several. That would allow you to add a link and brief description to your other sites.

You could also add a category like “Sponsored by” or “SEO Theory Sponsored By”. Then add a links to that category to the site (or sites) you want to list.

By Michael Martinez on August 24, 2007 at 9:54 pm

Hm. Are you suggesting I open up the “Sponsored By” page to links for other people?

Maybe I can get Google to buy a sponsorship!

By Connie on August 24, 2007 at 11:27 pm

Not at all. Since you do not have any advertisements on the blog, someone has to be paying the bill.

There would not be a “Sponsored By” page. Only a Sponsored by Category. The Sponsored by Category would show as text just like “Pages”, “Monthly”, and “Categories” do in your current set up.

Then you would add a link to that Category to your home page, If that is the same site that is paying the bills for this blog.

That someone could be your employer, or it could be your science fiction site http://www.xenite.org. I don’t know.

If that someone Paying the bill) is the home page you want to link to it would be an option where you could use the site or company name in the anchor text without confusing the visitor.

I was just thinking that might be a more visitor friendly way to display the anchor text you want to display in the link.

I’m very aware that you do not like to use “Home” as anchor text.

Another option would be to include the link to the home page in the same file that displays your RSS feeds. I’m not familiar with your template, but I would guess that would be in the header template.

Hope I made myself a little clearer this time.

Off topic: One thing that surprises me in light of some of your recent comments in regard to Google. You are still using the nofollow attribute on links.

By Michael Martinez on August 26, 2007 at 6:13 pm

Google will remain on the “nofollow” list for the indefinite future — at least until the quality of their search results begin to show significant improvement.

Using “Home” in anchor text may be good for usability, assuming the visitor understands the context (most people do but there are still new people coming onto the Internet).

My preference would be to use something like “SEO Theory Home” so that people know it’s the home page for SEO Theory. I’ll try to do this today.

By Connie on August 27, 2007 at 11:59 pm

Michael, personally I’m so opposed to the way Google is trying to force the no follow link, that I have stripped it from Spam-Whackers. I apply it on a case by case basis.

You may not have time to do that, but I do. The only reason I even looked at the source code was because my last smiley did not show. :) or :D. not sure right now which one will show.

Personally I think links from a forum or blog that I’m commenting in have a lot more value than some SE value. So the nofollow does not bother me.

The only reason I raised that question, was because of some of your comments recently about how Google is trying to control everything.

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Michael Martinez is the Director of Search Strategies for 1st Query, an Internet Marketing firm offering organic SEO and PPC services.

Building a query space Market Share, Metrics, and SEO