After I actually spent a decent amount of time searching for people to add to my dinky collection of friends on Facebook the other night, and I only mean dinky in terms of the sheer poor little number, not the caliber, although that’s up for debate at times, I realized that the whole social media thing has really gotten out of hand. I’ve never given a flying crap about being popular, yet now I feel inadequate if every blog post I write doesn’t make Search Engine Watch, every person I contact doesn’t want to be my friend on Facebook (Rand Fishkin, you better watch Fatal Attraction again and see what happens to people who ignore nice Southern belles), and I am never tagged in photos on Flickr. Sure, you aren’t supposed to upload photos of people being spanked by black hat spammers, but that is no excuse.

Social media is such an utter waste of my time, but it’s also the latest big thing in SEM. Thus, I’m on it like a homosexual on a man sandwich and I spent an inordinate amount of time doing online networking, with really nothing at all of value to show for it other than some Sphinns (which are really nice, by the way!), a few Facebook wall posts, and the knowledge that Rhea Drysdale and I do not share the same taste in movies. I will also admit to enjoying poking and being poked by Lisa. Sorry some of you men can’t make this same claim.

Since I am prone to musical references (I mean references about music, not references to something where I play the theme from “Deliverance”) let me give you another one…and please stop groaning. You probably have to go check to see if anyone’s Facebooked you but hang on for a minute. I’m busy as hell too but I am taking the time to write this post. One second…need to poke Lisa.

OK then, the reference! Adam and the Ants. Yes, again. They were an absolutely amazing band early on, and they even kept it up for a bit of time before disappearing. Then, years later, Adam morphs into Doctor Evil and all hell breaks loose when he gets into a fight in a pub because some locals, quite understandably, made fun of his cowboy outfit.

It’s the embarrassment factor. Obviously I am not TOO embarrassed to mention Adam since I do so every three posts, but my point is that his band was mindblowingly enjoyable when it first started, then no one wants anything to do with him. I’d be willing to entertain the notion of being his love slave if he’d put on some more of that white war paint, sure, but I am certainly not going to post that on a blog for all the world to see! How soon before we’re as embarrassed about falling for social media as we are about doorway pages and meta keywords? And yes, I have written several posts about the greatness of social media so I am, currently, starting to become a tad bit embarrassed myself right now.

What has social media really done for anyone, other than help us make connections? Yes, it is nice that I can tell the world that I like The Pogues and Father Ted but I still see no actual benefit in this other than to remove the need for chitchat when you actually meet someone in person. As you can tell, I really do enjoy social media, but there are all these articles and blogs about how to use it for your advantage and why you need to do it, but nothing really seems to be even remotely upfront about the fact that, in the end, it’s all just a lovely waste of time.

So why is it everywhere? Because it’s easy, it takes very little thought to do (sure there was a mishap when I tried to use the Upload Photos bit of Facebook but nothing a few reboots and curses didn’t take care of). It could, of course, be that I just haven’t yet discovered how to really utilize social media to do anything besides send a virtual drink or poke Lisa. Like anything else matters…I just have to wonder though, if this is the Emperor’s new clothes all over again? Are we all on board with it simply because we’re supposed to be? If it’s helped anyone gain anything even remotely good, then great. Personally, it’s afforded me lots of amusement and I’ve been able to learn that, if I were a character from Harry Potter, I’d be Fred and George and Dumbledore.

This isn’t saying anything about the capabilities of SEOs either. I think it’s a very telling thing that SEOs spend so much time being technical and creative that they have flocked to something so simple as putting up a profile and adding an application that pokes another person. That reminds me, need to poke Lisa. Social media HAS been the next big thing, and it still seems to be, and it’s fine to enjoy it, but let’s not take it so seriously that we spend tons of time trying to make it out to be something it isn’t.

By the way, Adam Ant, if you’re on Facebook, check out my profile! Take my movie compatibility quiz. Oh, and you’re more than welcome to poke me whenever you want. You devil.

It’s common practice to formulate a link development plan that includes tasks such as “build relevant inbound links” and “use relevant anchor text” when putting an SEO strategy together. I have even been guilty of making this recommendation without adequately qualifying it, and I expect to have my backside smashed about it soon.

Relevancy is, unfortunately, a concept that’s bandied about without most people actually taking the time to think it through.

The problem is that relevancy is not a black and white matter. We’re kind of told that it is when Google dictates that relevant links are ok, but when you examine the very nature of relevance, you’ll see that it simply cannot be this or that. It’s just not a discrete concept. What I think is relevant to a topic at hand may indeed be relevant in MY mind, but not in yours.

You know how you read a really good blog (like the SEO Chicks, perhaps) and someone’s talking about something and kind of goes way off topic (doesn’t happen here, though, so stop thinking about our posts damn you!) and then makes the seemingly irrelevant points finally connect…and you realize that, Julie is actually doing this intentionally and that yes, The Clash really do have something to do with search engine optimization. At first glance you think “Jaysus what’s she on about NOW, the freak?” and that (hopefully) soon turns into (hopefully) “well by god she actually does have a point that’s relevant to the topic at hand.” Indeed.

Since search engines consider anchor text to be an accurate representation of the link to which it’s attached, technically it should be very difficult to determine whether or not a link itself is relevant. It’s quite easy to be a bit manipulative here isn’t it? Sure, a human being doing a review can detect irrelevancy if it’s blatant, but if you’re at least partially clever and can cross the street on your own, you should be able to find a way to gloss over the irrelevancy in some way. If anchor text is what the engines look to in order to see that yes, this link is indeed relevant, then there you go. Make your anchor text relevant.

The main issue is that big engines like Google can’t control every tiny aspect of linking but, if they admitted that or stopped doing the omnipotent act, you might just be onto them and maybe, if you were prone to backing down quickly, you’d stop trying to exploit links for your own good. Sugar Rae had a great post about the links that Google could never identify as being paid links. It’s all a giant scare tactic to help them reach their supposed goal of making life on the internet only about the end user. They can’t catch half (or more) of the paid links out there, and they can’t tell whether or not your links are relevant, without a human review. They might not be able to catch you then either.

On the SEO Theory site I found an excellent recent article entitled “The measured nonsense of SEO relevance.” Here, Michael Martinez states that “Search engine optimization has to respect the limitations of search algorithms and it needs to put a limit on the credibility of unreasonable expectations. Relevance is not determined by links but by text.” That’s pretty much dead on.

If you think you might be prone to a human review, then have your inbound links structured in such a way that they do, indeed, become relevant to what’s being said somewhere. It’s not too tough unless you’re a complete and utter moron. A site about how Mrs. Fish Palace really makes a good fried catfish platter (gag) really may have need of linking to your site about dancing cats, such as when they say something about how “the dancing cat sweatshirts that we sell at Mrs. Fish Palace really are hot!” An example that makes me shudder certainly, but still, you can see that even though these two sites should technically have nothing to do with one another, this is indeed a relevant link. Usually you won’t have people randomly linking to your site if it’s not relevant, because what purpose would that serve for them?

Wikipedia has a fascinating entry about relevance, with this quote being the most interesting to me…”It is elusive, because the meaning of relevance appears to be difficult or impossible to capture within conventional logical systems.” The algorithms, although they don’t always seem to be, really are built on a logical framework you know. Therefore, how can a machine-built system, based on logic, determine meaning? We’re back to the whole issue of machines making judgment calls. It’s impossible for them to understand meaning because they cannot infer.

In discrete mathematics you learn about finiteness. To grossly summarize this, it means that you have all these little 0s and 1s, off and on switches, yes and no. There’s no in-between. Something is, or it isn’t. This makes perfect sense to a machine, and possibly less to a human being. However, as you may have ascertained, relevancy cannot be lableled as a 0 or a 1. I found another great quote on an old Search Engine Watch post that equates the attempt to measure relevancy to “asking people to eat different types of cakes and answering whether each cake is simply edible. Edible is fine in some instances, but what you really want to know is who serves the best cakes consistently?”

I could, and do, say that The Clash is the best band there has ever been. To me, that’s completely true and really, I have been known to crack open a large six-pack of whoop-arse on anyone who says something stupid like “hey didn’t they do that ‘Dance Hall Days’ song?” So let’s say that there’s a question of “who’s the best band ever?” and I said “The Clash.” Well obviously I am RIGHT, but you might think that The Sex Pistols is the best band ever. I’ll give you leeway because really, let’s face it, they were a damn fine band too.

However, both of our selections are right in our minds, but they aren’t in agreement with each other. Is my choice more or less relevant? Well, more relevant obviously since The Clash really IS the best band ever, but there’s an obvious gap here in who thinks what. Can we even accurately answer a question like that? What do you mean by best? Most talented, most records sold, best lyrics, most enjoyable? Impossible stuff.

So can an algorithm really assign a true measure of relevancy to your inbound links? There is no freaking way on earth it can. It may try, and I’m not denying that it does, but with a fluid concept such as this, there is no way that you can work to gain favor in this aspect. You can throw in 10 keywords into your meta keywords tag, if that’s what the engines want. 10 is 10. What I see as a relevant link may not seem relevant to you. Considering the way I think, god only knows what’s going to seem relevant to me anyway. I can draw a perpendicular to anything.

So, for those of you who are only concentrating on trying to get RELEVANT inbound links to your site, please calm down, have a Mike’s hard lemonade (or three), listen to someone other than Enya, and just take a Zen approach to boosting your links. You can, after all, make just about anything relevant if you try.