…but what can I do? Besides look to The Clash for inspiration, I mean.

Miss Judith recently berated the rest of the Chicks for not writing much…well, she did it quite nicely, I hasten to add. Still, it really made me think about why I haven’t been writing lately, and the reason is simple: I’m bored out of my freaking mind right now.

There is definitely a lot going on with the industry, but so much of what is out there for our consumption deals with personal issues. This person doesn’t like THIS one, this idiot thinks another idiot was rude, this asshole thinks that someone was wrong to criticise him or her for making a truly stupid analogy, etc. Several of my good friends, people that I have the utmost respect for (plus Rob Kerry, ha!), have taken a LOT of heat over things ranging from speaking their mind, nicely of course, to trying to do the right thing and prevent Sphinn from becoming even more of a suburban high school drama. If you like gossip and silly antics, you’re probably happy right now. If you actually give a damn about anything else, good luck finding much about it.

As much as people like to talk about how meaningful things other than link development are, from what I see, not much else truly means all that much. Since I own a link development firm, talking about it in this blog doesn’t really interest me…I LIVE it. Otherwise, what’s left? The newest search engine that MAY compete with Google? Whether Yahoo and MSN will merge? How to prevent people from snooping on your site? Yet ANOTHER piece about how to properly code a robots.txt file? You can see where I’m going…Boredom City. Consequently, I am struggling to write these days. There is simply nothing that I haven’t said, or that another SEO Chick hasn’t said, or that one of you hasn’t said. There are so many bloggers out there blogging about the same things right now. You can read 10 different opinions on one tiny little tidbit, all written within an hour of each other. While it’s nice to read differing voices, sometimes it becomes a bit difficult to actually want to add to the noise.

I’m not bored with what I DO every day, actually, nor am I bored with the industry in general. I am simply bored with writing about it, because the online space is becoming incredibly cluttered with people who seem to know absolutely nothing about anything; they just want to create disturbance. They harass people in comments, they trash everyone who says anything of any value, and they attract like-minded followers who, in turn, attract their attention and they feed off each other. Instead of joining in, I’d rather focus on making sure my company makes a profit, and that my clients get what they pay for. I’d rather watch Father Ted DVDs and order broccoli and tomato pizza. I’d rather watch “Control” again (spoiler alert! Ian Curtis DIES at the end!!) even though it makes me cry and I become depressed for days, spending money on a variety of crap that I don’t need, and eating lots of chocolate doughnuts. I’d rather talk to Flora and Tw@ and make rude comments about Liza’s Facebook photos. Those activities, however, don’t make for good blog fodder. Well, the conversations with Flora and Tw@ would but I don’t want to incur the wrath of all the people we constantly talk trash about so…

Take a look at the current (as of this writing, obviously, I mean) headline stats on Sphinn: 8 on the front page are about social media in one form or another, whether it’s fake profiles or Digg; 3 are about Cuil; 4 are pieces dealing with numbers of either “this many experts say x” or “this many reasons to do or not to do y”; and the rest are all variations on themes we see all the time like new Firefox extensions or what’s wrong with Wordpress. Honestly, I understand that there are many people just starting out in the industry, but how many ultimate guides to SEO do we truly need? We’re also seeing tons of recaps of various conferences, further reducing the desire of many people to actually attend these once enormously popular events. Now, it could be argued that Sphinn isn’t representative of what’s going on in the industry, and as much as I would like to believe that that is indeed true, I really don’t, sadly. BO-ring.

So, until there’s a major Google Dance or people start going to federal prison for buying links, I really don’t have all that much to say unless anyone is interested in which bands I’m going to see this summer. I’ll continue to discuss anything interesting with the people I trust on IM or Facebook, or make prank phone calls.

Love it or hate it, we’ve all seen it. Flash sites built for beauty and not spiders have often been the source of grief and stress within the SEO community as we try and explain why it was a dumb idea to do it that way. Ya, that’s harsh but so it trying to force a use to guess where they need to mouse over to find a menu.

I have a site I love to use as the perfect example of how flash lets you down. This chocolate company has some of the most yummy looking chocolate treats. Problem is, Google doesn’t think it has much to do with chocolate. Take a look at the Sweet Thoughts chocolate site which looks like this to Google and results in the Cadbury UK site along with many others to outrank it for a search for chocolate. In fact, the spidered flash is there but just not ranking. So the new spidering of flash content by Google should be a RankSaver for sites like this but I would caution everyone for the moment against complacency and encourage adoption of existing best practices.

From July 1st, Google started spidering the content of flash files to help to unlock some of the last places on the web left unlookedat. However, rather than looking normal, these sites are clearly marked with “[FLASH]” next to the search result. Yahoo! have had the technology made available to them as well but have not yet committed to a timeline to implement this enhanced spidering. Who knows what Live will do - maybe Ms. Dewey will simply take her crop and beat the offending sites in to HTML submission. Or run over them on her motorcycle. Mocking them might work as well

Google’s help files specifically state that “In general, search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos, and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines”. So while this is changing for flash, I would still continue to create a mirror site for those with things like old browsers and flash turned off.

While being able to spider Flash content may seem like a solution to the issue of invisible content like the chocolate site above, it can present additional problems. Any flash currently loading via JavaScript will still be inaccessible since Google’s spider will not be having the ability to execute javascript added anytime soon if they tell the truth over in Mountain View. Recent personal experience leads me to believe they are sometimes painfully honest about some things so I’ll trust the news on this.

A lot of the Flash content has no text basis to it since it has been created out of images and possibly links. This spidering change will have no impact on the ranking of these sites until it combines image recognition with flash spidering. Sometimes, flash files are better left hidden but it may help with the ability of Googlebot to access and possibly rank deeper pages previously inaccessible.

Some flash content has multiple text-based ‘pages’ buried within the program. So lots of text, no context. If this causes one page to become authoritative for multiple keywords, it could cause issues with ranking. With the chocolate shop example, it could cause all items to be lumped on a single page, diluting a stronger authority if similar products were grouped logically together with unique textual content. So really, to catch chocolate lovers like myself that will want to include a different version of the content which breaks up text through a set of logical, focused pages to help Google rank each page for what it is authoritative for.

While duplicate content will be less of a problem with Flash since it’s all lumped together, the underlying code itself would need to be clearly understood by a robot. So you’ll suddenly need very clean, very well structured and very well written code. Since sometimes code which executes well is not necessarily written well, this may also pose potential spidering issues.

With the potential for so many problems, best practice remains the same. Include alternate, text based information for search engines in order to help them spider, understand and rank your site. Especially if you sell chocolate

Next time, I’ll look at the problems of javascript driven chocolate sites and how to overcome problems of the type the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory has.

Aside from the bundles of work that I am doing at my agency, I have also been helping my friends become bloggers. Non-Industry friends come to me all the time and ask about blogging. Usually through some sort of barter system and in this case “chocolate chip pancakes”. It gets to a point where these bloggers are the only people producing interesting blog content on the internet today. Look at how big networks like Blogher have become!

Obviously there could be a lot of black hat type stuff going on if you employ all of your friends to blog about client related topics. I am sure it’s done quite often. But I work with my friends on Mommy Blogs, Music Blogs, and others for pure amusement (and pancakes). It teaches me about how non industry bloggers are really using the internet and social platforms. This helps me to understand the space around me with much more efficiency which to me is worth it all.

I decided to share this information by asking my best new trainee how she feels about the blogosphere.

Dana Malave is a newbie Mommy Blogger @ Zen 4 Kids and a Motivation Blogger @ My Life In Abundance. She has only been blogging for about a month but is quickly picking up why using Social Networks, tags, proper anchor text, commenting, and engaging is so very important.

Here are some questions I asked her:

1. What is your blogging inspiration? My blogging inspiration is knowing that I can speak my mind freely, touching upon any subject I want. My family gets to see a side of me that they never knew by reading my blog everyday.
2. How do you find your constant flow of content? For my mommy blog, being a mother of two children, I spend a lot of time in the playground. I look around and see things that are happening that bother me and it inspires me to write. For my Motivation Blog, I use my life experiences in hopes that sharing my story will inspire people to be more motivated in their own lives.
3. What are your blogging goals? My blogging goals are to reach as many people possible in all age groups and all ethnicities and make them feel like they are not alone. I’d like for my blog to generate money and good reputation.
4. Where do you see your blog in the next 3 years? I see my blog opening the window for me to have motivational conferences worldwide.
5. How much do you care about Ads and Networks? Joining networks helps me to promote my blogs and generate some revenue at the same time, which is great.
6. Do you actively use Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter to promote your blog? Do you find value in them for social reasons as well? Yes, I use Facebook, Twitter, Ning and Myspace to promote my blog and reconnect with old friends. And I constantly look for product support from Business twitter accounts like @wholefoods while food shopping.
7. What blogs do you read? I read a lot of blogs on Blogher, that covers a lot of the female focused blogosphere. I also read many blogs on Cafe Mom.

In the world of Social Media, it is becoming more and more important to ask questions and learn about non industry bloggers and Twitterers. These are the evangelists of our clients brands and they are voices to be reckoned with. They are more accessible than publishers and can easily build fantastic relationships with you. So next time you come across a blog that interests you or the likes of your clients, talk to them!

When I joined, Lisa announced that new SEO chick Judith Lewis was joining and yadda yadda yadda but I started out talking all business and not much fun SEO - and here I go again!  One of the areas I often write about is the connection between paid and natural search and how both are an important part of your online strategy.  This importance stems not only from the point of view of controlling real estate on the page, but the reinforcement within the searchers mind of your brand.

Organic search results and paid search results are mixed in on the search results page (commonly referred to as the SERP) to varying degrees depending on the engine.  The human brain will register unconsciously more information than the conscious mind can grasp.  On a SERP, this means the more mentions your site/brand has, the more likely this will register in the searchers mind and sway their decision making process.

Natural and paid search can work in harmony to increase brand/site awareness especially if your organic rankings are not in the top five.  While a smaller proportion of searchers will click on a paid search result, it is still important to have a presence there.  Since you do not pay for exposure, just clicks, maintaining a presence in the SERP is essential.

For some searchers, this paid result represents an investment in that search term and therefore increased relevance.  For other searchers the ad may have a more compelling call to action.  To those searchers who choose organic results, your paid ad may become more relevant if what they require is not listed naturally.  A paid search ad can also offer a different call to action than your organic listing.

Organic listings, attracting around 80% of searchers clicks, are the main focus for any site.  With each page able to rank for a query it is authoritative for, getting organic optimization right is essential.  Temporal, semantic and popularity elements of the search algorithm are difficult to fool and as such, sometimes paid search gets you where natural/organic has not yet placed you.

Paid and natural search both have a role to play in attracting searchers.  Each provides opportunities to target searchers through exposure and availability of listing.  The importance of display cannot be discounted though as Seth Godin illustrates here

Sometimes, you cannot help but pity the poor people who come up with terrible marketing campaigns. I actually feel pretty bad for the people at Me.dium.com whose promotional video is nothing short of horrifying. Their software doesn’t appear to be bad, but the team in charge of approving that video should be fired. It’s supposed to be a parody and it’s supposed to be corny, but it’s the worst viral fail I’ve seen since P. Diddy thought you had to buy YouTube channels. I warn you: watching the video may induce the need to shoot yourself in the face. Of coure, this horrific car wreck of a campaign did act as linkbait in a way, as so many people linked to its awfulness. Notice that I’ve nofollowed my Me.dium.com link.

Technically, this was a viral marketing failure as opposed to linkbait, but it got me thinking about what does and what does not constitute link-worthy content.

Things That Could Be Linkbait

1. Sordid email and IM transcripts. Politicians know this quite well. It happens to them all the time, usually involving someone of or under the age of seventeen. It happened to the mayor of the town I lived in in 2005. Nothing so exciting had ever happened to Spokane, Washington and nothing as exciting has happened since. Here is an example of something that would be linkbait were it not for the big black rectangle in the middle of the good bits.

   

   If you can get your hands on someone’s email exchanges, or care to publish your own, and they’ve talked about anything other than who’s managing the company’s H3 tags or whether the loos on the second floor are still broken, people will love it.

2. Screenshots of epic stupidity. I’d not recommend adding the picture to StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg etc as simply a picture. You decrease the likelihood that people will link to it and increase the likelihood that they’ll just steal it. When I had a neat picture to put on Digg, I linked to the post rather than the picture. This way, it received scores of comments and was reproduced less / linked to more. But I digress. Posting pictures (and video, for that matter) of humanity at its worst will always get some attention.
3. AnonyBlogging. The SEO industry has been catching on to this lately, but it’s been around for a while. It comes in two forms: We have both SEO Hack and Slightly Shady SEO, neither of whom will tell the majority of us who they actually are. Then we have one-off ranters like SEO Bitch on Shoemoney’s blog, and anonymousblogger from today’s helping of YOUmoz. Plenty of people like to speculate who SEO Bitch and anonymousblogger really are, which only adds to the buzz and links. I must, at this point, go on a tangent and point out the funny thing that happened when I was lazy and searched for “SEO Bitch on Shoemoney’s blog” in order to find the post. Yes, I’m aware it wasn’t a good search phrase.

   

   That is indeed Matt Inman’s SEOmoz member profile. The problem with this approach is that it’s often hard for writers - especially good ones - to disguise their style. It’s almost as hard as faking an accent, and anyone who’s heard my botched up AustrAmeriKiwi voice will attest to how tough that is.

4. All things really fucking random. This is a perfect example where the bait and switch could be used. For some reason, we like domains with very little content. Silly little sites that usually serve no purpose whatsoever. We love them. We link to them. We Stumble them like they provided valuable content. They inform us of very important information such as whether or not it’s Christmas and show us dumb pictures. No, it’s not funny, is it? Then how in fuck does it have a PageRank of five? Milk it for what it’s worth and 301 it to somewhere else. Keep the cat if you’re concerned about ethics. (There is more content on this domain than just the cat, but the cat alone has 59,425 inlinks.)
5. Clever Photoshopping. A perfect example of a marriage of three things geeky, this image combines zombies, Twitter and Photoshop. There’s only one thing better than presenting people with one thing they like: cleverly combining multiple elements into one display of awesome.

But you’re SEOs and you knew that. How about some things that are definitively not linkbait?

1. Long dumb lists of stupid “did you know” facts. What in hell were they thinking? Let me list the fails:
   • White text on black background. I have 20/20 vision and can see from Seattle to Japan and I have trouble reading that.
   • Page as long as The Last Samurai. The last time I read a document that long, it was a text-only paper and it was for a sociology class that I didn’t want to take and which proved to be an utter waste of time.
   • Massive area of white black space at the bottom of the page for no reason.
   • Exists as the dillionth “did you know” list on the Internet. The Internet has had enough.
   • Anti-fail: The last “fact” is lovely, true or not.
2. Video of other people’s fireworks. Fireworks can be wonderful. The fireworks in Seattle from Gasworks Park this Independence Day were a thoroughly professional work of art. I could feel the sound-waves through my feet on my concrete patio. The way the sound echoed off Capitol Hill was amazing. But on a shitty video, reproduced on YouTube, the noise is fantastically annoying. Exception to the rule: Fireworks fuck-ups. Seattle’s New Year’s Eve display was positively painful. I had the pleasure of watching one of the biggest cockups in fireworks history take place out of both my living room window and on television.
3. Reproducing this. Again. And again. This too. Although it’s still funny.
4. Posts bitching about being asked to present a receipt upon leaving Circuit City. I understand. We’re honest adults who bought unnecessary sound-canceling headphones during our lunch break because it finally dawned on us that iPod headphones are crap. The security guard likely saw us at the check out, purchasing said headphones. The security guard may well have even seen the cashier hand us our receipt. But for Christ’s sake, is it really a human rights violation to show the dude the receipt as we walk out? Is it worth giving him the satisfaction of causing us a world of shit? If it is, I seriously suggest getting a hobby aside from blogging. The internet is rife with posts like this. Just show him the fucking piece of paper. He’s a Circuit City security guard, for Christ’s sake. Give him something to do. Surely you have some veal to eat or something.
5. Everything on this list. This is quite possibly the most wonderful thing Wikipedia has ever done.

LondonSEO pissups are things everyone in the SEO community has come to look forward to. Not only are they a chance to see people you likely haven’t seen since the last conference you went to, it’s also a chance to indulge in free drink and help friends.

For the last while, LondonSEO has also been the home to Sweedish Druid Chocolate – a yummy concoction of chocolaty goodness lightly dusted with cocoa powder. They are quite yummy and favoured by many… but not all.

Regular readers know of my love of FINE CHOCOLATE (not an affiliate link but a gift registry-it’s a silly link) but I do not scorn those of lesser status. Indeed I embrace the Cadbury’s and Masterfoods chocolates of the supermarket shelves. I gleefully indulge in whole nut chocolate and malteesers while dreaming of peanut M&M’s. Chocolate is a consuming passion for me

So, armed with boxes of “Heros” and “Celebrations”, I strong-armed my new work colleagues (nat vis as they are called here at i-level) and we ventured forth to the Ship Inn. This fun pub was hidden down an alley and yet was full with regulars and SEOs alike.

Immediately greeted with fellow SEO Chicks also proudly wearing the green SEO Chicks t-shirt I ventured up to the SEO bar to procure some wine to go with my chocolate. Having eaten only a small bag of nuts for lunch, the wine went straight to my head and foolishly I tried to joke with my fellow SEOs offering “chocolate for links”. Apparently at least one took me seriously. Come on people! When have *I* ever asked for a link? Please. Last time I drink before eating though.

The chocolates went well, finding an even wider audience than usual. It seems that I’ve found the “new hope” for chocbait… Heros and Celebrations! So onwards and perhaps after ad:tech there will be another LondonSEO event!

I love SEO Conferences, but there’s a good possibility I’ll never attend another one. Why? Well, for one thing, after I tick off all the conference hosts today with this post, the SEO bouncers might block me from entering. But in reality, I may never go to another conference because the prices are just too freaking high. (please bear with me on this long rant, because really, you’ve GOT to read it all…seriously)

Yeah, yeah, I’m cheap, I know that. And I agree that conferences have a hidden value, especially in the networking, and that even one tiny nugget of information gleaned from a conference can make up for the price. And yep, I understand that it costs a lot of money to host one of those puppies because you have to pay an arm and a leg for the fancy conference hall digs, and give the keynote speakers a few bazillion dollars plus a promise of everyone’s third-born child. I get all that, really I do. And no doubt, there’s lots of big companies out there that don’t have any problem whatsoever paying all that money to send a couple employees to a conference.

And I agree that the first conference I went to was great. The second…pretty darn good too. But I just honestly can no longer justify the ginormous costs of these events any longer.

What got me started on this rant was the fact that PubCon’s prices have risen pretty dramatically since the last time I went. And while it’s finally in line with the rest of the conferences, it still didn’t make me happy. And it got me to thinking…how can all these people afford to go to conference after conference after conference?

Here, look, let me throw a few numbers at you. I picked just 3 conferences although there’s lots more every year. But I figured 3 was a good solid number, and I’m pretty sure quite a few people hit at least 3 each year. So I chose SES San Jose, SMX East, and PubCon Vegas as good examples of popular conferences that lots of people will attend. I then looked at the prices of the conferences, the hotel prices, the typical airfares, and included expenses for food and drinks (although I went really, really cheap on that part). Each conference has several “tiers”, including early bird pricing, and various options of what is included (full conference, expo only, etc). I used mid-range pricing for full conferences (meaning I used pricing that was early-bird, but not the deepest discounts), and figured out what it would cost to attend all 3 conferences…give or take a few hundred dollars.

The grand total was $11,225.* That’s right, the average conference is going to set you back nearly $4,000, and if you hit all three, you’re likely going to spend over $11K.

Guess what? There ain’t no way in hell I’d ever get that much ROI out of those conferences. So I decided to play around a little with that $11K and see if I could come up with any ideas to make that money work better for me. See if you don’t agree.

First, let’s take a look at what a typical conference looks like, with my head photoshopped over some other woman’s head. (Sorry for cropping you out of the picture, lady, but it’s really important for me to be able to stick my photoshopped head on other people’s bodies in this rant post, k? And I really wanted to see how short hair and bangs would look on me. Not so good.).

Woo. Doesn’t that look like fun. Yeah, k. Now, multiply that fun by 3 and that nets you 3 conferences for 11K.

Ok, moving on.

I could take that same $11K, grab a partner in crime, and spend 2 glorious weeks in Aruba at an ALL-INCLUSIVE resort instead.

(See, that’s my head below, at an Aruba pool, and yeah, that hair style looks better on me, don’t you think? So, ok, we’ll stick with this one from here on out).

But wait, let’s expand on this thought. What if we ALL spent that 11K by meeting up at this same all-inclusive resort in Aruba for two glorious weeks. and just hung out with each other all that time…imagine how much we’d get out of THAT!

Don’t like Aruba for some reason? Ok, let’s all spend that 11K by going to Disneyworld for 2 weeks instead? We can stay at the Polynesian resort shown below (with my head shown there, with above-chosen “do”) and choose one of their nearly-all-inclusive package deals.

Again…two weeks, with a loved one, just hanging out with all our buds. How much ROI do you think we can get out of that, huh? Now I don’t know about you, but I’d rather spend that money in either Aruba or Disney than in three of those “lovely” conference rooms shown above. What about you?

Ok, so now that you get my point, let me get serious. Ever heard of WordCamp? Guess what? They hold that sucker for the lofty price of FREE. Yeah, free. I think we need more of those kinds of conferences in our industry. Who’s with me on that, huh? C’mon, raise your hands!

Either way…Free, Cheap, or Aruba/Disney…I’d take any of those choices over the expensive conference circuit right now. But hey, that’s just me. I’m cheap that way.

Wait, don’t leave… there’s more. There are, of course, even more options. You could actually use all that money to pay for - oh I don’t know - lots of good quality content? a decent link building/baiting package? creation of a kickass web app? outsource your entire seo campaign to Bob Massa’s new company for just $1000/month? Just ’sayin… I mean, that doesn’t get you a photoshopp’d pic of my head on someone else’s body, but it sure as heck would likely generate some nice ROI.

* Here are more numbers (which could be significantly higher for you overseas peeps) in case y’all feel the need to do some number-crunching yourselves:

SES San Jose
conference: $1795-$1995 (+ $745 or $1345 for half day or full day training (optional))

hotels:
san jose marriott $215/night
hilton sj $179/night

flight: $460

food/drinks: $250

***

SMX East New York City

conference: $995-$1595

hotel: westin ny at times square
smx east special rate is $359/night + tax

flight: $296

food/drinks: $400

***

PubCon Las Vegas

$899 -$1499 (+ $150 for pubcon on last day (optional))

no official hotel listed, but wynn is closest
$299/night

sahara (kinda run down, but close and cheap)
$48-$113/night

flight: $458

food/drinks/entertainment: $500

(Now I’ll need to get plastic surgery so the SEO conference goons don’t recognize me).

Whilst entering a search for “hitbacks” into Google, one of our link developers encountered the following helpful message (and if anyone wants to call me out as being pretentious for using the term “whilst” like one of you ponces did with Jane, then let me tell you that I wrote this on my way back from London where I had tea with the Queen so I think it’s ok in this case):

“Did you mean: wetbacks”

Normally this is where I’d issue an offensive exclamation. Wetbacks?? Did we mean WETBACKS? Holy fucking shit. This is obviously done by Google’s spell checker, and, if you look closely, you can see that, indeed, hitbacks and wetbacks are quite similar in their spelling. I only say that because I’m becoming more and more wary of the intelligence of the majority of people after the Lyndon linkbait fiasco. Just wanted to draw attention to the bleeding obvious..

The question I have is what exactly triggers the spell check to give you an alternative suggestion? There are results found for the term hitbacks, after all, 2320 to be exact (at the moment.) There are, however, sadly, 150,000 results for the term wetbacks.

According to Google, “Google’s spell checking software automatically looks at your query and checks to see if you are using the most common version of a word’s spelling. If it calculates that you’re likely to generate more relevant search results with an alternative spelling, it will ask “Did you mean: (more common spelling)?”"

How on earth does this calculation work? Oh god, it’s another one of Google’s famous relevancy algorithms! Haven’t we seen how well those tend to work with links (um, and search results)?

Does anyone remember the infamous Google Jew Watch fiasco from a few years ago? Searches for the term “Jew” were bringing up an anti-Semitic website as the top result. As you can imagine, no one but my usual flight attendant (I’ll call her Cheryl since I once hated a Cheryl) liked this (Cheryl is always very nasty to anyone ordering a kosher meal, especially when he’s sitting with a shiksa wife, and she asks questions like “did Jew want more water?”) and Google was called out for being racist. There was definitely a relevancy factor there though, and it had nothing to do with racism or anti-Semitism or the hatred that some people show towards small Yorkshire terriers. Relevancy is not something that a machine can accurately determine. At the risk of almost defending Google (gag), I do think that they are simply fighting a losing battle by attempting to determine relevancy. As I wrote awhile back, when I had inspiration and more free time and it wasn’t so freaking hot where I live and my bloodhound wasn’t 100 pounds of drooling and destructive magnificence, you can make anything seem relevant if you’re slightly clever.

Obviously my main interest here is in finding relevant links, or at least finding decent links (and sometimes shit ones) and making them seem relevant, but this affects our work on many different levels…if you’re the tiniest bit bright, you can word content in such a way that it works, for example. So IF relevancy can be so easily manipulated and faked, why does it continue to be such a big thing with the engines? If you search for “google relevancy” in Google, you’ll see over 10 million results, so people are quite concerned with this, yet I can’t imagine how accurately the relevancy of anything can be determined. Searching for a phrase such as “American watch”, for example, could give you results ranging from watches sold in the States to a site devoted to keeping the public informed about all the stupid things this country does. If that’s the exact phrase that you enter, how can Google make an accurate determination on which results are the most relevant? There are a ton of examples like this, with words typically used as verbs being used as adjectives in YOUR mind, but being interpreted as verbs if that’s their typical meaning.

Google says this about how they determine results for a query:
“We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.”

Lots of room for error there…and you can also imagine all of the wasted money due to Google Adwords being shown and clicked on by some clueless spaz like, maybe, my mom. If you have an ad set to exact match for “stiff little fingers” because you’re selling joint cream or a carpal tunnel syndrome brace, some person with quality musical taste and a high level of impatience might excitedly click on your ad thinking she’s getting a new punk album. Those Irish boys were such jokesters anyway, so it’s an easy thing to confuse, or so I think. Humans will never be exempt from determining relevancy, no matter how hard the machines try to do it for us. You just have to figure out how to make everything fit the algorithms’ idea of relevancy.