Bah.

I just updated a webste sitewide with a single newline character, and watched it “recover” from a Google dump inside 30 days. That’s right, I added a single newline to the template and republished the entire site, reversing the steady downward trend Gogle had delivered for about 3 months. One month later it’s almost fully recovered.

SEO is a word game, mucked up by links and penalties and spam reports and guesses at intent projected by the search “engineers”. Google is the idiot next to you at a Scrabble tournament, blabbing on and on about his pet cat while you try and make a word out of IXYKQ.  It’s imposible to make good content out of bad ingredients, if you have someone distracting you.

So forget it. Content is not king, and it never was. Those SEOs who say “write an article a day for a year you’ll rank” are being silly… that’s an hour a day for 365 days to rank page 1 for “knitted socks from Grandma” on your travel website, and even that will only deliver customers to your contact page…until the day you adjust it and even that traffic disappears.

The midnight database raids? Valuable for their efficiency, but that’s not SEO. And the clever link magnets you see today are for links, not SEO. You need links when you have IXYKQ and you can’t make any words. If you’re an SEO, you plop down “qi” on a tripple word score and move onto the next round.

Well, when everybody’s doing it, is it Black Hat anymore?

Here we go with YAMDHPRO (Yet Another Million Dollar Home Page Rip Off). TagsPage sells words, which are listed as tags, on a tag cloud page. BFD. But the twist is shown at the top of the page.

• TagsPage uses the same concept as the Million Dollar Page with tags instead of banners. Add your tag now!
• Special: Got a blog with Alexa rank smaller than 200,000? Post a review of our site, send us the link and you’ll get a tag with a top value of $69
• All exclusive tags will be added on top of two PageRank 6 pages and will stay there for 1 year

So this person is selling an ad which provides a larger ad for a higher price (the more you pay, the bigger your tag in the tag cloud). That has little to do with SEO and everything to do with traffic. The sitewide offered is based on PR, and he is also willing to trade wth sites that have Alex rank. That makes two ways he’s trading on rank. The site also offers free and shared (low cost) tags, which would be a way to generate additional traffic (which hopefully siphons off to the largest ads on the home page).

A mashup of pixel advertising and link selling?

I’m almost done with Wordpress.

This has been tough, using Wordpress for the past few weeks. I have always hand-coded my websites, and will continue to do so. It simply doesn’t make sense to use these bloated, slow, complex, and cumbersome CMS programs. As an editor, it’s too slow and unreliable. Firefox crashes under the weight of the js every once in a while, and more often than I like the Wordpress editing page loads only partially, leaving some controls inaccessible.

One of the key factors in my SEO is…. oh, sorry. I’m not giving out info like that any more. Well anyway the pageload times are way slow with Wordpress compared to my other sites on the same host. And I notice the page load time displayed by Wordpress is not at all true… it even updates before the page is fully loaded. Sure it’s probably a browser parsing issue, but why should I care what it is? The page loads slowly. Period.

I worked with Wordpress 1.2 and loved it, but it wasn’t secure nor stable enough to run a business on it. By the time 1.5 was stable, adoption was too high and the footprint too obvious. And now with 2, WP is bloated beyond recovery. Mambo was the same… not stable enough, too many features, and then too complex, too bloated, and too much risk. Now Joomla! and we’re back in the same cycle.

I always hated Dreamweaver for the way it interfered with my code, changing things when I hit save that it shouldn’t change. And TypePad… geesh, what they did to Typepad! I edit the HTML and they convert it into what-is-that, XUL? Well Wordpress is doing the same funk to my posts. A p tag here and a BR there, here a P, there a BR… is that really necessary?

So no matter how much it makes me feel like an old-timer, and no matter how slow I think I am developing by hand with TextPad and an assortment of home-grown tools, I’m sticking with it. Of course that brings me back to the one real reason I returned to Wordpress for this blog. For competitive reasons, it is not wise for me to show the world my standard technology toolset. Its’ what keeps me competitive. I don’t want to use my own tools on my publicly owned blog. Ahhhh…what to do.