Sebastian’s Pamphlets

Mantra: There’s no such thing as wisdom of the crowd. Repeat. There’s no such thing as a wisdom of the crowd! You’ve got a brain of your own for a reason.

There’s a huge difference between Thomas J. Watson’s campaign in the 1920s, which made IBM -as a company gathering intelligent individuals- think big and therefore get big at the end of the day, and the votable daily insane pestering social media, forums, blogs, and whatnot, that we willingly and thoughtlessly consume in today’s information ghetto. The difference is, that nowadays the crowd delegates their thinking to a few well paid ‘early adopters’, bullshitters/prophets, and other conmen who dominate the Interwebs just because they’re loud enough.

In fact, all the hypes celebrated by the dumb crowds distract and mislead you on a daily basis. As a webmaster you really shouldn’t care about ‘latest discoveries’ like LDA and ADL, or search engine FUD reiterated on webmaster hangouts as advice that ‘answers any question’, for that matter.

Not that you can’t get valuable advice out of search engine webmaster guidelines at all. The opposite is true, but you need to read the source, and judge yourself based on your skills and your experience, applying common sense.

Also, there’s other good webmastering advice out there, if you’re willing to seek(needle, haystack=wget(’http://google.com/search?q=seo|sem|webdev|webdesign|webmastering|internet-marketing&num=n‘)). Don’t. Rely on yourself, and your capability to interpret facts, not on speculation spread by ‘authoritative’ sources.

It’s so much easier to join a huge community or two, and to believe/implement/adapt what’s ‘hot’, or what’s repeated often, respectively. Actually, that’s a crappy approach, because the very few small communities that openly discuss things that matter, are out of reach for the average webmaster, chatting and networking protected by /var/inner-circle/private/.htpasswd.

Here are the components of a public webmaster/SEO/IM community, listed by revenues in ascending order (that’s -1 before zero and 1), what equals alleged trustworthiness/importance in descending order:

• Many fanboys (m) and groupies (f) who don’t have a clue, but vote up everything what an entity listed below suggests. They will even rave speak out at other alien places, if their idols (see below) get outed for bullshitting anywhere. They go by the title of junior members.
• A few semi-professional whores who operate blogs/forums/aff-programs theirselves, and manage to steal a tiny portion of the floating popularity to feed their pathetic outlets. Those are considered senior members.
• A handful of shiny rockstars who silenty suck up to their owner master (see below). They may or may not participate monetarily, and have the power of moderators.
• One single guy who laughs all the way to the bank.

Looked at in full daylight: when you join a crowd you become cannon fodder, and your financial misery is considered collateral damage. Lurking (silently listening to crowds) is not exactly cheaper, and certainly doesn’t make you an unsung hero, because you’ll totally share the crowd’s misery. Your balance sheet doesn’t lie, usually.

Reboot your brain before you jump on popular band wagons. Don’t listen to advice that’s freely available, not even mine (WTF, you know what I mean). If somebody discusses ethics (hat colors), then run for your life, because ethics will kill your revenue. When it comes to SEO, then it helps to evaluate (search engine/any) advice under the premise “what would I do, and what could I achive (technically), if I’d run this SE?”.

It’s all about you. Don’t care about the well beings of search engines that suffer from WebSpam, or the healthiness of affiliate programs that make shitloads of green out of it, but tell you ‘thou shalt not spam’ because they sneakily dominate your SERPs with their own graffity. WebSpam is what gets you banned, everything else just makes you money. Test for yourself, and don’t take advice without proof that you can easily replicate on your very own servers.

Do not risk your earnings -that is your existence!- with strategies and tactics you can’t handle on the long haul, just because some selfish moron tells you so.

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Folks, I’ve got good news. As a matter of fact, they’re so good that they will revolutionize SEO. A little bird told me, that the major search engines secretly teamed up to solve the problem of context and meaning as a ranking factor.

They’ve invented a new Web standard that allows content producers to steer search engine ranking algos. Its code name is ADL, probably standing for Aided Derivative Latch, a smart technology based on the groundwork of addressing tidbits of information developed by Hollerith and Neumann decades ago.

According to my sources, ADL will be launched next month at SMX East in New York City. In order to get you guys primed in a timely manner, here I’m going to leak the specs:

WTF - The official SEO standard, supported by Google, Yahoo & Bing

Word Targeting Funnel (WTF) is a set of indexer directives that get applied to Web resources as meta data. WTF comes with a few subsets for special use cases, details below. Here’s an example:

<meta name="WTF" content="document context" href="http://google.com/search?q=WTF" />

This directive tells search engines, that the content of the page is closely related to the resource supplied in the META element’s HREF attribute.

As you’ve certainly noticed, you can target a specific SERP, too. That’s somewhat complicated, because the engineers couldn’t agree which search engine should define a document’s search query context. Fortunately, they finally found this compromise:

<meta name="WTF" content="document context" href="http://google.com/search?q=WTF || http://www.bing.com/search?q=WTF || http://search.yahoo.com/search?q=WTF" />

As far as I know, this will even work if you change the order of URIs. That is, if you’re a Bing fanboy, you can mention Bing before Google and Yahoo.

A more practical example, taken from an affiliate’s sales pitch for viagra that participated in the BETA test, leads us to the first subset:

Subset WTFm — Word Targeting Funnel for medical terms

<meta name="WTF" content="document context" href="http://www.pfizer.com/files/products/uspi_viagra.pdf" />

This directive will convince search engines that the offered product indeed is not a clone like Cialis.

Subset WTFa — Word Targeting Funnel for acronyms

<meta name="WTFa" content="WTF" href="http://www.wtf.org/" />

When a Web resource contains the acronym “WTF”, search engines will link it to the World Taekwondo Federation, not to Your Ranting and Debating Resource at www.wtf.com.

Subset WTFo — Word Targeting Funnel for offensive language

<meta name="WTFo" content="meaning of terms" href="http://www.noslang.com/" />

If a search engine doesn’t know the meaning of terms I really can’t quote here, it will lookup the Internet Slang Directory. You can define alternatives, though:

<meta name="WTFo" content="alternate meaning of terms" href="http://dictionary.babylon.com/language/slang/low-life-glossary/" />

WTF, even more?

Of course we’ve got more subsets, like WTFi for instant searches. Because I appreciate unfair advantages, I won’t reveal more. Just one more goody: it works for PDF, Flash content and heavily ajax’ed stuff, too.

This is the very first newish indexer directive that search engines introduce with support for both META elements and HTTP headers as well. Like with the X-Robots-Tag, you can use an X-WTF-Tag HTTP header:
X-WTF-Tag: Name: WTFb, Content: SEO Bullshit, Href: http://seobullshit.com/

As for the little bird, well, that’s a lie. Sorry. There’s no such bird. It’s bugs I left last time I visited Google’s labs:
<meta name="WTF" content="bug,bugs,bird,birds" href="http://www.spylife.com/keysnoop.html" />

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