SEO Ga Ga

Warning: Contains technical language. No nudity.

For those of you still reading, SEO, if you didn't already know, is Search Engine Optimization. Like the name suggests, it means tweaking your website / blog to make it easy for search engines, and consequently web surfers, to find your website / blog. As with things technical, what began as simple and honest tips has now morphed into something George Lucas could make another futuristic good v/s evil epic out of. There are these White Hats, or people who use White Hat techniques. Derived from cheesy westerns where the good men wore white hats. These are the Jedi. They use honest means like dilligently writing META tags, sharing links with relevant sites, regularly writing good and original content and then, waiting for the search engines to rank them high. Slow and steady, straight and narrow. Then there are the Black Hats, or people who use Black Hat techniques. Derived from aforesaid cheesy westerns where bad guys wore black hats. These are the Sith Lords. They use linkbaits, pay and accept money for link sharing, put machine-generated or even copied content, and do those kind of things that are aimed solely at jumping the search engine ranks and content be damned. Search Engines spend top dollar and top synapse trying to weed out sites using these techniques. And then there are Brown Hats. Derived from some color-blind moron who thought brown in midway between black and white. These people walk the knife edge between good and bad. That was SEO 101 for you.

Prometheus knows a few blogs that have an unusually high Technorati rank, even though the posts aren't regular or topical. And Prometheus has received offers to link share with sites and blogs just for the sake of jacking up that rank figure. Familiar, innit? Prometheus can hear you (figuratively speaking) say that you don't give a retarded rodent's rear to your Google Page Rank or your Technorati Rank or your Alexa Traffic Rank. Some of you would own up to being edgy about comments, checking on them like a miser counting his money over and over again. But hey, that's White Hat, innit?

1. Surprise 1: Umm.. those memes that we do are, theoretically, Brown Hat. Specifically those with a daily theme and a blogroll widget to indicate participation. The only Wordless Wednesday Prometheus did shot his Technorati rank from 104K to 28K.


2. Surprise 2: Page Rank works on the basis of counting the number of inbound links (sites linking to you) and outbound links (sites you link to). Which means not linking back to someone who links to you, or quoting a website or blog without a hyperlink to that site, are Black Hat.


3. Surprise 3: This post is Brown Hat. What place does search engine whacking have on the Moving (Middle) Finger Writes? Had it not been for the fact that Prometheus wrote this original content after being poked in the head by that Thinking Blog Award below, this post with those rich keywords (SEO, Black Hat, Page Rank, Traffic) would be downright Black Hat. Uh.. the words in the last parentheses contribute further.

So does that make Prometheus evil? Write your comments here. Prometheus will be checking every half hour for new ones. And the bestest comments will win a reciprocating linkback to their site.

Technorati tags: SEO, Page Rank, Technorati Alexa, blog, blogging, internet, technology, google