Tag: essay

Anti-Social Competition

A lot has been said already about how stupid Twitter is to bite the hand that tweeted them into fame. People are all on about how Facebook’s draconian actions will hurt them. Now Instagram is in on the restriction game. There are business models for actions like this, and we’ve seen them time and again. People think the only way to keep their user base (i.e. their revenue) is to stop the users from integrating with the other tools.

They’re wrong.

Look, none of us use a product because they limit us, or because they force us to. While the monetary loss and software hassle of switching to a PC would hurt me, the reason I use a Mac is not because they make it impossible to switch, but because they make me not want to. It’s a part of a psychological gambit, making it easy to do what I want, and if I really wanted, easy to walk away. But what neither Apple nor Microsoft does is attempt to lock me in to their way forever.

Now some of you might argue that’s not true, but look at the US phone system. AT&T and Verizon and all the other traditional companies lock us into their systems. We can’t leave without paying exhorbinant fees. With Apple and Microsoft, the setup fee was my choice, and I don’t pay ongoing prices to use their service, though I can in some cases.

When I see things like Instagram and Twitter having a slap-fight, to the point that Twitter decided to remove Instagram’s embedding in Twitter, I wanted to kick them both. Twitter is going to hurt itself more and more by biting the hands that feed them (which we already knew about when they decided people making their own Twitter tools was bad). Instagram is following the trend, and that doesn’t help at all. What they’re doing is generating anti-social behavior, which is to say that they’re making it hard to be social.

These are social media outlets, and it’s almost to the point where they’re saying ‘You can drive our car, but it only uses gasoline from these vendors.’ We would cry foul and sic the lawyers on them for that. In fact, we did. Remember when Microsoft made it near impossible to run other browsers by tightly integrating IE with their OS? Look at how well that worked out. Sidebar: I don’t think Apple limiting the default browser on iOS devices is the same thing. Unlike Microsoft, they own both hardware and software, so it’s more like saying ‘You can’t put a Fiat engine in your Mini Coop.’ I do think they should allow it, but it’s not the same as the gasoline analogy. Hair splitting, I know. Don’t think I like that I can’t set Chrome as my default browser on my iPad, it really annoys me.

One of the driving points I love about open source is that we all work together to make things better. With a few notable exceptions, we really try hard to be cooperative, because we know that one group, alone, can’t do everything. This is why I’m often an evangelist for people to contribute, I know that we need to work together in all things. My chosen flag is, right now, Open Source.

For some reason this is lost on people when they start looking to monetize their products. And it’s not just products like Twitter that do this stupid thing. Right away, everyone’s an enemy. Recently, Carrie Dils ran into this when her presentation at a WordPress Meetup was rejected. Carrie correctly pointed out, she’s not your competition. (I’m very confident this will be addressed in the meetup world, and I know this is not the kind of behavior anyone encourages or endorsees.) Except in a way, she totally is my competition. Just not the way that guy seemed to think of it.

That bizarre situation points out the absurdity in all this. The world is not a zero-sum game. You’ll never have all the money, all the products, all the clients, or all the people. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t aspire to have as many as you can manage, but it means you don’t need to attack the other guy. Having a rival, having competition, is good. Every other forum moderator is better than I am at something. Even if it’s just quilting, or as weird as Microsoft servers, the crux of the issue is that competition can be a good thing, and the way to ‘win’ is not to smear the other guy or block them from sharing your client base, but to offer what the other guys doesn’t have.

Look back at Twitter and Instagram. Twitter is for sharing 140 characters of words. Instagram is for sharing retro photos. So what does Instagram have to gain by blocking people from being able to show photos in Twitter? Well there is a practical point here, and it’s one I tout: Own your own data. After all, I don’t allow hotlinking of my images on other sites specifically because I want people to come here for content (and it’s bandwidth theft, which I hate), but also I don’t like when people steal my content without asking and present it as their own. A large part of owning my own data is also owning where it lives. So while I use Instagram and Twitter (and Facebook), anything of merit that isn’t just casual chatter ends up on one of my own sites.

Unlike Instagram, I will happily embed small version of my content (excerpts) on any social media site I care to use. Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus all allow me to put a link, or a link and a phrase, that shows a teaser of my blog content. This drives traffic back to me, which increases my presence, and nets me what I want. Instagram could have done this, and permitted embedding like that on a small scale (click to see bigger, click to leave comment) on Twitter and anywhere else, which would probably help them.(Wouldn’t it be cool if we could code our own sites to let Twitter embed some media from them too? Sadly, they won’t let us because some people would use it for Goatse.cx (DO NOT VISIT)) Instead, they put up a wall to make people click a link and go through. This is why WordPress lets you embed media on your site from other sources. They get it.

I wish those other guys did. I just want to play in the park with everyone.

24 January, 2013
Don’t Tread On Me

Even the non techs have been hearing about Do Not Track lately. The basic idea is that letting advertisers track you is annoying, frustrating, and something a lot of us just don’t want, but moreover, we don’t want random websites doing the same thing! Imagine if you went into Starbucks, and they followed you around to everywhere else you went that day? Starbucks.com could do that, and I personally find it invasive.(I’m not the only one. My friend Remkus goes even further than I do.)

This is, in part, what that stupid EU law was trying to tackle.

There are a lot of ways to block that sort of tracking, but the latest way is to use Do Not Track (DNT). Turning on DNT on your browser puts an extra header in your web page requests that says “Don’t track my behavior!” Now, the only real downside is that both your browser and the site you’re on have to agree to these rules for it to work, but with Microsoft in the mix, turning DNT on by default for Windows 8, I think we’re on the right track.
If you go to IE’s testdrive of DNT you can see the status of your current browser, and all others.

Interstingly Chrome doesn’t have this yet, and when it does, it will default to track. Safari does that too. It’s weird for me to be saying ‘Microsoft has it right’ but I suspect it comes down to how advertising works. Microsoft really doesn’t need to advertise except to improve their image. Everyone knows Microsoft, and they know Office, IE, and Windows. Apple’s still a small percentage, and Google was a techy thing for so long, I think that’s why their first social network failed. Because Microsoft has such a percentage of non-tech users (i.e. everyone) and because of their bad rep, the best thing they can do to improve everything is start protecting the users more.

Of course, we all know that being tracked is a function of being online, or even in a store. Physical stores have often watched where people linger to figure out how to better arrange stores, and they ask for your zipcode when you show to understand who buys what. This is all a part of marketing. Of course the problem with online is that the more I search for something, the more I see it in my ads (Google). Why is this a problem? Let’s say I research a MiFi device, find the one I want, and buy it. For the next four months, I got ads for MiFis.

I should explain, while I have no problem with people tracking me for analytics (I rely on them myself, can’t understand your visitors without data), its what they’re doing with that data that pisses me off. Getting my info to make a better product for me is great. Getting my info to sell to people is not. And that’s why I’m for do-not-track. Or at least ‘Ask to track.’ It goes back to the store. If I go to Office Depot, they ask me for my zipcode or phone, and I can decline. They use that to track me, and if I don’t want them to know that I drove 80 miles to get something, I don’t have to tell them. Online, I should have that same option.

Sadly, the steam behind Do Not Track is running out. Ten months after everyone agreed this needed to happen, nothing’s happened and that’s problematic. Why did we all go dark over SOPA? Because, at some level, we all believed that the Internet is changing things for the better. And yet, we all promised to have Do Not Track up by the end of 2012, and that sure didn’t happen. Then again, we’re merrily Thelma and Lousie’ing right off a fiscal cliff too, so this really isn’t a surprise.

I’m actually against ad-blocking software, and yet we’re at the point where I’ve installed it on Chrome, and I’m starting to block people. Oh, I run the other way with this. I only block certain sites (generally I’ve taken to blocking ones that have annoying ‘overlay’ ads) because, again, I get that people need these metrics to make things work, and I too make money off ads.

In fact, this is yet another reason I use Project Wonderful for my ads. They have a very simple policy:

Specific tracking of user interactions that don’t involve clicks is not allowed, including view-through tracking, key-modifier tracking, and mouse-location tracking.

So please, allow ads on my sites. I promise I don’t track you with ads. I do have Google and Jetpack tracking your visits, but that’s just for me to measure how things work on the site, and I will never sell or otherwise use your personal information for my own gain.

14 January, 2013
Social Throttling

Lately we’ve all seen the ads on Facebook ‘Promote this post and have it seen by a wider audience!’ And many of us pish-posh it, because the people who liked us will see our posts, and who needs it. Right? Wrong. Not even 25% of the people who like you, or your page, will ever see your posts if you don’t promote them. What they call ‘organic’ reach is highly limited, especially with their new timelines. The way in which they filter the new timeline is going to make this even harder.

A lot of people I know had no idea that Facebook limits who can see your posts. When you start combining this with Google’s encrypting of search terms, the easy valuation of your SEO is creeping swiftly into overly complicated. A lot of A/B testing relies on this information and now that it’s being taken away, we’re back to the age old metrics of grabbing people off the street and asking them which sock is whiter.(Of course with on-line prompts to fill out those Q&As, we’ve already hurt ourselves. We’ve all trained ourselves to ignore those ad-like things that get between us and content. But that’s another post.)

Facebook Ad Example
Twitter has had ‘promoted‘ tweets for a while, which is probably why they get so tetchy about the other Twitter apps. The concept is that you pay and more people see your tweets. Not a bad model, really, though most of us just roll our eyes and ignore them. Still, all your tweets are just as popular and shared with people who follow you.

Not so, Facebook. For a long time, Facebook did something kind of similar. Your sidebar has “sponsored” posts, which are just plain ads. If you have a Page, you can pay to sponsor your posts, similar to Twitter, and push your brand. But here’s where Facebook’s a shit-bird: Edgerank.

The concept is like Pagerank from Google. The more popular, and active, your page/post are, the more they’re worth. But that doesn’t make sense for people, since my brother’s edgerank may be low, but I still want to see all his posts. Supposedly Edgerank doesn’t affect this, but I’m not so sure, given how many ‘important’ Facebook messages I miss. This probably stands out more to be since I don’t visit the site with any regularity. If I have a blog post (like this one) that I push to Facebook via Wordpress, I may go back to see if people commented there. That’s really the only time I notice what’s in my timeline, and while I do quick scan it, it’s filled with cruft.

What happens on the Death Star stays on the Death Star.
If you’re on Facebook all the time, you’d never notice. If you got Facebook emails, you’d never notice. I don’t meet either of those requirements. If I use Facebook, I use it. If I don’t, I don’t want a hundred emails cluttering up my space, and this is a problem. See, if I don’t participate actively, by clicking like (something I rarely do), then I cause your edgerank to drop and fewer people to see your posts, so fewer of us click like and thus it sucks. They aren’t wrong with their algorithm, as Facebook is a work based on connections. A likes B likes C who shares A with D. That’s how things get around.(If you’re interested in the math, Dan Zarrella did the math and Harvard reblogged it.)

With that in mind, if you’re trying to improve your ranking for your product, Ari Herzog has a suggestion: Concentrate on interactions. If you have some regular people who leave comments, talk with them. They’ll be more inclined to share and retweet your posts, which gets you better ranking. Remember, we’re working under the assumption that everyone wants to get noticed more for business, and while SEO is not a zero-sum game, there are winners and losers. Concentrating too much on the media aspect of social media is a quick way to lose.

For the rest of us who just want to communicate with our friends and family, you’re better off getting a blog that emails them directly. At least then the only fear you have is the spam filters. But of course, that falls into the argument of why you should own your own content anyway, and is a post for another day.

18 December, 2012
Stolen GPL

I made a polarizing comment on Twitter back in November, which was perfectly plain to me, but apparently not everyone else.

“GPL means that you can fork, but it doesn’t mean you can steal, and you know damn well what theft is.”

I should have said ‘doesn’t mean you should steal, and you know damn well what that is’ but the point is close enough. Forking in GPL is not only okay, it’s encouraged. Many of us get our starts forking and improving plugins. But there’s a difference between that and stealing someone’s work and presenting it as our own. That’s stealing, plain and simple. If you fork, you attribute. I have a plugin that started as a fork and ended up 100% re-written in a totally different way, but I still credit my original inspiration.

Why?

Because of the community.

Look, per GPL, taking someone’s plugin is not stealing it, in so far as taking the code goes. You have the right to distribute someone else’s code. And I don’t even think that taking someone’s copyright protected work is actually theft. What I do think is that is taking someone else’s work with questionable motives, and rebranding it as your own, is stealing.

Here’s the GNU’s take on Copyright ‘Theft’:

Copyright apologists often use words like “stolen” and “theft” to refer to copyright infringement. This is spin, but they would like you to take it for objective truth.
Under the US legal system, copyright infringement is not theft. Laws about theft are not applicable to copyright infringement. The copyright apologists are making an appeal to authority—and misrepresenting what authority says.
Unauthorized copying is forbidden by copyright law in many circumstances (not all!), but being forbidden doesn’t make it wrong. In general, laws don’t define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don’t fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change.

I agree with their explanation, and think it’s valid, in so far as it goes.

Where it breaks down is the motive, as I mentioned before. If I buy a plugin or theme to use, I’ve bought it for the intended purpose. If I buy it to fork, I’ve bought it for another intended purses. If I buy it to sell as my own, now I’ve walked into asshole territory. Per the GPL, this isn’t theft and it isn’t stealing (again, forking is okay). But when you look at it dead on, you’ve taken someone else’s work, with the intent to profit from their work, without any attribution or credit or compensation.

In any other situation, that would be, clearly, stealing.

Theft is taking someone else’s property without permissions and with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. Obviously we’re not depriving the owner of the product when it comes to software, but we are intended to deprive them of the profits of their software, by circumventing their established ‘sales’ procedure. This works the other way, too. If I take someone’s free theme/plugin and sell it, I’m stealing from them as well. However. In both cases, if I’m not selling the product, but selling my support of it, I’m not stealing anything.

Stealing is presenting someone else’s works as your own, among other definitions, and taking without right or permission. When it comes to GPL, you have both right and permission to take, that is unquestioned. But again, once you start presenting this as your own, you’ve walked into asshole territory. You didn’t do the work, you didn’t write the code, and you didn’t do anything except copy/paste. That’s not coding. You’re being dishonest, and I feel you’re stealing.

It’s morally ambiguous and sticky for me to just say ‘this is stealing’ which is why I have to come back to the intent and motive. Am I doing this for altruistic reasons? Did the developer take a walk and abandon their work, and I’m simply keeping it alive? Did the developer reject my patch so I forked it? Or am I doing this because I resent them charging $85 for a plugin when WordPress is free? If it’s that last one, then I’m a thief, because my motive is to stick it to the other guy.

Separating ‘stealing’ and ‘theft’ is like undoing a Gordian knot. You can do it, but it starts bumping into all sorts of crazy semantics. That’s why, most of the time, we don’t bother. I have a very strong opinion on the subject of code-theft, and always have. I feel that the only way to keep the GPL going is to not only do what’s right, but mean it, and being a good steward of the community, be it WP or Drupal or even Expression Engine, means you have to do what’s right.

The right thing is to thank the guy who came first. Even an ‘Inspired by a snide comment by Ipstenu’ is being a good steward. You’ve encouraged me to do more by taking the time to recognize my effort. With that encouragement, I’ll go on to do more. It’s positive reinforcement at it’s best.

13 December, 2012
A Theme By Any Other Name
When I redesigned my sites earlier this year I struggled with some concepts that later drove me away from child themes and into the arms of custom plugins. The issue at heart is that the term ‘theme’ is used in far too broad and encompassing a manner, which confuses people when they find out there are different types of themes. And no, I don’t mean responsive vs static vs mobile. I touched on this earlier in the year when I reviewed the very concept of managed themes, but apparently I didn’t do it well enough.

After some talks on WP-Hackers, I’ve got a better list.
- Theme – The traditional theme.
  - Child/Parent Themes
- Theme Framework – Can be used as a traditional theme, normally used as a parent.
  - Starter Theme – Never used as a standalone theme, only used to build themes.
  - Managed Theme – A theme that acts like a framework and a child at the same time.
So let’s look at them in order.

Theme

Example: TwentyEleven, Buttercream, pretty much anything in wordpress.org

This is the most basic, simple, normal theme in the world. It works right out of the box. You can make a child if you have to, but most people don’t. Themes may or may not be built off of a Theme Framework, but they can all be used as is, no alterations needed.

Child / Parent Themes

The short version here is that child themes are built off a parent. A parent can be any of the themes here (Theme, Managed, or Framework). A child theme can never be a ‘theme’ however, it can never stand on it’s own. And there are some themes that don’t support children at all. The parent/child relationship muddies the waters quite a bit when it comes to understanding what type of theme you have, but I would go with the basic rule of “If a theme requires another theme to be installed separately, it’s a child theme.”

Theme Framework

Examples: Hybrid, Genesis

These themes are crazy robust. It’s like taking a normal theme, giving it steroids, and then handing you toolkits to expand it. Theme Frameworks can be used as a theme themselves, but often are treated as either Starters or Managed (see below). Frameworks come with a bunch of new, extra functions, along with documentation. Oh yes, these babies are documented so the theme guru can carry on, or the newbie can learn all about how themes work.

There are two types of Frameworks (and this is where people will disagree with me a lot).

Starter Theme

Example: _s, Bootstrap, Hybrid

These are used to build a parent theme off of, and cannot stand on their own as a theme (they’re skeletons). No one actually uses the theme as a theme on it’s own without forking and adding in their bells and whistles. These are turned into full-blown themes, and use the normal parent/child relationships from there out (which is why they’re a subset of frameworks). The starter theme itself is not a stand-alone theme, however, and the person who builds their parent theme off these ‘framework’ is responsible for updating their theme when the framework is updated.

Managed Theme

Example: Genesis, Thesis

A managed theme is usually built on a framework, but unlike a starter theme, these can be used as is if you want. The real difference is not that, however, but that everything that you should be doing is within the WP Dashboard. All CSS tweaks, and even functions, can be added there-in, and not the functions.php files. Sometimes these are just parent themes that you don’t make children off of, ever, and others are children themselves of a framework. The best ones have a way to export your theme settings. To make things easier, you’ll find a lot of plugins that do what most people want, and they never need to edit code.

Drawing The Lines

What is a theme and what is a plugin, then? I was trying to explain this to a non-techy the other day, and jokingly said “You know how Barbie has all those clothes you can put on her, like the ski outfit? That’s a theme. A plugin is the Barbie Camper.” As horrific as the metaphor is, it’s not inaccurate. The theme changes the design, the plugin changes the function. Many theme developers hate putting code like Custom Post Types into their themes, because they feel that code should be separate from theme, and you should be able to keep your content, no matter what theme you’re using.

For a long time I never used ‘starter’ as a theme designation, because to me the word ‘framework’ meant ‘a frame I build off of.’ With the conversations I had on wp-hacker in mind, I have reclassified themes into two types. Themes and Theme Frameworks. That’s it. That’s all you get. And yes, that means I think a Starter Theme is a framework. Look, Genesis, Hybrid-Core, and Bootstrap are all themes that someone uses to build other themes. They’re all frames that people can use to paint their own masterpiece.

When you start looking at managed vs starter, it gets clearer. I call Genesis managed because that’s how the end users will see it. It’s not a starter, because people don’t fork Genesis to make a new theme, they use it and make children.

The following explanation is using the two frameworks I’m most familiar with.

Hybrid is a Starter Theme Framework. People download it, extend it into their own theme (see Oxygen, News, etc, all of which are stand-alone themes in the repository), and use those themes as full born ‘traditional looking’ themes. They can make children theme, but the point is not that Oxygen (built off Hybrid) is a theme or not, but that Hybrid, it’s source, is not a theme, but a Framework. They are separate things.

Gensis is a Managed Theme Framework. It remains a separate parent theme, and technically can be used as is (it’s a very nice basic theme), so in that way it’s a Framework, but people don’t take that as a base theme and extend it like they do Hybrid. When you make a child theme of Genesis, it’s a true child theme, and never a copy of Genesis, renamed, and extended. Thus, Genesis could be a framework, but it’s really a managed theme because you never fork it, you always manage it via the dashboard or a child theme. Genesis is a theme built off a framework, and no one else uses that framework but Genesis.

If you treat everything like a nail, you’ll always use a hammer. And a nail will go wherever you want if you hit it hard enough. I don’t suggest that, by the way, and as a principle of forcing your way on everyone, it’s not a good one. Treating all theme types as exactly the same will get you into trouble. If I extend one the nail/screw metaphor, one reason themes take on so much is that they can’t install plugins. Managed themes are a great example of themes crossing the line between being a hammer (theme) and a screw (plugin).

A starter theme framework is Home Depot. All the tools are there, there’s even some help, but you’re going to pick out your tools and your lumber and build what you want. When you need more, you can invent and create anything you want. You may have to go back to the store and buy more nails and screws, but your limit is your own ability and imagination.

A managed theme framework is Ikea, with that Ikea Toolkit. It has all the parts you need, and while you can hack the bookshelf into a standing desk with little work, and no extra parts, you’re meant to use it out of the box and follow their directions to design differently. And when you need more, there are plugins to add on to what you have to make it more. Within limits.

My Recommendation

Use what you like, but understand what you’re using.

Themes are very personal. A plugin is easy, you want something to fit a specific niche, you find it, you use it. You may pick one over another based on ease of personal usability, but the final function is the real deal breaker. A theme, on the other hand, has to look right and feel right to use, and that’s very, very hard. No matter which one I use, and I use a theme, a framework, and a managed all on my sites, I make sure it meets my feel-good and my needs. I know I’m perfectly comfortable hacking functions to bend to my whim, but if I was handing over a theme to someone less techy, I would think twice.

When you’re making a site for someone else, think about how much you want to support. The more complex a theme, and the harder for the users to edit it, the more calls you get. Even when you’re making a site for yourself, you have to know what kind of theme you have, and the best way to edit it. If you’re using a stand-alone theme, built on a framework or not, once you know how to use child themes you’re good to go. But a managed theme may be a new learning curve for you, so remember to take time and ask around for how to use this theme the best way.

The best thing about learning to use a managed theme is that they’re usually used to the newbies, so for an experienced theme dev, that learning curve is short and shallow. You already know how to find the docs, read them, and apply them. You know that there will be options, between editing functions.php and using a plugin, and you can weigh the pros and cons for yourself and your clients.

Understand what you’re using, understand how it works, and use what makes you happy.
28 November, 2012
SEO: Impossible

For someone who thinks SEO is crap, I sure talk about it a lot. Google’s got a new toy: Dissavow links.

In the wake of Panda, a lot of sites got hit with bad SEO rankings from having crappy backlinks. In specific, I know many WordPress theme developers were hurt, including WPMUDev, because spammers and scammers used their themes. Basically their own popularity bit them in the ass, through no fault of their own save their success. After all, a pretty common question people have is “Do those crappy, low-quality inbound links hurt me?” And most of the time, the answer was no. Except when it did with Panda. At the time, it didn’t seem fair to anyone that your popularity would be detrimental to your SEO, and thus we have Dissavow. (Amusingly enough, Bing got there first.)

But what does it do? Here’s Matt Cuts explaining this:

For the rest of us, it lets you say ‘These links are crap and they’re not related to me, so please don’t let them impact my search ranking.’ Many of you are looking confused here, and wondering why they impacted you in the first place. After all, it’s not your responsibility to monitor the quality of sites on the Internet, is it? That’s why Google and Bing make the big bucks. And yet we all know how terrible search results can be, and frankly Google’s blog search is horrible. I have to hand it to Google, though. Search is hard, and crowdsourcing the work of teaching a computer what is and is not spam is actually a good idea.

Google (and Bing’s) methodology rub me wrong. Now that Google has us doing the work for them, by picking out spammy sites and effectively reporting them, you’d think all is good for the theme world. Alas, not so. I’ve heard rumblings that Google is now asking theme developers to remove backlinks!

While I don’t feel a theme developer will be broken for this, it will make it much harder for them to promote their works. On the plugin end of things, I’ve had people ask me to remove their plugins because we don’t permit WordPress plugins to show backlinks unless they’re opt-in, and this means the dev can’t make money. Part of why is that you can have hundreds of plugins, but only one active theme. The other part is we feel it looks spammy. Now, so does Google.

But all that aside, if you want to disavow your backlinks, you can now do it, and the directions aren’t complicated. Click on the disavow link, upload a text file formatted in a certain way, reap benefits. Sounds great, right? What if I told you that Google sends you no confirmation at all? There’s no confirmation, no way to see if what you did worked or not, and worst of all, this could take weeks, if not months, for them to crawl, sort, and re-crawl your sites. During that time, you hear nothing. When it’s done, you hear nothing.

You do all this work and end up in a vacuous hole of ‘well, there’s that then’ with no assurance of anything at all being done. That caught my attention in a bad way. How can I tell I’ve done the right thing? We’re already being killed by not being able to track encrypted search terms, and now we’re not going to be able to tell if removing the links from the bad people is going to help our SERP?

This is why I think SEO is full of it. To one degree or another, it’s always been about gaming the system, and tricking search engines into letting you rise to the top. Meta tags trumped quality, and then it was links (because obviously if people link to you, you’re valuable). Now we know people game links, so we remove that, which actually doesn’t hurt as much as you think. See, a lot of your search engine ranking came from the quality of sites that linked back to you. But the most valuable sites (like MediaWiki) have stringent policies and rules about not linking, or linking and using nofollow, to prevent you from getting link-juice. In the case of MediaWiki, it makes sense since anyone can edit it.

But…

That just went to prove the system was broken. Blogs (WordPress included) nofollows comment links for the same reason. If the door was open, the spammers would use it and make themselves look more important. And as the tools got smarter and started making those links worthless, the spammers started scraping your quality content, which Google et al had to learn to filter. We’re at the point where links are valueless. It doesn’t matter who links to you anymore, because none of the good sites will give you a lot of value since they’re trying to get rid of the spammers. So why is Google giving any weight to these spammer links?

If the state of link-relativity is so poor that search engines are asking us to remove backlinks from themes, and also to tell them which links to us are worthless, then all links are more trouble than they’re worth and we need to figure out a better way to measure the usefulness of our sites. What measuring sticks do you use?

2 November, 2012