According to the rash of SEO types who contact me to get their webpage re/linked to through the library's...

BLOT: (17 Aug 2011 - 03:31:57 PM)

According to the rash of SEO types who contact me to get their webpage re/linked to through the library's...

[Quick note of explanation to start: One of my jobs at the reference desk is to help facilitate use of electronic resources. I maintain things like this libguide, try to set up links to resources after I seek them out and test them, figure out tips and tricks and solve issues, and so forth. While most would see that I'm a librarian and assume my day is mostly full of books, I am one of those librarian whose job is mostly to do with electronic things. This is not to say that I don't like books, I just do the other more...]

According to the rash of SEO types who contact me to get their page [and/or service] re/linked to through the library's website, Google practically punishes websites that do not have their content associated with their URL. Or, um, vice versa. Maybe. Some sites to which we already linked have asked us to please change it so that they can get the hot rankings without dying in the limbo of newness infested URLs. "My website at www.fact-rabbits.com is all about blah, so now you need to link to www.fact-rabbits-blah.com or we won't get the Googles!" Verbatim, that sentence happened. Verbatim.

Even more of these emails are of the form "Please linkah to my website http://payforcollege.[insert thinly veiled domain name meant to drive up for-profit school websites over public/private university websites on Google].com, it will be of much interest to you!" And, true to form, most of their URLs are really informative, in that way a bottle of pills that called MakeYouFeelAwesome is informative. You at least know what they want you to think that it does.

Interestingly, the #1 tactic, and it comes with the regularity of a form letter, is to point out a broken link on our page [the big problem is these emails are almost always referring to out of date pages that our students never access but still exist in old back alleys on our site] and then offering THEIR link in exchange. Rarely does their link have anything to do with the broken link, and the random structure of the broken link suggests, to me, that they are using some quick bot to check for a broken link and then auto-genning the email.

I digress because I mostly just wanted to say that my URL is apparently all wrong. If Google is punishing me because I rarely talk about wyrmises and largely talk about other things [I do talk a lot about things that wyrmises link and how to feed and entertain them], then I probably should have picked a better URL. Like http://peopletosendmoney.nostringsattached.com. Now that would be a great URL. It would get me places.

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OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: August 2011