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Say No to Being a Lemming
(Article Contributed By Marie, of Sex Story Text - Posted on June 02nd, 2010)
And so the day starts with what seems like half the Internet being down for those of us down here in Australia.
It looks like it could be a very nasty DNS issue that's impacting lots of sites and there must be some very frustrated people out there. The main online newspaper for this state is appearing ... well at least the news part of the site is ok ... but much of the high-cost advertising that's pulled in from third-party sources is failing to appear. Oh dear ...
Oh the joy of trying to do business online. We tend to think of the Internet as being very stable and reliable but sometimes it takes just one little fault to bring it all crashing down. Of course sometimes the faults can be rather large ... like the time a few years back when some Taiwanese fishing boat managed to haul up part of the cross-Pacific cable ... but fortunately those big faults that can take weeks to fix are rare
But even little faults can have dramatic consequences for people who rely totally on the web for their income ... people like you and me. In our line of business it's hard not to leave yourself open to being damaged when those problems do arise but it's not something that we should be fatalistic about.
If there's something that we can do to spread the risk then we should be doing it and obviously the first thing we need to do is identify those single points of failure where there are no work-arounds in place in case a problem arises.
And now to lemmings ... the topic I wanted to talk about today.
A lemming is a small furry rodent like creature that lives in some of the countries of northern Europe up around the Arctic Circle. It's a widely held belief that every few years almost the entire population of lemmings commits suicide by following one another over cliffs, into rivers and anywhere else that might result in their demise.
It seems that that belief is a myth that was helped along by a Walt Disney documentary that faked the whole scene of lemmings blindly following one another off cliffs and into swiftly flowing into rivers. That's all led to some very bad press for lemmings and it's nice to see that they don't actually commit mass suicide but for the purposes of this column let's stick with the myth.
I want to stick with the lemming myth because in lots of ways webmasters and wannabe search engine optimisation gurus are a lot like those mythical lemmings. One lemming ... err ... webmaster or SEO guru gets an idea and suddenly everyone is writing about it ... trying it out ... telling others about it ... and generally following each other in the general direction of the nearest cliff or river.
A perfect example was pointed out today by one genuine search engine optimisation specialist that I know in Canada. Now I'm not trying to imply that there's only one genuine SEO person in Canada ... I'm sure there are lots of them ... but this is the one guy I know of.
He blogged today about 'the reasonable surfer' ... and that came about after another genuine search engine optimisation expert earlier this month wrote about a new patent that had just been awarded to Google.
The patent title is 'Ranking Documents Based on User Behavior and/or Feature Data' and the concept behind the patent is that a search engine might give greater importance to links on a web page if more people ... more 'reasonable surfers' ... click on that link than any other.
Now the guy who first wrote about that patent made it clear that the patent application had been lodged way back in 2004. That's right, it was lodged six years ago and, as he and the Canadian guy know ... and pointed out, you don't lodge a patent and then wait for it to be approved before you start using whatever it is that you're trying to patent.
So Google has undoubtedly been using this concept of ranking the importance of links based on how many people click on them for quite some time and that's worth thinking about.
But suddenly the search engine optimisation lemmings aren't thinking, they're on the move. It only took a few more people to start writing about the patent ... wannabe SEO gurus who try to gain a reputation by regurgitating what more knowledgeable people write about ... people who didn't realize that the 'reasonable surfer' concept has been a system that Google has probably been using for years ... to stir up the SEO lemming colonies.
Suddenly people are rushing around looking for ways to make changes to linking strategies ... strategies that have probably worked well even though the effects of the patent has been in place for years. Suddenly people want to make changes when they don't have to and that's bringing them ever closer to those cliffs and rivers that they lemmings of mythology love so much.
And of course all they're going to do is more harm than good to their sites and they won't learn from their mistakes. They'll go on being lemmings for the rest of their lives because they don't want to stop and think about anything ... they just want to react ... they just want to be on the move and doing things. They don't want to stop and think because thinking is often too difficult ... it's much easier just to be a lemming and follow the herd.
So if you want to really succeed at search engine optimisation then it's time that you stopped being a lemming ... it's time you started thinking for yourself ... it's time to turn your back on those cliffs and rivers ... it's time to survive the urge to follow everyone else.
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