Negative SEO blog : SEOassassin

Well, well, it seems that Affiliate Future are having a bad day. Trying to access their UK site currently shows you this

0wned by PSYCH@ Fucked israel

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Unique content is critical for the prosperity, nay, the survival of any long term website. Sugarrae has an excellent post on the topic, which inspired me to comment (in the pre-blog days), and now to take up and expand on what I said.

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Well, that was moderately painful. Being the aforementioned blog n00b, I’ve been struggling with some relatively obsucre technical aspects of the setup - nothing major, but things like getting the site running on the www subdomain, rather than the root domain; disallowing indexing access to the folders; adding an index.htm file, so you don’t get a 4xx return when you access the domain root.

Nothing too disastrous, I think you’d agree, but all things that I’d rather not have broken, y’know? Between that and yesterdays escapades, it’s made me think a bit about how far from being an “average” user I am.

In 2 days, I’ve gone from concept to relatively tidy, functioning blog, including buying the domain and separate hosting plus getting the 2 working together, selecting and installing a blog package, and grabbing some FTP software, configuring it and using it to upload .htaccess and other files to the correct locations in my sites directory structure.

If I hadn’t been working in Internet related stuff for a few years, I wouldn’t even have known that half of these thngs were even possible, let alone have a chance of figuring them out on my own. How the hell do WWW n00bs ever manage this stuff? It must be a nightmare for them. I guess that’s why some of the more “fire’n'forget” solutions (Blogger on a Blogger subdomain etc) get traction.

Actually that’s a lie. I’m just trying out some of those headline writing tips from Aaron. As well as everything else, this blog is, for now, an experiment. I want to see if it can begin to take off without any formal promotion.

Loosely, the rules I’ve sort of set for myself are not to submit it to anything (at least not yet), and not to drop it or promote it, except by using it as my website when I comment elsewhere, or trackbacking other peoples posts etc. In short, I’m not going to SEO it and do the things I’d normally recommend people do to promote a blog. I want as “natural” a growth as possible.

This is partly in a spirit of enquiry, and partly because I’m painfully aware of my technical shortcomings as a blogger. Whilst it took me about 2 hours to go from thinking “I’m going to get a blog!” to actually having one (including selecting and purchasing a domain, purchasing hosting, setting the nameservers to the new host and installing WP), I know there’s an awful lot I DON’T know, and I’d rather have some time to polish the damn thing before I try and show it off.

Currently, about 4 other people in the world know I have a blog, and I live with one of them. Theo (SmallTroll) sort of knows too, as he was playing in the room as I was swearing at the WP control panel trying to find non-existent functions, but he’s only 20 months, and doesn’t even know HTML yet, so I don’t think he really counts as “aware” of it.

I may have to break the rule somewhat to get some help if I can’t can’t figure things out though - I’m not a masochist.

why do I have one? Good question. Well done.

Tricky.

Well, several reasons. Firstly, lots of people I know and even respect have them. That’s kind of a hint that I may be missing something.

Secondly, I’m an SEO who’s not got a blog. That’s similar to being a doctor who’s never treated a patient (the relationship isn’t exact, but it’s the best that comes to mind right now). Even most half-assed SEOs have managed to jump on this bandwagon by now, and I’d like to think that I’m at least three-quarter assed. Even Matt Cutts went and got one, for Gods’ sake. Who am I to argue?

Thirdly, as a friend pointed out recently, given my current state of employment, there may be better uses of my time than contributing pages of quality content to someone elses’site. So now I have my own.

Fourthly, I’m at least an OK writer (feel free to disagree though). I also find myself wishing I had somewhere that is mine to write things, and that is now fixed.

Fifthly, it’s been slowly dawning on me that people actually read these things… careers have been built on blogs. I could just do with a career right now. I’ve been hanging around SEO a while, I know a few things, and I’ve got the beginnings of a brand in my usual forum handle, TallTroll. It has also dawned on me that most of the people I know who have a really good brand, generally have a blog presence to hang it off. Sounds good to me

I didn’t think it’d happen. I really didn’t. But now, I have a blog. I feel so… ashamed *sob*

Back when blogging was new, I sneered (privately, of course) at those who spent their days bashing out their posts, for the tiny feeling of self-worth every time they hit the “publish” button. I laughed as they told their tales of comment spam. I ground my teeth every time I read the word “blogosphere”. And now I’ve become the very thing I despised.

Bugger