Blogs are born free, yet everywhere they are in SEO

You might think I sound like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but I can assure you there is no need to go back that far in time.

Are you old enough to remember the case of Trent Lott? Or how about “miserable failure”? Are you even aware that Google ever cleansed the web? These days, they do it so much that only idiots actually believe their results are valid reflections of the actual content on the web.

Yet since I have been watching videos on wordpress.tv for a couple years now, I have noticed that many in the WordPress community seem to think that search engine optimization (SEO – actually, when people use this term they are usually referring to something like “Google optimization”) is a worthwhile use of time and other limited resources (such as money).

Why?

Why kowtow into submission to such a bunch of nonsense algorithms? When I learned that the PageRank algorithm was awarded a patent I LOLed so hard because I couldn’t believe it. Not only has citation indexing been around since the late 1950s when Eugene Garfield developed this approach, but by the 1970s it had already been thoroughly discredited as a valid and/or reliable source of information. These doctoral students apparently pulled the wool over many people’s eyes – plus, they even got a patent out of it. Well, the patent was revoked about a week after I pointed out the absurdity of it all.

Personally, I am not interested in jumping though a bunch of bogus hoops to satisfy some moronic rules brainstormed by closeted maniacs. Why, for example, should I care whether a website is a card-carrying member of some secure “SSL” https mafia organization? Such a distinction between http and https says absolutely nothing about the quality of the information source.

I can understand why people who have identified such idiotic suckers as are gullible enough to believe Google might reflect reality (when it has, on the contrary, recently been shown to reap inordinate profits from promoting fake news) are deemed sly enough to take the money they “earned” from such dubious schemes to the bank (and therefore also why some people consider this to be a good investment). I can also understand that such wads of money might go a long way in influencing politicians in Washington, D.C. But I feel people in the WordPress community should clearly distance themselves from such shenanigans.

In my opinion, the WordPress community should avoid sullying its good name from association with such a corrupt system as Google has become. In contrast, the WordPress community should instead further extend the software’s capabilities towards making the WordPress system a useful guide for search (aka “information retrieval”). The WordPress software has evolved over many iterations, the technology has been developed over many generations, and the software’s capabilities are presently top-notch. Compared to WordPress, the technology used at “social media” and “social networking” websites like Facebook or Twitter are infantile.

Yet that is not to say that the WordPress project is anything close to “done”. While groundwork and foundations have been set for a much larger project to begin, there is still a lot of work that needs doing, there is still ample room for improvements.

The main problem is that many in the WordPress community continue to believe in Google. This belief system makes Google a kind of Pope, and stunts the growth of enhanced search capabilities that could be developed directly within the Web’s “lingua franca” blogging architecture. Developing new technologies need not eradicate the old ones – so there is no need to combat Google, at least no more than there is any need to abolish the many rules and regulations listed in Leviticus. Let Google continue to make absurd laws to further cement the establishment powers of government, traditional publishing, etc. But if the WordPress community wishes to move forward, then I think the time is ripe for the people in this community to realize that they need to move on to better things.

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