Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I tried leaving this as a reply to Jesse Anderson’s A Few More Million Amazonian Monkeys but the blog comments are broken:

This is fundamentally pointless–there are only 27^9 (a-z and a space) combinations to run through. If you can do maybe 1M/s you can do them all in ~62 days. A better question is why, unless you hate the universe and want to spend our computational power producing entropy?

An interesting article in the NYT today called A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web describes how Vitaly Borker makes his business tick using negative feedback and reviews to game search engines:

“Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes dot com,” the post began. “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

It’s all part of a sales strategy, he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: “I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.”

Ironically, the New York Times links directly to one of Vitaly Borker’s sites, giving him a big boost of authority in search engine rankings. (aside: What do I have to do to get the NYT to link me, I wonder?)

Over on TechCrunch there’s a flattering review of a new Website SEO Analysis tool called Woorank:

WooRank evaluates Web sites based on 50 criteria in an automated fashion, free of charge, and provides helpful SEO and other tips. [...] I gave the tool a spin and generated a report for techcrunch.com – turns out we’re worthy of a WooRank of 82.4. [...] Frankly, that’s a lot of valuable information available free of charge.

I gave it a spin on my homepage, and it gave up some valuable suggestions (as well as a score of 68.2, which isn’t too bad):

Among its suggestions are the following:

• Add meta-description and meta-keywords to every page
• Put alt-tags on all images
• Make sure the site validates
• Use a 301-redirect on WWW
• Get listed in the DMOZ/Yahoo directories

While the information it offers up is useful, it’s almost exactly the same as WebsiteGrader, and less detailed on load-time, etc, than . But, the way to go, of course, is to plugin your blog URLs into as many of these cookie-cutter analysis sites as you can, do some thinking on your own, and make a few tweaks. Everyone has their favorite tools, so let me know of other free “SEO Analysis” sites in the comments. If I like them, I’ll update this post.