This is quite the HN title/link bait (currently: "3 Lines of Code to Rank a Website to 1# on Google"). The real title of the article is "Pay Day Loan Rankings: The shady tale of Joomla hacks and Drupal leaks". The article is about how a Joomla plugin added malicious code to their plugins to get referral links via spam on websites.
No, this method actually applies to all languages and all platforms with the same given tactics. Anything with an open ecosystem of plugin/themes where other users can download will be affected.
I've seem some similar activity in wordpress themes a while back. And if the results are as good as this post says, this kind of activity will only keep growing.
The results are exactly as reported. The ones published are from last week, but today the top 20 results are still dominated by websites doing the same.
I seriously despise "search engine optimization" as an "industry" or specialization of this internet industry.
What a bullshit term. Read it back to yourself:
> Search Engine Optimization
They're already liars. They aren't optimizing anybody's search engine. They're optimizing HTML so that it can be easily parsed and crawled, but that doesn't sound as sexy.
It's marketing hocus pocus, tantamount to chart reading for day traders in the stock market. Just like chart readers, gazing into the Rorschach blots of spikes and trends in the stock market, they don't truly understand, and can't honestly answer to, how their composite numbers tie back to reality.
They honestly have no control over the search engines they claim to optimize for, and have only an outsider's probed understanding of the internal workings of the search engines they target. The exception to this is when former employees of search engines are hired as consultants at these places that claim to offer these services, but honestly aside from that sort of intra-industry incest, what else do they have to offer?
SEO as a term is a throwback to the late 90's when a lot of people didn't really understand what search engines do, and got sold on a trend.
Yes, yes, robots.txt. Yes, unobtrusive JavaScript. Yes, structure your DOM in a well-organized, logical manner. Yes, simplify unauthenticated link URLs, and try to correlate references semantically. Yes, use the alt, title and name attributes, to further orient semantics. I get it, okay. Y'know, these same ideas overlap well-enough with accessibility standards. Anything beyond this kind of coding practice is really either link spam, or simple tasks like requesting that a search engine crawl your domain. And that's a marketing campaign. Nothing is being optimized.
Can I stop putting this archaic buzzword on my resume? I don't optimize search engines, and unless you're posting an ad for a position at one, neither do you.
SEO is just a form of Marketing consulting. I work with lawyers and insurance agents - and I don't do blackhat,or greyhat, nor do I make promises. What we do is go after our keywords by writing quality content, and press releases mostly - as well as very good on-page optimization.
I guarantee that people need the service, I also do web development, which gives me even more insight into how everything plugs together.
Most lawyers and Insurance agents don't even know what a robots.txt file is, or javascript, or the dom, or alt / title tags - they just want leads for their business.
I do think some people place a little too much emphasis being #1 for specific searches, because #1 doesn't always mean tons of money, or business.
A/B testing is also important, as is other methods of business gathering. Also, a lot of times adwords can be more beneficial and less costly than SEO -- if you're paying an SEO 300 a month, vs a 300 a month Adwords budget where adwords is guaranteed clicks -though there's optimization there as well.
The best solution in my opinion is to hire a web developer who knows SEO and SEM, because to lower Adwords costs, and rank high requires some level of programming - for instance I had a site that was costing $2.49 per click, I made it so that the adwords landed on a dynamic url which would grab the keyword they searched for, load it strategically throughout the webpage in specific locations including description, title, keyword tags. This increased the page value in Google's eyes, and brought my cost per click down to $1.68 which was a huge savings! My client could never have come up with that on their own, and would've lost a thousand dollars by just spending the extra money without knowing how to optimize..
Where ever there is something technical, there are people who don't know jack about it, and sometimes people take advantage of them, sometimes people are honest, same goes for other industries like Plumbing, or house repairs...
"I made it so that the adwords landed on a dynamic url which would grab the keyword they searched for, load it strategically throughout the webpage in specific locations including description, title, keyword tags. This increased the page value in Google's eyes, and brought my cost per click down to $1.68 which was a huge savings!"
This reminds me of shill bidding; instead of fake bids that drive up the apparent value, your insert fake content (keywords) and thus fake "votes" for the searched term on your page. That doesn't strike you as a little scammy?
The Google algorithm is supposed to let me find the item I'm interested in. Your fake "detour" signs may drive more traffic to your web site but they detract from the usability of the web search for everyone else.
I'm not the biggest fan of that term myself, but it's just something known in the web world.
I prefer to think of it as internet marketing as far more goes into it than on page HTML optimisation and such. The real agencies will work with a company to help build and develop a brand and continue to work with that company over a long period.
Makes me wonder how many Wordpress plugins are rogue. I have seen a few plugins on the Wordpress site that are suspect, but there is no way to report them to anyone at Wordpress, there is no report this plugin link anywhere. Anyone know how to report plugins on the Wordpress site?
Yes, this is true. Nobody really knows how many of these contain elements that should not be there. I can't think of a concrete way around it that's realistic. But I think user ratings on an official site are a good thing and are normally fairly accurate.
Beside the link bait title (right now "3 Lines of Code to Rank a Website to 1# on Google"), I found it very misleading that the article mentions that a CWS being open source is a problem because it can be exploited.
It is implying security by obscurity, and this is always bad advice, obscuring your source code, won't make it safer, quite the opposite, it will make easy to if someone find a vulnerability, you won't have enough resources to close it fast enough.
I am not implying this at all. In fact, I am a huge fan of open source software. I simply offer the advice to check what you are using first as there can be issues, as reported.