SEO: like global warming, but ends in annoyance instead of starvation
I was working on GitHub and finally figured out how to make my commits just show as [terry] instead of [Terry Heath]. It’s my damn Apple user name, so I’m guessing that comes from your actual machine’s username, and not your profile. Which is a little dumb, GitHub.
But anyways, I was curious what that would do to googling my name. I hadn’t googled my name in a while, and the first hit is now some eponymous SEO douche.
SEO contributes largely to the smog of the internets. I realize it’s a natural progression once a medium gets popular to try to get *your* content on top, but the nice thing about the internets back in the day was that good content rose to the top and bad content stayed put.
SEO “consultants” screw that up, and instead you don’t always find what you’re looking for. Oh well, I’m sure the people at Google are smart enough to find a better way to defeat them.
A good way to do it? Don’t add comment backlinks to a site’s score. A nice side effect would be that I wouldn’t have to filter out a bunch of spam saying “nice site!”
Anyways, I’m not concerned with not being first for “terry heath,” (I’d rather be on the 2nd or 3rd page, to be honest), but figured I’d drop a little SEO rant.