Once upon a time there was a Spider

Originally posted in ruminations on Thursday, July 27, 2006, 02:00 AM

“Come into my parlor”, said the spider, “and I’ll tell you how to become king of the internet”.

“Sit here, sweety, and I’ll tell you how it’s done”, she said.

“First of all, you must write your pages as if I don’t even exist. Yes,” she said with a knowing nod, “like me and my sisters were never born. Just write your pages for your visitors. Full of unique content, and lots of it.”

“When the lofty authority sites and my mighty army of bloggers see what good things you have written you’ll be assured of fame and fortune because they’ll all link to you.”

“Those links will lead my spawn to your beautiful site and they will crawl all over it. Then you will be indexed very, very highly.”

“Oh yes”, she said. “One other thing. Don’t write one of those awful thin affiliate sites. I know they might make you a few dollars each month, but they really are so dreadful. And, they clog up my lovely index.”

“If you absolutely must have money coming in, then just put up some of my nifty contextual ads on your site. You know the ones. The little boxes that say ‘ads by Grandma’. Those will do the trick.”

“Don’t you worry your pretty head about selling things. Let Grandma do the selling. You just keep on writing that wonderful, fresh (mmmmmmmm), unique (golum,golum), revelant (slurp) content. Pardon me for drooling, honey. I have such a big appetite.”

At that point the Big Bad Wolf jumped up from the big comfy couch. Looking the spider straight in the eye he said, “What a big mouth you have, Grandma.”

“Come off it” he said. “Only the rankest newbie will believe that load of horse hockey.”

“And, what small ears you have Grandma. Can’t you hear the lost and lonely webmasters out there? They followed your advice faithfully and now can be found on page 754 of your vaunted index.”

“Here is the way it really works,” he said. “Your big old authority sites could care less if a new website is published. They’ve got theirs and don’t really want any competition.”

“The bloggers are so busy playing tag, socializing, and working on one-upmanship, that they aren’t going to let a new site into their circle.”

“So, you end up with billions of pages with golden content, no inbound links, and fit only for the intended viewers. The only problem is…how does the intended viewer ever find the page? How does that fit in with your ‘no evil’ plan,” he asked?

“How dare you,” said Grandma. “I’ll banish you from the listings and you’ll never get back in.”

The wolf just laughed. “You’ve banished me five times already. One more won’t make any difference. My buddies and I have you all figured out, Grandma.”

“You’ve gotten fat and slow. How long did it take you to catch on to our doorway pages? Two years? More? We made thousands before you came up with a way to stop it. And, we already had another plan in place when you finally did stop us.”

“Besides being fat, you’re also getting greedy. Here lately you’ve taken to biting the hands that have fed you so well for so long. What’s up with that?”

“You can’t sink your fangs in us though. We’re long gone when you spring the trap. All you accomplish is to destroy some more innocent sites in your rage.”

“Wanna know what we have planned next,” he asked? “You’ll see”.

And, with that, the Big Bad Wolf walked out. Sauntering gaily down the garden path, he pushed his big black hat to a rakish angle and whistled a merry tune.

The spider slumped in the parlor, mumbling something about SEO’s and BlackHats, and Algos.

Just then she spied a newbie coming down the path.

“Come into my parlor”, she said………

Now, the moral of this story is: Be good, but carry a big stick. Learn all you can about on-page optimization. Make your pages so that you will be ranked for the phrases that YOU want to be listed for.

Then, gather up all of the legitimate links you can find.

Rinse and repeat. Test and retest. It works if you keep at it.

~dink