NYCPHP Meetup

[inforequest]

Adam Fields fields-at-hedge.net |nyphp dev/internal group use| wrote:

>On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 12:12:55AM -0800, inforequest wrote:
>[...]
>  
>
>>This is a very good reminder of the dangers of adopting scripts. My 
>>original article on this is at http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5589
>>    
>>
>
>Interesting that the last comment is Kim claiming that this was an
>accident and he's removed the offending code from the latest version.
>  
>
I don't know of any reason to suspect it was intentional. The backlinks 
are commonly understood to be valuable, hence the insertion in exchange 
for the free mod. And everybody knows that if you plastered 13 backlinks 
at the top of people's sites they would not like that... and probably 
not use the mod. Since IPB already maintains a bot class definition (for 
stats and the like) and Kim was already re-writing (internally 
redirecting)  the site at the header level....it might have made sense 
at the time to only serve the ugly links to search engine bots.

As much as "SEO" has become a household word for coders and script 
kiddies in the past year, it should really be left to the professionals. 
By its very nature, competitive webmastering seeks to define an existing 
practice standard (through observation) and then exploit loopholes left 
by the standard practice ("exploit market inefficiencies"). In other 
words, once everybody is talking about how backlinks help you rank, 
professional SEOs are on to the next thing and it isn't long before 
backlinks are penalized by the SEs as a means of eliminating spam (as 
happened in the fall of 2005).
I agree a problem is the tremendous amount of bad advice out there, but 
from what I can see it is also true for PHP coding, security, etc. 
Caveat emptor and all that.

-=john andrews
http://www.seo-fun.com