If you don’t know what I do for work, it’s called SEO (search engine optimization) and it involves setting up websites so they show up higher on Google.

If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is. You might even call it rocket science.

I’m going to throw my thoughts into the ring on this SEO is or isn’t rocket science debate because I have a unique perspective on it that might conjure up some magical moments.

My unique perspective is that I am a fucking rocket scientist.

INNOVATION

There is one and only one way SEO techniques and technology are improved. It’s commonly called the “Throw shit at a wall and see what sticks” method. From the whitest of PPC auditing to 302 hijacking, someone figured that stuff out by giving it a shot. Here are some links to see more of that in action:

Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C

Woops! I didn’t link to the Throw Shit At a Wall technique in SEO at all! I linked to the colossal failures of that very same technique in the field of rocket science. If rockets and rocket science look like anything more than dudes and dudettes in lab coats throwing multi-stage liquid Oxygen controlled atomic explosive shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, it’s only because rocket science has been around about 30 times longer than SEO. (300 vs. 10 years?)

DIFFICULTY AND COMPLEXITY

Go get a two liter bottle of Diet Coke and a pack of Mentos. Congratulations, you’re a rocket scientist! You know what would make that better though is if you got some PVC pipe the same size as the bottle to feed those Mentos in lickety split. Yea, now we’re talking. Okay, but instead of Diet Coke, fill it with a solid brick of ammonium perchlorate, aluminum and hell why not throw in a bit of iron as a catalyst. And obviously instead of Mentos, use a flare gun.

If you’re comparing the difficulty of SEO and the difficulty of rocket science, then you might as well go straight to the top because even the worst SEOs are doing more than dropping Mentos in Diet Coke.

That doesn’t mean Danny Sullivan or Greg Boser, or shit even Dave Naylor vs NASA either. That means Google vs. NASA. Google is the ultimate SEO.

NASA and Google partner it up.

SEO, at the level to which Google has taken it, which is exactly putting sites in front of more human eyeballs than anyone else in the world, requires an amount of computer processing and data storage and handling that not even NASA can match.

“While our joint efforts will benefit both organizations, the real winner will be the American public,” said NASA Ames Center Director G. Scott Hubbard.

That means if you think SEO isn’t rocket science, you hate America.

OFF BY A MILLIMETER

Rocket science is plagued by minuscule cock-ups that shoot multi-million-dollar satellites into deep space instead of landing them gracefully on Mars because some jackass forgot to convert meters to feet.

If you’ve ever done THIS

“DELETE FROM proxy_db WHERE prox_host LIKE ‘%.%’

instead of THIS

“DELETE FROM proxy_db WHERE prox_host LIKE ‘%.edu%’

Then you know exactly what that feels like. Wait, here’s another doozy:

if(is_googlebot())
  header(”Location: http://www.fuckoff.com”);
else
  show_cloaked_pages();

Here’s a hint on that one. It’s backwards!

SEO is rocket science.

PS. This is not link bait. Please god don’t call it that. Don’t even link to it. It’s just for fun. Actually, no one is allowed to link to it.

If you’ve got a lot of links out there pointing to a missing page on your Wordpress blog, why not 301 redirect them to your main page by downloading THIS FILE. That way you can funnel all the link juice at your main hog (industry terms).

Unzip it and upload the 404.php file into your template directory with all the other files (index.php, single.php, etc.php) Then give it a shot.

here’s a page that doesn’t exist.

Fuck, this blog is getting more and more worky by the day.

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO DON’T KNOW…

AOL released like 650,000 internet searches made by their users. It was meant to be anonymous, but of course everyone searches for their own name first so it’s easy to pick that search up and match a person up to all their other searches using the brilliant AOL “anonymous” ID system.

That means if you searched for your name (and of course you did) and then searched “abnormally large penis” the next day, there’s a CHANCE the ladies in your office are looking at you differently because you use AOL and they went HERE.

That was not my point.

This is my point: Who the fuck out there is searching for me? I gave in and searched for myself in the Big Database in the Sky (the BDS). This is what I found.

Dax Hammer

Cool! Then the very next search from the same guy:

Dax Hammer Utah Prison

What!? That is not me. Whoever is out there searching for me in prison, I have not been. Why in the hell was that the next search? Who are you!?

I’m back from SES baby! (That means the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose).

If you want to know how awesome it was, just check out that picture of me in my pimp suit right there; courtesey of Ronee Holmes who runs the flutterfetti.com confetti site which was Pimped by me and my crew. If you’re looking for cool confetti wands that shoot confetti everywhich way like fun explosions (or funigasms), go there and buy shitloads.

Here are some more highlights in order:

The Delta Gamma girls at the BoDog party who gave absolutely no fuck that I performed the marriage ceremony for their Delta Gamma president. I guess they’d never heard Gnarls Barkley before.

The guy who bought the same new watch as me. If he looks happy, it’s because his watch is fucking sweet (and time synchrosized with mine).

The Pimp My Site panel starring Guest Pinch Pimper Rob Snell who sells a book on Yahoo! stores that you should buy!

Meets and greets with The Shoester.

And of course the good city of San Jose, who doesn’t kick people off pianos in their hotels or restaurants no matter how drunk they are or how 1PM it is on a Thursday.  Still waiting for those pictures…AHEM!
San Jose: 1, New York: 0.

I set up a frame buster on this site (just for fun) only to find that I could no longer edit my posts!

The Wordpress built-in auto-preview on the edit post page kept redirecting me back to the main site — hoisting me on my own pitard so to speak.

If you want a frame buster on your Wordpress 2.X site and are still interested in editing your articles, use the following code:

<script>
if (parent.frames.length > 0 && document.referrer.indexOf("post.php?action=edit") == -1)
top.location.replace(document.location);
</script>

Giggidy Goo.

Ajax is a computer internet thing that webpages use to fuck with the content of your screen without taking you to a new page. It saves you time (in theory) and it makes your internet experience better (in theory).

Doesn’t make any sense yet, huh? Let me come up with an analogy with my humongous brain.

Think of it like this: you’re trying on some new clothes or shoes or whatever, and you don’t really like the color. Let’s say you’re trying on a pair of blue pants at a store and you think brown pants might look a bit snappier. Maybe your hair is blue at the moment and you think that’s too much blue.

“What am I a Smurf?” you say to the cute sales girl who doesn’t laugh.

If you were shopping at a store powered by Ajax, instead of bringing you a brown pair of pants and letting you change, some jackass would come out and spray paint your pants brown. Change your mind? That same dude would come out and spray paint your pants back to blue.

Sounds pretty fucking stupid huh?

Well here’s Amazon’s take on Ajax which is pretty much exactly how I explained it.

CLICK HERE for BLUE PANTS at AMAZON

First of all, I see a lot of brown pants on that page, but that’s okay. I’m sure that wouldn’t confuse 99% of people using the internet for shopping. The Ajax bit of the page is at the bottom where it says Next. Click it. Yes, it zooms you up to the top and loads up a whole shitload of new blue (but brown) pants. Seems pretty cool huh. Now click Next again. And again. And again. That’s great! You haven’t even left the page! Plus it’s way faster! Talk about a bonerific user experience!

But wait, what about that one pair of blue pants on like the second page, I don’t remember which one exactly. They looked interesting. Let’s press the Back button a few times and give them a second look, possibly purchase them.

Woops. You’re fucked. The back button takes you back to Google or this site or the middle of nowhere. Maybe it’s just all greyed out. It doesn’t matter though because what it doesn’t fucking do is take you BACK.

And that’s Ajax when it’s used improperly — which is how all engineers use any new technology because they can’t wait to jizz all over themselves with it. Just like Flash, and the MVC architechture, and the BLINK tag, and Doxygen. What we have here is some A-jackass coming out and pulling a three card monty with your results. Where’d the blue pants go? The answer is that you just lost two minutes. Care to play again?

No, I would not.

Fuck Ajax. For the love of God do not effectively remove my back button. The back button is like the colon of a web browser. I get cancer, I kill Jack.