inter:digital strategies

I was scanning through the statistics for this site this morning and ran across a term which I not only didn’t think appeared in the site but which I couldn’t even identify: RSStatic. Being the curious writer I am, I promptly launched Google and performed the obvious search.

And know, although I still don’t know why the term brought in this site, I am quite aware of RSStatic. RSStatic is an RSS aggregator which " will allow you to constantly add content to your site without having to be a writer". This is a perfect example of a product which may have valuable, legitimate use for some sites, such as a news aggregator, but is definitely an easy candidate for use in scraper sites.

A scraper site is an search engine spam technique which culls writing from other sites in order to increase its content quality and searchability. These sites are not necessarily guilty of copyright violations, but they are using your work to bring traffic to their sites.

How is this different from publishing "free-for-use" articles? There are hundreds of article directories out there practically begging you to publish their works! Well, that’s the difference right there. Article directories have given permission for their articles to be used and have established guidelines for use.

A tool like RSStatic provides the ability to build your website without any effort and without asking permission of the feed author. If you read through the marketing copy on the RSStatic site, it has the strong scent of black hat SEO. I can’t help but be a critic of any technique which advertises that you can increase the value of your website without doing any work.

Please feel free to comment if you think I’m missing the point.

Search engines are very powerful tools. They can bring traffic to your well-designed, optimized site - and they can tell you a lot of information about your site. When starting an SEO campaign for any website, the search engines are one of the first places to go for information.

All of the major search engines have a wide variety of advanced search features which can provide you with great information about your site. This post will focus on Google’s operators, although I won’t fail to mention a few other interesting options in the other major search engines.

The first step I frequently take in search engine investigations is to use the site: operator. Using this operator followed by a URL, you can retrieve all of the pages the search engine has indexed for the site. This is a great tool to find out whether there may be a problem crawling your site - if the number is significantly lower than what you expect, you may have a problem.

The second great option is the link: operator. This is truly great - using this operator, again followed by a URL, you will retrieve all inbound links to that site which the search engine has identified. All major search engines support this tool, although Yahoo! has supplied an additional operator linkdomain: which retrieves all inbound links to the domain, rather than to a specific URL.

Additional useful code includes allintitle:, allinurl:, allinanchor: and allintext:. These are all keyword analysis tools. You can use this to find competitors who are using your keywords - in their page titles, URLs, anchor text, or in the body of the page. The tags all except multiple keywords, to pin down your selected keywords more precisely.

Examples of use:

site:yourdomain.com

link:yourdomain.com/index.html

linkdomain:yourdomain.com (Yahoo only)

allintitle: keyword1 keyword2

All of the allin format keyword searches work identically - just change the operator!

When representatives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco came before the House subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations yesterday, they were roundly criticized for "caving to the demands of the Chinese government", for "collaborating with [chinese prisoners] persecutors."

Entirely ignored, of course, is the US government’s long history of enabling human rights offenses in China through their own collusion - offering generous trade agreements including membership in the World Trade Organization and "Most Favored Nation status" despite grievous human rights concerns.

The government seems to justify their policies by the belief that an open market relationship with China will help build their economy and lead to a long term development of a more open culture. More specifically, that the capitalist influence will win over the authoritarian communism.

Then why is the behavior of tech firms like Google, Yahoo, and MSN so different? Are other US corporation operating in China not obligated to follow Chinese law? Or is it just that human rights issues are not as important when it comes to child labor and working conditions? The principle of free speech is what is at stake here - and free speech is very important. However, the information available to the Chinese people would not be in any way improved by the absence of these search companies from the market. I agree that Google’s decision to censor their results is a shame, but I also agree that to allow somebody else to censor their results is no better.

I’m not defending Google’s position, or the positions of the many other tech companies who have made concessions to the Chinese government. Neither am I willing to condemn them - they have made concessions which are no more harmful than those made by any other company in the Chinese market, and certainly no more harmful than those made by the United States government.

I condemn the US government - for hypocrisy.

Edit: Official prepared statements from the February 15th hearing. (In PDF format.)