Standard Mischief

This blog entry goes out to my fellow pro-RKBA bloggers. I have a favor to ask and a little tech tip to pass on to ya.

I know it’s as natural as breathing, when we blog, we link. But sometimes we blog about something we don’t want to promote. Example: The Gun Guys.

The Gun Guys

We all know by now that the slick slimy whomever that’s behind this and other sites is anything but a straight shooter, yet we can’t stop blogging about the maggot. The site is pure fraud, lies, and distortions. Yet we go there anyway, and we get ticked off, and we blog.

Every single time you blog and link to something, you, as a good blogger in the eyes of the search engines, cast your vote with whatever blogger cred you have achieved. You are proclaiming to the Internets that this site here is worthy of your attention. In Google-speak, you are “leaking” a little of your “pagerank”. That’s kind of confusing because it implies that you have a certain finite amount of cred and you are handing bits of it out. While you can change a site’s ranking in a search engine by linking to it, by doing so you are not taking yourself down a notch, unless your site starts to look to the search engines like a “link farm” (generally hard to do, don’t worry about it).

There’s a work-around here though. It was initially promoted as a cure-all against comment spam. As you may have noticed, it didn’t work. However, it’s still useful, and it’s been endorsed by all the major search engines. It’s called the “nofollow” tag, and it’s really easy to use.

So when you are editing your blog entry, this is how you usually code a link:

<a href="http://standardmischief.com/2006/05/04/ stop-linking-to-the-btard-rel-nofollow-the-gun-guys/">Now here's a cool little HTML trick!</a>

But if we didn’t want to promote a site, this is how we would add the “nofollow” attribute, with the attribute portion shown in bold:

<a href="http://standardmischief.com/2006/05/04/ stop-linking-to-the-btard-rel-nofollow-the-gun-guys/" rel="nofollow">Look at this loser, everyone knows this trick already!</a>


So if you can edit the raw HTML code that makes up your blog entry, (Which is the default on blogging software like WordPress) you can use this tag. I’ve never used Blogger and the like, but I assume this is fairly straight forward on every platform.

Question: What about the comment area of my blog? What about the comments I’ve already left on other blogs?

It’s probably already done by default by your blogging software. As far as I know, Google was first to endorse the tag, and they have used their massive influence to get it widely adopted. Surf to a page that has a link in it’s comment section and look for yourself (That’s a “Control-U” in IE and Firefox). I know it’s the default already in WordPress and Blogger, probably most everywhere else too.

Question: Whoops, I’ve linked irresponsibly in the past already, it’s too late to fix that, right?

Nope. You can go back over your blog and add the tag back in. It won’t happen right away, but major search engines will eventually reread your site and rerank their listings. On Google, this is called the “Google Dance“, and it happens roughly every month. For instance, you may have noticed in the past that you were #1 for the Google search “Hog Lard“, yet you check back after a bit and found that that’s no longer the case. That’s the Google Dance. Rankings are constantly shifting.

(More Q&A below the fold)

Question: This is a “Google Bomb”, right?

Sort of. It’s a “reverse” Google Bomb. Here’s the classic Google Bomb that you have probably seen already. Go to Google, type in “french military victories”, and hit “I’m feeling lucky”. You’ll go to this page: www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/victories.html, Which is not Google but a spoof of Google. The reason that it works is because the author got a bunch of people to put up the words “french military victories” on their webpages, and link them to like this:

french military victories

We’re “un-linking”, which ought to have the reverse effect.

Question: What about referrers?

Well, if you want to link, you really can’t get around this. When a user’s browser follows a link on a page, the user’s browser requests a file from a remote server. With that request, a browser passes a bit of info back to the server saying where the reader is coming from. I’ve gushed enough lately about Tam and Uncle, so instead take a peek at PawPaw’s Sitemeter page. As you can see, you can tell where PawPaw’s getting most of his traffic. Obsessive bloggers check their sitemeter pages all the time. It’s an ego thingy. If you want to send you readers somewhere, but not let on to where everyone is coming from, the best you can do is to just put the link in as plaintext:

http://standardmischief.com/2006/05/04/stop-linking-to-the-btard-rel-nofollow-the-gun-guys/

…and ask your readers to cut the text out and paste it in their browser window. Sorry about that.

Question: So if you are such an 1337 h4x0r, why do you still have this crappy ugly default install on your blog?

Short answer: I’m lazy.

Longer answer: I’m not a hacker. Well at least I don’t:

1.Drive a cab for a living.
2.Write pulp fiction for a living.
3.Break into other people’s computers for fun or profit.

If your definition of hacker extends beyond that, then perhaps it’s OK to call me a hacker, but I’m not a leet hacker, I can only do the standard mischief.

Oh, and I’m lazy.

Any other questions? Post ‘em in comments.

Update 05may06: I edited “Hog Lard” above to point to PawPaw’s page. It’s an experment, because where he once was #1 in google for “hog lard”, it seems he’s fallen to 289 or so, well below Junior’s Juke Joint at #13. Don’t mind me, I’m always fooling around like this. After the Dance, we’ll see what one quality link can do. Yes, it’s silly. Join in if you wish.

I’ve also linked “Google Dance” to Google search.