The Googlebot - Man Against Machine

Before committing pen to paper, or should I say finger-tips to the computer keyboard, I did a reasonable amount of reading about what writing a blog is about.

“Content is king,” goes the general refrain.

Next, “content” is frequently qualified as “quality content”, and you are also advised to write with "passion”.

But then comes the real crunch - “keywords”.

You might write whatever you like, whatever you're passionate about, but hey, watch out that others find your posts interesting. “Others” are not only sentient beings like human readers, but also the bogeymen search engines that “crawl” your writing - an image more frightening could not be imagined. Do these crawlers crawl for interest or for passion? No, they crawl for keywords.

It's true that pure gibberish would not be tolerated even by the search engines, because they're ungoogleable. Such content will be despatched to the farthest reaches of cyberspace. But content that looks like English will survive the acid test. If it looks like English, and sounds like English, then it must be (readable) English content, even if it cannot be understood by a human reader.

So as we write, we keep an eye out for the bogeymen, trying our best to preserve some creative passion alive in the struggle.

Stop... listen...

Do you hear it? Can you not hear the distant googley gurgle of the crawlers? I bid thee farewell, for I must hasten to fetch some more content and keywords from the wilderness, so as to appease their appetite when they come; forsooth they will devour me otherwise. Better safe than sorry.

Wish me a safe journey. Give me encouragement and give me strength, for truly it's a jungle out there.