Does everyone remember the story of the 13 year old boy who stole his father’s credit card to buy some hookers to come play Halo with him and his friends?

Yeah. It’s a lie. Never happened.

This story was pieced together by an SEO (search engine optimization) professional named Lyndon Antcliff. Lyndon posted the story on money.co.uk, a website of no particular consequence, as part of his duties to increase their traffic.

I don’t know why people were surprised that someone lied to direct traffic to a website. What’s harrowing is that this revealed, rather harshly, how little source-searching huge media outlets perform before giving a story a headline. I guess they take the Internet too seriously.

Who’s to blame?

So this guy Antcliff made up the story, posted it on the website, and the story got picked up by Digg. Due to its illicit nature and the elusive “chuckle factor,” it spread like wildfire. The news outlets reported on the story, and now they all look like idiots.

So whose fault is it? Is it Antcliff’s fault for knowingly fabricating a story and telling people it was legit, or is it Fox News’ fault for not doing even a cursory fact check?

Fox NewsAny chance that I have to blame Fox News for something, you can bet that I’ll blame Fox News. Fair and Balanced my green ass. But Antcliff knew that his story would be perceived as real, at least until someone did the slightest bit of research.

The author’s statement, that this story is a “parody” and not intended to be taken seriously, doesn’t really hold water. It’s kind of like when Ann Coulter says that her statements about the 9/11 widows were “satire.” If they can point to what thing it is they are parodying or satirizing, then I could maybe stomach those thinly-veiled excuses. But they can’t. They’re just plain liars.

What this guy did is the inevitable conclusion of the SEO business model: Hits via lying. And what’s worse, Antcliff is now having a linkbait coaching seminar. This guy really is a piece of work.

S. to the E. to the O.

Everyone has heard about it, and everyone has their own way of utilizing it. There are also plenty of people making a living off of it. But what, really, is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is a technique that exploits tools like Google, Yahoo and Altavista to generate traffic for a specific website. It is cheating. It is saying, “I don’t have the best content out there, but I can phrase it in such a way that Google is tricked into thinking that it is the best.”

Now, when I say SEO is cheating, I don’t mean all of it. Elrond is working on an SEO tutorial that will help people enhance their content. Basic site structure stuff, like using the Header tags and the <strong> tags to identify keywords.

But SEO companies are about manipulating your content, or in this case fabricating content, to trick the search sites into thinking your website is more important than it actually is.

Google Makes It Harder

In the mid-ninties, SEO simply meant filling your keyword metatag with as many word combinations as you could possibly think of. I’m pretty sure that Merriam-Webster was considered the first search engine optimizer.

Google figured out that people were being disingenuous with their keywords and changed their algorithm to ignore that metadata. That’s right. Google doesn’t care what your keyword metatag says.

Other search sites might still include the keywords in their indexing, but is that really what we want? To be playing dueling keywords with every site out there? No, there’s a reason that Google is far and away the most used search engine out there.

Atonement

We are of the opinion that Mr. Antcliff, by way of punishment, should have to watch every episode of The O’Reilly Factor for a whole year. Then he will know what it’s like to be lied to by someone who says you should trust them. Or, he should have to personally fact-check all of Digg’s frontpage news items. Either of these things would be satisfactory as discipline for his actions.