OK, OK, so I read The Guardian. But you could never accuse me of being a Guardian Reader - a breed separate and distinct from the rest of humanity. Probably the best analysis of the type comes from George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier. He's actually talking about the intellectual, middle class socialists of his day, but the description fits the classic Guardian Reader just as well:

...a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting...One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror...

Today, the average fruit-juice drinker, nudist and sandal-wearer has a new misapprehension to twist his already slightly deformed worldview. It's been added by Bobbie Johnson, the Guardian technology correspondent, in his article The sparring and spin of the Google dance.

According to Johnson's article, some SEO companies '..use unethical strategies to boost their clients.'

Well, bugger me, you don't say? And I thought all those keyworded footer pages represented the dawning of a new literary style. To prove how easy it is to manipulate Google PageRank, Johnson created a mock website purporting to sell eco-friendly flip flops, and used a variety of blackhat SEO techniques to force it to the top of the Google rankings pretty quickly.

This, of course, will confirm the suspicions that Guardian Readers (and a few people who simply read The Guardian) have about the Internet: viz. that it is the creation of the CIA and multinational corporations, expressly designed to control our minds and brainwash us into buying SUVs and Crazy Frog ringtones.

Johnson has done the Internet a disservice. He writes a particularly entertaining blog, so I don't intend to slate him personally - but I have to take issue with a few things in his article.

For a start, Johnson writes that he added "invisible data" - copy written in the same background colour as the page - to boost its rankings. This would have worked very nicely in 1999, but by now Google is sufficiently sophisticated to compare HTML/CSS font and background colour markups, and disregard any copy which is tagged to be invisible. Nobody knows for sure that it does this, but I'd be pretty amazed if it doesn't - it's certainly the case that no contemporary SEO companies I know, whatever the colour of their hats, still recognise it as a viable technique. Likewise, the sidebar information implies that it's still possible to fool top search engines using metadata keywords. Again, it may have been in 1999, but no longer.

Second, when he created his mock site Johnson seems to have been rather disingenous. The reason www.ecofriendlyflipflops.co.uk got to the top of the rankings so quickly is that it's one of only five sites out there that contains his major search term, "eco-friendly flip-flops", as a contiguous string - though obviously that's going to grow as the story gets commented on by people like me. One of the other five is his own home page, and the rest have since discarded the string. If you don't believe me, type the term into Google exactly as it appears above, with double inverted commas to tell the engine that the string should be searched only in its in entirety rather than as fragments. It's only when you search it without the inverted commas, and Google starts looking for every page that contains the words individually, no matter how far apart they are, that the site gets to the top of 'hundreds' of results. Getting a top ranking like this is a piece of piss: if he'd set up a site dedicated to Britney Spears, B.A. Baracus or even Bungle from Rainbow he'd have had a much harder time getting so far so quick.

I guess he used these wheezes because he had to prove a point, and prove it in such a way that simple newspaper readers could grasp it. It's true that blackhat SEO is a problem, and it's right that newspaper readers should be alerted to the fact that websites don't get PageRank simply by being useful and relevant. But to overstate the case just to make a point is damaging. Those fruit-juice drinkers may never trust the web again.

^{*This post also appears on my main business blog}