Superstition and civilization have always been sibling rivals, maturing together through the millenia while eying each other warily. In olden times, mankind created gods and heroes to explain the phenomena they couldn’t understand. That is the underlying thread beneath all superstition: lack of understanding. The strongest superstitions, the ones etched most deeply into the collective psyche, are responses to the deepest misunderstandings. One of the biggest sources of modern superstition in the world today: Search Engine Optimization. In the age of the internet, search engine pages have replaced the unsettled land of yore. The new frontier is digital. And it’s a frontier that very few people understand.
So few understand the deep workings of the search engines (certainly I don’t understand them very well), and yet so many are affected by them. Together that creates fertile ground for superstition. The search engines (and primarily I’m speaking of Google) conceal the secrets of their trade, leaving us unenlightened mortals to wild speculation. Schools have developed, with their own dogma and ideologies about how to get on the front page of a web search!
Here are a few examples of superstitions about Search…
* “If you want to rank high, you’ve got to repeat the keyword a million times!” There’s evidence this actually worked in the early days, when search was really bad. Not so much today. For a while, I was guilty of the opposite superstition. After analyzing the word counts of some popular bloggers, I became convinced that the desired keyword should actually have a fairly low density! These days, I no longer parse my articles in such depth. I figure one superstition is no better than another. I’m better off just having more fun by writing how I want 
Not how Zeus, God of Search wants.
* “Links with the ‘nofollow’ attribute are useless!” A while back, to combat spam, Google announced a way for webmasters to mark links which were susceptible to spam– like blog comments or wiki edits. Basically, this has been wildly successful at cutting down on spam. However, there are minority schools who theorize that the whole ‘nofollow’ thing is a feint from Google. After all, it doesn’t really matter whether or not the links actually contribute to a page’s success– as long as spammers don’t think they contribute! As for me, again, I see only two religious cults fighting one another. I’ll just ignore the tag and focus on the things I can actually know, control, and/or enjoy.
* “Doing such-and-such will get you blacklisted by Google!” If this were true, everyone would intentionally do such-and-such while disguised as their competitor. Nintendo would hire thousands of script kiddies (under the table, of course) to spam every corner of the web with pro-Playstation links. Spammers know this, so it’s always very interesting to keep an eye on the ever-developing war between spammers and Google. 
* “Google favors its own products!” I don’t know how common this actually is, but I know it was a factor in my decision, when I first started blogging, to go with blogspot. But as I’ve written in Blogspot vs. WordPress, it seems Google is so far from favoring their own blogging platform, it seems blogspot is crippled with handicaps! Well, at least nobody can honestly accuse Google of favoritism there
Transhumanists believe that we’ll eventually pass a “singularity point” after which our technology will be so awesome, all the puzzles of today will seem trivial. I wonder how a transhuman, planted in the year 2010, would look at the search engine optimization battle. It would be like if you or I went back to an ancient Roman religious ceremony!
FURTHER READING
What would programming syntax be like if the Japanese invented it
My experience with computer programming
How To Become A Better Conversationalist