Home of the Dutch Gecko

The last few weeks I have been working. And I don’t mean the kind of work where I spend a whole day staring at my mass of illegible code, interspersed with a few sessions of DotA. This is real life in-the-office nine-to-five work.

Well, two days a week.

I’m working for Web Certain, a search engine optimisation company based here in York. They’ve been working multinationally for years, and recently aquired a few Dutch and Belgian clients, and needed a Dutch speaker who could participate in the mind-numbingly dull task of “link building” - the act of creating new links to a website so that search engines such as Google notice it more, and consider that page more important. Link building requires no real thought, and where better to find bored, semi-qualified and cheap labour than on a campus!

Amusingly I was contacted via Facebook, which is certainly a new recruitment method to me, but hey it could become popular. Do a search for fields that interest you (e.g. home address - the Netherlands), and mass spam the results that appear. You’re practically guaranteed to find the right person. You never know, it might work for love as well.

So, I now spend my Mondays and Thursdays in an air-conditioned office at the other end of York, after huffing and puffing five miles uphill to get to the place. And I get paid to, essentially, surf the internet. It’s not really that simple of course: I’m expected to either be looking for website directories, similar to the famous Open Directory Project, or to be applying to these directories to have links added. At least the searching involves some thought, even if the twinkling at the back of my brain is constantly diminished by having the same sites turn up time and again, but the actual application part is tedium beyond measure. Visit site. Search for category. Check if indexed by Google. Click “Submit”. Click the automatic form filler. Click “OK”. Next site.

It’s just too complicated to be completely automated, but at least I’m winning against the machines (for now). But the work leaves my brain with free cycles (they’re cycles, right?) to do what it pleases in the background. Having to keep this spare thought literally work-safe, I’ve instead made a few observations.

1. Dutch websites are butt-clenchingly face-gurningly ugly. Now I’m sure that many sites will be absolutely fine on the eyes, but for a country so reliant on the internet and with quite a rich design history, the fact that these abominations even exist is terrifying. The process to get a .nl domain is already pretty difficult, why not add “your site may not cause permanent sight loss” to the terms of service? The nerds amongst you may want to laugh/cry at the underlying HTML for those sites too.
2. Directory sites don’t mind lying. Despite claiming to be “SEO optimised” and “guaranteed to improve your search engine ranking”, many will resort to dirty tricks like asking for a so-called reciprocal link: we’ll include a link to your website, if you include a link to ours. Such practises were figured out by Google a long time ago, and nowadays are more likely to harm your ranking than help it. Amusingly these sites are running themselves into the ground by encouraging this technique.
3. Most multinational companies don’t have the time to work on SEO, instead outsourcing the bulk of the work. Last week I was collecting sites on which Microsoft Belgium could post their link, since they apparently aren’t doing too hot in the Belgian Google index (I’ll do them a free service here). And now the talk of the office is about a new order from Xerox needing to publicise some of their newest laser printers. These are big, big companies, and Web Certain appears tiny in comparison, but apparently they’re the team to pick.

Anything else?

Apart from real work I’ve been doing some fake work as well. I recommend checking out the new improved Artotron, a showcase site for artists. Do art? Sign up in the forums. The community is still small and needs your input!

I’ve also been secretly designing a big web-programming project, but I need to learn more PHP and MySQL before I can get on with the nitty gritty. It could easily take a few years, but you’ll hear more about it as it starts to become more complete.

Since I failed to (re)complete my last post, I’ve passed the year, and things are dandy. Heleen passed her year too after some resits. I’ll get round to rewriting the last post “soon”

This wonderful distraction was created in the late afternoon on Friday 21st September, 2007. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.