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CNET is carrying a story today about a recurring FBI proposal that Internet Service Providers retain usage data for 2 years. Privacy advocates are up in arms over this proposal, which the FBI has made in years past.

Unfortunately for the privacy community, they lost the battle fourteen years ago when Congress passed the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Most people naively believe the courts struck down this statute, but the most devastating part of the law remains intact. That is section 230, which grants the status of telephone service providers to Internet service providers.

Large ISPs like AOL and Prodigy (neither of whom is the Internet power it once was, btw). Prodigy doesn’t even exist any more — it’s now a part of AT&T (which used to be a real telephone company before it was run out of the business by the U.S. court system). AT&T of course provides wireless and long distance telephone service in addition to Internet service.

What Congress did not understand (or chose to ignore thanks to the high-paid lobbyists who represented the interests of AOL and Prodigy back in the 1990s) is that Internet Service Providers DO NOT ACT LIKE TELEPHONE PROVIDERS.

The telephone company facilitates a transient transaction. Once you hang up the phone your phone call is gone. That is not what happens when you surf the Web or send out email messages. In fact, whereas the phone companies don’t listen in on your conversations Internet service providers regularly filter your email, block or restrict user access to certain sites, take Web sites down, and otherwise participate in the online usage experience.

There but for a lie codified by Congress is a huge engineering distinction between telephone service providers and Internet service providers.

The codification has also withstood at least a few legal challenges, so don’t even hope someone will come along and get it struck down. That ship has sailed and the U.S. courts — ignorant of how Internet services differ radically from the way telephone services function — have ensured that CDA 230 will be around for a long, long time.

So now the FBI is saying they need to be able to track our Web usage for up to 2 years to see if we’ve been visiting child pornography sites. And CDA 230 strengthens their legal reasoning. BUT let me clue everyone in on something: with a few lines of code I can ensure that many thousands of people visit child pornography sites on a frequent, regular basis without their ever knowing it.

You could be rounded up and hauled in to jail because your Internet service provider will show the FBI that your computer visited child pornography sites multiple times. All I have to do is embed some code on a popular Web site that takes the user to the child pornography.

You’ll never see it, but your browser will. There will be no popup windows. Nothing left behind when you close your browser window.

HTML is that powerful and it is capable of making you look like you’re visiting a thousand Websites a day.

A few years ago I worked for a company that had a staffing issue. One of the people who needed access to the Internet was abusing his access to visit pornographic sites at work. The company raked him over the coals, monitored his access, restricted his privileges. He was so persistent that finally the company began monitoring everyone’s Internet usage.

And that was when I was hauled into my boss’ office every month for several months and chewed out for visiting hundreds of Websites a day when I should have been working (never mind the fact I was the most productive employee he had ever hired). He knew I wasn’t sitting there surfing the Web but he couldn’t explain all the Websites showing up under my account.

After a while it sank in to me what was happening: I would frequently leave a browser window open on a major news site. The news site, unbeknownst to me, began refreshing its pages every ten minutes or so, thus reloading all its on-page advertising. When I looked more closely at the tracking reports I began to recognize the domains from my own Internet marketing experience as ad servers and related resources.

My heavy usage was legal and mostly benign (although it used up company bandwidth in the most slothful way). I solved my problem by closing my browser window.

But that experience taught me that user logs don’t tell the whole story. And since becoming more deeply involved with the Internet I’ve learned things that would scare a drunken sailor sober. You have no idea of how easily your Web surfing can be managed and manipulated remotely.

So when the FBI tells Congress they need access to 2 years’ of our history, that tells me the FBI is not ready to police the Internet. They have absolutely no clue as to what they are doing or talking about.

In order to mask their activities child pornographers could easily flood their sites with unknowning traffic from tens of thousands, perhaps millions of innocent people. Instead of strengthening its investigative powers the FBI is proposing the virtual dilution of those powers.

I don’t know how Web-savvy the child pornography community are. But I read the occasional news story about the people who get arrested. They include judges, police officers, lawyers, prosecutors, doctors, and even some state and local lawmakers. They also include people who have been hanging around the Internet for years.

To blithely assume that these people have no knowledge or skill in setting up Websites that are sneaky and malicious is to put the public good at risk, and that is (in my opinion, which is not necessarily shared by my employer or co-workers) extremely irresponsible.

On the Internet there are NO simple tasks and solutions. We are STILL feeling the repercussions of “simple” things that happened in the 1990s. We have absolutely no business enacting new laws that threaten to drag multitudes of innocent people into legal quagmires that will destroy their personal, social, and work lives.

This is NOT the way I want my tax dollars to work.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this article are strictly those of the author and do not reflect the views or opinions of any other person, party, or entity.

There are some Websites where you can register, answer several questions about yourself, and self-publish an interview. You supposedly get some visibility and links. I actually considered setting up such a site many years ago. In fact, I set up a prototype and tested it with a group of authors.

In the end I decided not to do the site because I felt it would require too much oversight. Some people just do not behave rationally when it comes to promoting themselves and their Websites. They draw no boundaries. They respect no boundaries set by other people.

There are two popular “white hat” SEO techniques that people are using to build or attract more links for their Websites: article swaps and interviews.

Article swaps are the new form of reciprocal linking. Because the links are embedded in relevant content, the thinking goes, they will be deemed more acceptable by the search engines. Of course, instead of writing articles themselves, hard-core site promoters hire freelance writers to pump out dozens of articles every week.

Through the years I have often noted that the only real difference between many types of Web spam and legitimate content is excess. Too much of a good thing spoils it.

I expect article swapping to eventually be added to the search engines’ growing list of things not to do. There are just too many people doing it now for the brazen and sole purpose of building link popularity. And most of the articles aren’t even well-written. They are mechanical rehashes of the same basic points that earlier articles already covered.

Interviews have not caught on as wildly as article swaps, perhaps because people feel they should only be interviewing “noteworthy” people. Maybe you cannot find many celebrities in your industry, but if you interview all five of them you’ll have given your readers something new and different…maybe.

As I noted on SEO Theory today, Websites can turn out canned interviews in volume and I just don’t believe that is the kind of content we should advise our clients to create.

Most business sites could, in fact, turn out some pretty good interview articles. All they have to do is publish some case studies of how their customers use products and services. An interview doesn’t have to be conducted with someone famous. CNN often publishes micro-interviews with “people on the street” (or the Web). Other news sites do this, too.

You could also interview engineers or designers who have had an impact on your industry, or marketers, or other thought leaders who may not be famous but whom you personally sincerely feel deserve some recognition. There is nothing wrong with bringing your friends from college into your Web marketing if they can offer your visitors a valuable reading experience.

The SEO community sometimes goes in for interviews but more often it goes in for “guest blogging”. So far as I know the best SEO blogs that open up to guest blogs are NOT engaging in article swaps. They are legitimately asking people they respect to write custom articles for a single site. I’ve had to turn down several requests over the years for guest posts because Visible Technologies has not really supported that process (due to how it manages intellectual properties).

Still, guest blogging offers you a little of something that article swapping offers (other people create your content for you and they will probably link to your site from their site) and a little something that interviews offer (your visitors can see what other people — whom you find interesting — think about your industry).

Nonetheless, I just cannot see the average business site inviting guest bloggers over to talk about their products and services. The SEO community may not be wholly unique in this aspect, but I doubt there are many other industries where people feel comfortable writing content for their rivals.

However, if you are the business with an affiliate network, you may be able to leverage your affiliates in some creative ways. For example, you can feature your best performing affiliates in your monthly online newsletter (several major retailers have done this). Or you could ask your affiliates to interview you or let you write a guest post for their sites (just don’t rehash the same self-promotional shmucky crap for them). Some marketers have done that, too (mostly with canned self-promotional schmucky crap, so let’s move away from that style of writing).

If you’re going to be the star of your affiliate community, you need to provide your affiliates with high quality, unique value. Help them help you in the most Jerry Maguire-like fashion possible: put your heart and soul into the game and stop holding out for a bigger paycheck.

We have learned to create and use every type of user-generated content possible: surveys and polls, comments, guest articles, voting knobs, profiles, and more. We have done a very poor job of creating and using community-generated content.

When a community comes together to share an interest, people will ask questions. Someone should provide the answers. People will share points of view. Someone should challenge those points of view. People will celebrate their successes and bemoan their failures. Someone should be cheering them on.

Real community building does not consist of editing comments on your blog. Nor does real community building consist of bashing people who disagree with you — unless you only want to build a toxic community.

To create a positive, forward-looking community experience you have to go the extra mile and create unique, interesting, and potentially even useful content for people — and help them do the same. It cannot all be about you.

You can start raising the bar by demanding better performance from your freelance writers. Better yet, demand improving performance from your own marketing. Even if you’re just stitching together an affiliate site, you can find ways to create a good experience for your visitors. You tend to think they are only there to give you money. In reality, they are there to fulfill a need. That need unquestionably goes beyond making the purchase.

Engage with those people and help them help you in ways that help improve everyone’s Web experience. That’s the type of content and link building that stands the test of time. Everything else is just a spam filter waiting to be implemented.

There seems to be a new generation of script sellers out there. Their Z Power SEO solutions offer you the most profitable search conversion experience possible.

Is it too good to be true? Not exactly.

I’m sure this stuff works. I won’t predict how long it can work, although one package I just looked at (and which I have not seen before) offers to create email accounts, solve CAPTCHAS, and build RSS mashups for you.

RSS mashups … that is SUCH a 2007 tactic.

Read between the lines here: RSS mashups were being used by black hat SEO spammers years ago and now someone else is offering an RSS mashup spam package for sale. If it’s really THAT good, why is he giving up his advantage?

Because maybe he can make more money by selling it through an affiliate program?

So, what do the black hats use for their SEO tricks? How do you spot them? How do you deal with them? Well, your task as a Best SEO practitioner is not to police the Web or the search results, but here are a few signs that you’re competing against a high-powered SEO spammer (or maybe a script kiddie who couldn’t optimize his way out of a brown paper bag).

You get two things to work with in SEO: Links and Content.

• Link injection tools – These little programs find “do follow” blogs and forums and drop links for you. I first saw them in 2005/2006. The better ones register an account, drop a few messages, and maybe even target their comments to content on the site.
• Blog farming tools – These programs set up hundreds of blogs (usually using Wordpress) on domains you buy and host. They’ll populate the blogs with RSS feed summaries (or whole posts) from all over the Web (or maybe just from Syndic8t’s spammy RSS feed list). I first came across a blog farm in 2006.
• Autogenerating tools – Some people call them article spinners. Some people call them dynamic content creators. They come in all forms. Spinning is controversial because some people see it as a cheat, even though it may create very original content. I’ve come across many schlocky spinners that publish garbage. Some are better than others.
• Text injection tools – Got a hankering to be big in social media? I’ve only seen text injection tools at work for the past year or so. Some may be older but the ones I’m aware of are less than 6 months out of beta. These tools will Tweet, Hub, Stumble, Publish, or do whatever it is you want to do with social media. They create a huge footprint that would take about six Google data centers to notice. For now.
• Artificial blogs – Some people are unbelievably good at creating realistic blogs. When other analysts ask me for an opinion on why a funky-looking site is probably not for real, that means even seasoned professionals are not sure of what they’re looking at. These blogs are used for a variety of reasons: some to carry AdSense, some to position links for other sites, some to test algorithms — and maybe some are just being mean.

I’m not telling anyone to stay away from these kinds of tools. If you have an opportunity to use this technology, it may indeed give you exactly the results you want. Some of the better systems will meter out the links in a randomized pattern so it looks like you’re acquiring links at a normal pace.

Then again, I’m not promising you won’t be caught, filtered, penalized, banned, or kicked out of any affiliate programs.

If you’re going to go play with fire, expect to be burned. You had better be willing and able to take some big hits because if you buy in to all the promotional hype you find on the Websites pitching these products you’re asking for trouble, plain and simple.

In every gold rush, the people who make the most money are the merchants selling picks, pans, and shovels to the miners. A few miners become rich. Everyone else just becomes a nameless face in a historic photograph, wishing history knew who they were.

The bottom line here is that there ARE substitutes for good, old-fashioned hard work. You can buy content, you can buy links, you can steal content, you can steal links. You cannot blame anyone but yourself if you get caught, though.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The screaming and shrieking have reached crescendo volume. Search engine optimization’s dirty little secret — that highly experienced optimizers don’t like to divulge their “real” secrets — has almost gone mainstream. This perception is approaching the status of SEO myth — not necessarily because it’s not true (although it’s not) because it is being used in classic myth-like fashion to explain why the SEO advice people find on the Web seems to suck.

Why the SEO advice you find sucks — Really

There is certainly plenty of bad SEO advice being hammered into naive people’s heads and hearts every day but I think a more common occurrence is that people looking for SEO advice are just getting hammered for asking for help.

On the one hand, many people are willing to offer an occasional quick glance at a Website. Some SEOs do this regularly in an attempt to drum up business, I suppose. I do it so that I can see what is actually happening on the Web “out there”, beyond the circles of experienced SEO.

On the other hand, many of the most helpful SEOs resent being treated as a free service pack for some stranger’s Website. They get a little testy when they see a message like, “Hi, I just launched a Website. Would someone please review it and tell me if I’m doing this right?”

People looking for that kind of help are setting themselves up for failure. Experienced hands usually don’t like to give free SEO reviews, and the people most eager to provide such reviews in response to those kinds of requests usually lack the experience you’re looking for.

So while people like me will complain about bad SEOs giving out advice, the apparent dearth of good SEO advice is really not a dearth. After all, there are thousands of pretty good articles and blog posts still available through many archives.

All the SEO bloggers have stopped blogging about SEO

While it’s true that some people get burned out on a topic, most people in the field move on to something else. It’s a natural part of the personal evolutionary process. Many people who start out learning search engine optimization move into social media optimization and some of those folks move into Web business marketing and strategy. The pathways unfold in many directions.

But there comes a point where after you’ve proved your SEO chops on your blog you have to acknowledge that there is more to Web marketing than search engine optimization. Search is not the only source of traffic on the Web. It never has been and hopefully it never will be.

There are relatively few people in the industry who can keep saying something about search engine optimization without drifting off into another social media escapade. SEOs have coopted social media prerogatives in so many ways it could be argued that most of us should now call ourselves Social Media Marketers rather than Search Engine Optimizers. Many people have made that transition already.

I think a new generation of SEO bloggers is emerging and that group of people will flower into something brilliant. All it takes is time. There is still much to be said (and learned) about search engine marketing, but you’re probably going to have to look for the newer voices to find something that hasn’t been said before.

It’s not that all the SEO bloggers have stopped blogging about SEO so much as that there is a new set of SEO bloggers who have found their passion for the topic.

The times, they are a-changin’

It’s hard for me to remember which search year I’m in. Today’s search results look like the results from last year. Today’s grave SEO doubts about what is happening on the Web sound like those from five years ago.

Google is getting bigger, faster, pickier, and I can’t get my site to rank in Google and how many links do I need to succeed with Google?

With all the innovations in search that we’ve seen through the past five years, people still seem to grouse about the same old stuff: their sites are penalized, not indexed, not being crawled, not ranking well for all keywords, etc.

Search engine optimization is being called on the carpet every year for promoting smarmy sites. The SEO industry leaps to defend itself every time someone criticizes it. And we cannot agree on which methods are “white hat”, effective, or the best practices everyone should be using.

So why are the times a-changin’? Danny Sullivan is still running search conferences — he’s just using a different company to do that, now.

Rand Fishkin is still trying to get everyone to share their SEO thoughts on his site — he’s just got more money to work with now.

Todd Friesen is still having a blast with all his buds at the bar — he’s just living in the U.S. now.

We have no standards, no trustworthy certifications, and no means of reining in unethical SEOs.

I don’t see that all that much has changed in search engine optimization. We’re still batting away noisome flies with nothing to do and building Websites and planting links and looking at search results.

It’s the people that have changed, not the times, not the process.

Understanding that will help you cope with all the change you’re seeing today and tomorrow. Change is the only constant in this industry.

A client calls you up and says “I want to optimize for New Brand Name” and you say, “You’re doing a bad job of optimizing for Abused Brand Name“. How do you think that conversation should go forward?

If the SEO specialist is not paying attention to the client’s stated marketing objectives, then how useful is the SEO advice that the SEO technician has to offer?

Before you reach for your tattered old copy of “Classic Client Blunders In Search Marketing”, take a long hard look at what Bill Gates is trying to do. On the little SEO-stomping floater that pops up when you hit the site, Bill says:

I thought it would be interesting to share these conversations more widely with a website, in the hope of getting more people thinking and learning about the issues I think are interesting and important. So, welcome to the Gates Notes.

He doesn’t say anything about becoming a blogger or joining the blog community.

You know, there IS still a World Wide Web beyond the blogosphere. Bill Gates’ site doesn’t look like a traditional blog in any sense to me. I get the distinct impression he doesn’t want to be just another blogger.

So the fact that a lot of imposturous blogs are crowding a name space (”Bill Gates blog”) that Bill has eschewed doesn’t lead me to conclude he is doing anything wrong.

I have, through the years, criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft in many ways, but I have always lauded Mr. Gates’ marketing savvy.

His approach to launching his Website flies in the face of SEO expectations — and that is EXACTLY the kind of thinking the SEO community needs to learn from.

Just because every idiot with a Bill Gates Complex wants to rank for “Bill Gates blog” doesn’t in any way mean that Bill Gates should want to. In fact, that is the most compelling reason for Bill Gates to avoid the “Bill Gates blog” name space completely.

Sure, Bill could hire a search reputation management company to clean up the name space for him but he doesn’t need to. He has caché — an intrinsic value that ensures millions of people will follow his footsteps across the Webosphere wherever he goes.

Bill Gates can easily do what most people only dream of: build a query space. People will search for “The Gates Notes” because that is the name by which Bill Gates Website is being promoted.

Whether people find it using “Bill Gates blog” doesn’t matter any more than whether they find it by using “Bill Gates sucks”, “Bill Gates is evil”, or “Bill Gates should fire Steve Ballmer”.

The brand name the client chose was “The Gates Notes” and it was a stroke of basic marketing savvy — no one had made an effort to pollute the name space. Bill Gates scored a coup over all the illegitimate bloggers and armchair SEO advisors by deftly moving around the problem.

In fact, I am sure many people will link to http://www.thegatesnotes.com/ with the erroneous anchor text “Bill Gates blog” and variations on it because everyone thinks that all you have to do on the Web is create a blog.

If The Gates Notes is a blog, it must be a proposal for what 3rdGen Blogs should look like, because it doesn’t look like a blog, it doesn’t act like a blog, and it doesn’t have to be a blog if it doesn’t want to be.

Danny Sullivan’s very long-winded SEO analysis of the Gates site has undoubtedly earned far more links and commentary from news organizations and bloggers than this little ‘ole response will — so the public has been led down the wrong path once again by the good intentions of someone who forgot to apply the standards of the Web to the subject of his post.

Oh, wait. The Web has no standards.

In fact, neither does SEO — and if SEO did have standards we have no way of knowing whether those standards would have discouraged the shot across the bow that Danny lobbed at Bill Gates.

It’s unfortunate that someone so visible in the SEO community should go to such extreme lengths to offer what amounts to a load of hogwash — or, what we would call in more polite terms — very poorly framed SEO advice.

You don’t just run down the client and say, “Hey, Bub! More people search on ‘Bill Gates blog’ than know to search on ‘The Gates Notes’ so you need to change your title tags.”

That would be equivalent to telling Dial Soap that they need to change the title tags for their site to include the words “hand soap”, “bar soap”, and similar generic expressions.

How much money do you think you would make as an SEO offering that kind of advice?

Although “bill gates blog” is nowhere near as ubiquitous as “hand soap”, it’s still not the brand that Bill Gates chose to build. Should Dial Corporate start marketing its site as “tips on how to use soap”? What about “the best soap blog around”?

Before you go shooting off your mouth, criticizing people for not using obviously spammed out keywords in their title tags, stop and consider that maybe — just maybe — some people are a little more comfortable with the process of building a brand than the average small business and affiliate site owners.

The SEO industry really doesn’t get the full value of what it means to be a brand.

Danny Sullivan is certainly a very successful thought leader in our field — he could teach most people more than just a thing or two about search engine optimization.

But I really have to say, Danny, what were you thinking when you wrote that post — except that maybe it would be a great piece of link bait?

The SEO rarely if ever gets to pick the brand keyword — we just have to knuckle down and do our job to ensure that the right site(s) appear for the new brand.

THAT is what search engine optimization is really all about. It has nothing to do with calling out people for the sake of obtaining a few golden links.

Disclaimer: My use of “the client” is only figurative and not intended to mean that Danny Sullivan has a business relationship with Bill Gates.