I always find Allyn Hane’s posts to be amusing and informative (always a good combo). Right now he’s doing a series on backlinks and that series is a part of a larger series on SEO in general.

His most recent post How To Get Links by Darren Rowse and I Agree is about, well, how to get links! Basically, this post focuses on 301 redirects and the “family of brands” concept (yanno, where you go on a site and at the bottom they have links to all their related sites). Very good post with good information, but I’d recommend checking out the rest of his posts on backlinks since there’s a lot more to quality link juice than just what’s in this post!

Anyway, the point of this post is that he said something that struck me as rather funny in his Darren Rowse backlinks post.

…I call this “content pruning” and it is based on John Chapter 15 of the Bible believe it or not. I will do a full posting on this in the future as it is very important when you want to build and sell a site for $30,000.

Emphasis mine.

This cracked me up that anyone would base any element of SEO on a portion of the New Testment. However, the devotional that I’ve been reading ironically (is that the right word?) had John 15:1-8 as that day’s reading. Oh yes, God is a joker.

OK, so what is John 15 about? Well, the first part of the chapter is the “I am the vine, you are the branches bit. If you’re not familiar with the Bible, the exact words of verses 1 and 2 are:

¹ “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. ² Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away;^[a] and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.

Bwahahahaha! Seriously! Who knew the Bible could teach you SEO? (For those who aren’t into making money online, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it just means a way of making your content attractive to Google.)

In other words- if you have a crappy site that isn’t pulling its own weight, cut it off. Sell it, let the domain run out, scrap it and start over. If you have a site that IS doing well, edit the content, change the anchor links, edit tags, and so on, so that your site will perform better.

Ok, so I’m amused by the dumbest things.

Now, I also wanted to send out some linky love to another great internet marketer. She wrote a review of Brian Clark’s Scribe SEO uh… for lack of a better word, plug in. While she doesn’t call it a scam, she does declare it a waste of time and money. The product is aimed at SEO newbies, yet the price starts at $27 a month, for what amounts to a digital post it note. SEO newbies aren’t going to be making enough money to cover the cost of the plug in, and the plug in is totally unnecessary for anyone who knows enough about SEO to make back the monthly fees.

Still, I’d recommend going over and reading her review, because Brian Clark shows up and makes a total pig’s snout out of himself in the comments. It’s quite amusing. Bad publicity, but funny.