• some guy (unregistered)

    $words[frist]

  • Sgkgdl (unregistered)

    <?php eh($comment) ?>

  • Hal (unregistered)

    I have mixed feelings here. Obviously a lot of people that do SEO out right just spamming. They are hosting crap that has no original content and isnt anything other than a vehicle to drive ad-impressions for pennies. Those guys obviously deserve to hung drawn and quartered.

    However a site that is a legitimate blog, actual business, etc doing a little SEO does not bother me. There are more clever ways to go about it then what has been showcased here obviously but I see nothing wrong with attempting to manipulate search results favorable so that your get seen in this stage of the WWW. It isn't as if any of the search tools are neutrally presenting besting matching results based on relevance. All of them are pay to play in some respect or aggressively favor their own properties or those of their corporate relations. In some cases they are going as far as to tell you what you ought to be searching for instead, etc, etc.

    Don't hate the player, hate the game.

  • Robin (unregistered)

    I've no idea what eh might be (I presume some home-cooked nonsense that does "something", but PHP is notorious for its thousands of globally namespaced built in functions so I wouldn't be shocked to find it was a "standard library" function), but I must say it is perfectly named in relation to this code.

    Although let's face it, if it was named wtf it would be more appropriate if a bit less polite.

  • Jeff (unregistered) in reply to Robin

    Not that it really matters, but it looks like the "eh" could be for "exception handler".

  • Jeff (unregistered) in reply to Robin

    Not that it really matters, but it looks like the "eh" could be for "exception handler".

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to Hal

    Doing it properly isn't SEO. SEO is attempting to game the system instead of building a better site.

    20 years ago you could defend the notion that the system was basic and it was worth adapting to its quirks. These days, it's hard to argue Google are doing a poor job ranking sites. If your site isn't ranking highly enough, you need to make it better instead of trying to trick Google.

  • (nodebb)

    Yes, they just hard coded a bunch of tags that they presumed would drive clicks

    They forgot "kittens" or anything to do with pornography.

  • ooOOooGa (unregistered)

    It must be rather old code since it doesn't have 'Minecraft' in the tags.

  • King (unregistered)

    Sri-Lanka?

  • Barry Margolin (github) in reply to Jeff

    Exception handler doesn't make sense there. It must be some kind of echo.

    And I guess random() is a function that selects a random number in a range, but doesn't select the same number that was used previously ($last_rand).

  • ZZartin (unregistered)

    That might has worked with yahoo but google ain't falling for that shit.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Dave

    SEO is attempting to game the system instead of building a better site.

    As someone who's had an SEO business in the past, I would distinguish between white-hat SEO and black-hat SEO. The most robust and effective way to optimise your search engine results is to build a site that provides real value for its users--i.e. build a better site.

  • Carl Witthoft (google)

    I remember the "good old days" when AltaVista was the NewBigThing. Websites started adding a word-cloud-ish collection of text they hoped would catch lots of random search terms. The words usually were in white (so invisible) font at the bottom of the page. My how we've improved /s

  • (nodebb) in reply to Dave

    It's hard to argue Google are doing a poor job ranking sites, it's impossible to argue it's being impartial in ranking sites. Either to favor their own properties or those of their corporate relations or for ideology reasons.

  • Officer Johnny Holzkopf (unregistered) in reply to jkshapiro

    Because both search results and SEO are teh reel bizniz, it's always possible to not build a quality website with quality content that provides value to real users - and instead just buy a better ranking. Everything can be compensated with money, that's what "ads & markets" funds are for, and you can easily make your customers pay for it. It's easily possible to see this in effect by high-ranking lower quality or even inappropriate search results. This isn't strictly a Google "problem", it's just a common symptom for the whole search and ads industry (which, to some extent, are now interconnected and interdependent, and "almost one and the same thing").

  • löchleindeluxe (unregistered) in reply to King

    Checks out. Twitter is convinced for months now that I should be interested in Malayalam movie technicians. So yeah, Sri Lanka, why not?

  • (nodebb) in reply to King

    Sri-Lanka?

    Don't you know anything about Sri Lanka? About how the Sikhs are killing like tons of Israelis over there?

  • Sgkgdl (unregistered) in reply to Jeff

    eh() could be "echo html" (escaped). A common practice back in the day - otherwise you have XSS, althrough there is no user input here.

    But once you write your global eh() helper, you simply eh() everything by muscle memory.

    It could also mean "escape html", but then they would need to use <?= eh($something) ?> syntax instead, which is a shorthand for <?php echo ...statement... ?>.

    The fact that they don't and still print out something to the page suggests that "e" stands for "echo" html in this case - hopefully also escaped.

    Back in the day I also had a similar function in a legacy project - sh() - which obviously stands for "safe html" and nothing else.

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