There is a village where the barber shaves all those and only those who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber?

This question was asked on Yahoo Answers and featured on the homepage for some god awful reason.

The following answer (even though flawed) was chosen as best answer:

OK. take a deep breath and read this slowly, because it is very tricky. First two definitions:

def 1) All and only those who shave themselves = S

def 2) All people in the village, including the barber, are either members of S or members of not-S. there is no one in the village that is a member of both.

If the barber shaved himself then he would be a member of S.
If the barber does not shave himself then he would be a member of not-S.
A barber who must shave all and only not-S can not shave any S
The barber can not shave himself, because he would be shaving a member of S
if the barber is not a self shaver then he is a member of not-S
The barber must shave himself because he must shave all members of not-S
Thus he must both shave and not shave himself
This is the paradox.
No one else in the village can shave the barber because only the barber can shave members of not-S.
This is a variation of Russel’s paradox, and there are several ways to solve, or attempts, to solve this depending on how it is interpreted. I’m not even going to attempt a solution here. Someone could, and probably has, written a doctoral thesis on the subject.

The FACT is that the riddle said nothing about the villagers not being able to shave anyone else. The answer is that any one of the villagers can shave the barber.

Let us break it down here.

all those and only those who do not shave themselves… so the fact is that if none of the villagers shave themselves, then any one of them can shave the barber. He did not say he will not shave those that shave other people.

See the original here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090625164520AAgNZ4A

First things first ….Meta Tags

You will come across a good number of seo professionals who will tell you that meta tags are no longer relevant. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live no longer rely on meta tags to determine your ranking. The fact is that meta tags DO matter. Here’s how.

Meta tags used to be something that you could abuse. You could own a website with adult content on it but place meta tags that told search engines the website was about fashion. Your website would then show up in search results displaying the information about fashion that you placed in the meta tags, and when you visited the website you would get an eyeful of naked women that were not wearing anything, nevermind something fashionable.

Search engines caught on and closed that loophole. But they did not rid meta tags from their algorithms completely. If a website lacks meta tags (keywords, and descriptions) then it get hits with negative points. How many negative points only the search engine knows. If you DO have meta tags, then the search engine will scan them and determine whether or not they match the page content. If they do not match the page content then you lose more points than you would have had you not used meta tags at all. If they do match then you get plus points in the algorithm.

I cannot tell you how I know this, but I can tell you that you can experiment with this if you want and find out that I am right. My recommendation is to use meta tags and make sure they match the content on the pages as best they can. If you have a dynamic site like a blog then you can find excellent plugins that will add/edit the meta tags automatically to match page content.

Anchor Text

Anchor text has nothing to do with boats. Anchor text is the keywords that you see that are hotlinked to another page. Lets say you have a navigation. Your navigation has “Home, About Us, Contact Us, seo Services, link Building” and each of them are linked to a page. The words About Us are anchor text. When you have a website with products for clothing you will want anchor text that says “women’s clothing, plus sized clothing, mens clothing, biker shorts, summer wear”.

Anchor text linking tells the search engine what it is about to find by following that link. If the page content on that following page matches that anchor text then you are in the clear. If it doesn’t match then it doesn’t look good for your seo efforts.

Page Naming

Using the above anchor text information, the next item is page naming. When you link an anchor text such as “seo services” you want it to go to a page named “seo-services.html” or a similar variation. This basically nails the coffin shut in regards to anchoring. The keyword you are targeting is not only in the link, but the actual url that the end-user ends up on. All that’s left is for the content on that page to display text about seo services.

link Building

link building is important because you want to tell Google that your website is popular enough that other webmasters wanted to link to it. An outbound link can end up being bad for the website that linked to you if your website content was not related to the anchor text that linked to you. It is like recommending an employee to your boss who hires him, and he turns around and craps on the bosses desk while he was sitting there eating lunch.

One of the methods used for link building is to submit your site to directories in the proper categories related to your website. You want to find directories that do not require a reciprocal link. It is generally not a good idea to link to a directory, unless your website is about directories. You can also find many directories that do not require a submission fee. Allot of the time, directories that charge a fee never survive so your link will end up being lost in the future anyways. Directories like DMOZ do not charge a fee, and in fact if they find editors trying to make money for adding a link, that editor will be banned from editing at DMOZ.

You can write articles related to the website you are working with. Let’s say you have a website for an event planner. You can write articles about planning the perfect wedding, or managing costs at large corporate events. You can then submit your article to free article publishing sites on the net. Your article will be published and often republished by other webmasters along with the required link back to your website. This will help you generate traffic and inbound links at the same time. It also builds your PageRank.

You can take part in blogs and forums while placing your URL in your signature. This will make it so that when you post a comment or thread, your url will automatically be posted. If anyone wants to learn more about you they can click the link and visit your website. Allot of the time these types of sites use the “nofollow” attribute so it does not benefit your inbound links or PageRank. But it is still worth the brand recognition and potential traffic from direct clicks.

Outbound Links and rel=”nofollow”

When linking to a site that you do not want to associate with on a technical level with Google you can use the rel=”nofollow” attribute at the end of your link code before the ending brackets. This will tell Google that you do not approve of the website and do not want it to bleed your PageRank to this website.

It is best to use this feature when linking to general websites. If you are doing reciprocal linking then you DO NOT want to use the “nofollow” attribute because it is plain rude and will only make the other webmaster to take your link off of his website. The biggest purpose of link trading is to get a link back that counts, so nofollow basically removes that purpose.

Dynamic URL’s and Sessions

Dynamic urls are those ugly urls you see on your browser where you type the http://www. and it often looks like a ? and a random string of numbers, letters, and other charactors. This is bad for seo, and you basically want to read above under the subtitle “Page Naming”. The dynamic urls do not provide keyword page naming. Depending on what script you are using for your website there may be a mod, plugin, or some other feature to allow for “search engine friendly url’s”. If not, then you will need to hire a web developer to handle that for you. It can often be done in Apache using the mod_rewrite feature.

Blogs and Fresh Content

Blogs are an important feature in your seo/sem campaign. A blog will allow you to post content regularly without touching a single link of html code. I often come across clients who want a website using the WordPress platform as a CMS (Content Management System). WordPress is very good for search engine optimization and it is the platform I use for this very blog you are reading now!

Your blog does not have to have the standard ugly design. You can create a custom theme that matches the design of your website, or you can download many free themes available under the extend section of the WordPress website as well as other websites offering free WordPress themes.

Social Media / Social Networks

Social networks are an obvious outlet for publicity. Go where the people are. You can utilize Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Tagged, Hi5, and many other social networks out there to generate traffic to your website. My WordPress blog uses a plugin that automatically posts to Twitter the blog post title and a link to read the article when I post a new article here. It will happen immediately after I hit the publish button when I am done writing this article. If you noticed, I also have a graphic in the lefthand side of this blog that when you mouseover displays multiple social networks and rss syndication sites you can repost this article to, or a link to it. I also have a little Digg icon at the end of this article. Check below. I invite you to utilize that Digg button .

This article is not meant to replace an seo professional, but it will get you started whether you are the DIY type or you just want to know what your seo is or isn’t doing. Good luck and thanks for reading this article.

Craigslist

The biggest website on my list is Craigslist.org which is a free classified ads service. It is unique because of the massive amount of traffic it receives. I use it to post my ads, barter for items and services, and give away things for free. The problem comes in when competition becomes a factor. Craigslist has multiple categories. The computer service category is one of the bad ones. There are always computer savvy people trying to circumvent the 1 unique post every two days terms of service imposed by Craigslist.

The methods used currently as of this post are bypassing the account requirements. In order to do this you create a new email account. You can use gmail for this. You then verify the account with a phone number. You can use vonage to get cheap phone numbers then cancel them after you verified them on Craigslist. You can also use the Google Voice service to get a free phone number that you can forward to any number you choose. Currently Google Voice is by invitation only, but at the current rate you can get an invite within a week of requesting it.

Once you have a verified account you can post a couple of ads, as long as they have different titles and wording in the ad that makes it look unique. For example, you can advertise web design, and then post an ad promoting seo services. Then you can go back in two days and do it again without looking suspect.

Craigslist also utilizes a flagging system that allows the general population to flag a post if they think it is spam, inappropritate, wrong category, etc. But there are software programs that automatically flag posts you tell it to, or ones matching certain categories with text you specify. It will flag over and over using different ip addresses and user agents. This allows you to flag the competition posts so that your posts remain on the top at any given time. You can also use this method to flag something on a barter or free section that you want for yourself and it prevents others from getting to it first.

Until Craigslist is able to rid themselves of this sort of abuse, they will not win my respect. Fair competition does not include over-posting and wrongfully flagged posts.

GetaFreelancer

Another website that has abuse issues is GetaFreelancer.com which is a job bidding platform for freelancers. The first issue at hand is the fact that you can create multiple accounts simply by using different email addresses. You can then big on the same project multiple times to increase your chances of getting the job.

The issue with GAF for Americans is that freelancers from 3rd world countries bid way to low on projects that normally command large fees. For example you will see Americans posting outsourced work for pennies on the dollar because the same service from an American professional will cost standard industry prices or higher. You can normally find a project demanding you perform it for $100 when a reasonable company would charge $1,000 for the same work. This is a problem when you spend thousands of dollars on a graphic design education only to have your job outsourced because your “art” is too expensive. This sort of abuse waters down the worth of web designers and graphic designers everywhere!

Another abuse at GAF is when you have multiple accounts and you create a “fake project” then aware the project to another account owned by you. You can then proceed to pay the minimal fee imposed by GAF for the awarded project, and give “fake feedback” to your other account. The feedback system is supposed to tell other service buyers how well you handled the project. By posting fake feedback you are basically removing this buyer safety while they think they are in good hands.

YouTube

YouTube is a great way to get an audience and have your voice heard, or your face seen. It is also a great way to spam in order to gain traffic. It is another site that you can sign up with mulltiple email addresses. You can then report videos along with different description variations. You can even post videos that do not belong to you and do not have a url signature in the video itself, then use that as leverage to get traffic to your own website from individuals looking for more great content.

YouTube needs some sort of video signature verification that prevents the same video from being reposted. I am unsure of how this will be implemented because as far as I know, the technology does not yet exist to filter this abuse. For now, the best bet to combat this abuse is for them to hire a larger staff to manually review accounts for this type of thing and ban abusers.

There are literally a ton of websites that you can abuse for personal gain and basically get away with it. I will revisit this page when I feel like writing more extensively because I know many of them.

I personally had extensive experience with computers. I did not have a degree or anything, just a good amount of time to teach myself different things. So I ended up sort of falling into the search engine optimization business. I had the basic knowledge and the software to assist me. I proceeded to network and get some paying clients. For me it was a monthly fee per client because that is how professional seo‘s bill out their time. I wasn’t rich or anything, but I was happy to make money without going to work somewhere out of my home.

When I first started out, I had zero word of mouth. So that came in due time only after working hard for my existing clients. When you first start, it will be hard to find clients. You have to establish yourself. In order to establish yourself you will have to put your name out there so that potential customers can find you. There are different ways of doing this. A general resource is Craigslist.org which is a high traffic classifieds website. You can advertise your business in the proper category, and I advise you to learn how CL works. Basic html will help you create some eye-catching ads that will hopefully turn into a phone call or website visit.

There are other classified websites like Backpage and Kijiji but they are not as useful in my opinion. I have had hardly any traffic to my websites in them, and really not much for phone calls either. But you should post there occasionally just in case.

If you are new, then you will want to establish a website. Without a website you do not have an identity. Your website is your showcase and a huge selling outlet for your business. Your website should be professional unlike some of those sloppy websites with horrible backgrounds that blend with text. Be smart and hire a professional website designer, otherwise you can actually turn off potential customers/clients.

You will also want to get your business name out there in your local community. You can join the local chamber of commerce to make yourself known to a large audience.

I do not intend to get deep into the how-to’s of home based business on this article, but rather to tell you that it is possible to become self-employed. A large portion of society does not understand how easy it can be to make money on your own. You just have to get out there and do it. The reason new businesses fail is because of a lack of self confidence in the owner(s). You have to know that you can succeed and go for it, otherwise your negative self image will show to your clients.

Now I am trying to get a correspondence high school diploma and I can’t pay the damn tuition. I am about $120 behind. And I want to go through the material which is why I don’t just go and get my GED. That plus I can do correspondence when I have time, and I can’t do that with a GED.

God hates me. That is if god even exists. If he does then he is a bully. Fucking with me my whole life. Any christians wanna bash me? Feel free to comment. Same with athiests who want to bash christians

So bloggers, I challenge you to not sound stupid. Come up with your own words, or at least words that are not “popular” among your peers. Be a leader, not a follower. Or at the very least, fucking avoid posting that shit where my eyes shall roam!