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NewsWeek Looks at Search Engine Optimization
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Dec 12, 2005 01:29 AM
from the good-the-bad-and-the-dishonest dept.
from the good-the-bad-and-the-dishonest dept.
* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us that Newsweeks is taking a quick look at search engine optimization. From the article: "If search-engine rankings are supposed to represent a kind of democracy--a reflection of what Internet users collectively think is most useful--then search-engine optimizers like Fishkin are the Web's lobbyists. High-priced and in some cases slyly unethical, SEOs try to manipulate the unpaid search results that help users navigate the Internet. Their goal is to boost their clients' (and in some cases their own) sites to the top of unpaid search-engine rankings--even if their true popularity doesn't warrant that elevated status."
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+1, Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
-1, I wanted to say that. (Score:2, Interesting)
+1 Funny (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:+1, Ironic (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:+1, Ironic (Score:5, Informative)
It's clear what's happening here.
Parent
Re:+1, Ironic (Score:5, Informative)
Sometime is going on :)
Parent
Re:+1, Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought it might be an honest mistake at first, but it's just happened way too many times now to be a co-incidence. And Slashdot wonders why they're losing readers left, right & centre to Digg? DO YOUR JOBS PROPERLY AND SORT YOUR DAMN EDITORS OUT!
Parent
Uninteresting content gets undeserved attention (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead, it's about some company using link farms to boost website rankings. While this might be interesting to someone who was actually affected by page rankings, I doubt that anyone really cares about their page rank for anything other than vanity. In general, the websites you are looking for, given the right search terms, come up in the first few search results, so despite the efforts of companies such as this, their efforts simply can't overcome the value provided by serving real content.
Re:Uninteresting content gets undeserved attention (Score:3, Informative)
For businesses, it gets you seen. Few people are going to try to look at anything beyond the first page or two of search results. Therefore, if you are #35 on the listings for a keyword vital to you, you're going to get a lot less traffic. If you are a business, and you have 5 competitors selling X, then whenever someone Googles X, your goal is to be the first website they see (aside from X.com or whatever the parent company is).
For non business organizations, i
Lying to Robots for Profit, not just for fun (Score:4, Informative)
Zach is quite correct that it's about money - if you do a Google search for "rolex watches", for instance, the first five or so entries (other than the advertising section) appear to be legitimate, and the rest appear to be various sites put together by scammers who are trying to SEO themselves into the highest ranking by writing inane content and playing link games. (Fortunately, I don't want to buy such an ungeeky watch, but I do often want to find out technical information about various medicines, and that often gets swamped by SEO-spammer medicine stores. Bad enough that it's hard to find articles on how drug X interacts with drug Y, because even the legitimate sites will have indexes on their pages pointing to their articles about drugs A-Z, but if either drug is something that's heavily promoted for sale on the web, that increases the probability of your search drowning in spam.)
Parent
Re:Uninteresting content gets undeserved attention (Score:2)
A) I made it two days ago. I'm a college student, give me time over winter break.
B) This was mostly to make the point in an ironic manner.
I never said business people weren't people, I just said they aren't the only people.
4 easy steps to profit! (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Post useless crap to slashdot
3. Enjoy increased traffic and pagerank
4. Profit!
No need for ???? here. The domain that beatles-beatles has on his profile has a pagerank of 5. I imagine a fair amount of that is from his slashdot posts.
If you don't have the google toolbar, you can check a pages pagerank here: http://www.only999.com/google_page_rank.php [only999.com]
Alexa Ranking (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details
If you click the link you'll get to see a graph of his "reach"
(% of internet users)
For those too lazy to click the damn link:
Traffic Rank for george-harrison.info
Today: 297,221
1 wk. Avg: 383,824
3 mos. Avg: 1,133,067
3 mos. Change: [UP] 502,098
Parent
Re:4 easy steps to profit! (Score:2, Informative)
The bottom line... (Score:4, Insightful)
Jacking up your ratings by any other means may work in the short-term, but let's face it, if you come up first on a search engine and your site is not relevant, what good does it do you (except of course in the case of porn and warez)?
Re:The bottom line... (Score:2)
Unless, of course, someone is an artist who just wants his work [darkicon.com] to be seen and enjoyed by others (or a photographer, or a fledgling game designer [darkicon.com], etc.). Suddenly, text-only browsers don't seem so relevent -- a flowery description inside an Alt tag just ain't the same.
Mind you, I'm not saying text-only browsers have no use (of course they do!), just that they have very lim
Re:The bottom line... (Score:3, Insightful)
What the devil is value these days? (Score:4, Insightful)
Point 1. If the search engines want to retain their value in returning valuable information, then they need to detect rank-promotion techniques and appropriately downrank them. Unfortunately, that will be an unending war.
Point 2. The reason these marketing "people" keep at it is because the fundamental economic system has become broken. It used to be true that 'you got what you pay for', at least roughly. In particular, if you got much less than you paid for, it was pretty easy to determine that the reason was some sort of fraud. Nowadays, it has become very difficult to tell the difference between 'good' stuff that's worth more money and cheap [often Chinese] imitations of the most popular models. At the same time, a nice brand name will allow selling roughly equivalent goods for several times the price. All broken.
The result? All values are becoming totally distorted, and they market presidential candidates and even wars in just the same reality-detached ways. Is the joke on the Chinese for continuing to accept the IOUs?
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:5, Insightful)
If chinese Rolex knockoffs are achieving market parity with real Rolexes, it's because, for the people buying them, they're the same thing. Or, at least, the people buying them have decided they'd rather have 1,000 chinese "rolexes" over their lifetime than a single real thing.
When you say the market is "broken," what you really mean is that the market is, well, the market. And that some (most) people disagree with your estimations of intrinsic value. In reality, the market can't be "broken" any more than the weather can be "broken" -- it's a complex system that may evolve in ways we don't like, but if people really didn't like it, they'd change their behavior and the market/weather would trend back to what people consider "normal."
Might as well declare that sports, music, or academia is "broken." Large, complex systems tend to evolve. Deal with it. Or at least realize that your ideas of intrinsic value may not be shared by all 5 billion other people on the planet.
-b
Parent
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2, Insightful)
I regard you as hypocritical and stupid, but that's okay. Reality is terribly persistent, and I remain confident that there is such a thing as intrinsic value even beyond the ability to lie convincingly. I
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2)
jes sayin'.
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2)
So I'm hypcritical and stupid? Please demonstrate. I will cheerfully admit either or both when you point out where exactly I've contradicted myself or indicated stupidity.
As for stupid, you've indicated a belief in intrinsic value, but given nothing to back up *why* you believe in it. Because it "should" exist? If so, who should set the values? In the absence of a market, is an apple worth more or less
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2, Insightful)
Let me just check what you are saying in your post...
"Curse... Generalise... Insult... Self-righteousness. And now I've run out of cohesive arguments, I'd like no replies and to take my ball away because I'm not winning".
Come back when you've got a cohesive argument with regards to intrinsic value beyond "I remain confid
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2)
Ah, you "intrinsic value" people are so cute. So convinced that goods and services are somehow worth some abitrary values based on what they should be worth, as opposed to what people are willing to pay for them.
He said nothing about "intrinsic value". If anything he was talking about the increasing disconnect there is between the cost of producing an item and the cost to the consumer. Whether or not we have efficient, low margin, commodity markets in other words.
If chinese Rolex knockoffs are achie
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2, Insightful)
Look around the web, and you can often find out which products are the same.
Oops (Score:5, Interesting)
Search engine rankings are not, and should not be, based on popularity. When you type "britney spears naked" into a search engine, you don't care about how many people have clicked on the resulting links. You're looking for *relevance*, which is entirely separate from popularity.
TFA is interesting, but that flawed presence really hurts it. SEO's don't try to convince SE's that a site is more popular (well, there's backlinks, but that's a whole different story). Instead, they try to convince SE's that a site is more relevant. The use of backlinks, etc, is entirely secondary to that purpose.
Me, I'm all for Google and other SE's efforts to negate the effects of SEO by detecting and penalizing SEO behavior (gateway pages, bogus backlinks, etc). SE's may be wrong about what a surfer wants, but intentionally trying to *make* them wrong us abusive to surfers and ultimately makes SE's less useful.
After all, if I have the biggest and best widgets site and try to trick SE's to linking to me for searches on "wodgets," it's only reasonable to expect that people who make "wodgets" will try to SEO "widgets". Customers end up not being able to find what they want, and SE traffic is devalued for everyone.
Cheers
-b
Re:Oops (Score:3, Interesting)
Try searching for specs or anything on older laptops (besides auctions/where to buy batteries/memory). You end up seeing page after page of ads. Even looking for reviews... sometimes you just find ads for memory with a link to add your own review... it's driving me crazy!
Same thing with stereo components, car audio...etc.
Re:Oops (Score:3, Interesting)
Different kinds of SEOs (Score:5, Informative)
Before everyone jumps directly to the conclusion that SEOs are evil, let me tell you this. As the article states, there are 2 kinds of SEOs:
Only the second kind is evil. Other SEOs out there actually do good things and truly make the Web a better place.
Re:Different kinds of SEOs (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the Money is in the Black Hat side (Score:4, Interesting)
But the SEOs who do most of the promotion about the SEO business are really the black-hats, building link farms and similer techniques to lie to the robots, making them think your boring pages are interesting to humans, so the robots will lie to the humans who want to find interesting pages. It's dishonest, and it screws up the value of search engines for the users, and good luck to Google in finding them and stopping them.
Parent
A more accurate measurement (Score:2, Funny)
Democracy (Score:5, Informative)
The only way to counter this effect is to have a larger base (i.e. at least more the 50%) of educated and critical thinking people in a society. And maybe for the first time in history we might have the chance to get closer to this goal.
Re:Democracy (Score:2)
Re:Democracy (Score:2)
That is the reason why fools are allowed to vote, so they can defend their best interest, instead of trusting the choices of "smarter" people.
I rather make my own choices than allowing other people's agenda on the loop, even if that person is smarter th
In last week's article on a related story, I said (Score:4, Funny)
I suppose repeating [whatjapanthinks.com] the same tactic [whatjapanthinks.com] in a second post would move me into the unethical [whatjapanthinks.com] category?
Google Insight to Article ... (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, the "better mouse trap" addage definitely fits here. Black hat SEOs won't ever be stopped because of the way the web works currently. What I am wondering is when will domains that have a really early create date but are inactive are going to be realized for their SEO potential down the road. Older domains are definitely moving to the top of the list since the last Google update.
The Irony (Score:2, Interesting)
Does Newsweek break the Back button on purpose? (Score:4, Interesting)
On a related point, isn't it time browsers were fixed so that when clicking the Back button would bring you to a page that redirected you to the current page, the browser has enough sense to bypass the redirecting page?
Thanks for the mention, again (Score:4, Interesting)
When Brad (Stone) originally wrote the piece, it was to be featured in Wired magazine. However, Chris Anderson, the magazine's editor, didn't like the piece in its final form, so Brad sold it to Newsweek. Brad and I spent about 4 hours together here in Seattle for the initial interview and another 5-10 in emails and phone calls.
I think he's done a good job of trying to encapsulate the industry from an outside perspective, but there's certainly more to be said and several inaccuracies (I pointed out several here [seomoz.org]).
SEO is more and more about influencing relevance via popularity - building links and building content that will generate links and recognition. I'm sure no one konws this better than Slashdotters. The industry has a long way to go to build public trust, but it's definitely a goal of mine and I believe the article should help.
Hmmmm (Score:2)
The nice thing: (Score:5, Funny)
**Beatles-Beatles pushing spyware? (Score:5, Interesting)
Good job I browse using Firefox...
Funny thing is, it's not doing it to me now (despite a Firefox restart, killing the site's cookie, etc) and I don't see anything in the page that could have caused it to happen (unless it's a random chance thing, or a once-a-day thing based on IP address, etc). Still, people using less secure browsers might want to be careful of clicking on the guy's username.
Re:**Beatles-Beatles pushing spyware? (Score:2)
Re:**Beatles-Beatles pushing spyware? (Score:2)
Re:**Beatles-Beatles pushing spyware? (Score:4, Informative)
I use Ad Muncher and it (very neatly) seperates the site's links/src's/etc for you into searchable categories.
/plug
Here's some of the sketchier SRC's that showed up
(anything like Wwxzz means AM killed the script)
http://www.softwarewings.com/cgi-bin/l
http://www.exitblaze.com/exit.js
http:
http://georeport
http://georeport.ge
ht
http://map.
I'm not going to list all the stat counters that showed up in the scripts... trust me, there's even more of them.
Oh, and * * Beatles-Bealtes, if you're reading this: you should probably remove http://www.exitblaze.com/exit.js from your site as they now redirect to hxxp://www.trafficology.com/
Don't ever say I never helped you
Parent
We shopped for an SEO (Score:5, Interesting)
So after months of trial-and-error with Google we decided it might be time to hire someone. The first thing we decided is to approach every prospective company with two simultaneous requests, from seperate subsidiaries. One RFQ for our "high profile" site that we needed a quote on, and another RFQ for a seperate website without an Alexa ranking.
Time after time, the quote was 2, 3, 4, even once 10x higher for the site with an alexa ranking in the top 250,000.
These people are scum.
So we decied that hey, we're no slouches. If **these people** can learn this trade, than we can too. So we did. And now we're number 1 organically on the our first and third most important phrases and number 3 on our second and fifth most important. We're still working on that "number 4." But we did this without SPENDING A DIME. And, I admit, we had a little help from Jagger. Especially Jagger 3. All my love to Matt Cutts and his family this glorius season.
The moral of the story: Caveot Emptor. These people don't know anything that isn't readily available if you're willing to spend the time. It's not trivial but if you're worrying about SEO then you've probably mastered things more difficult then this.
And, a tip: Most of these SEO guys have a copy of "Boiler Room" for home and an extra one for the office. Once you call them and make contact, play a little coy. Make him think his usual pitch will work on you. See, he's going to want to prove that he's got this encyclopedic knowledge that justifies his $15,000 quote. If you just shut up and let him talk, he'll explain everything to you. Every phone call-- and this can be many. These sales guys will talk to you as long as you let them-- can yeild real nuggets of useful knowledge. And it's all totally free. Just ask a lot of open-ended questions and prepare to wade thru some BS.
Shane
Unethical? Perhaps, but necessary!! (Score:5, Interesting)
And for some strange reasons it is indeed necessary to optimize them, or they don't show up in the first page at google.
Example: www.jiyukan.de or www.aikido-karlsruhe.de. Same site, seconod is forwarded to first. When you google "Aikido Karlsruhe" the site did not show up on the first page of search results for ages. Until an expert figured how to optimize it.
The anoying thing is:
a) the other search results never had anything to do with "priacticing Aikido in the town Karlsruhe" nor did they have anything to do with martial arts or Karlsruhe but where jsut random search results.
b) If you don't change the content of the page every few weeks it drops from the first page of search results? Why? The teachers are fix, the training times are fix, every information on that page does not change. But we are artificially forced to change it, or people googling for it won't find it.
This fucking site is about one of the 5 only Aikido dojos in the town Karlsruhe and around. As long as no other side has both terms "Aikido" and "Karlsruhe" close together in their content they should not show up at all.
Anyway, as long as ranking gets more and more complex there is a business in boosting/manipulating rankings.
angel'o'sphere
Re:I'm calling BS on this one (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm calling BS on this one (Score:2)
What's wrong with displaying rules ostentatiously?