NewsWeek Looks at Search Engine Optimization

* * 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."

Different kinds of SEOs

[this great guy]

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:

• White hat SEOs, who help people redesign their websites to use robots.txt files, META tags, etc.
• Black hat SEOs, who spam the Web with thousands of links, and generally abuse the technology.

Only the second kind is evil. Other SEOs out there actually do good things and truly make the Web a better place.

Re:Uninteresting content gets undeserved attention

[ZachPruckowski]

PageRank is worth a lot more than vanity.

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, if you want people to read what you have to say, like if you're a blog or a wiki or just a regular site, it helps to be one of the first sites on the google listing. For instance, two days ago I started a wiki as a project to create a third American political Party [wikispaces.com] based on a technologist and freedom stance, as opposed to big business. Now, it's not for money and is just for a fun project, but I want people to see it and contribute. Obviously I have an interest in SEO, but I'm too cheap to pay for it.

Democracy

[nephridium]

This is why people like Socrates opposed democracy - lobbyists (i.e. people good at manipulating other people) can sway many of the less educated populace, which in ancient Greece (and actually all through history to this day) was the majority of citizens. And the worst part is that those lobbyists/demagogues/politicians etc. don't need to be very knowledgable themselves, they just need to be charismatic and very convincing. Socrates (and his disciple Plato) saw this as a huge danger for society (which would prove true often enough in history, take Hitler's rise to power as the most prominent example).

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.

Alexa Ranking

[TubeSteak]

Alexa's ranking is less relevant these days, but still informative.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? range=1m&size=large&url=http://george-harrison.inf o [alexa.com]
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

Google Insight to Article ...

[hagrin]

Matt Cutts offered his take on this article here [mattcutts.com] where he talks about how Google can diagnose a lot of these black hat activities automtaically without any human intervention.

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.

covered recently

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the same company that was recently covered on slashdot [slashdot.org] with their beginner's guide to SEO. [seomoz.org]

They also have a great search engine ranking factors list [seomoz.org]that contains a large list of the factors that influence rankings in the major SEs.

Re:+1, Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

Want more insight into the mind of a PageRank player? Here's his user page [slashdot.org]. Note how the few posts he's made have been completely devoid of useful content, yet he makes copious use of BOLD AND CAPS to overemphasize whatever buzzwords he writes. Also note how his sole journal entry consists of lifting a few minor details from a Time article, including a few choice links to the appropriate content.

Re:+1, Ironic

[BillKaos]

The best info in that page is that 16 of 18 of his submissions were accepted by the same editor, ScuttleMonkey.

It's clear what's happening here.

Re:+1, Ironic

[BillKaos]

Sorry for replying to myself, but it's also worth noting that in the last history [slashdot.org], about 50+ comments talking about this guy went (presumably by someone with enough power) modded offtopic.

Sometime is going on :)

Re:4 easy steps to profit!

[BillKaos]

You miss a point: 0. Get the same ./ editor to accept 16 out of 18 of your submissions.

Lying to Robots for Profit, not just for fun

[billstewart]

Most of the SEO business is dishonest, even though it's still hard work - it's figuring out what the search engines think looks interesting to humans so you can take your client's web pages, which aren't interesting to humans other than your client, lie to the robots about them, so the robots will lie to humans who want to find interesting web pages about various subjects.

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.)

Re:**Beatles-Beatles pushing spyware?

[TubeSteak]

At the risk of pumping up his rankings by clicking into his site....

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/li vecounter.cgi?cntr=Active&nm=harrison&pg=default&l oc=",escape(document.location),"&ref=",escape(            Wwxzz),"
http://www.exitblaze.com/exit.js
http:/ /www.softwarewings.com/cgi-bin/livecounter.cgi?cnt r=Active&nm=harrison&pg=default
http://georeport. geobytes.com/~27559.1/Clear?
http://georeport.geo bytes.com/~27559.1/Clear?ref="+sReferrerUrl+"
htt p://stats.keeca.com/images/stats.gif
http://map.g eoup.com/~43072/geoup?template=harrison

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