NewsWeek Looks at Search Engine Optimization 147
* * 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."
+1, Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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)?
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:Different kinds of SEOs (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Not possible (Score:1, Insightful)
You're chasing a ghost. It's not possible by definition. For instance, you can say on TV "We have a crisis in this country. Almost half - half, I say - of the population has less than average intelligence. We need to fix it. Now!"No matter what is done, this cannot be changed. The sad thing is, I would bet you could actually attract funding to fix this so-called problem.
No matter what you do, by definition half of the population is going to be subpar in anything you can name. The only hope is to put in charge a subset of the population which is smarter than average. As an example, I expect the readership of Slashdot to be such a population...
What I would think is "The only way to counter this effect is to have
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 even think there is such a thing as good, and things will continue to get better on average. However, I know better than to attempt to discuss philosophic niceties with fools.
Perhaps I'm jumping to the conclusion, but I think you should designate me as a "foe" and we can merrily ignore each other forever. I really have much better things to do with my time.
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.
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 confident that there is such a thing as intrinsic value".
Like "spanglish" vs Spanish (Score:2, Insightful)
An unoptimized site is the equivalent of Spanglish [wikipedia.org]. Yes, it's written in a way the audience can understand, but it isn't written with proper Spanish grammar. So, going through a site and making all the verbs and nouns agree and removing all of the slang is really all optimization is:
-make it valid HTML
-add your metatags
-link to other valid sources of similar data
-get them to link to you
-add yourself to http://dmoz.org/ [dmoz.org]
While, yes, I admit that the skill is in getting the site to be standards compliant while not breaking the design, and in knowing how to write the best metatags, anyone offering anything more than that might as well be selling the Brooklyn Bridge [barrypopik.com].
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!
Re:We shopped for an SEO (Score:2, Insightful)
So basically, you lied to the sales guy to get pricing. Hopefully your customers at Custom Silicon Bracelets don't approach you on pretense to get pricing intelligence like you did the SEO guy. Glad you have so much time to burn over $1000-$1,500 per month (which is probably a fraction of what your self-seo effort cost you).
These people are scum.
You really have no room to talk about ethics after how you treated other businesses. What you did in milking salespersons and sending out fake RFPs (where you had no intent to buy) is as deplorable as some of the practices in the SEO business. This is one reason why no salesperson in their right mind should ever entertain RFPs or RFQs except from established clients or from the government. It also gets salespeople fired when they pin their hopes on an RFP that turns out to be a troll.
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.
Low traffic sites are easier to optimize than high traffic sites. More links, more external factors and more customer handholding (probably the biggest expense) is needed to make things happen. At the end of the day I do totally agree with you that SEO is not beyond the abilities of most web masters or web developers. The question is, is it the right thing for them to spend their time and money on relative to everything else. What is right for you may not be right for everyone.
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.
You've succeeded in optimizing for terms that are not all that competitive. Anyone who downloads the free version of Web CEO [webceo.com] could likely done as well.
Re:The bottom line... (Score:3, Insightful)