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Climbing up the Search Ladder
j_heisenberg writes "Wired carries a story on SEOs or search engine optimizers. Among some bold claims: traffic is up 6 times and sales double, once you hit the first page of results on major engines. The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page."
Is there any limit on how much you can optimize.. eventually, everything will be at equillibrium...
The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page
You mean like the Pyramid Scheme?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Why should I truest oneupweb when they don't have the #1 position for the keywords 'search engine optimization'? :-)
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
Make the front page scroll to infinity- then no one can complain.
Can pay for the best SEO, then they will always be at the top of the charts... You might as well just pay Google as a slot for advertising to be posted with the biggest "donation" to the company getting first place
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
The problem now is that the internet is looking more like a catalog. Sometimes I want to learn about something beyond what those selling things want to tell me. I'd like to see google be google and froogle be froogle and that be that.
This was tried during the dot com boom. It just dosen't work. Isn't this what Google was supposed to stop?
Just by using XHTML compliant code and writing in our blog my fiancee and I are the #1 result in Google, Yahoo, and the new MSN search for a wide variety of topics. This includes areas we only talk about in one post or something. Perhaps the $$ and time that people spend on search engine optimization sites/links/etc would be better spent writing proper XHTML?
Our site is http://www.caseyandanna.com [No link, please don't slashdot!]
A few of the common search terms that we see involve: Cinara Aphids, Shrek2 pictures/etc (my typo), Aramark norovirus
Anyway, that's our experience.
I run a music site (Yeah, i know, shameless link...) that is constantly being beaten out by 3 domains. I did a whois on the owners and they're all the same guy in india.
I heard that this is why Google signed up for domain selling. They're getting their hands on the whois information to cross reference.
That would get rid of a lot of falce pagerank building...
There's only one first page for every searched keyword combination. We're not all targeting 'european natural wigs'.
Wouldn't it be ironic for a Search Engine Optimization company to be on the 2nd, 3rd, or worse, even below, in Google's list? :-P
Am I the only one who considers SEO unethical, almost to the sense of Nvidia or ATI making drivers that would cheat on benchmark programs? If your page is what someone wants, good, if it isn't, you can pay Google and they'll advirtise it on the side of the page along with all the other junk.
Why is it stupid? Well lets look at it:
1. What keeps people on your site? Optimization? Or quality content? What got/keeps people at slashdot? Content or optimization?
2. Search engines catch on, and adjust so nobody super inflates.
3. It's not a business strategy! You ultimately need to have something more.
4. SPAM. How do you think search engine optimization promises super high rankings? They use their bots to spam blogs, forums, guest books, etc. To inflate google based on page rank. Effective? Yea, even with the new rel="nofollow", but it's not good. And could get you blackisted as a spammer as many domains are finding.
So that is what the idiots who are constantly spamming by blog call themselves?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Really? Doesn't that assume that you have at least 15% of margin to play with? A lot of business would kill for that much.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...how much does business increase or decrease when the moderators post an ad^H^Harticle on slashdot?
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
It all boils down to content, content and more content. I've worked with a very small SEO company. It does not matter how much you make your site search engine friendly. You need relevant content on your website to be content with your search engine placement.
My friend was once marketed by a company who was trying to sell car security systems. What they wanted to sell him was a website where he could market these systems himself. They claimed that all he had to do was purchase a premade website, for $12,000. After selling 15 systems, it would pay for itself. If the website didn't pay for itself, he would get his money back.
Anyway, as soon as he purchased, he noticed that his page was showing up on page 50+ on google. So, he wanted to fix this. He payed big bucks to a Search Engine Optomization company. In return, within a few months the company had him moved up to the 2nd page.
Did it work, yes! Was it worth it, no. Everything they had him do, I suggested to him (I found lists of techniques online). By the way, he got his $12,000 back (sounded like a scam to me, but I guess not).
Search Engine Optmization just rings of illicit behaviour that is closely related to spamming. I'm aware there are "honest" individuals who insure that the page is well formed, uses proper heading/title tags, but what of those blackhat individuals who stop at nothing to boost pagerank and call themselves SEO's?
Take for instance Referral spamming of weblogs. Certain bloggers would publish their recent referrers lists and these spammers caught on and well, I now receive several hundred fake referrers from various v~1~a~g~r~a types, to seemingly legit websites. Of course, upon checking their website, you can see that there is no link directing visitors to my page.
Did the website owners use this tactic? I'm sure some have, but what about others who have turned to "SEO experts" who resort to these tactics?
I'm not even going to get into Comment spam. That's just a horrid thing that is on par with trapping email spam in terms of difficulty.
I'd like to see google be google and froogle be froogle and that be that.
There are some keywords you can tell Google to exclude if you don't want web stores. Try adding -price or -shipping or -checkout to your query.
A study conducted by a CEO of a SEO company shows that using a SEO company can create a thriving online business, and not using one can mean banckrupty.
In other news: Mafia concludes that not paying them protection money can be hazardous to your health ! Stay tuned for more headlines from the cutting edge of research !
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Since the dawn of the web, workarounds and cheat have continually been found to "optimize" search results. The sad result of every web site's quest to appear at the top of search results is that it has prevented search engines from providing "objectively relavent" results.
While Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft continue to develop "search relevance technologies", someone out there needs to develop and bring to market a cognitive search engine that can actually understand the content of a page the way a human does and connect it with the requested search terms. Something similar to the Cyc project that Doug Lenat has been working on since the 80's (and its subsequent OpenCyc F/OSS derivative, only tied into search engines. And, no, I am not talking about Ask Jeeves or other silliness like that. ; )
Otherwise, "relevance" is just going to become a euphamism for "the people with the most money to 'optimize' their results"
I though that Google's algoritms were designed to prevent this type of crap. I know Google isn't the only search engine, but I believe it is the most used (isn't it?). Thus, these SEOs ought to have limited effect of ranking, should they not.
That part of the TFA about Eastwood seems a little weak to me. They said they refurbished their website and then began to get more sales. They attribute tht to search engines. Could it not also be because the new design was more conducive to customers needs and thereby increasing sales?
"The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page."
Which is called the prisoner's dilemma. If no one uses these SEO's everyone is relatively happy, someone uses it to their benefit / detriment of others (as they go down the list). Everyone then starts wasting time / money using them and we are at a nasty outcome.
--
Get a Free Front Page Search Engine Ranking! Just complete one offer and get 500 of your friends to complete an offer!
This flies in the face of science.
"Slashdot carries a story on First Posts posting. Among some bold claims: Moderation is up 1000000 times and karma plumets, once you hit the submit button. The catch: eventually everyone will try to do a FP, and there is only one first post."
My sig can beat up your sig
Maybe Google could reduce the page rankings of pages with bad/incorrect/non-standard HTML?
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Specifically, you need people to have heard of you. Remember that many of the companies who employ these SEOs are selling products which would normally be sold through spam emails. They're not depending on some intelligent person to buy their products. They want the 8-year-old grandmother who every year pays those nice boys to apply sealant to her roof and always gets the special anti-rust coating for her car. They want the kind of guy who would actually click on a penile enlargement ad. They can afford to have a thousand surfers breeze right past their page for every person who buys something because, well, on the front page, you're being seen by millions of people each day. (Figures pulled out of my ass. Not sure what the actual amount of viewers of a particular search page would be, but I figure it's high) And even if you don't sell a product, you've left an impression on the person's mind. Unconsciously, they see "PHARMAKEIOS" and it's associated with their search for sleeping pills. Days later, someone will ask them about who offers sleeping pills, and the name will pop into their head.
That math is pretty simple. 0% of anything is nothing, but .1% of a huge number is still a fairly large number.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
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Isn't it ironic?
I read it as "Climbing up the Space Ladder"
she's kind of a hottie, but her boobs are too small.
http://www.fuckedgoogle.com/my_weblog/2005/01/ther es_a_sucker.html/ mentions a recent study that showed less than 18 percent of surveyed search engine users were able to distinguish ads from unbiased "content"
This is the foundation of the paid search model, as well as the SEO crowd.
At least for now, people trust the results search engines give them because they simply aren't aware that nearly everything you see on the first page or so is there due to payment or gaming the system.
From TFA:
Observe that we get almost no information about those 30 clients. Are these startups? Or long-running businesses? Furthermore, we get only percent measures of visits instead of a unique visitors per day count or something more tangible.
I know that due to recent developments of D1 (Drift) racing competitions, there is a higher demand for niche products. Again, we don't get any tangible numbers, but just percent increases.
This is not an informative article.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
In most trades, when someone comments on SEO, it's almost always a quote from one of the founders of SearchEngineWatch, a subscription only forum and web site focused on "Search Engine Marketing." Reasearching the site, it really is amazing how many people and companies are involved in "optimization." This field is getting huge, and as the article says, just about every major business is doing it. FYI, most of the strategies involved aren't fraud (like farm linking) but rather how certain keywords and meta tags result in different search engine rankings.
But man, I laughed my ass off when I read it :)
Kind of like +1:Funny, -2:Mean
It makes you good at getting a higher score on the SATs, not actually improving your abilities.
Similarly, if your web site is aimed at getting a better page ranking, you'll get more attention even though you're not actually better.
It's a way to defeat - or at least get a leg up in the system. Unfortunately it means that everyone will have to do it in order to keep up, and eventually search engines will yeild the results of a popularity contest, not which web pages are most relevant. Especially when they're trying to sell something.
Come to think of it, this sounds just like politics as well...
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
^_^ Well, you can set the number of searches displayed to an upper limit of around 100. It's not infinite, but it's enough that you usually either find what you want or get tired of looking within the first page.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
(Haiku form)
There is only one
page which gets found as the first
On the search engine.
However I ask:
How many search terms can be
As typed by users?
S-E-O's should do:
Think more about their users
And target their pages
Rather than just cheat
(does the first one always win?)
On the stupid google race.
Get to work, you dumbs
free market will always have
many companies.
I would like to thank
The DeCSS Haiku
for inspiring me.
Yes, I'm a stupid
for posting this in haiku
(well, it's my first try)
Don't mod this funny
But insightful, or even
as interesting.
You are right that mass market products will reach equilibrium. So, everyone is hoping for some little clever trick that will make them something special. Sadly, whenever you have a market condition where people feel they need to pull tricks for survival, you will create a market rife with scams.
Anyone with a defineable, replicable trick will probably end up selling out to the mass market fearing that their competition will sell out first.
Personally, I think the best hope against SEO tricks is for the market to have more independent directories and search engines with radically different algorithms and results. This world where your web site thrives or dwindles on the caprice of a single engine (google) or single directory (DMOZ) is far from ideal.
Self promoting sig: yes, I waste time making things like this page of Salt Lake Bands. I think others should waste time pounding out blogs and sites with things they think worthwhile.
This is a great idea. Actually, companies like Google and MS and Yahoo could hire the legions of unemployed dot-commers who keep refusing to get a new job/career and let them do it. Sure, every search would take a minute or so, but the results would be great, and all of the dot-commers could go back to the cube life they so enjoyed.
I don't respond to AC's.
I mean anyone can be creative and just keep on flooding there URL all the time. Wouldn't that just do about the same thing?
mnewberg.com
It should read:
"Rather than just cheat
(does the first one always win?)
On the google race."
I have a website that used to be on the front page of all the major search engines under the first words you would type and expect to find a site like mine. The hits were 10,000 a day for a while, then just moving to the second page on yahoo or google would make the hits drop down to 3,000 then 1,200 or so. Thats one of my problems with Google working so well, is that its impossible for a small company or person to get their website out there. They should give some high ranking to new sites to help them along.
The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page.
Obviously, what we need are bigger first pages.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
There are a few companies I deal with online and they do NOT come up on the first page.
my requirements are service, price, and quality. I'm a price whore that will pay more for decent service, quality I do not care about because I make informed decisions.. I.E. i'm after a specific make and model.
More and more people are doing this, becoming a more-savvy shopper and not doing the ADHD behaivoir of "ooh shiney first link!", and those people can not stand waiting 3-7 days to get something so they buy from a local store anyways.
finally for non physical goods, quality is foremost and usually NOT the first in thelinks unless I have a very specific search, I.E. : "geo metro clutch pressure plate replacement" will get me closer to what I want than "geo clutch". (for the trolls out there, my old Geo metro get's a higher MPG than the honda insight, it's old tech and kicking the arse of hybrids so NYAH!)
these "services" to get your site listed closer to the front page are becoming more and more worthless as internet users start to actually understand how to use a search engine. Yes, many people do not know how to use google. It really is amazing how many people have almost no searching skills or basic abilities to formulate a useable search string of more than 2 words.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I think about this all the time, finding reviews or instructions is a pita with all the stores.
Try Froogle and you see the certain web sites show up under multiple completely unrelated domain names. Froogle is well neigh useless.
Do it the old fashion way...GET THE BEST WEBSITE FOR YOUR TOPIC!
My website http://www.dmbtabs.com/ is #1 for anything search Dave Matthews guitar/tab/tablature and in top 5 for "Dave Matthews".....get a good website with valuable content for those who use it and your golden.
SEO's my ass...
Let's get ready to search SO GOOD!
I dunno. When I'm actually looking for a product or service, I usually end up skipping everything on the first page altogether, because there are so many worthless purveyors of useless crap clamoring to get to the top of the search.
I lack any insight into these matters, because I ceaselessly underestimate the stupidity and sheepishness of my fellow consumers, however.
The fact is 'Search Engine Optimization' through link-farms or what have you is an extremely easy practice to put an end to.
If Yahoo! or Google really cared about abuse they would spot-check for abusive practices. Abusers would be penalized by having their listings completely removed for 6 months to a year, or fixed to a deep ranking-level for a period of time.
Furthermore, Yahoo! or Google could crossreference all sites appearing on linkfarms and reduce page rankings for all of them.
The reality is that Yahoo! and Google do little in the way of deterring these practices. Their algorithms don't change all that frequently and pratices that distorted rankings over a year ago are still working well today.
One question I have theough is how cost effective are SEO rates with the known-quantity of keyword buys on AdWords and Overture?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Google's official statement on search engine optimization gives a number of reasons to be wary of search engine optimizers. While not condemning them outright, they have almost nothing positive to say.
I would think anyone paying money to "guarantee a higher rank on Google" would want to first see what Google itself says about the subject.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Being on the "first page of results" doesn't mean shit. My page is the very first result for MutantHamster but my traffic still sucks.
It depends on the search term, anybody can be on the first page of something.
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
Really? Doesn't that assume that you have at least 15% of margin to play with? A lot of business would kill for that much.
That's not much of an assumption. Margins in retail businesses are almost never anywhere near that low, unless it's on specific loss-leader items designed to increase traffic, or unless the item is a highly-competitive big-ticket item; say, loose diamonds or new cars. (The former because it's a commodity being sold and distributed by a rabid cottage industry, the latter because consumers have so much information about the costs)
I can say that loose diamond margins for internet purchases at the more cut-throat net retailers are down to about 6% for larger stones... you'll be paying by wire transfer and don't expect any extras. But that's what you'd expect for a commoditized $25,000 item. Compare that to finished pieces with smaller diamonds... a pair of half-carat total-weight earrings might easily be marked up 100%, maybe more if the manufacturer managed to get the diamonds in a cheap lot. (Yes, those $99 specials weren't that special)
A typical niche retail store has 50-200% markups on everything unless it's on special. The fact that the article mentioned the business in question was a "niche retailer" probably implies they're selling a highly non-commoditized item which means their margins might be even larger. Specialty items often have drastically higher margins because less availability means less competition, and less competition means higher prices.
There's even a term for the 100% gross margin: "keystone", which is a retail price of twice what the item cost.
Even Wal-mart and Target are often "less" in their stores because they wield such enormous pricing pressure over manufacturers. They end up having to sell to mega-retailers for less because if they don't, the megas won't stock their products and will buy from their manufacturing competitors instead. But if they DO sell for less to Wal-mart and Target, then they screw all the small retailers and eventually drive them out of business, leaving the ONLY outlet for their goods being the mega-retailer. If you're a hardware manufacturer and don't want to sell to Walmart/Target/Home Depot/Lowes, who are all too big to need you unless your brand is indispensable, then who's left? No one, because all the small hardware stores went out of business 10-20 years ago.
Mind you, at least in terms of price, consumers still benefit from this. Although that intense pricing pressure is what forced almost all manufacturers to outsource their labor to foreign countries. In the end, you're down to basically two types of retailers: massive juggernauts that are all pricing, and little super-niche shops which are essentially charging for the 'service' of finding and stocking niche items that are too rarely bought to demand shelf space at a megastore.
But, I digress. Even at Wal-mart, I doubt margins are anywhere near as low as 15% gross except on loss leaders.
How about people stop making sites that are so similar to existing sites that they are unnecessary? Before you launch your internet business, maybe you should try this.
1.) Go to Google and type in the search terms you would use to find a site like the one you're proposing.
2.) If you get more than a page of sites offering the exact same thing, find another idea because you're fighting an uphill battle.
I understand that there are some fields where there will be similarity. Geico, Progressive, and State Farm would all like to be at the top of the "auto insurance" search. But if you want to open an online bookstore, you'd darn well better have something to set you apart from the million other online booksellers (especially Amazon) or you're dead meat no matter what your Google ranking is. Find out what that one thing is, and specialize in it. Be the best online seller of 18th century railroad books or two-headed troll dolls. If you can't rise to the top in a highly specialized area, you deserve your obscurity.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
Google makes stacks of cash from selling advertising . How happy do you think those advertisers would be if Google started offering a totally ad-free search page? Ultimately Google has to make money. Whatever steps 1, 2, 3, ..., n-2, n-1 are, step n is always PROFIT!!!
The basic problem is the classic "Human-Machine Interface". Machines can't tell the difference from a page exploiting the scoring rules from one that is an honest web page playing by normal rules.
Google does honestly try to avoid this crap. The problem is in the end even with the cleverest scoring algorithm is still an algorithm. Knowing what Google programatically emphizes shows how to build web pages to take advantage of their rating which isn't necessarily a good web page or any more meaningful than anothers web page that doesn't take advantage of the information.
It is a constant tug of war between these guys and Google. Google is constantly trying to invent the best pattern matching to promote real information in web pages and not this fake stuff. These SEOs are constantly trying to find weak points in the rules that they can capitalize on.
ps. If MSN Search targets "trying to beat Google" instead trying to beat web pages and SEOs then they have already lost...
Their stories suck these days.
;)
The article is only a few paragraphs, it's inaccurate and
mainly just opinion.
It mentions a few companies, one of which is a submission company (shudder) and then goes on to
bash Traffic Power? Who paid for this frame up?
The skinny on Traffic Power?
They were doing the SAME thing everyone else was...
They were just the most successful at it and
google felt it. So google fought back.
google is a very un-ethical headless corp now. I don't like them
and have personally stopped using their search engine and
coach people to do the same.
Traffic Power is STILL the best bang for your buck
as far as advertising on search engines is concerned. Yes, I used to work for them. Fabulous company to work for... only complaint I have
is that the soda and snack machines weren't free
This article begs the question of how much it would
cost me to have a poorly written un-accurate article
printed in wired about my competition...
So... what are your fees Adam?
To find a good SEO, just search Google for them. I've even seen some of them advertise the fact that you probably found them in Google.
I don't care if there are text ads on the side of an anti-froogle. I don't even care if they keep "sponsored results." I just want it to do its best to keep all the yahoo stores etc out of my search results on this hypothetical site.
These SEOs are a giant crock of shit. A client of ours hired iProspect at a fee of about USD70,000 and they were a complete joke. At the time of building the site, they sent a list of things to ensure we did correctly: this list contained not a single thing we weren't already going to do. They didn't provide us with any meta data, page titles, title (alt) text or anything until the site had been up for 3 months, by which time google had crawled the site using the entries I had made. These ad hoc entries left the site at #2 on google using their preferred search terms. (#1 had an impossible number of links pointing to it, and could not be displaced.) Over the next 2 months, dribs and drabs of data started rolling in from iProspect. It arrived as Word document, text files and Excel spreadsheets - but never in the same format, and never in any meaningful context - or in any particularly order. .. (The site had around 140 pages)
This in itself was a joke - they were completely unprofessional, totally amateurish, and the people we spoke to by video and audio conference really didn't have a clue what they were talking about. (Me and my team have spent a lot of time creating highly ranked sites on Google).
Finally, after 2 months (and $70,000 DON'T FORGET!) we had all the "correct" (LOL) data entered and Google was instructed to crawl the site again.
I then tested a range of search terms we had the previous results for, the ones the client specified, and after the $70,000 makeover, not a single result was higher than my Ad Hoc (and FREE!) entries.
We were absolutely disgusted. I tell ya, I'm in the wrong game. I could have charged $90,000 for the work they did, and it would (conservatively!) taken me less than a week to do the job it took iProspect 2 months to do - AND I DID A BETTER JOB!
I can't mention the URL here I think, but the site supports USA's longest running infomercial (yes, outsourced to New Zealand!) This site turns over better than 40 Million USD annually, and get's around 3-4000 sessions a day.
So, to anyone considering iProspect (in particular) or any other SEO company, my advice to you is simply to let your web developers have a crack first, because in many cases the results will be superior to anything these so-called "experts" can come up with.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Traffic Power won't show up in the top rankings for
'SEO' or 'Search Engine Optimization' Or anything
else along those lines due to their contracts
with re-sellers of the services they provide.
With all SEs you can set how many results you get
_ ________
back per page. Results ranging from 10 per page
to 100 or even 200 results per page.
So their guarentee of getting you on the first page
is dependent on what the number of results per page
is. If they're assuming 10 then GREAT!, but if its
100 or 200 results per page well then...
Arash Partow
_________________________________________
Be one who knows what they don't know,
Instead of being one who knows not what they don't know,
Thinking they know everything about all things.
http://www.partow.net
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
I'm considering Google as a broken search engine.
SandBox, overating links - link farm impact, hilltop oligarchy, big sites oligarchy, 2x32 double index as not able to go on 64Bit therefore sites dumped in secondary index, 301 redirects not working, 302 page hijacking...
There are a lot of faults they have to be blamed for doing nothing to solve it out.
But the sandbox massacre is a real crime they are responsible for to the Web community:
They dump about a year now 90 % of the new opened domains into a secondary index (mainly its assumed tha G$$gle is be not able to go over the 32 Bit barrier for siteids as all money is pumped in opening new shops and not in the core bussines SE) and thus never pop up in top SERPs. But as well a lot of this sites would in Googles normal algo if not Google would filter them out.
They block 1 year of 10 Internet year - what a crime!
Try this to see unfiltered results:
keyword keyword -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf
Or see all the great new domains filtered out for your keywords here.
I don't... and neither does 80% of the search
engine user population.
It is better to appear stupid than to type and remove all doubt.
Google has become a shitty company folks... Use a different search engine please.
OMG. It looks like he's dating his mom!!!
Since that is what Google et are focussing on, or trying to. Don't go for the SEO trick of the day, since it will mean your site will drop when something changes. My experience is: write content. Watching the SERPs, tweaking your pages constantly, and checking your PR is a waste of time if you do it all the time. Add pages, and focus on the content. If your visitors like your pages, you get more links, and in the end that works better than the hack of the week. I am able to get 300+ visitors/day every month by just writing content. Other sites, blogs etc. link, my PageRank increases (currently 7). It goes more slow, but I am sure when Google tweaks its algorithm, I will keep my good position, or even go up a bit.
Perl Programmer for hire
but some are more equal. If you want to be first on "undefined paranormal experiences", you'll have no trouble, since there are no hits yet. Try the same with "imported viagra".
I'd bet they reduce the ranks of new domains because most domains are created by spammers and their ilk, and those domains usually come and go within a year. A domain that is less than a year old therefore has a much higher probability of being garbage than one that is older. It actually seems like a pretty good policy to me.
You're complaining that the people behind Google deceided that older, more established sites are more trusted than brand new ones? That doesn't make the least bit of sense to you? Wow.
Cyc gets touted here at /. a lot, for reasons beyond me. Cyc is an untenable approach, with exactly the kind of silliness that Ask Jeeves used when they started up. You cannot explicitly program semantics/pragmatics for everything that you need, at least not for anything but toy examples. How this lesson was not learned from early failures such as SHRDLU is a mystery too.
If you want to take a look at a much more promising approach, check out Steve Pullman's work at the oxford NLP group. He's been working on extracting semantic information from texts automatically, and while the approach is new, the results are impressive.
I don't think search engine optimization is any different from any other kinds of marketing. You have anything from honest marketing, to really sleezy marketing techniques. Some ads leads to products that lives up to the promise, most ads leads to products that are totally bogus.
The issue today is that you can have a great site that no one will notice unless you at least make some rudimentary attempts to market it i.e. make it known to other people.
My own pet peeve is that I'm tired of searching for information on the web, just to get page after page of information telling me where I can buy a book about it.
His whole premise is anecdotally wrong based on the fact that paid placement exists. Businesses do not spend money on advertising which does not work. People find places to buy via search engines, and paid placement gets you there. Therefore, placement in search engines does work. Therefore, if you can get more hits via spending on SEO than you can via paid placement, you will spend it.
You don't "need more". If someone searches for "widget" to buy it, and you're #1, they'll click you and quite possibly buy from you; at most, they're likely to compare a couple sites to determine best price, get a feel for reputability (ie, your site "looks" legitimate), and other factors (testimonials? Ease of use? payment methods accepted?). But ultimately, if someone goes to a search engine to find a place to buy something, the paid results and the top few results are where they will buy.
I actually write SEO content -- but in a specialized manner. All of my content has to be keyword specific -AND- useful. Its the only way to get onto the search engines, and realistically stay there.
My works never involved link farming, or similar sort, and in the end results in better company pages (and ranks).
However, my competition doesn't see things in that way: They put bullcrap up for the search engines, which results in more bullcrap jobs for SEO.
(And by SEO, I mean standard content for websites. SEO is becoming the requirement for all pages to get into google at all... not just spider food (Bad SEO))
I can't say I don't like SEO: Its my job. However, if Spider food is banned or removed and replaced with half-decent content that actually means something, the internet would be better off.
Unfortunately, companies want to pay 1 or 2 dollars per 500+ word article for spider food, and expect their rankings to sky rocket. (I only write for higher paying markets. If the company is serious about good content, they should pay for it.)
Content writing has been outsourced just as much as tech jobs, straight to India. So you pay for crap, and get crap.
With so much crap out there, one good content writer CAN drastically improve a company. Now, this won't have such drastic change in the future, but right now its making a real difference.
It'd be nice if people were more concerned about having GOOD sites, rather than spamming search engines. While it costs more to get into it, the results will be better for everyone.
But, until some companies get over actually having to pay consultants and writers, I think it will be more junk in, more junk out. This is a prime example of how outsourcing is doing a lot more damage than good. (even the SEO companies are starting to outsource instead of using inhouse writers -- which means non-native, half of the time non-fluent English writers.)
It is quite frustrating, really.
Companies like the one in the article, while expensive, do tend to be more effective than the 1 or 2 dollar jobs -- in the long run. I just wish the companies would see it that way as well.
-- RJ
I think it'd be a lot easier if google just blacklisted everyone who was ever caught doing bad SEO (link farming, blog spamming, misleading keywords, and the like) by name, domain, company, etc., and refused to ever show any link to any page they were affiliated with. As a private company, they can take whatever retribution they want, especially considering that many SEO practices are designed specifically to lower the relevance of Google's search results by promoting inferior links.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
Search returns with almost equal weights should be shuffled.. so the top few sites do not appear in order, unless one site has overwhelming weight over the others.. like searching for "CNN". Even the lower-weight items should be randomized, with a lower probability for them to rise, such that the 100th item will in 0.001% or less of the returns appear as item # 1. The domain name should be given a great deal of weight.
Apart from these, we can just let the commercial entities pay for their rating, so the highly-advertised site appears first. We fought long and hard against Communism, for Capitalism, lets see it in action.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
(Yeah I know it's not about SOE's but it is about google).
I logged into gmail this morning to find 50 invites to give away, a quick check of the Invite Spooler shows they currently have 24,714 to give away. So if you've been waiting for one, or just want to see what all the fuss is about go get yours today.
A friend's SEO company (RefreshWeb.com) has this ad:
Who says we're the top Austin Internet marketing agency? Our national clients. Our friends.
Oh, and...Google. Go ahead, make our day: search on "Austin Internet marketing agency."
I like the self-referential nature of the humor in this.
I am the webmaster for a small business (http://www.beadstore.com).
;)
/. audience about where the reputable people are hiding and how to find them.
Except I'm really not. I'm a lawyer with the government. Beadstore.com is just a small family run business and I help out when I can. We're not getting rich of off our website. We don't have the time or money to put into get rich quick schemes hoping that maybe one might work. (But if anyone wants to trade web help for legal advice in Maryland, let me know
So I know enough HTML to design my own page, but mostly use Dreamweaver. We use a commercial shopping cart host (netstores.com) which is fairly decent. I used to pick up the occasional book on programming, but honestly, I don't really have the time or interest in teaching myself the technical details of how to do what we'd need to do.
A large portion of our advertising budget goes to Google and its Adwords program. Wow. It's a great program. But it's very expensive for a small business like ours. The increase in sales when we use it is noticeable. So is the drain on our bank account.
So ads from companies like SEO -- promising "free" high ranking searches -- is alluring. But it's a scam.
I know it's a scam.
Right?
It's a scam isn't it?
Well, honestly, I don't know for sure.
There is so much crap out there that it is impossible for someone like me to determine what is real and what is fake. Intelligent people manage to represent themselves in court all the time. But I guarantee that they are missing things that I as an attorney would see. It's a fact. It's not lack of intelligence, but lack of specialized knowledge.
That's me. I'm representing myself on the internet, competing against others who have real technical knowledge that I simply lack. So hire someone, right?
I'd be happy to.
Finding honest advice on page ranking techniques is extremely difficult. It's all spam. Or it's talking technical bull-hockey that I don't understand. Or (and this is almost always true) it seems to advocate ethically questionable techniques. Or being recommended and touted by a self-interested party. And usually, these offers are spammed anyway. Which gets us back to the first issue....
I have no doubt that the Truth is out there somewhere on the internet. Real people somewhere must be providing this service at a reasonable price. But I'll be damned if I have the time to ferret out the fakers from the legitimate enterprises.
So rather than hear about some self-aggrandizing company touting their dubious claims, I'd much rather hear from others in
A lot of people are commenting that SEO is worthless, that SEO alone won't get people to stay on your site and buy your products. Well, this is only partially true. Some people make a good living by climbing the search engine ranks, and not selling anything on their site. The trick? They sell linkage. If you own a site that Google considers a pagerank 10, other site owners will pay you thousands of dollars per month to link to their site. Yes, SEO can be a profitable business model in and of itself.
While Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft continue to develop "search relevance technologies", someone out there needs to develop and bring to market a cognitive search engine that can actually understand the content of a page
The problem with bringing a cognitive search engine to market is that no-one has invented a cognitive anything, let alone a useful search engine. Cyc has been around for a long time, and has been used in search engine tasks, and hasn't done much. That should tell you how successful that kind of approach is. I assure you that the big 3 of search would bring out cognitive search if they could. Meanwhile, information retrieval hueristics with no pretensions to intelligence continue to do the job in a surprisingly robust way.
and i think you forgot to add and a pony too.
All good websites need to use proper search engine optimization to let search engines and users find them. There are two types of SEO: those which are valid and important parts of site design and those which are tactics designed to trick search engines. I always help my clients with the first while reminding them that trying to trick the search engines is a good way to get themselves blacklisted.
A lot of websites don't even say what they do. How is a user expected to find your website if it doesn't say what it does? Clearly state the purpose of your website and the purpose of every page so that users and search engines will know what to expect. How many websites don't even have titles or have poor titles on most of the pages? A lot.
Websites tend to use images or Flash where text would serve them better. Stating what you do in an image or Flash does nothing to help search engines find you. Often these sites contain so many images and fancy animations that users have trouble navigating them. Websites should remember the golden rule of user-interface design: keep it simple stupid. Text should be text and not an image or Flash. If you must use an image or Flash then you should use the proper alt and title tags and you should repeat the same text as text in your page.
Many websites don't tell anybody they exist. They post something great but nobody ever finds it because they don't create incoming links for themselves. When you make a website, or a major new page to your website, then tell people about it. Tell people on archived mailing lists you use, list it with directories such as dmoz, etc. I personally encourage my clients to create community sites around their product and to sponsor paid-links (not ad banners) on informational websites related to their product.
Most of the steps involved are completely legitimate things you should be doing for your website anyway. The best way to rise to the top is to provide good content and to act like a website is expected to act.
A lot of howto websites have problems in SEO. They post useful information telling us how to do useful things but because they haven't considered their users actually finding their site they tend to be hard to find. That's why when you search for something you tend to find the first couple pages filled with unrelated spam and links to forums and mailing list articles. I had this problem myself for a long time. It's only been in the past year that I've began making an effort to get my howto's to rank well when people search for information on those topics.
Tricking search engines is negative SEO. It may work for a while but when the search engines catch on it can seriously hurt your placement. You shouldn't need to do these things either. Some things such as creating links to and from your website are perfectly valid but are often abused by people who have the misimpression that spamming out thousands of links is going to help them. For a while it might but usually not for very long.
Strategic partnerships with appropiate cross-linking is the way to go. Think of the way Slashdot links to Newsforge, Thinkgeek, Freshmeat, etc and they link back. THAT is the right way to do it. It's also not a bad idea to create rss feeds of your website that others can include into their own websites. THAT's a good way to get a lot of links back to your site.
Hopefully as awareness grows more websites will be properly optimized. Doing so will certainly make life easier for users Googling for what they want to know.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
A search at MSN search for "innovation" returns this page as the top link http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=1118486
My site has been #1 (and sometimes #2 as well - it is currently occupying both spots) with Google for a couple of years if you plug in "piping design" (without the quotes).
I don't sell stuff except for relevant, relatively cheap advertising, promo stuff through CafePress and AdSense, but do make maybe $100/year from commission on books bought via an afilliate relationship.
Maybe the subject matter is too esoteric for drastically increased page views, maybe Google considers the site as a good meta site for the subject matter, maybe having the search words as part of the domain name helps a lot, maybe I've done a good job with keywords and content, maybe...
What's odd is that my #2 Google results listing changes every few months to a page that has not necessarily been updated recently and the "Advertise Here" page is often in the #2 Google ranking. Perhaps Larry and/or Sergey have a secret appreciation for we who design refineries and other piping-related stuff.
'cause lately, when I want to learn about something beyond what those selling things want to tell me I turn to the comments section of amazon.com, -arguably the biggest damn catalog on the internet....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Alright man, I don't want to be mean, but I got greater undestanding of your post from the replies than from the post itself. This leads to two suggestions:
Best of luck, but you've done nothing to convince me Google isn't an awesome search engine with impeccable policies.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
Take a deep breath. Exhale. Your comments read like you posted while on angledust.
And don't ever use the word "algo" again.
Thx
I had one of these companies milk one of my uh... less sophisticated clients out of $3000 USD for what turned out to be link farming. I told him what was going on and that it was likely to get him blacklisted on Google. I don't think he ever saw any of his money again.
I'm sure there are legit "optimizers" out there but I've never seen one that wasn't either downright fraud or just selling common web design advice you can get for free from organizations like the W3C.
My username does not make me Apathetic. It's irony, get it?
If you find this useful then help others find it by linking to the above page. This kind of linking is how SEO should work. Usually though you'd want to post to more on topic chat. This post is just a general example of what I meant in the previous message.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I've often wondered about what I think of as the Googleberg uncertainty priniple. Because google lists the top ten sites as the top ten, then most people only look at those top ten sites, which are then linked to the most often. The very act of pointing out which sites are linked the most often ... changes the very system and ... oh, now my head is spinning again.
SEOs are in the business of taking pages that aren't actually interesting to humans and tweak them so Pagerank will give them an artificially high ranking anyway. Since the algorithms are just algorithms, not Artificial Intelligences, it's possible to do a certain amount of reverse-engineering and accomplish this, and Google has had to tweak their algorithms over the years to detect SEO cheating and down-rate it, and there's an arms race between the two sides.
SEOs do also have a side business of advising clients to write pages that are not only interesting, but also are friendly to indexers - things like putting the keywords into the appropriate parts of the document instead of having them be part of the cutesy animated dancing graphics, and coincidentally that also makes the page more friendly to humans as well as machines. But that's something a 1-page FAQ can do just fine, if web page authors bother reading it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks